Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 7th, '07

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"There is a small percentage of iPhone customers who have had a less than perfect activation experience." – Apple


"Playing relatively high bitrate VGA H.264 videos, our iPhone lasted almost exactly 9 freaking hours of continuous playback with cell and WiFi on." – Ryan Block and Chris Ziegler


"People don’t turn off their emotional responses while they’re fast-forwarding." – Carl Marci


"If you don’t know how much you’re paying for something, will you notice when the price goes up?" – David Leonhardt


"To have four down weekends in a row and have attendance lagging is a surprise. We need more movies with legs." – Paul Dergarabedian


"No, no, no, no." – Nancy Prager


"We’re elated." – Harvey Weinstein


"If they keep bringing in money hand over fist like this, how are we ever going to drive them out of business?" – Fieari


"I ♥ Explosives" – Dyno Nobel t-shirt given out at summer camp


































The Winter of My Internet

The spreading conviction that somehow a so-called closed private sector is better able to manage complex social systems than an open public sphere has mutated from a philosophy initially empirically based to one that is now among certain conservatives nothing much beyond a quasi religious mythology resting on little more foundation than the sweet addictive fog of think-tank gas.

If there are many well publicized examples of public sector blunders, and we’re talking about decisions made by elected officials in an open and well examined space, private sector advocates rarely acknowledge the profound disasters caused by private industry, like Enron, tainted pet food, lax security, chemical pollution, mercury poisoning, Bhopal, birth defects, toxic juice, exploding radial tires ad-infinitum, not to mention horrors leading to the creation of the F.D.A during and preceding a time when the country was hardly regulated at all. The fact is that job number one of the private sector is taking care of its own, and its “own” are its owners, not the greater community in which it operates. It is only lucky for us such a system has led to breakthroughs and benefits for some, because it is in and of itself no guarantee of either.

The present debate over the importance of unfettered Internet access brings this into high relief. Net neutrality, or the right to enter the taxpayer created web for our own purposes without prejudicial economic interference from the handful of private carriers we must now pass through isn’t something we’re going to keep because we think it’s a good idea, or even “important,” not when the levers of power are abused by these same private sector priests. To the contrary, it’s clear that no matter how many studies we commission or how baldly broadband companies abandon competition, net neutrality isn’t something that’s going to be guaranteed by market force but instead will only be maintained by law.

The United States has some of the worst Internet access speeds in the West and alarmingly the situation isn’t improving. This in a largely unregulated market, compared at least to the countries that are trouncing it. The average broadband subscriber’s download speed in the states is and has been for years slightly under 2 Mbs while in other countries it can be well over 40Mbs – some twenty times faster - and will soon surpass 100Mbs. In Japan for instance download speeds exceed 60Mbs. Compare that to AT&T’s “futuristic” uVerse plan. So new the company doesn’t yet offer it in most service areas but already so technically archaic it’s 90% slower than Nippon’s NTT. Far from closing the gap with their foreign competitors the private U.S. broadband industry is letting it widen. Distressed industry watchdogs call United States speeds “pathetic.” They aren’t kidding. Communications Workers of America President Larry Cohen cautioned the issue is dropping off the radar screen. "People don't pay attention to the fact that the country that started the commercial Internet is falling woefully behind," he warns. Perhaps it’s because disseminating the information is up to those who have a stake in keeping it quiet more than it is a general indifference among users.

It may have more to do with age than apathy in any event. Many older Internet users, especially those plugged in politically are moving relatively few packets, so the pokey speeds are probably adequate for them, while more active and bandwidth hungry younger customers don’t yet have a voice in the political forum and are nevertheless looked upon with trepidation by those who do, particularly those who view such exuberant usage as somehow detrimental to their narrow self-interests.

Internet habits like most are formed early in life so it’s inexcusable to society that these same bandwidth starved kids are going to inherit a third-class broadband system when they grow up, even though their often brilliant online inventiveness and where it’s carrying them (and by extension, all of us) has been superbly beneficial to America. We are fast approaching a crisis of competitiveness with Asia and Europe and it’s here that enlightened public policy is urgently needed. Such policies could flourish in a system like ours were it not co-opted by a powerful but small core of intellectually dishonest free-market fundamentalists who map a perverse brand of capitalistic dogma onto some unworkable nonsense they’ve sold as reality.

The unfortunate but inescapable fact is this so-called free and competitive broadband market isn’t working to serve society, but instead to enrich a handful of owners who learned long ago that the less it’s regulated the less competitive it becomes. Continuing free-market activities are demonstrably merging the carriers into fewer and fewer dangerously concentrated gatekeepers, reducing in market after market what choice and open access consumers once had.

This has to stop, and it’s not the stockholders who will end it. If we are going to have a truly Independent American Internet we must fight to liberate it ourselves.


















Enjoy,

Jack

















July 7th, 2007








Universal in Dispute With Apple Over iTunes
Jeff Leeds

Steven P. Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple, is an emerging force in the mobile phone business, thanks to the snaking lines of gadget fans who queued up last week to buy the iPhone. But now he faces a headache in an industry Apple already dominates — digital music.

The Universal Music Group of Vivendi, the world’s biggest music corporation, last week notified Apple that it will not renew its annual contract to sell music through iTunes, according to executives briefed on the issue who asked for anonymity because negotiations between the companies are confidential.

Instead, Universal said that it would market music to Apple at will, a move that could allow Universal to remove its songs from the iTunes service on short notice if the two sides do not agree on pricing or other terms in the future, these executives said.

Universal’s roster of artists includes stars like U2, Akon and Amy Winehouse.

Representatives for Universal and Apple declined to comment. The move, which comes after a standoff in negotiations, is likely to be regarded in the music industry as a boiling over of the long-simmering tensions between Mr. Jobs and the major record labels.

With the shift, Universal appears to be aiming to regain a bit of leverage — although at the risk of provoking a showdown with Mr. Jobs.

In the four years since iTunes popularized the sale of music online, many in the music business have become discouraged by what they consider to be the near-monopoly that Mr. Jobs has held in the digital sector — the one part of the music business that is showing significant growth. In particular, Mr. Jobs’s stance on song pricing and the iPod’s lack of compatibility with music services other than iTunes have become points of contention.

By refusing to enter a long-term deal, Universal may continue to press for more favorable terms from Apple or even explore deals to sell its catalog exclusively through other channels. If Universal were to pull its catalog from iTunes, Mr. Jobs would lose access to record labels that collectively account for one out of every three new releases sold in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan data.

But if Apple were to decide not to carry Universal’s recordings, the music company would likely sustain a serious blow: sales of digital music through iTunes and other sources accounted for more than 15 percent of Universal’s worldwide revenue in the first quarter, or more than $200 million. (Vivendi does not break out revenue from Apple alone).

If push came to shove and Universal decided to remove its catalog from iTunes, it might not necessarily instigate a broader insurrection against Apple. The second-biggest corporation, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, recently decided to sign a new one-year contract making its catalog available to iTunes, according to executives briefed on the deal. A spokeswoman for the company, a joint venture of Sony and Bertelsmann, declined to comment.

Some industry observers have cautioned against taking on Mr. Jobs directly. “When your customers are iPod addicts, who are you striking back against?,” said Ken Hertz, an entertainment lawyer who represents artists like Beyoncé and the Black Eyed Peas. “The record companies now have to figure out how to stimulate competition without alienating Steve Jobs, and they need to do that while Steve Jobs still has an incentive to keep them at the table.”

But other music industry executives say the major labels must take a harder line with Apple at some point if they are to recalibrate the relationship. In particular, they say, it is unfair for Mr. Jobs to exert tight control over prices and other terms while profiting from the iPod. Mr. Jobs, in February, noted that less than 3 percent of the music on the average iPod was bought from iTunes, leading music executives to speculate that the devices in many instances are used to store pirated songs. (Of course, users can also fill their players with songs copied from their own CD collections.)

Apple has now sold more than 100 million iPods, and the device’s ties to iTunes have helped make Apple the leading seller of digital music by a wide margin. The iTunes service accounts for 76 percent of digital music sales, and the contract talks come as it is on the rise — Apple recently surpassed Amazon.com to become the third-biggest seller of music over all, behind Wal-Mart and Best Buy, according to data from the market research firm NPD.

All of that has transformed Apple into a prominent gatekeeper, wielding influence as a tastemaker by highlighting selected artists on iTunes storefront, and as an architect of the underlying business dynamics.

Apple has stuck to a pricing system that charges a flat 99 cents for a song since iTunes started four years ago (except for the recent introduction of songs without copy protection, which carry a higher price). Mr. Jobs has long argued that a uniform system and low prices will invite new consumers and reduce piracy.

But some music executives have been chafing at the flat rate that Apple has insisted upon in its contracts with the big record labels, and they have been pressing publicly or privately for the right to charge Apple more for popular songs to capitalize on demand or, in the event of special promotions, to charge less. Edgar Bronfman Jr., the chairman of Warner Music Group, reinforced that idea at a recent investor conference, saying “we believe that not every song, not every artist, not every album, is created equal.”

In the backdrop of the pricing dispute is an investigation by European regulators who are studying the roles of the music companies and Apple in setting prices in certain international markets.

At the same time, Mr. Jobs has refused the industry’s calls for Apple to license its proprietary copy restriction software to other manufacturers. Music executives want the software to be shared so that services other than iTunes can sell music that can be played on the iPod, and so that other devices can play songs bought from iTunes.

Mr. Jobs has argued that sharing the software with other companies would increase the likelihood that its protections would be cracked by hackers, among other problems. Instead, he asked the music companies to drop their insistence on copy protection altogether. So far, only one of the four music companies, EMI, has made a deal to sell unrestricted music through iTunes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/bu...versal.html?hp





Apple's Next Big Thing: Tiny Prices for iTunes Albums
Ryan Block

Sounds like Apple's Next Big Thing isn't too big at all: lower prices for full albums on iTunes. Introduced with a minor manifesto discussing the powerful influence of indie music on the mainstream, it's pretty clear that Cupertino's finally ready to lower the barrier of entry not only for consumers, but musicians and indie labels looking to sell music on the iTMS. $5.99 and $6.99 will now get you some tasty tracks by the likes of Peter, Bjorn, & John and LCD Soundsystem -- some are even iTunes Plus (read: DRM-free). Take note: want a great way to keep your music business popular and relevant? Offer more music for less money. Hat tip, Apple.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/06/a...itunes-albums/





Russia Shuts Down Allofmp3.com
Tony Halpin

The music download website whose activities threatened to scupper Russia's entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has been shut down.

The site, Allofmp3.com, was quietly closed as the Kremlin sought to end criticism from the United States that Russia was failing to clamp down on music and video piracy.

However, an alternative site run by the same Moscow company has already emerged. MediaServices says that mp3Sparks.com is legal under Russian law, using many of the same arguments advanced in support of allofmp3.com.

Customers found last week that allofmp3.com would not load on their computers, while others who went through its Russian web address were greeted by a message saying that it was closed "for maintenance". A former employee confirmed to The Times today that it had been shut down under pressure from the Russian authorities.

Susan Schwab, the US Trade Representative, singled out allofmp3.com during talks last year on Russian membership of the WTO and said that closure was a non-negotiable condition of entry.

She and German Gref, Russia's Minister of Trade and Economic Development, signed an agreement in October in which Moscow pledged to shut down the site, which contains one of the world's largest online collections of pirated music.

Russia also promised to target other Russian sites that distributed copyright material illegally. Allofmp3.com insisted that it was a legitimate business because it paid royalties to a Russian organisation that collected fees for distribution to copyright holders.

It argued that it was helping to prevent piracy by offering an alternative to free file-sharing sites. Western music companies refused to accept the fee, arguing that the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society had no right to represent their interests.

The site had been under investigation for two years by the Russian Interior Ministry. A bigger blow was struck in January, when Visa and MasterCard told MediaServices that they would no longer process payments for allofmp3.com.

The site had attracted 5.5 million subscribers buying songs for between 10 and 20 US cents each, compared with 99 cents at Apple’s American iTunes store and 79p in the UK.

Most customers were in Russia, but it was estimated to be the second most popular download site in Britain after iTunes. It was set up in 2000 by six computer programmers, who initially developed the site for their personal use then built it into a business earning a reputed $30 million a year.

The Mp3Sparks.com site looks virtually identical and claims to offer thousands of albums by popular artists for around 15 US cents per song. Bon Jovi's latest disc, for example, was on offer for $2.11.

MediaServices said that the site was registered with the Russian Licensing Societies, which it claimed had the right under Russian law to "grant licences and to collect royalties for the use of music without necessarily obtaining permission from the copyright owners".

The company's website said that it paid 15 per cent of proceeds to the licencing societies for distribution to copyright holders. It added that it was considering an additional payment of 5 per cent to performing artists, whether or not they owned the copyright, "despite no legal requirement to do so".

Nobody from MediaServices responded to attempts by The Times to establish how long the new site had been in existence and how it differed legally from allofmp3.com.

Russia and the US signed a bilateral agreement on Russian membership of the WTO last November after 12 years of negotiations. Russia is the only major economy that is not a member of the WTO, which has 149 members and aims to boost the global economy by lowering trade barriers.

Russia hopes to complete bilateral negotiations with other member states in time to enter the trade body at the end of this year.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle2016297.ece





AllofMP3.com Lets Buyers Use up Credits

Users of the shutdown AllofMP3.com site can still download music if they have existing credit with the online music store
Mitchell Bingemann

Although the controversial online music store AllofMP3.com was officially shutdown by the Russian Government this week for infringing copyright laws, customers from the site who have existing credit can still purchase songs through its downloadable windows desktop and smartphone client, allTunes.com.

According to the allTunes.com website, AllofMP3.com's six million existing accounts can still be accessed if users download the allTunes software client. Once downloaded, users can browse through its catalogue and download from the 778,861 available tracks.

A former AllofMP3.com user, who spoke to Computerworld on the condition of anonymity, purchased songs with his existing credit from the allTunes software client today and experienced no trouble doing so.

"The [allTunes.com] software allows you to browse their catalogue, do searches and make purchases. It's quicker than querying a website since it downloads the catalogue to your PC," he said. "I gave it a whirl already and it worked fine. The client downloaded, it grabbed the catalogue, I searched and grabbed a song."

In total, he said he has downloaded "a good dozen albums or so worth of music."

AllofMP3's six million users will no doubt be delighted they can use their leftover credit to purchase songs, but the site's longevity hangs in the balance. Just days after the Russian Government shut down AllofMP3.com, its sister site, MP3Sparks.com, suffered the same fate.

With song prices coming in at 2c per megabyte to download (around US$1-1.50 per album), the allTunes site offers much better value than the US$0.99 per song charge at Apple's iTunes. Unfortunately, the legal ramifications and copyright infringements are not so appealing.

Although an AllofMP3 executive claimed the site's practices were legal because it paid 15 percent of its song revenues to the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society (ROMS), recording artists have contended they never received any money from ROMS.

It appears allTunes.com takes the same approach as AllofMP3.com's revenue sharing model while still maintaining its services are above board.

"All materials in the Internet-Audit LLS projects are available for distribution via the Internet in accordance with license # LS-3М-P3М-06-13 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. Under the license agreement, Internet-Audit LLS pays license fees for all materials subject to the Law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright and Related Rights," reads the site's Terms of Use.

AllofMP3.com was given its marching orders late last year after mounting pressure from the US, and when the promise of World Trade Organization (WTO) membership was dangled in front of the Russian Government.

Russia responded by modifying its laws to crack down on music piracy. The changes, which only came into effect at the start of July, rendered the activities of AllofMP3 illegal.

After Russia formally outlawed the site, major credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard stopped processing payments.

Although former AllofMP3 users can use existing credit from their personal accounts, customers wishing to inject additional funds into their account are presented with a message that reads: "Processing for this site disabled."
http://www.computerworld.com.au/inde...4;fp;16;fpid;1





Top Cheap Russian AllofMP3 Alternatives
enigmax

The Russian government has closed down AllofMP3 and those who are trying to access its sister site, MP3Sparks, may be disappointed that the site also seems to have disappeared. But never fear, those Russians have plenty of alternatives. We take a look at some of them.

There were roughly 6 million customers who, up until recently, were enjoying great value and service at AllofMP3 but following pressure from the United States over Russia’s World Trade Organization (WTO) membership, they are looking for alternatives. MP3Sparks.com seemed to be the answer but as of this morning, the site appears to have disappeared - it’s unknown if this is a temporary situation.

In the meantime, we thought we could take a look at some other Russian music sites, offering cheap music to the masses. In no particular order;

JustMusic

Just Music carry around 160,000 albums from 44,000 different artists. Prices vary according to the amount of credit you apply to your account and range between $0.11 and $0.15 per track. Tracks are available at 192kbps and they take major credit cards and PayPal.

LegalSounds

LegalSounds.com prices are $0.09 per song, full album downloads average $1 each. Music carried includes the US Top 100 Albums/Singles, European Top 100 Albums and UK Top 50. Tracks are available between 192kbps and 320kbps and they take major credit cards.

GoMusic

GoMusic claim to carry over 35,000 tracks. Prices are $0.19 per track and around $2 per full album. Tracks are available in various bitrates and they take major credit cards.

MP3 Skyline

MP3 Skyline appears to be offering a huge amount of music. The site claims a staggering 2.2 million tracks available from over 128,000 artists. Prices are around the $0.35 mark for single tracks and encoded at 192kbps. Major credit cards and PayPal are accepted, along with other payment options. They also have a free download of the day, currently ‘Seeing Red’ by Killing Joke.

MP3Fiesta

MP3 Fiesta hold nearly 67,000 albums from nearly 17,000 artists. Prices are around the $0.10 mark for single tracks with full albums coming in at roughly $1.00. Tracks are available from 192kbps and they take major credit cards and PayPal

MP3Sale

MP3 Sale boasts a cataolgue of over 90,000 albums from 23,556 artists. Prices are $0.15 for a single track with full albums around the $1.50 mark. Tracks are encoded at 192kbps and the site takes all major credit cards, PayPal and a wide range of other payment options.

iSound

iSound currently offer nearly 60,000 albums from 14,000 artists. Prices start at $0.11 per track up to a maximum of $0.15, depending on the amount fo credit deposited in your account. Tracks are encoded at a minimum of 192kbps. Major credit cards and PayPal are accepted.

MP3 Search

MP3 Search carry in excess of 41,000 albums from 32,000 artists. Prices start at $0.19 per track but it isn’t immediately clear at what bitrate they are encoded. The site accepts major credit cards.

Those wishing to get further details about these sites and many more with the same sort of business structure, should take a look at the comprehensive SongBoom.com. It has reviews of many sites, including the ones detailed above, plus a handy site comparison matrix.
http://torrentfreak.com/top-cheap-ru...-alternatives/





ISP Forced to Block and Filter Pirated Content on P2P Networks
Ernesto

A court in Belgium ruled that ISPs can be forced, and are obliged to, either block or filter copyright infringing content on P2P networks. Freedom of expression and privacy are not important in this regard. How exactly ISPs are supposed to block and filter copyrighted content remains a mystery.

It is not clear what methods the ISP (Scarlet) has to implement, but distinguishing copyright infringing and legal content on P2P networks such as BitTorrent is likely to be a tough job, if not, impossible.

The judge thought otherwise and, based on claims from a P2P expert, said that ISPs do have the technical means at their disposal to block or filter pirated content on P2P networks. The ISP in question was given six months to implement such measures.
In a response to this news Rick Falkvinge, the leader and founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, told TorrentFreak:

“this confirms what we’ve been saying all along: the record industry wants to abolish postal secrets and freedom of the press in order to maintain their crumbling monopolies. They are actually celebrating the fact that a third unaccountable party gets to inspect everything sent between any and all private individuals, and gets to destroy any undesired communication.”

The ruling by the Belgian court implements EU legislation, and iaccording to the IFPI, it sets an important precedent in the fight against piracy internationally. In a response to the decision IFPI Chairman and CEO John Kennedy said: “This is a decision that we hope will set the mould for government policy and for courts in other countries in Europe and around the world.”

Let’s hope not. And, can anyone explain to me how ISPs are supposed to filter copyright infringing content?
http://torrentfreak.com/isp-forced-t...-p2p-networks/





ISPs Face Down Tories on File Sharing
Chris Williams

ISPs have given David Cameron's call for them to block P2P music sharing short shrift, repeating their stance that they are not "the gatekeepers of the internet", as he insists.

ISPA, the industry trade association, told The Register it would be writing to the Conservative leader to explain its position.

In a speech to record industry bigwigs (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07...ght_extension/) this week, Cameron said internet providers should be responsible for clamping down on piracy, comparing the problem to paedophilia and hate mongering.

He said: "ISPs can block access and indeed close down offending file-sharing sites.

"They have already established the Internet Watch Foundation to monitor child abuse and incitement to racial hatred on the internet. They should be doing the same when it comes to digital piracy."

A spokesman for ISPA said: "The Internet Watch Foundation is very focused in what it does and has taken a long time to get there working with the police. Unlike distributing images of child abuse, copyright infringement can be a civil offence.

"Any kind of blocking has to be the preserve of the courts."

The internet industry has consistently resisted years of attempts to turn it into a policeman for rights owners. The European E-commerce Directive recognises ISPs as "mere conduits" who are only liable if they attain "actual knowledge" of illegal content. The Conservatives appear to want to create a system which forces them to attain that knowledge.

In response to Cameron's comments, Malcolm Hutty, public affairs chief at Linx, the organisation which runs inter-ISP traffic, said: "Our technical experience shows that removal at source is the only effective solution: attempting to block traffic within the network is simply far too easy to get around for anyone who wants to.

"Blocking child abuse images may occasionally help protect users from inadvertently being exposed to such content, but this is quite different from preventing access to music sharing sites that users are actively seeking out."

Despite the industry's steadfastness on monitoring, Cameron's comments, combined with news that a Belgian ISP has been ordered to clean up (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07...lgium_p2p_isp/) copyright-infringing material from its network, are likely to reignite the issue.

ISPA's policies on P2P and content liability are here (http://www.ispa.org.uk/press_office/page_62.html) and here (http://www.ispa.org.uk/press_office/page_58.html). Cameron's speech is here (http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do...obj_id=137437).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07...eron_p2p_isps/





Swedish Police About to Shut Down The Pirate Bay (again)
Ben Jones

With their ongoing failure to find evidence in The Pirate Bay server seizure fiasco, the Swedish Police now seem to be resorting to any methods they can to disrupt the activities of the popular torrent site. Their latest effort appears to be an attempt to block access to the site, at least by Swedish nationals, through putting the site on a child pornography blocklist

Piratebay administrator brokep got wind of this addition to the blocklist, which is maintained by the police, and which Swedish ISPs voluntarily use. He said in a response:

“If the police would find anything wrong - shouldn’t they first contact us, then bring us in for questioning regarding the content, ask for our help or bring us to court for our wrongdoings? By not acting this way it’s very clear what this is all about. It’s all about quieting a voice that is really uncomfortable for them since they don’t have any legal standpoint in doing it. It’s sabotage, it’s abuse of power given to them.”

This is not the first time, either; back in June, there were problems with an overzealous addition into the very same filter, with the site kopimi.com – after some discussions with the police, it was removed from the filter.

However, unlike kopimi, The Pirate Bay is not yet in the filter. Any entry into that list, would probably be updated at the various ISPs during the next week. The latest information, however, is that in a draft version of a press release from the police on this subject, they state “it’s not decided that we’ll put The Pirate Bay in the list - if the content is still there next week we’ll put them there”. In response to this, brokep states “So, come on! What content are you talking about? Still not a single contact attempt from the police”.

Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Swedish Pirate Party said in a response to the news: “This is a devastatingly ignorant abuse of the trust relationship between the Internet world and the Police that was created in order to stop child pornography. This is not worthy a democracy governed by law. The people who have made this decision cannot remain in our judicial system.”

The lack of clear, logical procedures based upon facts seems to be endemic when it comes to the Internet these days. In many cases, things are blown out of all proportion, in order to enact some changes on the internet, a system which was designed to be as resistant to any efforts to disrupt, and remove the information available on it as possible. The perversion of lists like these, removes the credibility of the lists, by making the contents of them ripe for suspicion.
http://torrentfreak.com/swedish-poli...te-bay-again/#





Music Biz Agrees: Stop Shooting Self in Foot
Andrew Orlowski

At the Norwegian summer resort of Kristiansand in Norway last week, representatives of all corners of the British (and global) music business came together to think the unthinkable.

That's unusual in itself. What's generally called the "music industry" consists of violently opposed parties: small labels against big labels; publishers against recording rights owners; managers against everyone else. Much time is spent screwing or suing one another. The past sure is tense.

Perhaps for the first time, the entire range of representatives - including the biggest and most powerful recording interests - looked into the abyss, and agreed that what they what they need to do is very different to what they've been doing for the past 15 years - ever since since the sudden growth of public computer networks represented by today's free-for-all internet.

The event was convened by music manager Peter Jenner. Today Jenner represents Billy Bragg, but his 40-year career in the industry began as Pink Floyd's first manager (representing Syd after the split), and launching the Harvest label. Today, Jenner is secretary general of the International Music Manager's Forum, the IMMF. Jenner has been using his contacts book and influence to cajole the industry into radical change: a process which began with his "Beyond the Soundbytes" report and conference last year. Reporting restrictions, under the Chatham House rule (http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/index.php?id=14"), applied to all participants - so forgive your reporter for the generalities.

Out of Crisis

It's the dramatic fall in CD revenues - we don't have the official Q2 figures just yet, but they're said to be down 40 per cent year-on-year in some markets - that appears to have precipitated the change in thinking.

No Declaration or Manifesto was issued at Kristiansand. The event didn't even have a formal name. But a consensus looked forward to a post-physical media future, where music can flow more freely, and where creators can finally be rewarded from the wires and pipes over which music flows "anarchistically" today. While few readers will mourn the demise of the big, vertically integrated record label, the awkward fact remains that millions enjoy music today while cutting the creators out of the equation. The internet has concentrated power in the hands of a few owners in the telecoms and publishing industries - leaving originators with little option but to hope for fame, and beg for scraps.

At Kristiansand, attendees heard how the world may look pretty different, given concerted action. VC money or private equity could be the driver for the next waves of investment - where areas of expertise such as A&R, marketing and artists management are much looser than they are today.

We also heard concerns how business models will be able to sustain artist growth. Given that private equity or VC money is typically rapacious and shortsighted, the artists at the top of the tree looks set to prosper. Money follows the largest returns. Amateurs have never had it so good, with cheap production and marketing tools and new direct electronic distribution channels. But what about the pro performers who aren't ever going to be Madonna, and still want to sustain a career? It's a question without a clear answer so far.

• What consensus did emerge broadly favoured the following:Prosecuting end users is silly - when you can monetise them
• Since "piracy" today means "get free music", the future has to offer something that "feels like free"
• Vastly wealthier industries than the music business today profit from the demand for recorded music - without giving anything back. That isn't fair, and it's got to change
• Digital music services of the future need a better deal than the begrudging and piecemeal licenses offered so far by rights holders: but these have to be so attractive only the suicidal would want to turn it down.

What now?

"The era of levies is over," said one participant. "Government isn't going to step in and hand us a business."

History shows us almost every new technology affecting copyright owners is considered illegal to begin with, but eventually they all fall under an arrangement that addresses the needs of consumers and creators. This is a difficult balancing act: if the license proposition is unattractive, then either the technology is shunned, or it continues underground. Digital networks are far from the first "intangible" technology rights holders have encountered, but it has been one of the longest journeys to reach a state of agreement.

AT&T's recent decision to police its network (http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...ck=1&cset=true) for copyright violations using deep packet inspection suggests that network operators are dropping their objections to "common carrier" status. Of course, they'd much rather not be in the policing business, which is expensive and gains them no direct income: they would prefer to offer added value services you and I willingly want to pay for. But for that, they need the co-operation of the music industry.

Bendik Hofseth, the Norwegian composer musician who's on the board of the Norwegian Performing Rights Society TONO, and chairman of the Norwegian composer's association, played host at Kristiansand. He heads a new center to study emerging rights models and music business models at Kristensand's 15,000-student Agder University College. The research center promises to be a refreshing and long overdue European counterpart to the "cyberlaw" departments that have proved so lucrative for American academic business, but whose esoteric and abstract approach, rooted in US constitutional law, seems increasingly at odds with direction the rest of the world is taking.

Perhaps Kristiansand may be remembered as the place where sanity broke out.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/27/kristiansand/





Digital Music Singles Flex Muscles, Kick Sand on Antiquated Album
Ken Fisher

Sales of digital music can't stop, won't stop. The upward trend keeps on headin' up, as Nielsen SoundScan reports that digital music sales are 50 percent stronger through the first half of this year as compared to the same period in 2006. So far, Nielsen SoundScan reports that 417.3 million digital music tracks have been sold this year. For those of you keeping score, that's the total number of music tracks and ringtones sold in 2005.

Don't expect the music industry to break out the champagne, though. Good news for digital sales means bad news for the traditional album, which is down another 15 percent. People simply aren't buying physical albums the way they used to, and we've argued before that this is a natural effect of digital music sales. You don't need to buy an album anymore to get one or two songs you might like.

Albums look to be headed into a serious decline, however. In 2006, album sales were also down, but in the same period year-over-year, the shrinkage was only 4 percent. This year's decline, so far, appears to show a quickening decline, slipping to 15 percent fewer sales.
Lessons learned?

Despite the tough times for albums, the music industry is slowly but surely learning the most important lesson of all: give consumers what they want, and they happily open their wallets. That could mean a business model change for the industry which has long since focused on the album as its revenue workhorse.

That may also help explain why companies like Universal are looking to aggressively renegotiate their contracts with the likes of Apple. Who controls the pricing is a major deal, especially at a time when singles are taking away big revenue business. I've been told by contacts in the business that the labels would like to see significantly higher prices for contemporary singles, and it's rather clear why. What ultimately matters in this industry isn't single sales or album sales, it's revenues, and the nature of the revenue stream is changing.

That's why we can ignore the equivocations over the data. The AP coverage of the report notes that when you count groupings of digital singles as albums (say, 10 singles = an album), albums sales are only down 8.9 percent. Two points on that. First, 8.9 percent is still a heck of a drop: twice that of last year for the same time period. Second, I'm not sure what this data tells us... except that when we arbitrarily count a collection of singles as albums, it looks like more albums have sold. But more albums didn't sell.

The real reason these calculations are being made is to try and size up the state of the music industry as a whole, and in most of the industry's history, that measurement has been made via album sales. It's wrong, however, to try and crib album sales with digital music data and claim it's the same thing.

Digital music sales are a new business and a new way of thinking about and interacting with content. The industry should be paying closer attention to its meteoric rise and less attention to the dying, arcane album. It should absolutely drop the rhetoric about how piracy is destroying the business, because the sea change in sales patterns shows that something else is is afoot. In fact, the explosion in digital music sales should be encouraging to the industry. It means that when users are sitting at a computer and looking for music, more and more each year are turning to legal download services.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...the-album.html





BSA Announces $1 Million Reward for Piracy Snitches
Ken Fisher

Do you work for a business that's pirating software for its own internal use? If so, you could be in for a windfall if you report it to the Business Software Alliance (BSA) in time. The BSA announced today that they are increasing their reward ceiling for accurate piracy reports to a big, fat $1,000,000. The increased reward amount is a special promotion which will be accompanied by radio and online ad campaigns; it will expire after October. After that, the reward returns to its regularly scheduled payload of $200,000.

Why the big bucks? The BSA believes that $1,000,000 might make even the most timid person don the daring cape of the whistleblower. "Businesses often have a million excuses for having unlicensed software on office computers. BSA is now offering up to a million dollars for employees who turn them in," said Jenny Blank, director of enforcement for BSA, in a statement.

Potential whistleblowers are often quiet for fear that they could not only lose their jobs but also get a reputation as a "snitch," making it difficult to find employment later. Now thanks to the BSA, some whistleblowers could trade in their jobs at piratical businesses for varying shots at a big jackpot. The only catch: you need to be aware of some serious piracy goin' down to qualify for the big payouts.

The reward one can qualify for is determined by the size of the settlement paid by the company pirating software, or the size of awarded damages in the instance of a dispute heading into court. To qualify for the $1 million, you'll need a settlement of more than $15 million.

The BSA also revealed that since 2005, when their rewards program was launched, nearly $22 million has been generated via settlements with businesses who were accused of pirating software. Based on that number, we don't think the BSA has ever paid out anything close to $1 million to a single whistleblower before, but the BSA has not returned our queries on this matter. Nevertheless, with $22 million in settlements so far, the BSA is looking for a major boost with this program, since the requisite $15 million settlement would nearly double their take to date.

Big rewards for big, scary numbers

According to a study conducted by the International Data Corps (IDC) and cited by the BSA, the software industry lost $7.3 billion last year to piracy. We criticized the IDC findings when they were released last year because they are based on questionable calculations and seat-of-your-pants methodologies that desperately try to assign dollar amounts to unknown data points. IDC has to guess at how much software is pirated, how much would have been purchased had it not been pirated, and what the relationship of legit sales to pirated installations is. Heck, even IDC has criticized the ways in which their studies are sometimes trumpeted, such as in 2004, when IDC criticized the BSA's rush to talk about total losses.

None of that is to say that piracy doesn't exist or that it doesn't hurt the industry, of course. We simply lament the fact that trumped-up numbers are being used to sway legislators and public opinion on an issue that is considerably complex.

Oh, and before you nefarious types get any ideas, the BSA requires that reports detail illegal software installs ordered by management, so secretly deploying pirated AutoCAD software across your enterprise desktops on your last day at work won't qualify.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-snitches.html





Hollywood Hates Pirates, but Can it Use Them?
Greg Sandoval

Attorney Nancy Prager sees only thievery in file sharing. Don't even try to suggest anything otherwise to her.

Director Michael Moore's Sicko is coming off a glittering debut weekend at the box office. This despite the documentary's availability on the Web for the past two weeks--distributed widely over the Internet by file sharers who violate copyright law. Prager, a Washington, D.C.-based copyright attorney, was asked whether those who downloaded the movie could have helped ticket sales by spurring word-of-mouth sales.

"No, no, no, no," Prager seethed. "This is depressing. We're not seeing a rise in the peer-to-peer influence market. Anything positive they may bring is instantly canceled. These guys aren't just spreading their opinions. They're spreading the actual movies."

Ever since Sicko first appeared on the Web, CNET News.com has tracked the film's presence online and asked whether file sharing depresses ticket sales. Some in the file-sharing community hold that pirates often stir interest on the Web that migrates to the physical world in the form of ticket sales. The response from Hollywood studios is largely: we don't need thieves to help us market our films.

Online piracy is apparently becoming a priority to Hollywood, as the transferring of large digital files becomes less time-consuming and the quality of viewing improves. Already, billions of dollars are lost to illegal file sharing every year and the losses are certain to grow, according to the top U.S. movie studios.

So what can be learned from the Sicko controversy?

It is believed that tens of thousands of copies of Moore's documentary about the health care industry were downloaded without authorization during the past two weeks. The movie has also gone up on YouTube and Google Video, and was viewed by thousands before being removed. As the movie played on theater screens across the country this weekend, the film returned to Google Video and was watched more than 2,000 times.

Nonetheless, the movie opened in 441 theaters on Friday and earned an estimated $4.5 million for the weekend. That was good for ninth place at the box office. Pixar's Ratatouille was No. 1 with an estimated $47.2 million haul.

What is encouraging for Sicko's producers, the Weinstein Co., is that while the movie opened on relatively few screens, it averaged $10,204 per theater, according to a story in The Hollywood Reporter. The industry publication reported that only one other movie this weekend topped Sicko's per-theater average: Ratatouille, with $11,987.

If Moore's film has been harmed by file sharing, the damage is hard to find.

"File sharing has been going on for years now and yet the movie industry continues to see record profits and revenues," said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for Internet users. "Clearly file sharing is not killing the movie industry, far from it."

File-sharing buzz or buzz kill
After a slump in 2005, Hollywood saw revenue grow 11 percent to $25.8 billion last year, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, the trade group that represents the top movie studios.

Could file sharing have played any kind of role in the growth?

File sharers often argue that they are among the first to tell friends about a good movie. They say that this stimulates interest in people who don't share files. On the surface at least, this is the kind of buzz building that movie marketers are trying to ignite.

In a May 2005 report on movie marketing by The London School of Economics and Political Science, researcher David Lane found that the secret to stimulating ticket sales "is less about the film itself than about the success of pre-publicity and word-of-mouth recommendations."

Lane found that marketing techniques had changed in Hollywood in the past two decades and that what mattered most was "to get people talking about the film, creating prerelease interest and then to sell tickets--fast."

When Moore's documentary surfaced on the Web, it generated a host of news stories that served as free advertising. But there's no way to determine how many people learned about the movie from someone who downloaded a pirated copy.

What doesn't help support the premise that file sharing helped give Sicko a shot in the arm was that the movie drew mostly older audiences, according to published reports. Most file sharers are thought to be of college age.

"A Michael Moore film is going to be in the headlines no matter what it's about," said Gary Stein, an executive at Ammo Marketing, an advertising firm. "The news hounds were ready for a Sicko story and this one happened to be among the first to come out...You have to remember these aren't people that wake up in the morning and say to themselves, 'How am I going to get people to see this movie.' They get off on watching a movie for free."

And any measure of the effects that piracy has on a film must look at an entire theatrical run, said Prager, who represents independent music labels and has also negotiated movie deals. She points out that the financial performance of a documentary like Sicko may be particularly vulnerable to Internet piracy.

"This is not a big special-effects action movie that depends on the big screen," Prager said. "This is a film that people may be satisfied watching on their computers. That could really hurt the movie's sales."

In the end, nobody really knows what effects copyright infringement has on a movie's earning potential, said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University. Zittrain does, however, see one benefit from the controversy.

"The real benefit of this kind of leakage," Zittrain said, "is that it pressures Hollywood to think outside of the box instead of hoping the Internet will just go away."
http://news.com.com/Hollywood+hates+...3-6194649.html





MPAA's Media Defender Sets up 'Fake' Site to Catch Pirates
George Gardner

Don't get caught up in the Motion Picture Association of America's (MPAA) latest sting. Media Defender, a company which does the dirty work for the MPAA, has been caught setting up 'dummy' websites in an attempt to catch those who download copyrighted videos - entrapment comes to mind.

The site, MiiVi.com, complete with a user registration, forum, and "family filter", offers complete downloads of movies and "fast and easy video downloading all in one great site." But that's not all; MiiVi also offers client software to speed up the downloading process. The only catch is, after it's installed, it searches your computer for other copyrighted files and reports back.

ZeroPaid, acting on a tip from The Pirate Bay, found MiiVi to be registered to Media Defender using a whois search. Shortly after, the registrar information was changed, but the address still reflects Media Defender's address at 2461 Santa Monica Blvd., D-520 Santa Monica, CA 90404.

Not 10 hours after the site was found to be registered to Media Defender, the site went dead. There's no telling how long it was up; however, the domain was registered on February 8, 2007.

Perhaps Media Defender won't use its own name on the registrar the next time around, but it just goes to show the lengths at which the MPAA is willing to go, to fight piracy.
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...catch-pirates/





MediaDefender Denies Entrapment Accusations with Fake Torrent Site
Jacqui Cheng

Antipiracy agency MediaDefender strongly denies recent claims that it set up an entrapment scheme in order to catch so-called pirates downloading illegal movies and software.

Earlier this week, the Motion Picture Association of America and antipiracy agency MediaDefender were allegedly caught red-handed when Internet sleuths traced a "fake" BitTorrent site back to the two groups. But MediaDefender told Ars Technica that the story has been blown far out of proportion and was started by sites like The Pirate Bay and TorrentFreak in order to slam MediaDefender's organization and software.

The soap opera that the entire brouhaha revolves around started like this. A web site called MiiVi allegedly offered full-length motion pictures for download and offered to install special client software on the user's computer to help speed up the downloads. However, the software did a little more than that: it also reportedly performed searches of the user's computer for other illegal software and reported its findings back to MediaDefender. Acting on a tip from The Pirate Bay, the online publication ZeroPaid began an "investigation" (a followup to Torrent Freak's article) and found that MediaDefender didn't make much of an effort to hide who was behind MiiVi. The whois records for MiiVi were clearly registered to MediaDefender with the company's address in California and administrative contact information within the company.

The initial article by ZeroPaid was picked up among members of the tech web immediately, which must have caused MediaDefender to realize that torrenters were a little brighter than they had previously thought. Shortly thereafter, the name in the whois record was changed, although MediaDefender's postal address remained intact. As of today, all of the whois contact information has been removed and it instead reflects anonymous Domains by Proxy information set up by GoDaddy. Since the MiiVi site's public exposure, it has since been taken down and replaced with a parked GoDaddy page.

MediaDefender's Randy Saaf told Ars Technica that while the company does own the domain to MiiVi, the story itself was completely made up. "MediaDefender was working on an internal project that involved video and didn't realize that people would be trying to go to it and so we didn't password-protect the site," Saaf said. "It was just an oversight from that perspective. This was not an entrapment site, and we were not working with the MPAA on it. In fact, the MPAA didn't even know about it."

If this is true, why did MediaDefender immediately remove all contact information from the whois registry for the domain? Saaf said that after everything hit the fan, the company decided to take everything on the site down because it was afraid of a hacker attack or "people sending us spam." Yes, spam.

The MPAA's Elizabeth Kaltman also chimed in to say that they had no involvement with MiiVi: "The MediaDefender story is false. We have no relationship with that company at all," she told Ars.

We may never know MediaDefender's true motive behind MiiVi, but Saaf insists that it was nothing more than an internal site for research and development purposes only. If true, however, does this mean that MediaDefender could be looking into such a scheme in the future? Our Magic 8-Ball says "Reply hazy. Ask again later."

Without a doubt, however, something isn't right with this story. If anyone has a copy of the application that was originally hosted on MiiVi, we'd love to get a look at it.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...rent-site.html





‘Transformers’ Movie-Cammer Facing Prison
enigmax

Following the announcement of a fresh anti-piracy drive and new, aggressive legislation, a man has been caught using a camcorder to record the latest ‘Transformers’ movie and is now facing 6 months in jail and a $5,000 fine.

The MPAA claims that New York is a pirate movie haven and with a claimed 43% of all camcorded movies originating from the city, it was just a question of time before Major Bloomberg’s and the MPAA’s anti-piracy campaign - coupled with new legislation - claimed its first scalp.

According to reports, police descended on the American Theater on East Avenue in Parkchester, after warning theater workers in advance that they were about to conduct a sting to arrest a known movie ‘cammer‘ at a sneak preview of the new movie ‘Transformers’.

After waiting until the end of the screening on Monday night, Kalidou Diallo, 48, was surrounded by seven plain clothes officers, arrested and subsequently charged with the new anti-piracy misdemeanor. He had been allegedly filming or ‘camming’ the movie, utilizing a hidden camera and digital recorder.

The manager of the American Theater, Justin Hill, said that the authorities knew that his theater was the source of the ‘cams’. “The movie companies … knew it was coming from our theater,” he said. “We were taking heat for it because we weren’t catching anyone.”

Under the previous law, getting caught meant up to 15 days in jail and $250 fine. The new measures signed in May 1, makes ‘camming’ a misdemeanor offense, which means that Diallo is facing a possible 6 months in jail, accompanied by a $5,000 fine.
http://torrentfreak.com/transformers...facing-prison/





Chatterbox

RECORD companies collected $728m in royalties from 51 countries in 2006, up by 8% on 2005, according to IFPI

If they keep bringing in money hand over fist like this, how are we ever going to drive them out of business? – Fieari

http://www.p2pconsortium.com/index.php?showtopic=13585





Arkansas Schools Ban P2P Filesharing
p2pnet.net

Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG have a unique theory: schools don’t exist to educate our young people: they’re primary product marketing and copyright enforcement divisions.

With that in mind, the Big 4 are having increasing success using their RIAA and threats of imminent legal action to blackmail American school staffs and administrations into compelling students to buy corporate product, and only corporate product.

It’s hard to believe this could actually be happening, but it is, and with the full knowledge and active support of the Bush administration and, sadly, what becomes de rigeur in the US inevitably spreads elsewhere, to one degree or another.

As part of its continuing implementation efforts, the RIAA has been hassling the Arkansas Public School Computer Network (APSCN),

Now, starting tomorrow (July 1} the state of Arkansas, “will deny all APSCN P2P traffic at the State Network’s Internet edge,” says the Arkansas Department of Education.

“This will not affect in-state network traffic but will solve the majority of problems relating to P2P traffic. Overall state network performance should be improved and state resources spent troubleshooting P2P related problems will be conserved.”

And the RIAA can pat itself on the back for a job well done on behalf of its masters.

“P2P applications are consuming Internet bandwidth for what is primarily personal use,” says the Department in memo COM-07-137 addressed to superintendents, co-op directors, all principals and technology/business administrators.

“These applications make it simple for anyone to download music, video or any other kind of file from anyone else on the Internet that has the same P2P application running. Far and away the bulk of the P2P bandwidth is used to share illegal copyrighted material,” it says.

“DIS has had to answer a considerable number of RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) complaints in the past with a significant number of those complaints targeting APSCN IP addresses.”

The RIAA motto is, Hold Back the Future: Preserve the Past.
http://p2pnet.net/story/12644





Is RIAA's Linares Affidavit Technically Valid?
NewYorkCountryLawyer

In support of its ex parte, "John Doe," discovery applications against college students, the RIAA has been using a declaration (PDF) by its "Anti-Piracy" Vice President Carlos Linares to show the judge that it has a good copyright infringement case against the "John Does." A Boston University student has challenged the validity of Mr. Linares's declaration, and the RIAA is fighting back. Would appreciate the Slashdot community's take on the validity of Mr. Linares's "science."
http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/.../0025236.shtml





Why Grandma, What Big Attorneys You Have
Robert X. Cringely

Just when you thought they can't get any slimier, the Recording Industry Association of America manages to squirm even deeper into the muck. The RIAA is being sued by a 44-year-old diabled Oregon woman whom it tried and failed to take down in its relentless pursuit of file swappers, real or imaginary. The Recordanistas withdrew their suit earlier this month after admitting they could find no evidence of file swapping on the woman's computer.

Now Tanya Andersen is striking back by suing the RIAA for malicious prosecution. Among other things, Andersen says the Big Bad Record Companies tried to coerce her into a settlement by threatening to drag her 10-year-old daughter into their offices for a deposition, and that one of its fanged minions called the girl's elementary school pretending to be her grandmother. (It was probably the drooling noises and the howling that tipped them off.)

Of course, this is just an allegation, and as usual the RIAA has not commented. But is there anything these guys wouldn't do? Rather than scare consumers away from illegal downloads, tactics like this are more likely to encourage them. Let a billion Bit Torrents flow.

Incidentally, there is no truth to the rumor Dick Cheney plans to assume control of the RIAA after his current job runs out. But it wouldn't surprise me a bit.
http://weblog.infoworld.com/robertxc...cgd=2007-07-02





RIAA Sued for Using Illegal Investigatory Practices
Ken Fisher

A grandmother targeted by the RIAA for file-sharing is striking back at the controversial music industry association, arguing that it has knowingly engaged in "one or more overt acts of unlawful private investigation" to further its case.

Ms. Crain, the defendant in an eight-month-old P2P lawsuit, had her fill of hot air when she escaped Hurricane Rita. When Mother Nature was bested by yet another "RIAA vs. Grandma" lawsuit, she decided it was time to strike back.

Crain says that she'd never even heard of file sharing before she was named in the suit, so when the RIAA came looking for a $4,500 payout, Ms. Crain lawyeredup and filed a counterclaim against the RIAA. The whole ball of wax is Sony vs. Crain, filed in Texas.

It has now come to light that the case is taking a new turn, as Ms. Crain's attorney has filed a motion to amend their counterclaims to include new allegations against the RIAA and its investigative partners. According to court documents, Ms. Crain "has become aware upon information and belief that [the RIAA] have illegally employed unlicensed investigators in the State of Texas and used the information thereby obtained to file this and other similar actions across the country."

At the heart of the issue is a Texas law which says that investigations companies must be licensed in order to collect evidence that can be used in a court. According to court documents, Ms. Crain says that MediaSentry—the company carrying out the investigations for the RIAA—was aware of this requirement, both in Texas and in several other states, and ignored it. The counterclaims even suggest that the RIAA encouraged this arrangement.

"[The RIAA and MediaSentry] agreed between themselves and understood that unlicensed and unlawful investigations would take place in order to provide evidence for this lawsuit, as well as thousands of others as part of a mass litigation campaign," reads the motion.

Ms. Crain's attorney argues that such actions constitute "civil conspiracy" under Texas law and led to her suffering much undue distress.

MediaSentry, the investigative company at the center of the allegations, is used by the RIAA, MPAA, and a handful of other groups to track and identify P2P users believed to be infringing copyrights. Should Ms. Crain prevail in her counterclaims, it could jeopardize the evidence collected by MediaSentry not just in Texas, but in other states where similar licensing provisions exist.

Earlier this month Tanya Andersen prevailed in her battle with the RIAA: a battle which also focused on issues of evidence. That victory came at the same time that we learned of another defendant suing the RIAA for fraud, conspiracy, and extortion.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...practices.html





Private-Eye Hackers Are Convicted

Cops accused of intercepting calls, hacking computers
BBC

Two police officers who moonlighted as private detectives have been convicted of bugging phones and hacking into computers on behalf of wealthy clients.

Jeremy Young and Scott Gelsthorpe set up Active Investigation Services and ran a service dubbed "Hackers Are Us".

One of their clients, waste millionaire Adrian Kirby, paid £47,000 for AIS to spy on environmental investigators.

Gelsthorpe, of Kettering, Northants, and Young, of Ilford, east London, were convicted at Southwark Crown Court.

US millionaire Matthew Mellon was acquitted of spying on his ex-wife, Tamara, founder of the Jimmy Choo shoe company.

Mellon, 43, from Belgravia, central London, was found not guilty of one charge of conspiracy to modify computer material.

Gelsthorpe, 32, was convicted of two counts of conspiracy to cause unauthorised modification of computer material.

He also admitted conspiring to defraud and cause criminal damage to property.

Young, 39, had already pleaded guilty at the start of the trial to the same offences.

Also convicted was David Carroll, 58, of Highgate, north London.

But two other men - Daniel Carroll, 36, from Westminster, London, and Maurice Kennedy, 58, of Barnet, north London - were acquitted.

In January, eight other men were sentenced after pleading guilty to conspiring to intercept phone calls or emails, or false accounting.

Kirby, who is on the Sunday Times Rich List, was jailed for six months.

AIS was set up in August 1999 by Young and Gelsthorpe, who were both serving Metropolitan Police officers at the time.

List of wealthy clients

Gelsthorpe, who had been in the job for six years, was still on active duty while Young was on sick leave for depression throughout the time he was involved with AIS and only resigned after he was arrested.

The pair made up fake names for themselves - Jamie Black and Sean Durney - to make their activities harder to trace.

AIS offered many of the typical private investigation services including surveillance at £25 to £50 per man per hour.

But they were dubbed "Hackers Are Us" in court for the "extras" they offered for a wealthy elite. They used illegal means to provide extra services for clients and had a price list for those services.

For £5,000, AIS would "monitor" - or hack into - an e-mail account.

For this, they used the expertise of Marc Caron, an IT specialist based in Phoenix, Arizona.

He used so-called Trojan horses, which infiltrate computers through a seemingly innocuous e-mail, website or programme, but then allow hackers access to everything on the machine.

Caron pleaded guilty in the US and will be sentenced on 28 June.

Tapped phones

They could also tap a landline telephone at a cost of £6,000 per month.

For this, they employed the services of Michael Hall. He was sentenced before this trial began after admitting a string of offences.

AIS also used firms of "blaggers". Put simply, these were con artists who impersonated someone in a official capacity to trick information from a subject. On at least one occasion, AIS asked a blagger to pretend to be a doctor in order to glean personal medical histories.

Gelsthorpe told the court that "seemed like fair play" to him.

Clients varied. Some were individuals - often suspicious spouses.

These were known as OTS enquiries - for "(A bit) On The Side".

Others were companies. They included a multi-million pound waste disposal company, a transport company and a prestige bathroom firm.

Surveillance operation

Subjects varied too and included local council officials and ordinary residents.

Among the computers targeted were official networks in government offices.

AIS was investigated by the Metropolitan Police's Anti-Corruption Command following a tip-off from BT.

Then in July 2004 they began three months of intensive surveillance into what they called AIS's "corporate espionage".

The firm's office was eventually raided on 29 September 2004 and a total of 27 people arrested.

Police later realised AIS had been planning to expand operations to Ireland.

'Blind faith'

Gelsthorpe denied all knowledge of the illegal activities. He claimed to be merely the office "gopher", but admitted paying no attention to legislation governing AIS's business practices.

He told the court he took it on "blind faith" that nothing untoward was going on despite having underwritten the business.

He denied knowing what Caron was up to on the other side of the Atlantic despite e-mails going to and from his account to Caron discussing computer hacking.

Gelsthorpe blamed Young for everything.

Young admitted breaking the law. His former receptionist Karen Coulson told the court he was a "good storyteller" who told lies and "would stretch the truth".

Even his own wife did not trust him, Ms Coulson said.

"When he wasn't in the office she would go through his things. She was pretty thorough, she wouldn't leave anything unturned. I knew she used to go through his e-mails, but she also found a SIM card hidden in a filing cabinet," she told the court.

Detective Inspector Kevin Hyland, from the Metropolitan Police's Ant-Corruption Team, said: "This case has highlights the concerns law enforcement agencies have long held about the illegal activity undertaken by some members of the private investigation community which remains unregulated."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ws/6766841.stm





An Auction Site for Vulnerabilities
Tim Wilson

Discover a security flaw in a major application or system? You can't sell it on eBay. But starting this week, you can sell it on a new auction site that's not too much different.

WabiSabiLabi, whose marketplace opened for trading on Tuesday, is aiming to change the back-room market for security vulnerabilities and move it into the mainstream. Any researcher who finds a flaw can register to sell it on WSLabi's marketplace. WSLabi, a "neutral, vendor-independent Swiss laboratory," checks out the vulnerabilities and verifies their validity in its own labs before allowing them to be auctioned.

"This thing could definitely have legs," says Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security. "I've heard people talk about selling exploits for a while, auction-style or otherwise, but this is the first auction implementation I've seen. All this would take is a couple of successful transactions, and it could cause a big shift in the way we traditionally think about the vulnerability disclosure process."

There currently are four auctions going in the WabiSabiLabi marketplace, including a Linux kernel memory leak vulnerability that starts at 500 euros.

The marketplace's founders say they believe the "ethical disclosure" policy followed by many security researchers is costing them money. "The system introduced by 'ethical disclosure' has been historically abused by both vendors and security providers in order to exploit the work of security researchers for free," the auction site says.

"This happens only in the IT security field," the site states. "Nobody in the pharmaceutical industry is blackmailing researchers (or the companies that are financing the research) to force them to release the results for free under an ethical disclosure policy.

"In this view, WabiSabiLabi has a not-for-free-disclosure policy, explicitly aiming to reward researchers," the founders state. "The only free information available to both vendors and public will be the general information on each piece of security research listed on the marketplace, which will be enough to understand the issues introduced by each security research, without disclosing any sensible technical detail."

"Recently it was reported that although researchers had analyzed a little more than 7,000 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities last year, the number of new vulnerabilities found in code could be as high as 139,362 per year," said WSLabi CEO Herman Zampariolo, in a written statement. "Our intention is that the marketplace facility on WSLabi will enable security researchers to get a fair price for their findings and ensure that they will no longer be forced to give them away for free or sell them to cyber-criminals."

WSLabi states that the research can only be sold under the condition that "the provided security research material must not come from an illegal source/activity." The site does not say which country's laws it will use to define the term "illegal" -- Germany, for example, recently adopted legislation that essentially outlaws all unauthorized access of computers, even for security research.

Researchers who have seen the site say their first concern is who will be allowed to buy the vulnerabilities. WSLabi says it will "carefully evaluate" all potential buyers "to minimize the risk of selling the right stuff to the wrong people." But the site does not describe its process for doing the vetting, other than requesting a phone number and a faxed copy of an identity card.

"My main fear with this type of thing is that it is difficult to differentiate between a legitimate buyer and someone who simply wants to use the vulnerability for nefarious purposes," says Robert Hansen (a.k.a. RSnake), CEO of SecTheory LLC. "Many of the biggest players in the software industry have said time and time again that they will not buy vulnerabilities, in the same way that the U.S. does not negotiate with terrorists."

WSLabi says it will help researchers design the best-selling scheme and starting price for their discoveries, "enabling them to maximize the value of their findings. A piece of research that would currently sell to one company on an exclusive basis for $300 to $1,000 could sell for ten to twenty times more than this amount using the portal," the auction site says.

The site works much like eBay, with options for Dutch auctions, Buy Now, and a definite running time for each auction. Sellers can choose to sell exclusively to a single buyer or to multiple purchasers. WSLabi did not disclose how much it charges to test the vulnerabilities and act as a broker for each sale.

"I'd expect several researchers to give it a try," Grossman says.
http://www.darkreading.com/document....WT.svl=news1_1





One-Fifth of China’s Domestic Products Aren't Safe
AP

Nearly one-fifth of products made in China for domestic consumption failed quality and safety standards, the government said, while a state-run newspaper on Wednesday stressed the need to raise quality guidelines to meet international levels.

China’s dismal product safety record – both within and outside its borders – has increasingly come to light both in the local and foreign media as goods make their way through global markets. Major buyers such as the United States, Japan, and the European Union have pushed Beijing to improve inspections.

In the first half of 2007, 19.1 percent of products made for domestic consumption were found to be substandard, China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said in a statement posted on its Web site late Tuesday.

Canned and preserved fruit and dried fish were the most problematic, primarily because of excessive bacteria and additives, the agency said.

Though the survey covered many different products, it focused on food, common consumer goods, farming machinery and fertilizers.

Fears that China’s chronic food safety problems were going global surfaced earlier this year with the deaths of dogs and cats in North America blamed on pet food containing Chinese wheat gluten tainted with the chemical melamine.

U.S. authorities have also turned away or recalled toxic fish, juice containing unsafe color additives and popular toy trains decorated with lead paint. Chinese-made toothpaste has been banned by numerous countries for containing diethylene glycol, a toxic ingredient often found in antifreeze.

In an editorial Wednesday, the state-run China Daily newspaper said food exported by China sometimes did not meet standards of importing countries because of a difference in quality guidelines.

"This is not because the food itself was of low quality but because the standards we use may be lower," the editorial said. "It is becoming increasingly urgent to raise the food safety standards to international levels."

The official Xinhua News Agency quoted a top agency official as saying there were few problems with food exported to the U.S.

"Ninety-nine percent of food exported to the United States was up to safety standards over the past two years, which is a very high percentage," Li Yuanping, who is in charge of imported and exported food safety, was quoted as saying.

Yet, Chinese products continued being blocked, banned or recalled in the United States. Most recently, the FDA said it would detain Chinese catfish, basa and dace, as well as shrimp and eel after repeated testing turned up contamination with drugs that have not been approved in the U.S. for use in farmed seafood.

In response, China’s Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine issued a number of new measures designed to ensure the quality of exported farmed seafood, telling its local bureaus to "fully understand the side effects and major loss of the U.S. decision to the Chinese seafood industry."

Besides stepped-up inspections and quarantine, the agency said it would post on its Web site the names of companies that violate regulations and ban them from export activities for two years.

Beijing has also taken other steps to clean up safety problems. Inspectors recently announced they had closed 180 food factories in China in the first half of this year and seized tons of candy, pickles, crackers and seafood tainted with formaldehyde, illegal dyes and industrial wax.

Authorities said most of the offending manufacturers were small, unlicensed food plants with fewer than 10 employees. State media has reported that 75 percent of the country’s estimated 1 million food processing plants are small and privately owned.

According to the survey released Tuesday, more than 93 percent of products made by large companies met standards, while only about 73 percent of products made by small companies met standards. The agency did not say how it defined the size of the companies.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1058340





Companies in U.S. Increase Testing of Chinese Goods
Nelson D. Schwartz

General Mills, Kellogg, Toys “R” Us and other big American companies are increasing their scrutiny of thousands of everyday products they receive from Chinese suppliers, as widening recalls of items like toys and toothpaste force them to focus on potential hazards that were overlooked in the past.

These corporations are stepping up their analysis of imported goods that they sell, making more unannounced visits to Chinese factories for inspections and, in one case, pulling merchandise from American shelves at the first hint of a problem.

General Mills, which makes food products like Pillsbury dough and Chex cereals, is testing for potential contaminants that it did not look for previously, although it would not name the substances. Kellogg has increased its use of outside services that scrutinize Chinese suppliers and has identified alternative suppliers if vital ingredients become unavailable. And Toys “R” Us recently hired two senior executives in new positions to oversee procurement and product safety, mainly for goods made in China.

“We’re thinking in new ways about this,” said Tom Forsythe, a spokesman for General Mills. “We’re looking for things we didn’t look for in the past.”

A Kellogg spokeswoman, Kris Charles, confirmed that retailers had asked whether the company used ingredients from China that were banned by the Food and Drug Administration, including wheat gluten and soy protein.

The company had not, Ms. Charles said, but Kellogg took the extra step of scrutinizing the ingredients that it does import from China, like vitamins, honey, cinnamon, water chestnuts and freeze-dried strawberries. It also screened its Chinese suppliers for links to the recent pet food recall.

The discovery over the last few months of tainted or defective products from China — including toothpaste, tires, toys and fish — has prompted United States lawmakers to fault companies for compromising quality in their quest for inexpensive imports and higher profits.

If companies do not improve their safeguards and more tainted goods are found to be entering the United States, the safety of imports could take on a bigger political dimension, the lawmakers said.

“Food companies have been among the most resistant to informing the public about their ingredients,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, who has been a leading Congressional critic of China. “Now that’s more worrisome because these ingredients are coming from an unregulated environment.”

No fatalities or serious injuries from Chinese food products have been reported in the United States, although counterfeit Chinese glycerine has been linked to at least 100 deaths in Panama. In May, senior members of the Bush administration, including the secretary of agriculture, Mike Johanns, raised the food safety issue with Chinese officials during trade talks in Washington. And last week, in a step designed to reassure Western customers, the Chinese government said it had closed 180 food plants and identified 23,000 safety violations.

Although they affect only a fraction of imports from China, the rising tempo of alerts, including an F.D.A. restriction imposed on Thursday on sales of five types of Chinese-farmed seafood, has called attention to China’s sudden emergence as a major agricultural exporter. Between 2002 and 2006, F.D.A.-regulated imports of food from China rose from just over 100,000 shipments to nearly 235,000. Experts predict those shipments will reach 300,000 this year.

The spate of recalls and the rising volume of exports have highlighted another worry: the increasing dependence of the United States’s biggest food manufacturers on China for basic additives like apple juice, a common sweetener, and preservatives like ascorbic acid.

These little-known additives form the building blocks of many popular staples in American kitchens, keeping fruit from turning brown or providing the sweetness in breakfast bars. Food experts note, for example, that China supplies more than half of all the apple juice imported to the United States, up from a fraction a decade ago.

Other critical but common additives have followed an even sharper trajectory, according to Peter Kovacs, the former chief executive of NutraSweet Kelco and now a food industry consultant. More than 80 percent of ascorbic acid, better known as vitamin C and also used as a preservative, comes from China, Mr. Kovacs said. Chinese imports of xanthan gum, used to thicken dairy products and salad dressings, account for at least 40 percent of United States consumption.

“This is a problem for the whole food chain, but it was a blank spot,” Mr. Kovacs said. “They’re doing it now, but companies weren’t testing these additives before.”

Although Kellogg and General Mills disclosed these additional steps, they were reticent to provide additional details. And many food makers are nervous to discuss what is emerging as an issue that could threaten the trust of shoppers in long-established brands.

A spokesman for Sara Lee said executives were unavailable for comment, while J. M. Smucker did not return calls.

Not every company is altering its approach. In a statement, the agricultural giant Cargill said, “Our practices, which include fully vetting suppliers and conducting supplier audits, have not changed.”

Like many observers, Mr. Brown draws parallels between China today and the world described by Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle” a century ago. That depiction of the meatpacking industry led to the creation of the F.D.A.

Other legislators, including Representative Rosa L. DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, are calling for the creation of a new federal agency to oversee all food inspections. Such an agency would replace the current system, which splits responsibility among the F.D.A., the Department of Agriculture and other agencies.

“We haven’t had significant changes since the time of ‘The Jungle,’ ” Ms. DeLauro said. “It’s time to re-examine it because this is about prevention, not waiting for someone to die.”

Fusing fear of China’s growing economic power with worries about food safety, politicians like Mr. Brown and Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, have made it clear that food safety is an issue that resonates with voters.

“We’re saying to business, ‘You better protect yourself because right now neither the Chinese government nor the American government is doing a very good job of protecting you,’ ” Mr. Schumer said.

But consumers are not sure whom to trust.

“If you buy Cheerios, it’s a brand name, but you turn the box over, it doesn’t give you the list of where the ingredients are made from,” said Michael O’Brien, 59, as he shopped at a Food Emporium in Union Square in New York, referring to the General Mills cereal. “It absolutely concerns me because you never truly know the origin of your product.”

For the companies, the problem is two-fold: figuring out exactly what to test for and maintaining control over their network of suppliers, even as they turn to China for vast quantities of imports at lower prices.

Indeed, the discovery of the industrial chemical melamine in pet food earlier this year — and the likely death of thousands of animals as a result — alerted the food industry to potential dangers in the human food supply.

“What I’m seeing is that companies have recognized the importance of checking their suppliers,” said Dr. David Acheson, assistant commissioner for food protection at the F.D.A.

While the food industry has been in the spotlight lately, other sectors are also changing their approach to imports. Even before the toymaker RC2 Corporation recalled its popular Thomas & Friends trains because of high levels of lead, which can be poisonous if ingested, Toys “R” Us revamped its internal controls over procurement and product safety.

Late last year, Toys “R” Us hired Rick Ruppert from the clothing retailer The Limited as executive vice president for product development and global sourcing, a new position. Mr. Ruppert said the company has increased spending on safety and product development by about 25 percent in the last six months.

Toys “R” Us is also following the actions of its competitors more closely. After Target recalled about 200,000 Kool Toyz action figures because of sharp edges and lead contamination in November, Toys “R” Us discovered that the same Chinese company that manufactured those toys also made the Elite Operations figures in its stores. About 80 percent of the toys sold in the United States are made in China.

An outside testing company was called in to analyze the toys, and they were subsequently pulled from Toys “R” Us shelves when the tests confirmed similar problems. Toys “R” Us has also stopped doing business with the supplier, Toy Century Industrial Ltd. of Hong Kong.

More recently, after the Thomas recall last month, Toys “R” Us went back and had its own Imaginarium train line tested by an outside company. The toys proved to be safe.

“In the past we would have just reviewed prior test results,” Mr. Ruppert said. This time, “we just decided to take the next step: real-time, real-life review by an outside company.”

While the recent problems have raised concerns, it is still too early to know how widespread they are. But food industry officials sharply disagree with lawmakers like Mr. Brown and Ms. DeLauro, who warn of a looming crisis.

“The U.S. food industry has a tremendous track record,” said Pat Verduin, the chief science officer of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents food makers. “We are learning what to test. I’m not so sure we would have tested for melamine in a wheat product two years ago.”

Kai Ma contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/bu...mports.html?hp





Chinese Welder Killed By Exploding Phone

A security official in China says a welder working at an iron ore plant was killed when a Motorola cell phone exploded in his pocket.

The official blames the battery. Colleagues quoted by the Xinhua News Agency said it was apparently exposed to high temperatures.

But a Beijing spokesman for Motorola said it's "highly unlikely" that one of the company's products was involved. He thinks the cell phone or battery were fakes.

Motorola has sent a team of experts to the town in western China to help in the investigation.
http://www.local6.com/technology/13619507/detail.html





China Steps Up Its Safety Efforts
David Barboza

China made new public displays on Friday of its efforts to crack down on defective products, sentencing a former top drug safety official to death and disclosing an investigation into cellphone batteries after one reportedly exploded, killing a man when it pierced his heart.

The country, facing mounting international concerns about the quality and safety of goods made in China, has taken several well-publicized steps in recent months to show its determination to curb the production and export of unsafe or fraudulent products. It remains unclear, however, whether those steps will result in significant improvements in quality. Still, because its economic growth has been fueled in large part by exports, China has a strong incentive to make changes.

In southern Guangdong Province, one of the world’s biggest electronics manufacturing and exporting centers, Chinese regulators said that they had found batteries in Motorola and Nokia mobile phones that failed safety tests and were prone to explode under certain conditions.

Motorola and Nokia — two of the world’s biggest mobile phone makers — denied the batteries were theirs, suggesting they were counterfeit.

The batteries had labels that said they were manufactured by Motorola and the Beijing operation of Sanyo of Japan. Also on Friday, the state-run news media said that a former high-ranking official at the top food and drug watchdog agency in China had been sentenced to death for corruption and approving counterfeit drugs.

The former official, Cao Wenzhuang, was in charge of drug registration approvals at the state Food and Drug Administration until 2005. He was accused of accepting more than $300,000 in bribes from two drug companies and helping to undermine the public’s confidence.

Mr. Cao’s sentence was handed down by the No. 1 Intermediate Court in Beijing less than two months after the same court sentenced Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of the agency, to death for accepting $850,000 in bribes to help steer drug companies through various approval processes.

Mr. Cao, however, was given the death sentence with a two-year reprieve, a lighter penalty that might allow him to have his sentence commuted to life in prison.

For years, China’s role as the world’s factory floor seemed to usher in an age of lower and lower prices, helping to tame inflation around the globe and powering one of the greatest economic growth stories in history.

The dark side of that boom, however, has been a culture of counterfeiting or copying high-end Western products.

Counterfeit products have been produced here since the country’s economic reforms began to take hold in the early 1980s, and things like Gucci bags, counterfeit DVDs and Windows operating systems can still be purchased on the streets of big cities.

But now, perhaps for the first time, cheap and sometimes counterfeit products from China are beginning to look hazardous, increasingly dangerous and even deadly.

China’s state-controlled news media reported Thursday that a 22-year-old man in western China was killed in June after his Motorola cellphone exploded in his shirt pocket. The man was reportedly a welder and the heat associated with the job could have touched off the explosion.

In a statement from its headquarters in Schaumburg, Ill., Motorola said that its preliminary review of the incident “suggests that it is highly unlikely that a cellphone caused this accident.” A company spokeswoman added that the low levels of electrical energy in a cellphone make it “improbable” that the death in China could have been caused by a faulty battery.

The company said it was cooperating with Chinese officials to determine the cause.

Yang Bo-ning, a spokesman for Motorola in Beijing, said that all the batteries tested “were not Motorola genuine batteries; they were fakes.” He added that the companies distributing those batteries “are not our suppliers.”

Nokia officials said they were investigating and trying to determine whether any of the substandard batteries affected Nokia phones.

Nokia officials said that they did not manufacture batteries in China and that the company had no business ties with the Chinese distributors named in the safety tests.

“We are confident this is a counterfeit product,” said Eija-Riitta Huovinen, a Nokia spokeswoman in Finland.

The lithium-ion batteries used in today’s small, yet powerful, cellphones are half the weight of nickel batteries. But lithium is a volatile metal and batteries can become a fire hazard under certain conditions if there are flaws in the battery manufacturing process. The computer makers Dell and Apple recalled millions of lithium batteries used in notebook machines last year, after a few notebooks burst into flames.

Until about 2001, nearly all lithium-ion batteries for notebook computers, video camcorders and cellphones, were produced in Japan, according to industry analysts. But in the last few years, dozens of independent Chinese lithium ion battery makers have begun production — often making counterfeit batteries. These third-party producers often sell lithium batteries for one-third or one-fourth the cost of Japanese producers, analysts say. But attention to manufacturing processes, materials and testing can be substandard, increasing safety risks.

“Lithium is a hard-to-tame metal and even a little moisture seeping into the battery during the manufacturing process can be a fire hazard later,” said Richard Doherty, research director of the Envisioneering Group, a consulting firm.

The reports about the batteries are the latest in a series of high-profile recalls and public relations disasters for China that seem to be playing into the hands of the country’s critics and big corporations worried about protecting their intellectual property.

Exports of tainted pet food ingredients earlier this year touched off one of the biggest pet food recalls in American history after as many as 4,000 cats and dogs were killed or injured, according to American regulators.

Later, there were worldwide recalls of Chinese toothpaste laced with a mislabeled industrial chemical from China called diethylene glycol that was found to be responsible for nearly 200 deaths in Haiti and Panama.

And a few weeks ago, an American company recalled about 450,000 Chinese-made tires because they did not contain a safety feature that could prevent tire treads from splitting and falling apart. The recall occurred after a lawsuit linked the tires to an accident in Pennsylvania in 2006 that resulted in two deaths.

In response, China has taken numerous steps to reassure global investors, customers and consumers at home that “Made in China” is not a warning label.

Even as the government has insisted that most of its products are safe and of high quality, regulators have announced efforts to rewrite food safety regulations, introduce a national recall system and overhaul the nation’s top drug watchdog.

Officials have also dispatched over 30,000 inspectors on a nationwide sweep to find substandard foods, drugs and consumer products.

This week, the government announced the results of some of its inspections, and they were startling: nearly 20 percent of the nation’s food and consumer products were found to be substandard or tainted.

Food was laced with industrial chemicals, formaldehyde, industrial wax and dangerous dyes; baby clothes were contaminated with dangerous chemicals, children’s snack food had excessive amounts of preservatives; and old food waste was repackaged and sold as new.

Worried about a backlash from Western consumers, global corporations are now upgrading their own inspections, particularly in the aftermath of a recall by the RC2 Corporation of Illinois of its popular Thomas & Friends toy railway sets after they were found to have been coated with lead paint.

Companies are also preparing for possible class-action lawsuits.

“Big companies are doing two things: they’re considering alternative sources for products and ingredients from China, just in case China is closed off or American consumers reject their products,” said Gene Grabowski, a senior vice president at Levick Strategic Communications, a Washington-based consulting firm that advises consumer product companies. “And the more immediate concern is that a lawsuit would be filed, and so they want to have their legal liability situation in place and manageable.”

In Guangdong Province, investigators are looking into how the substandard batteries made their way to the market and whether they could have entered the export market, appearing to be identical to Motorola and Nokia goods.

“We approached the Guangdong authorities and then did our own tests,” said Mr. Yang at Motorola. “These were not our batteries. There are lots of counterfeits. Every year we seize thousands of counterfeit batteries and counterfeit battery labels.”

Guangdong regulators could not be reached for comment. Sanyo officials also could not be reached late Friday.

Nokia and Motorola, however, say they are concerned about the substandard goods.

“We take all issues involving counterfeiting very seriously because counterfeiting has the potential to affect the good name and reputation of our products,” said Ms. Huovinen of Nokia.

Kevin J. O’Brien in Berlin and Steve Lohr in New York contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/07/bu...s/07china.html





Assault and battery

iPhone Spin Goes Round and Round
Joe Nocera

By Wednesday morning, the iPhone tom-toms were beating in earnest.

They’d been building for some time, even before Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, announced at the Macworld conference that his company was months away from unleashing its “revolutionary” hand-held device, a machine that combined cellphone, music and Internet.

It sounds so prosaic when I phrase it like that, but on the Macworld stage that January morning, Mr. Jobs screened an iPhone demo, and it was dazzling — so beautiful and elegant it could have been designed by the gods. Who had ever seen such a gorgeous screen? Or such amazing functionality in so slim a package? Or so many sweet new touches?

Yesterday evening, the “Jesus phone,” as some technology bloggers call it, finally went on sale, with a hefty price tag of $499 or $599, depending on whether you buy a 4-gigabyte or an 8-gigabyte iPhone. But it was Wednesday, really, that the iPhone hype began building to its Jobs-orchestrated crescendo. That was the day the first reviews were published. There were only four of them, for Apple had allowed only four select reviewers, including Walter S. Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal and David Pogue of The New York Times, to take iPhone test drives.

They all raved. “A beautiful and breakthrough computer,” wrote Mr. Mossberg and Katherine Boehret, his Wall Street Journal aide de camp. “It does things no phone has ever done before,” wrote Mr. Pogue.

But Mr. Pogue also pointed out that “it lacks features found even on the most basic phones,” and in the course of his review he listed a number of drawbacks. It didn’t have voice dialing. AT&T’s cellular network was so slow for Internet access it made you long for dial-up. Mr. Mossberg wrote that you have to switch to a different keyboard view — the iPhone has two — every time you want to insert a comma or period. How annoying is that?

But deep in Mr. Pogue’s review came the paragraph that stopped me in my tracks. Pointing out that the iPhone, unique among cellphones, doesn’t have a removable battery, Mr. Pogue wrote: “Apple says the battery starts to lose capacity after 300 to 400 charges. Eventually, you’ll have to send the phone to Apple for battery replacement, much as you do now with an iPod, for a fee.”

Huh? That couldn’t be, could it? Did Apple really expect people to mail their iPhones to Apple HQ and wait for the company to return it with a new battery? It was bad enough that the company did that with the iPod — but a cellphone? Cellphones have become a critical part of daily life, something we can barely do without for an hour, much less days at a time. Surely, Mr. Jobs realized that.

Didn’t he?

When you do what I do for a living, this sort of question is usually pretty easy to clear up. You ring up a company spokesman, and get an answer. But at Apple, where according to Silicon Valley lore even the janitors have to sign nondisclosure agreements, there is no such thing as a straightforward answer. There is only spin.

“Apple will service every battery that needs to be replaced in an environmentally friendly matter,” said Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman. He went on: “With up to 8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of Internet use, 7 hours of video playback or 24 hours of audio playback and more than 10 days of standby time, iPhone’s battery life is longer than any other smartphone.”

This response didn’t even attempt to answer the question I’d asked him, which was how Apple planned to service its batteries. But never mind. This is another Apple innovation: the robotic spokesman, who says only what he’s been programmed to say.

With Apple taking the position that the battery replacement issue was not something it needed to share with reporters — much less buyers of the iPhone — I went elsewhere in search of answers. I talked to design experts, battery wonks, technology geeks, and Mr. Mossberg of The Journal, the dean of technology reviewers.

One thing I wanted to know was why Apple had made a cellphone without a removable battery in the first place; it seemed like such an extreme act of consumer unfriendliness. If the iPod was any guide, batteries were inevitably going to run down. With most cellphones, when the battery has problems, you take it to a store, buy a new battery, let the salesman pop it in, and start using it again. Why wasn’t Apple willing to do that?

“It is about assured obsolescence,” said Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group, a technology consulting firm. “That is why they don’t have a replaceable battery in the iPod. But the problem here is that the iPhone will run out of battery life before the two-year service contract runs out.”

“Steve Jobs has always worshipped at the altar of closed systems,” mused Mark R. Anderson of Strategic News Service, a technology newsletter. “Go back to the original MacIntosh. To get into the Mac computer required factory-only tools.” He added, “I don’t think it serves the consumer.”

Larry Keeley, the president of the innovation and design firm Doblin Inc., had another theory.

“The real issue is that Steve and Jonathan Ive” — Apple’s design chief — “have decided to emphasize sexiness and a different basic experience” over such ho-hum consumer needs as a replaceable battery. He was convinced that it was primarily a design issue; indeed, he thinks Apple is using a lithium polymer battery in the iPhone, which can be stretched into different shapes — and thus can be tucked into an extremely thin space.

The iPhone, Mr. Keeley said, “has been designed with a lot of consumer sacrifice problems,” not just the battery but AT&T’s sluggish network, which Mr. Jobs chose because a faster network would — how’s this for circular logic? — drain the battery too fast.

On the other hand, those who have drunk from the iPhone Kool-Aid were not remotely bothered by the removable battery issue. My assumption was that if the battery does indeed last for 300 to 400 charges, it will probably start to lose its capacity in about a year, at least for heavy users. Of course the iPhone warranty also lasts a year, so if my calculation is right, it means that the batteries will need to be replaced just as the warranty runs out. Meaning that iPhone customers will have to pay for a new battery instead of getting it free — just like the iPod.

But maybe I’m being too conspiratorial. Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies, a well-respected technology consultant, told me, “I think this is much ado over nothing.” Yes, he said, there would be heavy users who had to recharge their iPhones every day, but most people would get two full years out of their batteries. So it would at least last as long as the service contract.

“All I can tell you,” Mr. Mossberg said, “is that 100 million people bought an iPod without a replaceable battery.” He quickly added, “If they had made it with a replaceable battery, it would have been better.”

Still, Mr. Mossberg was knocked out by what he has seen of the iPhone battery so far — “I watched ‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’ which runs two and a half hours, three times! On a phone! Can you imagine doing that on a Treo?” (What I really can’t imagine is watching “Pirates of the Caribbean” three times.)

One of the battery experts I talked to, Robert L. Kanode, the chief executive of Valence Technology, a small company that is developing a new kind of lithium battery, said that the technology has advanced so much — as has the ability of companies like Apple to manage power inside their devices — that it was “perfectly possible that it will get you to two years.”

So maybe it will get two years. But let’s think about what that means. Those who are dismissive of the battery issue are saying, essentially, that when the two years are up, and the battery needs to be replaced, customers will purchase a new and improved iPhone instead. That’s why it is a nonissue for them — they are buying into the idea of assured obsolescence. If all you want is a new battery after two years — and don’t lust after whatever new phone gadget Mr. Jobs has come up with by then — then you’re just not with it.

Besides, don’t most cellphone users get a new phone within two years? The answer, of course, is yes. But most cellphone purchases are heavily discounted — costing $100 or less — and are tied to an extension of the service contract. Is Apple really going to play that game? I’m betting the answer is no. Buying a new iPhone is going to be an expensive proposition for the foreseeable future — which of course is great for Apple’s bottom line, but not so great for its customers.

And what about the people who have early battery problems? Or those who are such heavy users of their iPhone that they need a new battery after a year? The question remains, What are they supposed to do? Go without a cellphone while Apple is replacing the battery? From where I’m sitting, this is classic Apple behavior. It is perfectly happy to sell you the coolest $599 device you’ve ever seen. Just don’t expect them to be especially helpful when it runs into problems.

Then again, maybe there is a different explanation. Maybe Apple itself hasn’t figure out what to do about the battery replacement issue — and is avoiding admitting that by not saying anything. Yesterday morning, when I got into the office, I found a voice message from an Apple public relations hand named Jennifer Bowcock. Mr. Dowling was away, and she wanted to see if she could answer my battery questions.

So I asked her the same question I’d been asking Mr. Dowling: how was Apple going to handle battery replacement? “I’ll look into that and get back to you,” she said cheerily. I could hear someone standing next to her say: “We’re not talking about that.”

An hour later, she sent me an e-mail message. “You asked why the iPhone does not have a removable battery,” it began. “With up to 8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of internet use, 7 hours of video playback, 24 hours of audio playback and 10 days of standby time, iPhone’s battery life is longer than any other smartphone.”

I give up. Have a great launch, Mr. Jobs.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/30.../30nocera.html





86 It

Apple’s battery replacement service will cost $79, plus $6.95 shipping and should take three business days. In addition, rental phones will be available for an extra $29.00 plus a refundable $600.00 deposit and any taxes. – Jack.





Hey, that’s my carrier

D.Telekom's Mobile Unit Clinches iPhone Deal: Paper

Deutsche Telekom's mobile phone unit T-Mobile clinched a deal to bring Apple Inc's iPhone handset to Germany, according to a report in a German daily.

Without citing sources Rheinische Post said in a preview of a story to be published on Wednesday that T-Mobile is expected to sell the iPhone exclusively with a T-Mobile contract for around 450 euros ($612) starting Nov 1.

Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile were not immediately available for comment.

The iPhone, which comes with an in-built iPod, web browser and e-mail software, went on sale in the United States on Friday.

Apple has signed up top U.S. telecoms operator AT&T Inc. in an exclusive deal for at least two years to sell the phone in the United States, where customers willing to sign a two-year contract are expected to pay $500 to $600 for a handset.

In Europe, Britain's Vodafone Group, Deutsche Telekom, Paris-based France Telecom and Spain's Telefonica have been tipped as potential partners for Apple.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...83260920070703





iPhone-Free Cellphone News
David Pogue

Man, oh man. How’d you like to have been a PR person making a cellphone announcement last week, just as the iPhone storm struck? You’d have had all the impact of a gnat in a hurricane.

But hard to believe though it may be, T-Mobile did make an announcement last week. And even harder to believe, its new product may be as game-changing as Apple’s.

It’s called T-Mobile HotSpot @Home, and it’s absolutely ingenious. It could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, and yet enrich T-Mobile at the same time. In the cellphone world, win-win plays like that are extremely rare.

Here’s the basic idea. If you’re willing to pay $10 a month on top of a regular T-Mobile voice plan, you get a special cellphone. When you’re out and about, it works like any other phone; calls eat up your monthly minutes as usual.

But when it’s in a Wi-Fi wireless Internet hot spot, this phone offers a huge bargain: all your calls are free. You use it and dial it the same as always — you still get call hold, caller ID, three-way calling and all the other features — but now your voice is carried by the Internet rather than the cellular airwaves.

These phones hand off your calls from Wi-Fi network to cell network seamlessly and automatically, without a single crackle or pop to punctuate the switch. As you walk out of a hot spot, fewer and fewer Wi-Fi signal bars appear on the screen, until — blink! — the T-Mobile network bars replace them. (The handoff as you move in the opposite direction, from the cell network into a hot spot, is also seamless, but takes slightly longer, about a minute.)

O.K., but how often are you in a Wi-Fi hot spot? With this plan, about 14 hours a day. T-Mobile gives you a wireless router (transmitter) for your house — also free, after a $50 rebate. Connect it to your high-speed Internet modem, and in about a minute, you’ve got a wireless home network. Your computer can use it to surf the Web wirelessly — and now all of your home phone calls are free.

You know how people never seem to have good phone reception in their homes? How they have to huddle next to a window to make calls? That’s all over now. The free router is like a little T-Mobile cell tower right in your house.

Truth is, the HotSpot @Home phones work with any Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) router, including one you may already have. But T-Mobile’s routers, manufactured by D-Link and Linksys, have three advantages.

First, you turn on the router’s encryption — to keep neighbors off your network — by pressing one button, rather than having to fool with passwords. Second, these routers give priority to calls, so that computer downloads won’t degrade your call quality. Third, T-Mobile’s routers greatly extend the phone’s battery life. The routers say, in gadgetese, “I’m here for you, any time,” just once, rather than requiring the phone to issue little Wi-Fi “Are you there?” pings every couple of minutes.

T-Mobile was already a price leader in the cellphone game. But the HotSpot @Home program can be extremely economical, in four ways.

SAVING NO. 1 It’s not just your calls at home that are free; you may also get free calls at your office, friends’ houses, library, coffee shops and so on — wherever Wi-Fi is available. You can access both unprotected and password-protected Wi-Fi networks (you just enter the password on the phone’s keypad).

The phone has a built-in Search for Networks feature. Once you select a wireless network, the phone memorizes it. The next time you’re in that hot spot, you’re connected silently and automatically.

There’s one big limitation to all this freeness: these phones can’t get onto any hot spot that require you to log in on a Web page (to enter a credit card number, for example). Unfortunately, this restriction rules out most airports and many hotel rooms.
There’s one exception — or, rather, 8,500 of them: T-Mobile’s archipelago of hot spots at Starbucks, Borders and other public places. In these places you encounter neither the fee nor the Web-page sign-in that you would encounter if you were using a laptop; the words “T-Mobile Hot Spot” simply appear at the top of your screen, and you can start making free calls.

The cool part is that, depending on how many calls you can make in hot spots, the Wi-Fi feature might permit you to choose a much less expensive calling plan. If you’re a heavy talker, you might switch, for example, from T-Mobile’s $100 plan (2,500 minutes) to its $40 plan (1,000 minutes). Even factoring in the $10 HotSpot @Home fee, you’d still save $600 a year.

SAVING NO. 2 T-Mobile’s billing system isn’t smart enough to notice handoffs between Wi-Fi and cellular networks. So each call is billed according to where it begins. You can start a call at home, get in your car, drive away and talk for free until the battery’s dead.

The opposite is also true, however; if you begin a call on T-Mobile’s cell network and later enter a Wi-Fi hot spot, the call continues to eat up minutes. If HotSpot @Home catches on, therefore, the airwaves will reverberate with people coming home and saying, “Hey, can I call you right back?”

SAVING NO. 3 When you’re in a hot spot, T-Mobile has no idea where you are in the world. You could be in Des Moines, Denmark or Djibouti. So this is a big one for travelers: When you’re in a hot spot overseas, all calls to United States numbers are free.
SAVING NO. 4 T-Mobile’s hope is that you’ll cancel your home phone line altogether. You’ll be all cellphone, all the time. And why not, since you’ll now get great cell reception at home and have only one phone number and voicemail? Ka-ching: there’s an additional $500 a year saved.

Have T-Mobile’s accountants gone quietly mad? Why would they give away the farm like this?

Because T-Mobile benefits, too. Let’s face it: T-Mobile’s cellular network is not on par with, say, Verizon’s. But improving its network means spending millions of dollars on new cell towers. It’s far less expensive just to hand out free home routers.

Furthermore, every call you make via Wi-Fi is one less call clogging T-Mobile’s cellular network, further reducing the company’s need to spend on network upgrades.

In principle, then, HotSpot @Home is a revolutionary, rule-changing, everybody-wins concept. But before you go canceling lines and changing calling plans, consider a few small flaws.

At the moment, you have a choice of only two phones: the Nokia 6086 and Samsung t409. Both of these are small basic flip phones (both $50 after rebate and with two-year commitment). They sound terrific; over Wi-Fi, in fact, they produce the best-sounding cellphone calls you’ve ever made. But the screens are small and coarse, and the features limited. Fortunately, T-Mobile intends to bring the HotSpot @Home feature to many other phones in the coming months.

The Wi-Fi sucks power, too; these phones get 6.5 hours of talk time on the cell network, but only 4 hours over Wi-Fi.

Finally, T-Mobile eventually intends to price the service at $20 a month, or $30 for family plans. Only people who sign up during the introductory period (now through an unspecified end date) will be offered the $10 price, or $20 for families.

Even at the higher price, you could still come out ahead. With HotSpot @Home, T-Mobile has taken a tremendous step into the future. Most phone companies cower in fear when you mention voice calls over the Internet (Skype, Vonage and so on). After all, if the Internet makes the price approach zero, who will pay for phone service?

But T-Mobile has found a way to embrace and exploit this technology to everyone’s benefit. The result is a smartly implemented, technologically polished, incredibly inexpensive way to make over your phone lifestyle.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/05/te...s/05pogue.html





All the News That’s Fit to Print Out
Jonathan Dee

When news broke on May 8 about the arrest of a half-dozen young Muslim men for supposedly planning to attack Fort Dix, alongside the usual range of reactions — disbelief, paranoia, outrage, indifference, prurience — a newer one was added: the desire to consecrate the event’s significance by creating a Wikipedia page about it. The first one to the punch was a longtime Wikipedia contributor known as CltFn, who at about 7 that morning created what’s called a stub — little more than a placeholder, often just one sentence in length, which other contributors may then build upon — under the heading “Fort Dix Terror Plot.” A while later, another Wikipedia user named Gracenotes took an interest as well. Over the next several hours, in constant cyberconversation with an ever-growing pack of other self-appointed editors, Gracenotes — whose real name is Matthew Gruen — expanded and corrected this stub 59 times, ultimately shaping it into a respectable, balanced and even footnoted 50-line account of that day’s major development in the war on terror. By the time he was done, “2007 Fort Dix Attack Plot” was featured on Wikipedia’s front page. Finally, around midnight, Gruen left a note on the site saying, “Off to bed,” and the next morning he went back to his junior year of high school.

Wikipedia, as nearly everyone knows by now, is a six-year-old global online encyclopedia in 250 languages that can be added to or edited by anyone. (“Wiki,” a programming term long in use both as noun and adjective, derives from the Hawaiian word meaning “quick.”) Wikipedia’s goal is to make the sum of human knowledge available to everyone on the planet at no cost. Depending on your lights, it is either one of the noblest experiments of the Internet age or a nightmare embodiment of relativism and the withering of intellectual standards.

Love it or hate it, though, its success is past denying — 6.8 million registered users worldwide, at last count, and 1.8 million separate articles in the English-language Wikipedia alone — and that success has borne an interesting side effect. Just as the Internet has accelerated most incarnations of what we mean by the word “information,” so it has sped up what we mean when we employ the very term “encyclopedia.” For centuries, an encyclopedia was synonymous with a fixed, archival idea about the retrievability of information from the past. But Wikipedia’s notion of the past has enlarged to include things that haven’t even stopped happening yet. Increasingly, it has become a go-to source not just for reference material but for real-time breaking news — to the point where, following the mass murder at Virginia Tech, one newspaper in Virginia praised Wikipedia as a crucial source of detailed information.

So indistinct has the line between past and present become that Wikipedia has inadvertently all but strangled one of its sister projects, the three-year-old Wikinews — one of several Wikimedia Foundation offshoots (Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wiktionary) founded on the principle of collaboratively produced content available free. Wikinews, though nominally covering not just major stories but news of all sorts, has sunk into a kind of torpor; lately it generates just 8 to 10 articles a day on a grab bag of topics that happen to capture the interest of its fewer than 26,000 users worldwide, from bird flu to the Miss Universe pageant to Vanuatu’s ban on cookie imports from neighboring Fiji. On bigger stories there’s just no point in competing with the ruthless purview of the encyclopedia, which now accounts for a staggering one out of every 200 page views on the entire Internet.

The tricky thing is, the process by which Wikipedia usually, eventually gets things right — the notion that mistakes in a given entry, whether intentional or unintentional, will ultimately be caught and repaired as a function of the project’s massive, egalitarian oversight — doesn’t seem as if it would work when people are looking for information about events unfolding in real time. How on earth can anyone be trusted to get the story right when any version of the story is only as accurate, or even as serious, as the last anonymous person to log on and rewrite it?

Nothing is easier than taking shots at Wikipedia, and its many mistakes (most often instances of deliberate vandalism) are schadenfreude’s most renewable resource. But given the chaotic way in which it works, the truly remarkable thing about Wikipedia as a news site is that it works as well as it does. And what makes it work is a relatively small group of hard-core devotees who will, the moment big news breaks, drop whatever they’re doing to take custody of the project and ensure its, for lack of a better term, quality control. Though Wikiculture cringes at the word “authority,” in a system where a small group of people has the ability to lock out the input of a much larger one, it’s pure semantics to call that small group’s authority by any other name. Still, the only way to install yourself in that position of authority on Wikipedia is to care about it enough. So who are the members of this all-volunteer cadre, and why should it matter so much to them whether Wikipedia is any good at all?

Jimmy Wales, the founder and watchmaker-god of Wikipedia, isn’t completely sure who they are either, but that’s fully in keeping with the radically decentralized culture of the project itself. (Wikipedia last did a survey of its own users in 2003, and it has no plans for another one.) He did bristle when I suggested that they tended to be in their early 20s or even younger — editing encyclopedia entries, he said, is “not a young person’s hobby” — but after we traded stories for a while, he admitted that his own evidence was as anecdotal as my own.

“I’m always traveling and meeting Wikipedians everywhere,” he said, “but there’s probably some bias in the sample that I get, in that the very youngest may not be able to go out and meet us on a Thursday night for a beer because they have school the next day. So I may get a bit of a skew.”

Wales is a soft-spoken man with the unnerving focus of a person who sees something nobody else in the room sees. The word that comes up most often in his conversation is “interesting,” and that’s as good a key as any to understanding the mind-set of someone who has put in motion a public project so vast that he no longer has any real power over it. Not that such power is anything he covets. In his former life he made a killing as an options trader in Chicago, but his manner is much more monastic than that might suggest. We met at his rather shockingly modest hotel just south of Times Square, and while I could not source this statement well enough to satisfy an ardent Wikipedian, I would feel comfortable wagering that he is the only person on Time magazine’s list of the World’s 100 Most Influential People to have recently passed a night in that particular fleabag.

Wales’s own modesty sets the tone for the whole enterprise; still, Wikipedia does feature — though many users will deny it zealously — a kind of rudimentary institutional hierarchy. Among the 4.6 million registered English-language users are about 1,200 administrators, whose “admin” status carries a few extra technical powers, most notably the power to block other users from the site, either temporarily or permanently. Those nominated for adminship must answer an initial series of five questions, after which other users have seven days to register their approval or disapproval. Above the admin level are the cheekily named “bureaucrats,” who are empowered to appoint the admins and will do so if they deem a user consensus has been reached (the magic number is somewhere around 70 percent approval). There is also a level above the bureaucrats, called stewards, of whom there are only about 30, appointed by the seven-person Wikimedia Foundation board of directors. The higher up you go in this chain of authority, the humbler the language they use to describe their status: they compare themselves frequently to janitors or, more tellingly, to monks. There is an unmistakably religious tone to this embrace of humility, this image of themselves as mere instruments of the needs and will of the greater community. (The encyclopedia’s guiding principles are known as the Five Pillars.) The level of devotion to this ideal can get a little cultlike: one admin insisted to me that the vote by which he was elevated was not a vote at all but a “community consensus,” though he allowed that the means by which this consensus was reached did have “votelike tendencies.”

Though Wales is right that there are plenty of devoted Wikipedians out there who are upward of 25 years old, most of those who do the hard-core editing on a breaking news story seem to be at the younger end of the spectrum. Part of the reason for that may be that high-school and college students are much more likely than older folks to have six or eight hours at a stretch to devote to something on the spur of the moment. But there is also something uniquely empowering — for better or for worse — about Wikipedia, in that there is no real organizational ladder to climb: since everyone contributes behind screen names (which may or may not match their real ones), questions of age, appearance, experience and so forth don’t color the discussion. The only way to achieve a degree of authority in the world of Wikipedia is to show sufficient devotion to it, and that can happen in relatively short order. Gracenotes, for instance, was considered for admin status in part for his work on the Fort Dix story, and in part as a simple consequence of the fact that he will often, after his homework is done and his church responsibilities are fulfilled, spend six hours or more a night cleaning up errors in the encyclopedia. An amateur programmer and calculus buff who lives near Poughkeepsie, N.Y., he became seriously involved with Wikipedia just about eight months ago, after his parents ordered him out of a different online community of which they did not approve.

When you’re talking about Gracenotes and those Wikipedians like him — people who, though they work very hard, generally do so without leaving their bedrooms — what does “news” even mean? The presentational difference is that Wikipedia’s version of events comes in the form of one constantly rewritten, constantly updated, summary article, rather than a chronological series of articles, each reflecting new developments, as newspapers and even most news sites do. But much more significant than that, no Wikipedia article contains any attempt at actual reporting — in fact, original research is forbidden.

The rule, according to Wales, is “not out-of-context absolute” — if he, or some other trusted Wikipedia user, happened to be present at some catastrophic event and took a picture of it, that picture wouldn’t necessarily be removed from the site — but in general, he explained, “it’d be too easy to be hoaxed. And anyway, an encyclopedia is really not where you should go for that. Britannica doesn’t publish original research. An encyclopedia is the condensation of received wisdom.”

For real-time received wisdom, there’s pretty much one place to go in today’s world, and that’s Google. Thus Gruen fleshed out the Fort Dix story entirely by searching sources on Google and its offshoot, Google News. During the editing frenzy on May 8, he told me, “There was one dispute where somebody thought we should be using the word ‘alleged’ a lot more than we were, because it was, like, how do you know they were really planning on doing it? But I was kind of against too much use of ‘alleged,’ because, well, I don’t know, I just kind of felt that the F.B.I. was a pretty reliable source.” At which point thousands of dead journalism professors turned over in their graves.



But even when Wikipedia’s function is journalistic, its aim is not; rather than report the news, the goal is to act as a kind of phenomenally fast, bias-free digest of what others have already reported elsewhere. On a big news day, Wikipedia functions like a massive, cooperative blog — except that where most blogs’ function is to sieve news accounts through the filter of strong opinion, Wikipedia’s goal is the opposite: it strives to filter all the opinion out of it. With 10 or 20 or 50 pairs of eyes on every available news account, if one fact, or one loaded word — “terror,” say — appears in one of those accounts but not the others, Wikipedia’s own version will almost always screen it out. Not exactly investigative journalism, but it doesn’t pretend to be; it relies on others for that.

Natalie Martin, a 23-year-old history major at Antioch College in Ohio, was granted admin status last winter after contributing to the site for about nine months. She thought at one point in her life that she wanted to be a journalist, she said, “but then I decided that my only real interest in newspapers is fixing all the comma mistakes.” Martin works at the circulation desk of a local library — a job that often leaves her attention less than fully engaged, in which case she logs onto Wikipedia and looks for errors. Her usual M.O. is to check the “recent changes” page, a running log of the most recent edits made anywhere on the site, no matter how large or small. It gives you some sense of the project’s scale to learn that the roughly 250 most recent changes to the English-language Wikipedia were made in the last 60 seconds.

On a normal day, she told me, much of her work involves finding and instantly reverting vandalism, usually profanity from bored schoolchildren. Messing with a Wikipedia page requires no hacking skills whatsoever; thus vandalism is pandemic there. Though the admins are loath to give vandals special attention in any form, the fact is that there are some who earn their grudging admiration, if only for their sense of humor. Stephen Colbert, in his fake-newsman persona at least, has been a regular tormentor of the site, urging his viewers to change a given fact en masse; when the words “Colbert Alert” appear on the admins’ chat forum, 20 or more of them will rush to the ramparts of a targeted page. And users with a mind-boggling amount of time on their hands can sometimes raise their defacement to conceptual levels — for instance, Willy on Wheels, a legendary Wikipedia user whose vandalism consisted of adding the words “on wheels” to the headlines of literally thousands of entries. Uncountable hours were spent deleting those two graffitilike words from all over the site. He or she even spawned numerous copycats, and to this day, anyone whose user name contains the phrase “on wheels” runs the risk of having his or her editorial privileges summarily revoked.

On April 16, though, Martin’s routine vandal-catching and grammar-policing was altered by news of the shootings at Virginia Tech. By the time she got to the site, a few hours after the shooting itself, the brand-new “Virginia Tech Massacre” page had already been contributed to or vandalized hundreds of times, but she took control and has personally made more than 200 edits to the story. “It happened rather quickly,” she said, “and there were maybe a dozen people that were paying very close attention: information would break, and we would talk about how it should be phrased, how the gun-politics stuff should be phrased in a way that’s neutral and doesn’t use some of the loaded terminology that each side tends to use. I was not online when the name of the gunman was released, but I imagine somebody went and added it to the page within 30 seconds. Because that seems to be what happens.”

She and that dozen or so others decided to use one of their technical privileges as admins to “semiprotect” the page, meaning they have locked out any would-be contributions from anonymous users or users with registered accounts less than four days old. (The more seldom invoked “full protection” prevents anyone but admins from editing a page.) They made the decision, Martin said, because the level of vandalism was “just ridiculous. Sometimes it’s not malicious, it’s people who want to put in their opinion, or they put in ‘Go Virginia Tech!’ or something like that, which is sweet but really inappropriate in this particular venue. People liked to append the word ‘evil’ in front of the name of the perpetrator, and that’s again, like, O.K., sure, I don’t know or care if he’s evil, really, I don’t even know what that means, but it doesn’t belong in an encyclopedia.”

Martin was self-deprecating about her reasons for devoting so much time to Wikipedia — spending your leisure time hunting down strangers’ spelling errors does, she said, “feed interesting character traits” — but when pressed she offered a rationale that might seem disingenuous if it weren’t echoed by so many of her colleagues: pride of ownership. Virginia Tech, she said, “was one of the more visited pages for a few days, and I know that for myself and probably for some other people there was a desire to put our best face out to the world. A lot of people did go to the page just to look and see, and it was important to me that they see something very good, very professional and put together, not covered in vandalism, not excessively long, not excessively editorialized, just the best that we could do with the limited information that we had.”

Martin’s main comrade on the day of the Virginia Tech shootings was a fellow admin she has never met: “I don’t know his real name,” she says, “but his handle would be Swatjester.” Swatjester turns out to be Dan Rosenthal of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.; Rosenthal, who is 24, graduated in April from Florida State University, a little later than planned, because the National Guard unit of which he was a member was deployed for the initial invasion of Iraq and stayed there for a year. He is now the national legislative director of a war-veterans’ organization, doing everything from answering questions about pending legislation to helping suicidal vets find mental-health treatment. In the fall he will start law school at American University in Washington. On top of all that, he is such a devoted Wikipedian — editing and resolving disputes on the site eight hours a day or more, with a watch list that has ballooned to 4,000 articles — that he recently made a pop-in visit to Wikimedia’s modest headquarters nearby in St. Petersburg and left with an unpaid internship in legal affairs. His parents, he told me, are only marginally happier with this pursuit than they were back when he spent hours each day playing video games.

I visited Rosenthal’s student apartment in Tallahassee, where he was living with his three roommates; the place mushroomed with musical instruments and video games and unwashed dishes, just like any student habitat, and maybe for that reason, Rosenthal will often take his laptop to a local cigar bar and fulfill his admin duties there while having a Scotch. On the afternoon we met, though, we settled for a quiet sushi restaurant in a local strip mall with a wireless connection. “I’m trying to teach myself to eat more slowly,” he said with a smile. “It’s an Army thing. I’m used to having 20 seconds to eat, and if you talk that means you’re finished.”

You might think, having experienced the Iraq war himself, he would be tempted to correct mistakes or look for N.P.O.V. (“neutral point of view”) violations on Wikipedia’s many war-related stories, but he’s far too much of a true believer in the project to allow himself to do it. “In the beginning,” he told me, “when I didn’t quite understand all the rules, I got a little bit involved with it, but as I started to learn the system better, I just don’t edit that kind of thing anymore. It sets a bad precedent.”

He logged on and took me through an average editing session; unsurprisingly, everything went by at about the speed of light, but a few things about Wikisociety, as he called it in a moment of professed weakness (“I hate putting ‘Wiki’ in front of everything”), did become clear. For one thing, it’s a myth that any entry, no matter how frivolous, can find a place on Wikipedia — or, rather, the myth is that anything that goes on there stays on there. The presence of (in one admin’s embarrassed phrase) “five million Pokémon articles” notwithstanding, a great many entries are deemed unworthy even of Wikipedia’s catholic attention and are deleted within days, hours or even minutes. There are elaborate criteria for deletion or, in extreme cases, immediate deletion (“patent nonsense,” for instance, is grounds for the latter). But another extraordinary aspect of Wikipedia is its almost fanatical transparency: every change made to every article, no matter how small, is preserved and easily accessible forever. Exceptions can be made in rare cases, as when a vandal adds to a page somebody’s home phone number or — as in a recent controversy that left the more diligent admins exhausted — open-source buccaneers start randomly inserting the legally controversial HD/DVD de-encryption code into articles all over the site.

By the time we finished our lunch, 96 new pages had been nominated for deletion already that day — the backlog can grow to as many as 800 — and Rosenthal delivered the death blow to a few others while we sat there. “Take this guy,” he said. “ ‘Self-proclaimed write-in candidate for U.S. president.’ This article’s gonna get deleted. There’s no hope for it.”

There is a rough philosophical divide among admins between “deletionists” and “inclusionists,” and Rosenthal, even though he has never actually met anyone from Wikipedia outside the office staff in St. Petersburg, is on the site so often that he has a pretty good idea who’s who. He associates certain user names with certain political biases, and he recalls an online dustup with someone called Slimvirgin over whether the Animal Liberation Front was a terrorist organization. Personalities can become so pronounced in these debates that some even achieve fame of a sort on snarky Wikipedia anti-fansites like Encyclopedia Dramatica, where Slimvirgin has been thoroughly pilloried. “It’s disgusting on one level,” Rosenthal said, “but it’s also funny how the encyclopedia has gotten to be more about the community behind it. And like any community, it has its drama. For people that don’t understand it and don’t have an inclination to get involved in it, it’s pretty daunting.”

Wikipedia’s morphing into a news source, Rosenthal said, “is an inevitable step. Because the software is absolutely perfectly suited to that. And the rules, I’m sure unintentionally, are perfectly suited to it, with the emphasis on verifying and the neutral point of view.” As for Wikinews, he offered, with brutal kindness, that it was a good place for news that “doesn’t make Wikipedia’s radar.” Even Wales admitted, with something of a wince, that on any substantial news story, Wikinews is pretty well consigned to redundancy by its more successful sibling. “It’s something that the Wikinewsies have at times, I’ve felt, been a little prickly about,” Wales said. “But it’s just the sheer volume of people, also the sheer audience. Wikipedia derives a certain degree of authority and trust in the mind of the reader by avoiding original research and citing sources. And for whatever flaws there are in the model — you pick up the newspaper once a week and you’ll see some horrible thing from Wikipedia — if you read it generally throughout, you’ll find it’s pretty good; and you’ll recognize that there is a process here that does a pretty good job of getting at something important.”

The massive energy generated by that sense of the project’s importance is certainly alive in Rosenthal. “For me,” he said, “it really comes down to the advancement of human knowledge. I see heaps of praise being put on Google and Yahoo and Microsoft for being different, and they’re all just search engines. It’s nothing different. But this is something that’s never been attempted before. It’s just so unconventional, and it works. And it’s completely for the betterment of humanity. There’s no downside to it. I think that’s incredible. And I don’t want to see people take this thing that is 100 percent beneficial by itself and turn it into something negative by putting on whatever vandalism they like, or libeling someone, or whatever the effect is.”

[F]or something alternately heralded and feared as a harbinger of some brave new world, Wikipedia has a lot of old-fashioned trappings; in fact, within its borders it generates its own special brand of kitsch. Users get news about the site via a mocked-up newspaper called The Wikipedia Signpost; the series of high-tech discussion forums on which the admins communicate is called the Village Pump, and a forum for Wikinews is dubbed the Water Cooler. And users salute their peers, on a purely informal basis, by awarding one another special citations called Barnstars — a term derived from the decorative good-luck charms used to commemorate successful barn-raisings two or three centuries ago. “For being kind and simple in the face of my very stupid mistake,” reads one of the citations on Martin’s own user page, “I hereby award you this Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar .” It’s enough to set your teeth on edge.

But the kitsch is also a key to something, because in the end what’s most encouraging about Wikipedia isn’t all that’s new about it but all that isn’t. It is in some ways a remarkably old-school enterprise; for one thing, it is centered almost entirely on the carefully written word.

“The classic question I get at conferences,” Wales said, “is, ‘Do you think Wikipedia will remain text, or will it be more and more video in the future?’ I think it’s pretty hard to beat written words. Especially for collaboration, because words are the most fluid medium for shaping and reshaping and collaboratively negotiating something. It’s kind of hard to do with video, and I don’t think that’s just a technical barrier.”

And then there is the notion of the neutral point of view. It’s easy to forget how far out of fashion that idea has fallen, particularly in the Wild West milieu of the Internet. The N.P.O.V. is one of Wikipedia’s Five Pillars. When asked why that neutrality is something whose value they’ve internalized so deeply, some of the admins I talked to used a rather neutral word themselves: information freed from opinion, they said, is “useful,” where information burdened by it is not. But it doesn’t take much digging to see that the question has a moral component as well.

There was, of course, already a Jerry Falwell article on Wikipedia, but the day of his death in May saw a predictable spike in traffic. When I first logged on, I didn’t have to scroll far before coming across an obvious bit of teenage vandalism, concerning an unprintable cause of death that the writer evidently felt would, if true, have meted out a certain poetic justice. That bit of editorializing, a matter of fewer than a dozen words in all, was gone from the page in two minutes.

“I’m actually surprised it took that long,” Sean Barrett, a Los Angeles-based I.T. consultant and Wikipedia admin, told me. “I went to the Falwell page myself as soon as I heard that he was dead; high-profile things like that, breaking news, we’ve learned to be proactive. I’m sure hundreds of administrators put Jerry Falwell on their watch list.”

But it wasn’t just the longtime admins who were hashing out the complexities of how to give this polarizing figure his neutral due. A furious dialogue went on all day on the discussion page that shadows that (and every) Wikipedia entry; one comment from a user named Shreveport Paranormal read, in part: “Despite my personal dislike of him, the man did just pass away. . . . This is a place that is supposed to give accurate information. . . . The only way we can keep to the purpose of Wikipedia is to remain unbiased.” Not that extraordinary a sentiment, perhaps, until you take into account that Shreveport Paranormal (according to his user profile) is a teenager, and Roman Catholic, and gay. And that he had been a Wikipedia user, at that point, for two days.

Wikipedia may not exactly be a font of truth, but it does go against the current of what has happened to the notion of truth. The easy global dissemination of, well, everything has generated a D.I.Y. culture of proud subjectivity, a culture that has spread even to relatively traditional forms like television — as in the ascent of advocates like Lou Dobbs or Bill O’Reilly, whose appeal lies precisely in their subjectivity even as they name-check “neutrality” to cover all sorts of journalistic sins. But the Wikipedians, most of them born in the information age, have tasked themselves with weeding that subjectivity not just out of one another’s discourse but also out of their own. They may not be able to do any actual reporting from their bedrooms or dorm rooms or hotel rooms, but they can police bias, and they do it with a passion that’s no less impressive for its occasional excess of piety. Who taught them this? It’s a mystery; but they are teaching it to one another.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/ma...KIPEDIA-t.html





Brit Fumes Over Wikipedia, Lava Lamps

Drops the C word
Cade Metz

Is Wikipedia running a censorship board? John Barberio thinks so. After more than two years as an active contributor to the free online encyclopedia, the 27-year-old Oxfordshire man recently left the project over the behavior of its "OTRS volunteers," unpaid administrators who act on reader complaints about the site's content.

"I dislike using the scary C word, but OTRS are acting as a censorship board," he says. "And worse, they appear to be acting as an inept, heavy-handed amateurish censorship board." Others who have had brushes with Wikipedia's "Open-source Ticket Request System" are saying much the same thing.

To illustrate his point, Barberio points to Wikipedia's article on the lava lamp, which OTRS volunteers recently suppressed for almost two weeks - without explanation. From June 18 to July 2, anyone looking for information about the world's most famous novelty item was met with a blank page.

"No information on what exactly was wrong with the article was divulged," Barberio explains. "I've read over it trying to figure out what the offending part may have been, but can't work it out. It's still unclear what the issue was - or what steps could be taken to correct it. It certainly seems all too easy to get an article 'protectively blanked.'"

Wikipedia's OTRS is used to field email complaints about site content. Incoming messages are monitored by a group of volunteers, who assess the value of each complaint and act accordingly. As they weigh a complaint, they may "blank out" the article in question, so that no one can read it. Then, if they decide a complaint has merit, they'll edit the article.

On the surface, OTRS volunteers can't do anything you or I couldn't do. "They have no special power within Wikipedia," site founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales told The Register. But there's no denying these volunteers have a certain political pull above and beyond the Average Joe. Saying that OTRS volunteers have no special power, Barberio retorts, is "kind of like saying The CEO and the Janitor have the same privileges because they both have the same set of keys to the building."

"OTRS volunteers don't have additional extra privileges in the sense that the Wikipedia software doesn't let them do special things," he explains. "But they do have access to secret information, and they can demand that their actions not be reverted by other administrators 'until discussion is settled.'" If you go against their demands, your own privileges could be removed.

When we asked Wales if OTRS volunteers would ever blank out out an entire page while a complaint is under review, he said it was "pretty routine."

"When we have a complaint, we try to immediately remove the information that's the subject of the complaint - pending resolution of the complaint," he explained. "That's standard process across hundreds of articles every day."

This sort of thing is hardly unreasonable. There needs to be a means of policing content on the site. But Barberio is adamant that the process needs to be more transparent. If someone suppresses an article about lava lamps for two weeks, they should give sufficient reason. "It's not acceptable to blank a page out and never give a reason why."

Barberio acknowledges there will be cases where OTRS volunteers would be justified in keeping a complaint secret. If a person claims they're being libeled by a Wikipedia article, for instance, it stands to reason their identity shouldn't be divulged. But this was far from the case with the lava lamp article. Wales insisted that the reason for suppressing the article was posted to its "talk" page, but there doesn't seem to be a link between those discussions and the OTRS action.

As Wales says, OTRS volunteers are chosen because they're "respected members of the Wikipedia community." But Barberio believes that the community has become far too insular. "It's getting very combative over there," he says. "There are groups of admins who generally do not get along with anyone they consider an outsider." Are you having problems with Wikipedia community? Do let us know.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07...rs_volunteers/





Rockers, Royals to Honor Princess Diana
Jill Lawless

Rockers and royals, including Rod Stewart, Elton John and Princes William and Harry, were taking the stage at London's Wembley Stadium on Sunday to remember Princess Diana almost 10 years after her death in a Paris car crash.

The concert, organized by Diana's sons, falls on what would have been her 46th birthday. The princess died Aug. 31, 1997, along with her boyfriend Dodi Fayed and their driver when their Mercedes crashed inside the Pont d'Alma tunnel while media photographers pursued them.

The memorial concert features music from some of Diana's favorite acts, including Tom Jones and 80s chart-toppers Duran Duran. Younger performers include Kanye West, P. Diddy, Joss Stone and Lily Allen.

The two princes were scheduled to address the 65,000-strong crowd from the stage at some point during the show.

In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., William, 25, acknowledged being nervous.

"We'll probably be gibbering wrecks by the end of it," he said.

Security for the event was being reevaluated after the discovery of two unexploded car bombs in central London on Friday and an attack on Glasgow airport in Scotland on Saturday that involved a Jeep Cherokee in flames slamming into the main terminal.

Police said they believed Saturday's attack was linked to the car bombs, and Britain raised its terror alert to "critical" -- the highest possible level. At least 450 officers were to be on duty to police the Diana concert.

The show also includes a performance by the English National Ballet and songs by Andrew Lloyd Webber in honor of Diana's love of dance and theater.

Diana is remembered for her glamour, for her extensive charity work and for her tempestuous marriage to Prince Charles, heir to the British throne. The pair married in 1981 in a ceremony watched by millions around the world, but divorced in 1996 after admissions of adultery on both sides.

William said the concert was a chance for people to "remember all the good things about her because she's not here to defend herself when she gets criticized."

"After 10 years, there's been a rumbling of people bringing up the bad, and over time people seem to forget -- or have forgotten -- all the amazing things she did and what an amazing person she was," William said in the interview, which was recorded earlier this month and broadcast Friday.

Tickets for the concert cost $90, with proceeds going to causes Diana supported, including land mine and AIDS charities.

Harry, 22, said the brothers had asked John to play "Candle in the Wind," the song he played at Diana's funeral in Westminster Abbey. Originally about Marilyn Monroe, its lyrics were reworked in tribute to Diana, and it became a worldwide No. 1 hit in 1997.

A memorial service is also planned in London on Aug. 31, the anniversary of Diana's death.
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On the Net:

http://www.concertfordiana.com
http://www.courant.com/news/nationwo...,7462185.story





Electronica That Rocks, à la Française
Will Hermes

ONE of the most blogged-about sets at this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Southern California took place on a stage dominated by towering Marshall amplifier stacks and a huge illuminated cross. When the dark-clad musicians let loose with a familiar hammering riff, the fans erupted in roars, punching their fists in the air and barking out lyrics.

No, the group wasn’t a heavy-metal revival act — not exactly. Justice is a French D.J. duo at the forefront of a new school of electronic music far removed from the genteel soundtracks one commonly hears in W Hotel lobbies and design-conscious restaurants. The music is harder and hookier, as apt to inspire slam-dancing as hip shaking. It’s more like rock, which effectively dislodged dance music early this decade as the hipster soundtrack of choice.

“Our crowd is more a rock crowd,” said Gaspard Augé of Justice, who is still surprised that fans sometimes stage-dive at its gigs. Young audiences, he suggested, “just want more fun in electronic music, more hedonism.”

So in a year that has seen indie rockers like Bright Eyes and the Shins releasing conservatively tuneful CDs that parents might borrow from their kids, rowdy electronic music seems to be seeding a new underground. “People are dancing again,” said Tom Dunkley of GBH, the New York company behind Cheeky Bastards, a weekly club event that has embraced the new sound. When Justice and several like-minded D.J.’s performed at a Cheeky Bastards event in Manhattan in March, Mr. Dunkley said, the demand for tickets was “crazy, completely unusual.”

Justice’s debut full-length CD, whose provocative “title” is a simple cross icon, arrives July 10 via the Vice Records label. The duo had a video added on MTV (extremely rare these days for an electronic act) and has just finished a remix of “LoveStoned” for Justin Timberlake. And it has emerged amid the ever-growing influence of Daft Punk, the Parisian D.J. duo that pioneered the harder, faster approach that characterizes Justice’s music with its thrillingly crude electro-house debut, “Homework,” in 1996. The rapper Kanye West sampled a track from that album for his hit “Stronger”; this summer Daft Punk will embark on its first major tour in a decade, a multimedia extravaganza that will come to Keyspan Park at Coney Island on Aug. 9.

Some American acts, like LCD Soundsystem and Ghostland Observatory, have been channeling this new sound, as have cutting-edge artists elsewhere. (In recent recordings and live shows, Bjork has been adding noise to her usual dance beats.) But for the past couple of years France has served as its most exciting incubator, on indie labels like Kitsuné, Institubes and especially Ed Banger, which signed Justice and whose name suggests its M.O. (Try pronouncing “headbanger” with a Parisian accent.) And despite some tut-tutting by fans of minimalist techno and other esoteric electronic styles, the new headbanging aesthetic has found an audience.

The members of Justice — Mr. Augé, 27, and Xavier de Rosnay, 24 — met in Paris. Mr. Augé was a Metallica fan who once played in an experimental post-rock group. Mr. de Rosnay was a fan of hip-hop and pop. Justice was effectively born in 2003 when the pair, on a lark, refashioned a song for a remix contest promoted by a college radio station in Paris.

“You could download the separate tracks: guitar, drums and other things,” Mr. de Rosnay said via phone from Paris, explaining their remix process. “But we were working without music software: just a sampler, a sequencer and a synthesizer. So we downloaded just the voice on the chorus, because there was not space enough for more than eight seconds of sound on our sampler.”

The remix, a radical reshaping of “Never Be Alone” by the British rock group Simian, lost the contest (no one seems to recall who won) but netted the duo a deal with the nascent Ed Banger label in 2003. Eventually retitled “We Are Your Friends” to echo its shouted refrain, the track became a club and Internet phenomenon. To top it off a striking video clip for the song, which looked like the aftermath of a college keg party as dreamed by Michel Gondry, won the award for best video at last year’s MTV Europe Music Awards, trumping even the Evel Knievel-themed flamboyance of “Touch the Sky” by Kanye West (who, characteristically, threw a tantrum over the outcome).

“We Are Your Friends” isn’t on Justice’s new album, but there are plenty of other signs of the members’ fusion-minded taste, from a pixilated take on Parliament-Funkadelic (“New Jack”) to the kiddie-disco singalong single “D.A.N.C.E.,” which seems to have struck a chord: A leaked version was so widely remixed by Internet sample-jackers that Vice posted alternate versions on its blog.

The album also includes the vocal-less single “Waters of Nazareth” from the group’s self-titled EP, which made numerous best-of lists last year. The new version begins with a serrated sputtering of electronic noise; when a 4/4 kick-drum beat comes in, the noise becomes a simple, brutish melody. It mutates as the beats fragment, like chips of wood from the blade of a buzz saw, and is replaced by a churchy organ riff on the bridge; then the two melody lines combine, skidding back into pure modulating noise again at the end.

As with the best garage rock or heavy metal — as well as ’80s electro, the synthesizer-heavy urban dance style Justice frequently echoes — there is beauty in the relentless primitivism.

As for the cross-icon title, Mr. Augé said it was inspired, in part, because “it was a potent pop symbol in the ’90s, with people like Madonna and George Michael using it.” Of course it’s also a common heavy-metal motif, a connection also suggested by Justice’s crudely gothic black-and-silver cover art (not to mention those awe-inspiring Marshall stacks, which, it should be noted, are merely stage props).

Both members of Justice have worked as graphic designers, and visual presentation is an important part of Ed Banger’s aesthetic. So is a sense of playfulness, whether it’s the shameless potty mouth of Uffie, a female American rapper of sorts best known for the campy gangsta track “Pop the Glock,” or the way DJ Mehdi mixes old-school hip-hop and electro with bits of hair-metal guitar. (Both acts appear on the recent compilation “Ed Rec Vol. 2,” released in America via Vice.)

“I’ve never worked with a group that’s so fully formed,” said Adam Shore, the general manager of Vice Records, referring to the Ed Banger crew. “They’ve got the music, the art, the aesthetic, the amazing videos, and they’re kind of a traveling party.”

Ed Banger’s multimedia sensibility, not to mention its sound, has a clear antecedent. The label is run by Pedro Winter, who, in addition to making music as Busy P, has for many years managed Daft Punk, the duo of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. Like Justice, Daft Punk played Coachella, in 2006; its set was a spectacle of lights and video with the duo, in the guise of robots, triggering electronics atop a sort of neon pyramid.

Daft Punk is not directly involved in Ed Banger, but you can hear its influence on the label. And Mr. Bangalter’s superlative remix of DJ Mehdi’s “Signature” turns a teasing snippet into what might be the most ecstatic dance track you’ll hear this year. The duo’s influence persists elsewhere too.

“Daft Punk were my heroes when they released the ‘Homework’ album,” said Thomas Turner of the young Austin synth-rock band Ghostland Observatory. “That really influenced my view on music.”

Mr. Bangalter, who spoke from Los Angeles last month during a break from tour rehearsals, is amused that, at 32, he is considered an elder statesman to a new generation of electronic musicians. And unlike the scene veterans who reject the rockist attitude of Justice and its peers, Mr. Bangalter appreciates the music on its own terms.

“Most of these people were like 6 or 7 years old” during electronica’s first wave, he said. “It’s not really their history. So they are starting from scratch maybe. From more of a blank slate.”

Or as Justice’s Mr. Augé put it, “We just don’t care about respecting the rules.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/ar...ic/01herm.html





Baby it’s hot outside

Songs for an Overheated Planet
Ben Sisario

THEY will come from the highest ranks of the pop aristocracy tomorrow, filling stages on seven continents. As part of Live Earth, a planetwide series of concerts meant to encourage all people to live, consume and vote eco-responsibly, they will use their fame to persuade a global audience that climate change is not only an urgent problem but one they can help solve. Madonna. The Police. The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Dave Matthews, Bon Jovi, Kanye West, Metallica. And Nunatak.

Nunatak?

Even for the superstars playing Live Earth — which begins in Sydney, Australia, at 10 Eastern time tonight (noon Saturday in Sydney) and proceeds westward to Japan, China, Germany, Britain, South Africa and Brazil, ending tomorrow at Giants Stadium — the size of the crowd will be especially huge. Organizers of the concerts, boasting an elaborate “media architecture” of television, satellite radio and Internet broadcasts throughout the world, say they expect to reach two billion people.

But perhaps none will have as great a leap into fame as Nunatak, made up of five British scientists at a research station in Antarctica, which at this time of year — it’s winter there, when no ships or even planes can reach them — has a population of 22. When not studying marine biology or weather patterns, they play Blur and Nirvana covers and some originals in a spare room next to stores of sleds and tents. Their last gig, at a colleague’s birthday party, did not quite prepare them for what lies ahead.

“The last time we played, we played to 17 people,” said Roger Stilwell, a 34-year-old field assistant who plays bass in the band. “Suddenly we find ourselves playing to half the world.”

For former Vice President Al Gore, one of the principals behind Live Earth, the stakes are much higher than entertaining a big audience. His ambition is to “create a critical mass of opinion worldwide,” he said in a telephone interview from London this week, “that will push the world across a tipping point beyond which political and business and civic leaders across the spectrum will begin offering genuinely meaningful solutions to the climate crisis. I think that’s a realistic hope, and it’s greatly needed.”

Mr. Gore and his partner in Live Earth, the veteran live-event producer Kevin Wall, know it will not be easy. Live Earth joins a long history of mega-events in which the spectacle can sometimes overshadow the cause, and promises made under the spotlights can be hard to keep in the long term. Two years ago, after the Live 8 concerts — held on the 20th anniversary of Live Aid, the granddaddy of the modern worldwide charity superconcert — the leaders of the Group of 8 nations pledged to double their aid to Africa by 2010. But recently Bono’s advocacy group, DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa), issued a report saying that most of the rich nations had already fallen far behind in their commitments.

Mr. Wall, who worked with Bob Geldof on Live 8 and Live Aid, says the disappointments of the big concerts of the past have taught him the importance of holding onto a mass audience’s interest long after regular programming has returned to television.

“You can’t solve a problem in one day,” Mr. Wall said. “At Live 8, unfortunately, the big campaigns that could have followed, with the e-mail addresses and the people that joined, weren’t executed on. On this we won’t allow that to happen.”

His answer is to make Live Earth, which took six months to pull together, a “launch event” for what he says will be a three- to five-year campaign of education and grass-roots activism. The locations of the concerts represent the global significance of climate change — Nunatak’s involvement allows Live Earth to say it is on all seven continents — though the event has had difficulties in some parts of the world. Late last month Istanbul’s show was canceled, in part because of lack of interest, and this week the authorities in Brazil withdrew permission for a concert on the beach in Rio de Janeiro, citing security concerns, though organizers said yesterday that the decision had been overturned and the event would go on as planned.

Last week Mr. Wall and Mr. Gore unveiled a seven-point pledge they want people around the world to take, ranging from a demand for an international treaty to reduce greenhouse emissions to a promise to plant trees. It’s a nonbinding pledge of course, and tomorrow concertgoers and fans at home can make their affirmation by a conspicuously easy method: text message.

To announce intentions to change the world is to invite criticism, and Live Earth has already been hit by a predictable series of analytical arrows. Environmental bloggers questioned the need for big, energy-gorging concerts. News reports pointed out that performers would be making trips around the world in exhaust-spewing jets, and that some of them (Kanye West, Sheryl Crow) have songs in S.U.V. commercials.

And the ratio of political effectiveness to celebrity glitz is not always clear. Reebee Garofalo, a professor of media and technology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who has written about music’s role in mass movements, noted that many big charity events, like the concerts for Nelson Mandela, had tangible success; Mr. Mandela himself acknowledged the importance of music to the worldwide anti-apartheid movement.

But the event itself will fundamentally be about entertainment. “The people going are going to hear the music,” Professor Garofalo said. “So the question then becomes: How do you use that event to promote the growth and expansion of a political movement that involves collective action?”

Proceeds will go to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit group founded by Mr. Gore. Tickets for Giants Stadium, with the Police, the Dave Matthews Band, Kelly Clarkson, Akon, Smashing Pumpkins, Roger Waters, Fall Out Boy, Kanye West and others, are still available, from $83 to $348.

Unlike Live 8, the Tibetan Freedom Concerts and the Amnesty International tours of the ’80s, Live Earth focuses less on governments and world leaders than on ordinary people. An array of media will offer middle-class lifestyle tips to conserve energy and reduce waste. Live Earth has produced some 60 short films and 30 public service videos on these topics with Hollywood stars like Cameron Diaz and Will Ferrell, and chocked its Web site (liveearth.org) and a new book, “The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook,” with more information and guidance.

“In a funny way,” Mr. Gore said, “it’s probably easier to imagine change at the grass-roots level enduring than it is to expect political leaders to make changes in the absence of a political base of support for those changes.”

The organizers are hoping that the nuts and bolts of the shows themselves will be influential. They have created a concert “green standard” of alternative energy sources and waste recycling, and say they will be closely monitoring every drop of fuel and pound of garbage. Wind and solar power will be used in Tokyo, for example, and the power generators at Wembley Stadium in London will run on 99 percent biodiesel fuel, a spokesman said. Giants Stadium is to use recyclable concessions products and compost organic waste.

In these efforts Live Earth is tapping into a slowly growing trend in the music industry. Big festivals like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza have developed extensive green programs like using energy-efficient lights and recycled water and paper products. Live Nation, the country’s biggest concert promoter, has a similar pilot program in the San Francisco area and is planning to expand it nationally later this year.

But for many musicians at Live Earth, the concerts are less about parts per million than the urgency of the overall message.

“The climate change situation is the No. 1 problem facing humanity,” said Flea, the bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, in an e-mail message this week while on tour in Europe. “If it is not addressed globally, then all other attempts to reduce human suffering shall be for naught.”

To get to Live Earth in London, the Chili Peppers will play three shows in three countries over 24 hours. (Tonight: Paris. Tomorrow afternoon: Live Earth. Tomorrow night: Denmark.) But even given their passion for the cause, it took some glad-handing from Mr. Gore to persuade them to do it.

Mr. Gore said he went to the Grammy Awards in February to do some recruiting for Live Earth, and sat in the Chili Peppers’ dressing room discussing their thorny tour schedule. The band still had not agreed to play when Mr. Gore and Queen Latifah presented the award for best rock album.

“We opened the envelope, and lo and behold it was the Chili Peppers,” he said. “And they came onstage, and the confetti fell down, and after I gave them the award a couple of them took me aside on the stage and whispered to me, ‘We’re in.’ I just thought that it was a very neat way to get the news.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/ar...ic/06eart.html





Learning Guitar for Free (for Now) on YouTube
Frank Langfitt

Let's say you want to learn to play guitar — but you don't have the time or money for lessons.

Why not try YouTube? A number of people teach guitar on the video-sharing Web site, offering lessons for free.

In the past few months, two teachers have posted around 200 videos that demonstrate everything from basic strumming techniques to the opening riff of "Sweet Home Alabama." So far, people around the world have watched the videos a total of more than 3.5 million times.

One of the teachers is David Taub, who lives in San Diego and often appears wearing a flannel shirt and a backwards baseball cap. A one-time bar band rocker from New Jersey, he opens each video with the same line: "What's up, good people!"

His most popular video, a simplified version of the Eagles' "Hotel California," has been viewed more than 125,000 times.

The other teacher is Justin Sandercoe, who lives in London, where he teaches guitar and plays with a famous pop singer. He's a mellow presence with an impish grin. Among his song lessons is an acoustic version of Britney Spear's "Hit Me Baby One More Time" that is surprisingly affecting.

The teachers play slowly and use close-ups, showing each finger movement. If you don't get it at first, you can hit replay. It's like having a teacher with endless patience.

The lessons are informal and feel home-made. Sandercoe sometimes appears sitting on his floor, with his hair matted at different angles. Taub's lessons are mostly unedited and include moments like his golden retriever eating his guitar pick.

Taub sees the videos, at least in part, as a marketing tool for his paid instructional Web site, NextLevelGuitar.com. His videos emerged last year as an experiment when one of his students, Tim Gilberg, shot video of Taub teaching.

"We filmed about 10 minutes in his backyard," Gilberg recalls. "I put it up on Google. Then I forgot about it. Basically, two months later I went to see how many visitors we had. There were about 6,800 visitors, and I was like: Wow!"

Then they posted the videos to YouTube, and the audience took off.

On the free videos, Taub teaches the basic chords to popular songs, but he holds off explaining some of the riffs so he can drive people to his site. After playing a riff from Sheryl Crow's "If It Makes You Happy," he stops playing and says, "But if you want to learn that, you're going to have to go to our full site for the lead lines, okay?"

Gilberg says the Web site has hundreds of members after only six weeks.

Justin Sandercoe also has a teaching Web site — justinguitar.com. He has a few ads and takes donations through Paypal to cover the site's hosting fees. But Sandercoe doesn't charge visitors; he says he sees the site as more of a public service.

"I like the idea of being able to deliver quality guitar lessons to people who can't afford lessons, or who are in places where there's not that kind of access to somebody who can teach them the right stuff," he says.

When Sandercoe was growing up in Tasmania, it wasn't easy for him to find great teachers. He hopes his videos will help kids in places like Sri Lanka or India who may not be able to learn otherwise.

Sandercoe now has fans around the world, who often e-mail him with questions and requests for specific lessons. One is Linda Dumitru, who lives in the Netherlands and used to pay $26 for a half-hour lesson. But she stopped, she says, because she couldn't afford it. Then one day she typed "Johnny B. Goode" into YouTube and found one of Sandercoe's videos.

Now, she plays along to his videos in her apartment after dinner. Dumitru says Sandercoe's laid-back approach makes her want to learn. She talks about him as if he were a helpful, next-door neighbor.

"Every time he comes, he says: 'Hi, I'm Justin.' He says, 'Don't worry if you have trouble with the chords, because everybody has problems with it.'"

She adds: "It's like he understands you. He knows what you're going through."

When Sandercoe isn't teaching, he plays with Katie Melua, a star in Europe, so he's used to some attention. But his work on the Internet is raising his profile in ways he didn't expect.

"I got recognized on a bus the other day," he says, sounding amazed. "I literally went into town to do a bit of shopping, and I was on the way back and this kid goes: 'Are you Justin, the guy who teaches from YouTube?'"

But if learning pop songs for free online sounds too good to be true, it may be.

John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, says most of the songs Sandercoe and Taub teach are under copyright. He thinks it's only a matter of time before a licensing company orders YouTube to take them down.

"There's a very strong argument that the re-use of well-known chords in the sequence the instructor played them would be a violation of the copyright," Palfrey says.

Sandercoe doesn't think he's doing anything wrong. After all, he says, he rarely plays the songs all the way through. But Palfrey says all it takes is a few notes.

And although Sandercoe sees his Internet teaching as a public service, he has benefited from it.

Since he put his Web site up last year, he has developed a long waiting list for the lessons he teaches in person. And both he and Taub say that's still the best way to learn.

If someone tells Sandercoe to take down his song lessons, he says he will. But his most valuable videos are the ones that teach guitar basics — things like strumming, scales and finger-picking.

And even in the digital age, no one holds a copyright on those things.

UPDATE: YouTube Guitar Lessons Pulled in Copyright Spat

Thousands of guitar students lost a valuable resource last week. The most popular guitar teacher on YouTube saw his more than 100 videos yanked from the site. The reason: a music company accused him of copyright infringement for an instructional video on how to play a Rolling Stones song.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=11778602





Can Cryptography Prevent Printer-Ink Piracy?
Erica Ogg

In the computer printer business, everyone knows the big money comes from the sale of ink cartridges.

Most of these cartridges are made by printer manufacturers and sell for a substantial premium. Some come from unauthorized sources, sell for substantially less and attract the attention of antipiracy lawyers.

Cryptography Research Inc. (CRI), a San Francisco company, is developing chip technology aimed at helping printer manufacturers protect this primary source of profit. The company's chips use cryptography designed to make it harder for printers to use off-brand and counterfeit cartridges.

"We're not saying we can end piracy, but our system is designed to recover from failure," said Kit Rodgers, CRI's vice president of business development.

Not all ink-cartridge remanufacturing is illegal--much of it is, in fact, legitimate--but pirated ink-cartridge technology cuts substantially into original manufacturers' profits.

There are three main ways the $60 billion-a-year worldwide printing industry loses money:

• Used cartridges get refilled and sold as "new"-- instead of as remanufactured.

• Cartridges get illegally replicated through reverse engineering.

• Printers get hacked or physically altered to use any type of ink.

Although solid figures on counterfeiting are impossible to determine, it's estimated to cost the industry at least $3 billion a year, according to the Image Supplies Coalition, a lobbying group formed to fight piracy and cloning in the ink and toner industry.

Cryptography is a method of encrypting data so that only a specific, private key can unlock, or decrypt, the information. It's used in everything from credit cards to digital media. CRI plans to create a secure chip that will allow only certain ink cartridges to communicate with certain printers.

Although this concept isn't new, CRI said its chip will be designed for use in standard fabrication processes, eliminating the need for a special--and more expensive--manufacturing process. CRI also said that the chip will be designed that so large portions of it will have no decipherable structure, a feature that would thwart someone attempting to reverse-engineer the chip by examining it under a microscope to determine how it works.

"You can see 95 percent of the (chip's) grid and you still don't know how it works," Rodgers said. There also are other, secret elements CRI won't reveal for security and competitive reasons.

Skillful hackers can eventually crack almost any code thrown at them and then exploit it for commercial purposes. Once antipiracy encryption is hacked on a product such as high-definition DVDs, for example, it's cracked forever and the discs can be copied and played using the hack. CRI takes a different tack with its protection scheme: its chip generates a separate, random code for each ink cartridge, thus requiring a would-be hacker to break every successive cartridge's code to make use of the cartridge.
"We want to make sure you can't repeat the same attack," said Benjamin Jun, CRI's vice president of technology. "If (hackers) have to rebreak it over and over, it's not as good a business model."

The chip, called CryptoFirewall, is not in use in this industry yet, but it's been widely deployed in the pay-TV sector, where 25 million set-top boxes have a similar technology from CRI embedded, the company said. CRI will also soon debut a similar copy-protection feature for Blu-ray video discs. The printer technology will be available in early 2008, according to CRI.

Counterfeiting and piracy are all but impossible to eradicate, but CRI hopes to at least minimize the financial damage they cause. Today, there are 123 million desktop inkjet printers and 25.6 million laserjet printers in use in the U.S., according to InfoTrends.

In terms of making and selling hardware, printers themselves are one of the least profitable sectors. Often the manufacturers are willing to sell their printers at a loss with the goal of making money on sales of ink. Hewlett-Packard, the biggest PC maker in the world, actually makes the most profit from its printer business: 46 percent of its total earnings in the most recent fiscal quarter were generated by its Imaging and Printing Group. And ink is a key.

As mentioned, remanufacturing cartridges isn't necessarily a problem. There are plenty of companies that refill cartridges and resell them, offering many consumers and businesses cheaper alternatives to the cartridges sold by printer manufacturers.

"There's absolutely nothing wrong with that; it's an accepted part of a competitive industry," according to Tuan Tran, vice president of marketing and sales for HP's supplies business. "That is a legal competition in our minds."

About 11 percent of the money spent on inkjet cartridges and 25 percent of the money paid for monochrome laserjet cartridges goes to companies that resell cartridges they did not manufacture, according to John Shane, director of marketing at InfoTrends.

"The vast majority of that is perfectly legal. Most people believe (the U.S. market for illegal cartridges is) a lot smaller than the illegal market, say, in China," Shane said.

When faced with competition from counterfeiters, HP's Tran said, companies like HP are forced to turn to their "primary weapon" in fighting patent violations, the legal system.

"There are other folks who want to avoid the (proper) process altogether and design a cartridge to work with an HP printer," he said.

In a high-profile 2003 case, Lexmark International, the company that makes printers for Dell, took printer-supplies specialist Static Control Components to court for selling a chip that allowed Lexmark printers to accept any kind of ink cartridge. Lexmark ultimately lost the case, but it hasn't stopped others from trying fiercely to protect their business.

Just last month, HP's German subsidiary accused a Swiss print supplier, Pelikan Hardcopy, of using its patented ink formula and last week filed a separate suit claiming the company is selling remanufactured cartridges labeled as new. In 2005, HP sued another cartridge refiller, Cartridge World, for using an ink formula that it said infringed on its patents.

There are other, less litigious ways to keep counterfeiters at bay. HP uses a holographic security label on its ink cartridges to identify them as legitimate HP products.

InfoTrends' Shane also noted that the printing quality of printer manufacturers' cartridges holds up longer over time when the cartridges are used with the corresponding printers, whose technical specifications can present problems for remanufacturers and counterfeiters.

But a technology like CRI's at least has the potential to cut down on future legal fees and weed out counterfeiters early on in the manufacturing process. The idea is intruiguing to printer makers, although companies like HP say they will wait and see until CRI's chip is actually available.

"If there was a technology that enabled us to protect our intellectual property, absolutely, any company would be interested in it," Tran said.
http://news.com.com/Can+cryptography...3-6193424.html





Exxon Hacks the Yes Men

One day after the Yes Men made a joke announcement that ExxonMobil plans to turn billions of climate-change victims into a brand-new fuel called Vivoleum, the Yes Men's upstream internet service provider shut down Vivoleum.com, the Yes Men's spoof website, and cut off the Yes Men's email service, in reaction to a complaint whose source they will not identify. The provider, Broadview Networks, also made the Yes Men remove all mention of Exxon from TheYesMen.org
before they'd restore the Yes Men's email service.

From: The Yes Men <people @ theyesmen.org>
Subject: Yes Men booted by Exxon; need sysadmin badly
Sender: send26-proxypeople @ theyesmen.org

June 28, 2007
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

EXXON HACKS THE YES MEN
Yes Men badly need sysadmin, server co-location

Contact: people@theyesmen.org

One day after the Yes Men made a joke announcement that ExxonMobil
plans to turn billions of climate-change victims into a brand-new
fuel called Vivoleum, the Yes Men's upstream internet service
provider shut down Vivoleum.com, the Yes Men's spoof website, and cut
off the Yes Men's email service, in reaction to a complaint whose
source they will not identify. The provider, Broadview Networks, also
made the Yes Men remove all mention of Exxon from TheYesMen.org
before they'd restore the Yes Men's email service.

The Yes Men assume the complainant was Exxon. "Since parody is
protected under US law, Exxon must think that people seeing the site
will think Vivoleum's a real Exxon product, not just a parody," said
Yes Man Mike Bonanno. "Exxon's policies do already contribute to
150,000 climate-change related deaths each year," added Yes Man Andy
Bichlbaum. "So maybe it really is credible. What a resource!"

After receiving the complaint June 15, Broadview added a "filter"
that disabled the Vivoleum.com IP address (64.115.210.59), and
furthermore prevented email from being sent from the Yes Men's
primary IP address (64.115.210.58). Even after all Exxon logos were
removed from both sites and a disclaimer was placed on Vivoleum.com
on Tuesday, Broadview would still not remove the filter. (The
disclaimer read: "Although Vivoleum is not a real ExxonMobil program,
it might as well be.")

Broadview did restore both IPs on Wednesday, after the Vivoleum.com
website was completely disabled and all mention of Exxon was removed
from TheYesMen.org.

While this problem is temporarily resolved, the story is far from
over. Meanwhile, though, two bigger problems loom, for which we're
asking your help:

1. THE YES MEN'S SERVER NEEDS A NEW HOME.

Broadview Networks provides internet connectivity to New York's
Thing.net and the websites and servers it hosts, including the Yes
Men's server. Thing.net has been a host for many years to numerous
activist and artist websites and servers.

At the end of July, Thing.net will terminate its contract with
Broadview and move its operations to Germany, where internet
expression currently benefits from a friendlier legal climate than in
the US, and where baseless threats by large corporations presumably
have less weight with providers. At that time, the Yes Men and two
other organizations with servers "co-located" at Thing.net will need
a new home for those servers. Please write to us if you can offer
such help or know of someone who can.

2. THE YES MEN NEED A SYSADMIN.

The Yes Men are desperately in need of a sysadmin. The position is
unpaid at the moment, but it shouldn't take much time for someone who
knows Debian Linux very well. It involves monitoring the server,
keeping it up-to-date, making sure email is working correctly, etc.
The person could also maintain the Yes Men's website (which will be
updated next week), if she or he wants.

Thing.net also needs a sysadmin: someone living in New York who knows
Linux well. The Thing.net position involves some money and the
rewards of working for an organization that has consistently and at
great personal risk supported groups like the Yes Men over the years.

THE YES MEN AND THING.NET THANK YOU!
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/articl...70628201953222





More on Intel Anti-Cheat Technology Revealed
Charlie Demerjian

AS OUR OWN pink and green striped Ferret pointed out the other day, Intel is working on an anti-cheat technology. As is common at Research@Intel day, this is a research project and far from prime time.

The technology, as it is currently proposed has two parts, a communications component and a keyboard and mouse detection piece. It is envisioned that this would lie in the chipset or possibly the firmware, but the demo is strictly software. The game also needs to participate in the scheme in order for it all to work.

The concept is simple, the chipset records all input from the keyboard and mouse, and the game does the same. If the two don't match, something is giving inputs to the game that should not be, and you are 'cheating'. This is how most of the common hacks out there work.

As was said earlier, this could catch game cheats as well as click fraud, but could also help notify users of spyware and trojans. In general, if something emulates input, this should flag it.

I have my doubts about it's real world effectiveness, anything that is a standard defense is vulnerable to a standard crack. To make matters worse, the more effective it is, the higher priority it is to crack, be it for fame or for money.

In the end, I think this may do some good, but I don't think it will be foolproof. The internet is very good at breeding a better class of fools far quicker than the hardware update cycle.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=40535





15 Free Security Programs That Work
Preston Gralla

From the moment you switch on your PC, your system faces countless Internet-borne dangers, including spyware attacks, viruses, Trojan horses, home-page hijackers, and hackers trying to weasel their way into your system. And the Internet isn't the only source of trouble. Anyone with access to your PC can invade your privacy by prying into which Web sites you visit -- and learning a great deal more as well.

But fighting back is easy. We've found 15 great pieces of software -- firewalls, spyware busters, antivirus software, rootkit killers, and general Internet security tools -- designed to protect you against any dangers that come your way. They're free, they're powerful and they're easy to use. So what are you waiting for? Start downloading.

Preventing and Eliminating Malware

From firewalls to antivirus software to tools for combatting rootkits and spyware, here are some great downloads to protect your system against malicious attacks.

ZoneAlarm
Check Point Software's ZoneAlarm may well be the most popular free firewall on the planet, and the most recent release (finally) protects Vista machines. Arguably, ZoneAlarm is the product that made everyone conscious of the need for firewall protection. It's extremely easy to use, and its method of configuring outbound protection is particularly useful. Whenever a program tries to make an outbound Internet connection, ZoneAlarm announces it with a pop-up alert. You can then permit or disallow the connection, on a one-time basis or permanently. Configuring your level of protection is a simple matter of moving a few sliders. Though the free version of the software is exclusively a firewall, Check Point also offers for-pay security suites. But if all you're looking for is a firewall, stick with the free version.

Comodo Firewall Pro
ZoneAlarm is extremely popular, but that doesn't automatically make it the best free firewall you can find. One formidable contender is Comodo Firewall Pro, which independent testing site Matousec rated as the top firewall. Matousec found that Comodo offered the highest level of antileak protection, one measure of a firewall's effectiveness. Comodo offers true two-way firewall protection, is highly configurable, and (unlike most other firewalls) provides a great view of your system and your Internet connection.

Avast
Tired of dealing with bloated, overpriced security suites that bog down your system and cost an arm and a leg, when all you want is antivirus software? Then get Avast, a superb antivirus program that's free for home and personal use. Because it's a lean piece of software, it imposes a relatively light burden on system resources and RAM. Despite this, it kills viruses in their tracks and has plenty of extras, including live scanning to prevent viruses from infecting your PC in the first place. Avast can scan regular and Web-based e-mail for viruses, too, and it protects against instant messaging viruses, peer-to-peer dangers and more.

AVG Anti-Rootkit
One of the most feared types of malware is the rootkit -- malicious software that many types of antimalware can't detect. Not uncommonly, bad guys use rootkits to hide Trojan horses, which can then be used to take over your PC without your knowledge. AVG Anti-Rootkit's sole purpose is to find and kill rootkits. Run it and it scans your PC, sniffing rootkits out and removing any it finds. (Note that this utility doesn't work with Windows Vista.)

Spyware Blaster
Some of the nastiest kinds of spyware -- autodialers, home page hijackers, and others--install themselves as ActiveX controls. Spyware Blaster protects you against them, blocking the installation of ActiveX-based malware and other types of spyware, and eradicating tracking cookies that might otherwise invade your privacy. The program works with Firefox, Opera or Internet Explorer, and it prevents your browser from being diverted to dangerous sites. One particularly nice touch is the utility's System Snapshot, which (as you'd expect) takes a snapshot of your PC; if your computer gets infected later on, you can revert to the clean version.

Assessing risks to your system

Is it safe or isn't it? Whether you're asking this question about your own system, a site you'd like to visit, or a link you're tempted to click, you need the right tools to help you understand the level of risk involved. These utilities appraise the situation and deliver an informed assessment of where you stand.

AOL Active Security Monitor
Not being a big fan of AOL in general, I was initially leary about downloading and using this free tool. But this simple, straightforward application looks at the security of your PC, reports on what it finds, and makes recommendations. It checks to see if you have antivirus software installed and, if so, whether the definitions are up to date. Then it does the same for antispyware, tests whether you have a firewall enabled, and checks for peer-to-peer software that could pose a danger. The monitor doesn't have any protective capabilities itself, but it warns you if you need some. Be aware, however, that the software doesn't work with Windows Vista. And take its recommendations with a grain of salt: It touts for-pay AOL software such as the AOL Privacy Wall over free software that may be better. Still, if you're looking for some quick security recommendations, it's worth the download.

McAfee SiteAdvisor
On the Web, unlike in the real world, it can be hard to recognize a bad neighborhood when you're wandering around in it. There are no boarded-up windows, no empty storefronts, no hard-looking men lounging on corners or in doorways. In fact, the prettiest and most inviting Web site may harbor all kinds of malware. That's where the McAfee SiteAdvisor comes in. It warns you when a Web site that you're about to visit -- or are already visiting -- may be dangerous. You install it as an Internet Explorer toolbar or as a Firefox plug-in. Then when you search with Google or some other search engine, it displays color-coded icons next to each search result, indicating whether the site in question is safe (green), questionable (yellow), or clearly unsafe (red). It checks sites for downloads that may be dangerous, and for evidence that they will send you spam if you give them your e-mail address. The toolbar offers similar reports about the sites you're currently visiting.

LinkScanner Lite
This is another good tool for determining whether a Web site harbors dangerous content. Open LinkScanner Lite and type in a site URL, and the utility checks the site for dangerous scripts, bad downloads, and other hazardous content. It also warns you about phishing sites and other potentially fraudulent online operations, and it integrates with search sites in much the same way that McAfee Site Advisor does, putting icons next to search results to indicate whether they are dangerous or not. Unlike Site Advisor, though, it doesn't check whether sites harbor adware or spyware.

Internet Threat Meter
Every day, it seems, new threats hit the Internet. Symantec's Internet Threat Meter keeps you informed about the latest arrivals and includes a link to a Symantec site where you can get more information and find fixes. The program runs as a nifty little widget in Windows XP, or as a Sidebar Gadget in Windows Vista, gathering data about the latest threats and reporting the results to you.

Trend Micro HijackThis
Like it or not, no single antispyware program can detect and eradicate all spyware. Consequently your favorite antimalware utility doesn't fully protect you. If you suspect that you've been victimized by spyware, but you haven't been able to track down the source of the trouble using your usual diagnostic software, give HijackThis a try. It thoroughly analyzes your Registry and file settings, and creates a log file reporting its results. If your system is infected with spyware, that file will contain clues about the particular type you're dealing with. Though an expert can analyze the log to try to track down the problem, you shouldn't try to do any advanced analysis yourself unless you possess relevant expertise. Instead, simply upload the log file to a HijackThis Web site, and ask the community there to analyze it for you.

Covering your tracks and cleaning up

Encrypting private information, disabling potentially harmful scripts, and cleaning up accumulated detritus are all ways to strengthen your security. These downloads help you keep things safe and orderly.

Kruptos 2
Worried that someone may gain access to your most private files? Kruptos 2 uses powerful, 128-bit encryption to scramble files and folders so that only you can read them. It's particularly useful for USB flash drives and portable storage devices, which you can encrypt in the entirety. Kruptos 2 also lets you create self-extracting, encrypted archives; shred deleted files so that all traces of them vanish from your hard disk; and even disguise the filename when you encrypt a file.

Transaction Guard
This freebie from commercial security vendor Trend Micro is actually two pieces of security software in one. First, it's a spyware detector and eradicator that monitors your system in real-time for spyware and kills any it finds. Second, it introduces a "secret keyboard" to ensure that passwords and other sensitive information aren't stolen over the Internet. When you visit a site that asks for a password, instead of typing in the password, you enter it on the secret keyboard, which copies the password to the clipboard, from which it gets pasted directly into a Web form. The software runs as an ActiveX control in the System

CCleaner
When you surf the Web, you pick up many traces of your Internet activity. Your PC swells up with temporary Internet files, a history list, cookies, autocomplete entries, and lots more. In addition, programs create temporary files, file lists, and other bits of effluvia. Windows itself constantly monitors what you do, and records information about it in logs. In fact, a snoop could easily gather a great deal of information about you from stuff that's junking up your PC. CCleaner rids your system of all such traces. Not only does it enhance your privacy, but you'll regain hard disk space as well. When I used this utility for the first time, it deleted a whopping 835MB of files.

NoScript
Among the biggest dangers you face when surfing the Web are boobytrapped Java and JavaScript scripts and applets. Evil doers can disguise these harmful pieces of code as useful tools, or can hide them completely while they perform their nasty routines. Unfortunately, there's no practical way for you to separate the good ones from the bad ones. But NoScript, a free Firefox extension, prevents all JavaScript and Java applets from running, except on sites that you designate as safe. The extension presents you with a list of safe sites, which you can add to. NoScript tells you when it has blocked Java or JavaScript on a site. For added protection, this remarkably powerful and flexible tool also blocks Java, Flash, and other plug-ins on sites you don't trust.

File Shredder 2
Delete a file and it's gone from your PC, right? Wrong. Even after you delete a file and flush it from your Recycle Bin, special software can re-create it. Of course, in general, you'd like files to stay deleted when you throw them away. File Shredder 2 overwrites any file or folder with a random string of binary data--multiple times. You have a choice of five different shredding algorithms, and using the program is a breeze: Just choose your files, tell the program to shred them, and they'll be gone forever.

All links on original site - Jack
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9026125





Yakety-hack

Talking Trojan Taunts Victims
John Leyden

Malware authors have developed a talking Trojan capable of taunting its victims even as it goes about its work trashing their PCs.

The BotVoice-A Trojan (http://www.pandasoftware.com/com/vir...panda=empresas) informs victims that their Windows PCs have been infected as it deletes files. The malware uses Windows text reader to play the following message:
You has been infected I repeat You has been infected and your system files has been deletes. Sorry. Have a Nice Day and bye bye.

The comments are continuously deleted as the Trojan attempts to delete the entire content of the computer's hard disk, according to an analysis of the malware by anti-virus firm Panda Software.

Even if BotVoice-A only deletes a portion of files it can still render Windows PCs unusable. Changes the malware makes to the Windows registry mean that installed programs will fail to run. BotVoice-A Trojan also disables Windows registry editor, making the process of undoing these changes doubly difficult.

The Trojan spreads via a variety of means, such as by exploiting vulnerabilities to infect visitors to infected websites and by posing on media files on P2P networks
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/03/talking_trojan/





Building a BitTorrent Box
Ross

Why?

While most of our time on the Internet is spent IM’ing, e-mail, or just browsing the Web, you may run in to situations when you need to do some powerful file transfers. If you use a laptop, you’re use to getting up, suspending your laptop, and running out the door all of the time. But, sometimes you know you just need something dedicated to get work done. You’ll need a solution to retrieve files and serve data when you need it. In this guide, you’ll learn how to set a small headless Ubuntu server used to retrieve BitTorrent files, while even saving them to a external USB hard drive that can be disconnected on the go. You even discover how to remotely administer your server from the Web using SSH, VNC, and an inuitive HTML UI, while being able to retrieve files while you’re away from home.

This tutorial takes for granted you have a spare computer laying around. Building a computer is out of the scope of this article.

The OS Installation
Installing Ubuntu

We’ll be doing a basic Ubuntu Linux installation. Ubuntu is free operating system based on the [1] Gnome desktop and the [2] Linux kernel. But, “Isn’t this suppose to be a headless server?” you may ask. Why don’t we just do a server installation? Well, you could, but you spend more time later on installing the X-server packages needed to configure our BitTorrent client. Besides, you’re not tweaking this out to be a uber-efficient web host for thousands of people. This is targeted mainly towards those who simply need a private file host and BitTorrent client. Anything you don’t need, you can remove later.

Ubuntu can be downloaded from the [3] official Ubuntu website. If the computer you’ll be using is a slower model, you might what to consider using the alternative text-mode installer available instead of the live CD on the site. What your are downloading is an ISO, an image of a CD. This image needs to be burned to a blank CD. Depending upon what operating system you’re using, you can either either a number of applications in Windows to get the job done ([4] CD Burner XP, [5] ISO Recorder), or you can use a simple command in Linux (if the file is in your home directory) to do it:

cdrecord ubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso

Reboot your computer while the CD is in the drive. Select to install Ubuntu, and the setup process is extremely simple. You’ll be asked about what language you’ll want to use, and to setup a user account. The hardest part can be the partitioning, but if all you’ll be using this for is a BitTorrent box, you can just choose to use guided partitioning on to wipe the entire drive. Once the installation has finished, reboot and login using the newly configured user name and password. Now, you’re set to begin configuring the software.

Creating the “Headless” Server

Once the tutorial is finished, you should be able to disconnect the monitor from this computer, and never have to physically touch it again. If you need to configure anything, you’ll be able to do so via a console (SSH) or a remote desktop (VNC). You can leave the monitor and its peripherals connected if you like if its easier, because you now have a fully functional computer with an awesome operating system. If you want to create a headless server, browse through the menus at the top to “Applications->Accessories->Terminal”. From there, type these commands in:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server tightvncserver
sudo update-rc.d gdm remove

Note: You can add the GUI to start again at boot with this command:

sudo update-rc.d gdm defaults

Using these steps, you are installing a few remote administrative packages, and removing the GUI from starting when the computer is turned on. Now record the computer’s IP address somewhere handy by entering the following command:

ifconfig eth0

You’ll want to copy down the address in the “inet addr” field. The next time you restart your computer, you’ll be able to login that IP using SSH with your user name and password. You can use the regular SSH client built into Linux, or use a popular client like [6] Putty if you have a different operating system.

If you’d like to use a graphical interface, there a several clients you can use to connect to the VNC session, such as [7] RealVNC. Once you’ve logged in via SSH, you can always start a remote desktop session (if needed) using VNC:

vncserver -geometry 800×600

And kill it using:

vncserver -kill :1

Depending on how you want to work on the server is your choice. First, you can use SSH to connect via a console to enter commands. Secondly, if you want to configure it using a remote desktop, you can use VNC. Or, you can still use the computer as a regular desktop and finish the configuration locally. All of the steps from now on can be done one of those three ways. Note, when we need to configure Azureus, you will have to use a graphical interface to do so. Now you’re set to configure the software needed to build the BitTorrent box.

Configuring the External Hard Drive (Optional)

After the installation is done, you can optionally add an external hard drive to make it easier to move your data. We’ll be using a service called “[8] autofs” to automatically detect your hard drive and make it ready to share on the network each time you plug it in. To install autofs, use this command:

sudo apt-get install autofs

Once that finishes, you’ll want to connect your external hard drive and find out what device Ubuntu assigns it. After plugging in the hard drive wait a few seconds and then enter this command:

dmesg | tail

You should see something very similar to this:

[47820.164000] sdb: Write Protect is off
[47820.164000] sdb: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
[47820.164000] sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
[47820.164000] SCSI device sdb: 398297088 512-byte hdwr sectors (203928 MB)
[47820.168000] sdb: Write Protect is off
[47820.168000] sdb: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
[47820.168000] sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
[47820.168000] sdb: sdb1
[47820.184000] sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sdb
[47820.184000] sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0

The line “[47820.168000] sdb: sdb1” is what you’ll want to pay attention to. This tells us that Ubuntu is assigning the device to “sdb”, and it’s partition is labeled as “sdb1″. “1″ being the first and only partition on the disk. Next, we’ll what to find out what kind of partition is on the disk. Enter this into the console:

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb

The “System” column will display what kind of partition it is. Take note on what type of partition it is for the following instructions. If it’s “HPFS/NTFS”, you’ll want to use the “ntfs-3g” driver. If it contains “FAT”, you’ll use the “vfat” driver. Finally, if it’s “Linux”, you can just use the “auto” driver. Note, if it is a NTFS partition, you will have to manually install the new NTFS read/write drivers by using:

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

Next, we’ll want to add this information to the autofs service. Use to following command to edit to autofs master configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/auto.master

Note: You can replace “nano” with your preferred text editor. To save a file in nano, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+O. To exit, press Ctrl+X.

Now, find the line containing:

#/misc /etc/auto.misc

Change it to:

/misc /etc/auto.misc –timeout=60

Save it and edit the autofs “miscellaneous” configuration file next by entering this command:

sudo nano /etc/auto.misc

Add this to the bottom of the file:

external -fstype=ntfs-3g :/dev/sdb1

Remember to replace “ntfs-3g” with the type of driver you found earlier in this section. Note, if you are using “ntfs-3g”, you might want to append “,force” , making it “-fstype=ntfs-3g,force”. This makes it easier to use uncleanly unmounted drives. This maybe a little risky, but it makes it so much easier to troubleshoot.

Finally, restart the autofs service:

sudo /etc/init.d/autofs restart

Now, every time anything tries to find files in the “/misc/external” directory, Ubuntu will attempt to automatically mount that drive to be used.

The BitTorrent Client
Installation

Now for the heart of your BitTorrent box. We’ll be using the [9] Azureus BitTorrent client because it has a huge plug-in base, and we can configure it to run in a silent service mode without needing the GUI. The first thing you’ll want to do is to download the Azureus client and find a simple place to keep it in. You’ll need to install the Azureus dependencies, download the client, and retrieve the plugins. Enter the following commands to do so:

sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jre libswt3.2-gtk.java
mkdir ~/software
cd ~/software
mkdir azureus
cd azureus
wget \
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/a...4.jar?download \
-O Azureus2.jar
wget http://azureus.sourceforge.net/cvs/log4j.jar
wget http://azureus.sourceforge.net/cvs/commons-cli.jar
wget http://nerdica.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/azureus
wget http://nerdica.com/wp-content/upload...06/azureus-gui
mkdir ~/bin
mv azureus-gui ~/bin/
chmod +x ~bin/azureus-gui

Log out and then log back in for the new program files in your ~/bin/ directory to be recognized. Then edit the service configuration file:

sudo nano ~/software/azureus/azureus

Replace “(your user name)” with your actual user name. Do the same with the azureus-gui launcher:

sudo nano ~/bin/azuereus-gui

Save it, and then move it to it proper location using this command:

sudo mv ./azureus /etc/init.d/azureus
Plug-in Configuration

Now we’ll want to open up Azureus to edit a few configuration options to get everything in place, and to install the web UI for remote administration. Enter this command to open Azureus:

azureus-gui

Follow the simple setup wizard until the application has reached the main window. Once the initial configuration is done, you can now close the program by browsing to “File->Exit”. Next we’ll install the [10] HTML Web UI plug-in. Enter the following commands do download and install it:

wget http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugi...ebui_0.7.6.jar
mkdir .azureus/plugins/azhtmlwebui
mv azhtmlwebui_0.7.6.jar .azureus/plugins/azhtmlwebui/

You can now use and Internet Browser such as Firefox to browse straight to the HTML Web UI whenever the Azureus service is running to download torrents. You can do so by entering the IP address of the BitTorrent Box, followed by the port “6886″. For example:

http://1.1.1.1:6886/

You can add new BitTorrents by browsing to the “Upload” tab, and you can monitor all of your BitTorrents by browsing to the “Downloads” tab. You can tweak a few bandwidth settings by clicking on “Options”. Enjoy your sleek, easy accessible Azureus Web UI.

Now, if you have an external hard drive configured, you can setup Azureus to to move all completed torrents to the external hard drive. That can be set by reopening the Azureus GUI (azureus-gui). Browse the menu to “Tools->Options”. Then, browse the left menu to “Files->Completion Moving”. Check the widget labeled “Move completed files (after download)” and change the directory to “/misc/external”. If you do not have an external hard drive to use, just leaves all those options as the default.

If you’d like, you can also configure a user name and password to use for the Web UI. Browse the left menu to “Plugins->HTML Web UI”. At the bottom of the configuration panel are options to set up a user name and password.

Save your configuration by clicking “Save” at the bottom of the panel and exiting Azureus.

Starting the Service at Boot

Now that everything is set, you’ll want to make sure Azureus start up with your computer boots. Do this by adding the service to the Ubuntu runlevels at boot and shutdown with the following commands:

sudo cp ~/software/azureus/azureus /etc/init.d/
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/azureus
sudo update-rc.d azureus defaults

Now, Azureus will start when the server is booting. If you what to manually stop and start the service, you can do so by entering:

/etc/init.d/azureus stop
/etc/init.d/azureus start

Note: Azureus is now running in a completely silent mode. You will not see the Azureus icon in the icon tray of Gnome when the computer boots. If you ever need to configure Azureus, make sure to stop the service and then open the GUI to do so.

You can also find out about more of this section of the tutorial by visiting the [11] AzureusWiki (copyrighted under the [12] GFDL) page about it.

Hamachi
Installation

[13] Hamachi is a VPN software used to easily create small personal networks that will burn through just about any firewall. The Linux client is available on their [14] website. You’ll want to set this up so it will be much easier to connect to the Samba share hosting all of your files. Installing Hamachi is about the same as configuring Azureus. You’ll have to download the software, and then configure it to run at boot. You’ll begin by download the software package and extracting it somewhere useful. Enter the following commands to do so:

cd ~/software
wget http://files.hamachi.cc/linux/hamach...-20-lnx.tar.gz
tar xvfz hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx.tar.gz
wget http://nerdica.com/wp-content/upload...amachi_service \
-O hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx/

Next, install the software

cd hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx
sudo make install
sudo ./tuncfg/tuncfg

Then you’ll want to add a new Hamachi service to the server. First, you need to start by adding a new driver to be loaded when the computer starts. Edit Ubuntu’s modules configuration file to do so:

sudo nano /etc/modules

Append “tun” to the end of the file. Hamachi uses the “tun” module to be able to create a fake network device.

Now, we’ll add the new Hamachi service configuration. Download the Hamachi service configuration file and add it to the the proper runlevel as follows:

sudo cp ~/software/hamachi_service /etc/init.d/
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/hamachi_service
sudo update-rc.d hamachi_service defaults

Configuration

Next, you’ll want to create and join a network to join. First, you’ll start be creating a Hamachi account to use. Enter the following commands to create and account, and to go online:

hamachi-init
hamachi start
hamachi login
hamachi set-nick MyUserName

Make sure you replace “MyUserName” with a nick you would like to be identified by. Then, create a network to share you data with these few Hamachi commands, while replacing MyNetwork and MyPassword with your personal new network preferences:

hamachi create MyNetwork MyPassword
hamachi go-online MyNetwork

Now you have Hamachi completely set up for private LAN use. After you reboot, Hamachi will start automatically and connect to your network. If you ever want to reconfigure Hamachi for new networks, do so as root:

sudo hamachi join NewNetwork NewPassword

The last thing you’ll need to do is record your Hamachi IP for safe-keeping. You can do so by entering the following into a terminal:

ifconfig ham0

Copy down the address listed in the “inet addr” field.

Samba

Now, to finally be able to download your BitTorrents and to share them across your personal network. We’ll be using [15] Samba, a implementation of the Windows SMB service for Linux. Samba allows you to not only copy files, but to stream them on the fly.

Installation

To begin, enter the following command to install the Samba package.

sudo apt-get install samba smbfs

Next, you’ll need to create a user account to access the Samba share. Do so by adding the user name to the Samba user list:

sudo smbpassword -a (your user name)

Replace “(your user name)” with your personal user name. Enter in your password twice when it asks.
Next, you’ll have to edit the Samba configuration file. Do so by entering the following:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Find the line with:

; security = user

And uncomment it by removing the semicolon like so:

security = user

Now you’ll want to add an entry to share the directory where all of your downloaded BitTorrents have moved to. You can do so by appending an entry like so at the bottom of the “smb.conf” file:

[Downloads]
comment = Contains Azureus Downloads
path = /misc/external
browseable = yes
valid users = (your user name)
writable = yes

If you did not configure the external hard drive, the default directory Azureus hold transfers is in the “/home/(your user name)/Azureus Downloads/” directory. Remember to replace “(your user name)” with your personal user name. Also, you’ll have to leave the entire directory in quotes, because it contains a space. Replace “/misc/external” with that if needed. Now to test the Samba configuration file and to restart the Sambe service by entering the following:

sudo testparm
sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

Once all parts of this tutorial are complete, you should be able to browse to the Hamachi IP (”http://5.x.x.x:6886″) address of the BitTorrent box to send and queue BitTorrent files. Use your file manager, you can browse to the Samba share to pick them up later. In Ubuntu you can browse your downloads by going to “Places->Connect to Server”. Once the dialog box pops up, change the server type to “Windows share”, and enter in the login information for your server. In Windows, you can open Windows Explorer, type the address of your server into the URL bar (”\\5.x.x.x”), and browse your files.


In Conclusion

After completing this tutorial, you now have a fully functioning BitTorrent box configured to share its downloads across a secure, private network. You can even copy your downloaded files straight off the USB external hard drive, if you have one. Once you have a [16] Hamachi client configured on you personal desktop or laptop, you can connect to the BitTorrent box no matter where you are. There are many things you can do after this point. You can use it to share music, movies, and other personal data. You can use port forwarding on a router to give open access to your BitTorrent box across the Internet. With these simple tools, you are now able to download and share data however you like.


URLs in this post:
[1] Gnome desktop: http://www.gnome.org/
[2] Linux kernel: http://www.linux.org/
[3] official Ubuntu website: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download
[4] CD Burner XP: http://www.cdburnerxp.se/
[5] ISO Recorder: http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm
[6] Putty: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~s.../download.html
[7] RealVNC: http://www.realvnc.com/
[8] autofs: http://freshmeat.net/projects/autofs/
[9] Azureus: http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
[10] HTML Web UI: http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugi...in=azhtmlwebui
[11] AzureusWiki: http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php...sSwingUIAtBoot
[12] GFDL: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html#TOC1
[13] Hamachi: https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi/default.asp
[14] website: http://files.hamachi.cc/linux/
[15] Samba: http://us3.samba.org/samba/
[16] Hamachi client: https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi/list.asp

http://nerdica.com/?p=30





Closer Look at P2P Technology

Bittorrent is almost part of the online media establishment, but why has it become so successful?
Kelvyn Taylor

The internet was invented to allow people to easily share files and information. But ever since the original Napster launched in 1999, file sharing has had a bad name.

This is due to the fact that people quickly realised they could easily find and download files that they weren’t supposed to, such as illegally copied music mp3s.

But public demand for the capabilities unleashed by Napsters’s peer-to-peer technology (P2P) spawned a whole host of ‘me-too’ products and protocols, including Kazaa, Grokster and Gnutella.

Many of these have now gone to the wall; the Napster brand was reborn as a (non-P2P) legitimate music download service, Kazaa seems to be in virtual hibernation and Grokster was infamously closed down by the US Supreme Court.

But there’s one open source P2P technology – called Bittorrent – that has survived and prospered, even though it’s just as open to abuse as any file-sharing technology. Invented in 2001 by programmer Bram Cohen, it was developed as a way to efficiently distribute large files without the need for a dedicated file server. This reason alone helped it to become a popular – and legal – way to make Linux distributions available for download.

You might consider it a niche application, but an awful lot of people are using it – more than 150 million according to www.bittorent.com. Statistics published by Cachelogic (www.cachelogic.com) in 2004 showed that Bittorrent traffic accounted for more than 35 per cent of all web traffic worldwide. Bittorrent.com itself is currently ranked in the top 2,000 websites according to the website monitoring service Alexa.

Smart moves
In 2005 Bittorrent Inc. (the company that Cohen and partner Ashwin Navin created in 2004) neatly distanced itself from the shady side of P2P by doing a deal with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and agreeing to remove any illicit copyrighted works from Bittorrent’s commercial site.

Since then, Bittorrent.com has started offering paid-for legal TV and movie downloads. In 2006 it signed a breakthrough deal for online movie distribution with Warner Brothers. It now seems to be going from strength to strength, featuring video, music, TV and game content from top media brands such as 20th Century Fox, MTV, Paramount and Eidos.

Bittorrent, the technology, remains open source and is available for anyone to develop an application around, which is another reason it’s remained so popular, But how does it work, and just what makes it so suited to sending digital movies or huge Iso files around the world? To answer this, first we need to step back and look at some of the basics of P2P technology.

Peer pressure
There are two main ways to share a file between lots of users. The traditional and familiar client-server method is to put the file on a central server and allow multiple clients (PCs) to access it directly.

There’s no need for any communications between the clients – all they need to do is talk to the server. But this means that the server has to be able to cope with delivering multiple copies of the file to lots of clients simultaneously, otherwise the server becomes a bottleneck. For sharing via the relatively low-bandwidth internet this can obviously be a major problem, leading to high costs and congestion at the server.

A peer-to-peer architecture simply does away with the central server and allows any PC connected to the network (a peer) to act as both a client and a server. Peers can then communicate directly with each other to obtain the files they need. This gives several benefits, the most important being data redundancy and no need for massive bandwidth on any one peer machine. A peer can limit peer connections or file downloads depending on how much bandwidth it has available.

Napster used a proprietary P2P protocol to organise the downloading between peers and added a central server to register and validate users and store an index of what files were available on which clients.

It then wrapped it all up in an easy-to-use application that enabled users to search for a particular file or even chat to other Napster users.

Napster wasn’t ‘true’ P2P, but a centralised P2P system, because it relied on a central server for most administrative tasks, and didn’t fully use the computing power of the peers.

A ‘pure’ P2P architecture doesn’t need any central servers at all, sharing all the indexing and admin tasks between the clients as well. Such an architecture is often called a decentralised (or fully distributed) P2P network. Examples that are still going strong are the Gnutella and Edonkey networks. The once popular Kazaa, created by the inventors of Skype, was also a decentralised network.

As we’ll see below, Bittorrent falls between these extremes, adding new and unique twists that make it a hybrid between ‘pure’ P2P and a traditional client-server architecture.

Naming names
In any discussion of P2P, it’s easy to get muddled between application and protocol names, so let’s clear a few names out the way first. Napster was an application based on its own proprietary protocol, Kazaa software used the Fasttrack protocol and Gnutella is the name of the protocol. Edonkey is also a protocol.

For any particular protocol, many client applications are usually available, offering a variety of different features. For example, Gnutella clients include Limewire, Bearshare and Morpheus. Emule is the most popular Edonkey client.

Confusingly, Bittorrent is the name of the file-sharing protocol, the company, the associated website and the ‘official’ free software client, but there are dozens of alternative Bittorrent clients available, such as Utorrent and Azureus. For the purposes of this feature we’ll use ‘Bittorrent’ for the protocol or client and ‘Bittorrent.com’ for the company.

Torrents, seeds and trackers
From day one, Cohen designed Bittorrent and its interface to be easy to use, reliable, give fast downloads and avoid the problem of unfair P2P behaviour. In a normal P2P network, once a client has downloaded a file, it has no further incentive to make that file available to other clients. So the P2P network becomes reliant on a few generous clients and becomes very slow and inefficient.

In Bittorrent terminology, clients that are downloading are called ‘leechers’, whereas clients that are actively uploading are called ‘seeds’. A P2P network with only leechers wouldn’t work for obvious reasons.

Bittorrent tries to prevent this behaviour by forcing clients to do simultaneous downloads and uploads and using other tit-for-tat tricks in the protocol. The easiest way to explain this is to look at how you go about downloading a file in practice.

To download a file via Bittorrent, you first need a Bittorrent client. Probably the best one to start with is the official free client from Bittorrent.com. Although it’s a commercial website, you don’t have to register and there’s lots of free content that you can use to see how it all works.

Divide and conquer
The key to Bittorrent is its unique way of dividing files into small chunks called ‘pieces’ (typically around 256KB) to download.

A ‘torrent’ file is a small file (typically a few kilobytes) containing metadata that enables a client to download a file (or a collection of files) over the Bittorrent network.

When a torrent file (with an extension of .torrent) is created, an index of the source file’s pieces and data integrity information (an SHA1 hash number) for each piece is generated so that clients can verify they have received uncorrupted data. The protocol subsequently breaks these pieces into 16KB sub-pieces, to queue up TCP transfers (pipelining) and ensure maximum use is made of bandwidth.

To start a P2P download you first need to find a torrent file for the content you’re after. You can do this via Bittorrent.com’s search engine or any of the torrent search sites, of which Torrentspy is probably the largest. Be aware that outside the commercial sites, Linux and open source download sites such as www.distrowatch.com and http://sourceforge.net, there’s no way to tell whether you’re downloading legal content or not. And if you’re not sure, it’s best to assume the worst.

Torrent files don’t contain any of the actual file data; the metadata in the torrent file describes how many pieces of the file need to be downloaded, how big they are plus error-checking information to ensure you’re not downloading junk. The file also contains information on the ‘tracker’ for this file.

Trackers are Bittorrent’s way of letting downloaders find each other. They’re not involved in downloading the files, and they store no files themselves. In theory, anyone can run a tracker, but normally users rely on publicly available free tracker servers.

Many clients now support trackerless torrents, using DHT (distributed hash table) technology. In this scheme, each client effectively becomes its own tracker, so you don’t need one of these tracker server. The downside is that it only works while your PC is turned on.

Swarming
When a file’s made available via a torrent file and clients start sharing it, this is known as a swarm. The tracker provides all the members of the swarm with the IP addresses and TCP port numbers of a random selection of other members. Each client then tries to get the full collection of pieces from other clients, which is where the ingenuity of Bittorrent lies.

As soon as you’ve collected a few pieces of the file, the Bittorrent client makes these available to all the other members of the swarm, so you’re forced to simultaneously download and upload data to get the complete file.

This not only stops most of the usual problems of ‘greedy’ leechers, but also makes downloads faster the more clients there are in the swarm. With a healthy swarm, it’s quite easy to saturate all your available download bandwidth, even though each of the swarm members may only be uploading tiny amounts of data.

It’s like downloading from a super-fast web server, but without the need for high-end server hardware. This is why it’s such a popular way to distribute large files such as Linux distributions, but so unpopular with ISPs trying to maintain ‘fair’ contention of user bandwidth.

There are downsides to Bittorrent’s approach. Clients with a complete version of the file available to upload become seeds. The more seeds and leechers available for a particular torrent, the more efficient the downloading process. This tends to make torrents die out rapidly, with large swarms and fast downloads when a popular torrent first appears, but dying out to a trickle over time.

Looking ahead
We’ve already touched on one innovation – trackerless torrents – but there are several other possibilities waiting in the wings.

One is the idea of Bittorrent media streaming. Streaming is notoriously demanding on server resources for decent quality content, particularly video, so the idea is to try and leverage the power of the swarm to do the task cheaply.

Some companies are now starting to roll out streaming solutions based on Bittorrent or other P2P protocols.

Another technique called Similarity Enhanced Transfer (SET) claims to be able to speed up downloads by exploiting the fact that identical files are often labelled differently, and tries to spot identical data in different files. Again, there’s no implementation of this yet.

Of more practical interest is the incorporation of Bittorrent clients in hardware such as routers and Nas storage devices. In 2006, Bittorrent announced partnerships with Asus, Planex and Qnap to produce such hardware, and you can see one of the Qnap models in our Nas group test on page 97. We’ve also seen a Bittorrent client built in to the Excito Bubba home server we reviewed in our August 2007 issue.

P2P comes in from the cold
There was a time when to mention Bittorrent in polite company wasn’t a good idea. P2P is still viewed as the seedy side of the web, even though you can find P2P file sharing built into Windows Live Messenger, and Skype is a massive P2P-based VoIP service from the creators of Kazaa. But few pundits ever foresaw the bizarre twists that have led to us now seeing Warner Brothers and Paramount logos on the Bittorrent home page.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop the Bittorrent protocol from being used for illicit purposes, but that’s not the fault of the technology. The biggest story now is the ongoing fight between the torrent search sites, content pirates and the authorities, which is heading slowly but surely for a big showdown. Whatever the outcome, we predict that you’ll be hearing a lot more of Bittorrent and other P2P technologies over the coming months.

Bittorrent and security
Downloading via Bittorrent isn’t intrinsically any more dangerous than downloading an ordinary file from a website – which these days is perhaps cold comfort.

However, because you’re not downloading a single file from one computer, but lots of verified pieces from different computers, it’s much harder for malicious users to sneak in corrupted, pornographic or virus infected files; a practice Kazaa users were notorious for.

If the original file contains malware, there’s no way to check until you’ve downloaded it, though. Standard anti-virus and anti-spyware programs are sufficient protection, but there are other security aspects of Bittorrent to be aware of.

Any P2P application requires peers to be able to connect directly to your PC. If you’re using a firewall, this means enabling port forwarding for the relevant TCP ports (see here for an explanation of how ports work).

Many routers now have pre-configured settings for applications such as Bittorrent (see screenshot for an example). If your router supports Universal Plug and Play (Upnp), clients such as the official Bittorrent one, can do all the configuration for you automatically. A decent SPI (stateful packet inspection) firewall will also help ensure your safety.

Bittorrent needs these ports open to upload to other peers, but downloading will still work. You won’t get the best performance, though, as other peers may start to ‘snub’ you for not offering uploads.

Finally, you should be aware that when you’re connected to a public torrent tracker and performing either uploads or downloads, your IP address is easily viewable by the whole Bittorrent world via the client software. It’s not designed to be anonymous, so if that concerns you, then either use private trackers or avoid Bittorrent altogether.
www.computeractive.co.uk/2193584





P2P Traffic Shifts Away From Music, Towards Movies
Eric Bangeman

One of the stated goals of the music industry's barrage of lawsuits against P2P users has been to cut down on peer-to-peer traffic. Ars talked to Eric Garland, cofounder and CEO of Big Champagne Online Media Management to get a sense of whether the RIAA's efforts are bearing fruit and to find out what other trends the media measurement company has seen over the last several months.

As it turns out, P2P-based music sharing has remained relatively flat over the past year. During May 2006, Big Champagne reported just shy of 9 million simultaneously connected unique peers sharing music on the popular P2P networks. One year later, that number had increased only slightly to 9.35 million. "There have been years when we have seen double-digit percentage growth," Garland told Ars. "Compared to that, the last 12 months have been rather flat." In fact, on a month-by-month basis, traffic during 2007 has been flat, and almost all of the growth Big Champagne has seen falls within the margin of error.

It could be that the threat of lawsuits are keeping people from popular P2P networks like Limewire, driving them instead to a legal outlet like the iTunes Store. It might also be that the market has reached saturation. "It's like e-mail," said Garland. "For a number of years, the population using e-mail was increasing dramatically. Once everyone who wanted e-mail had e-mail, growth flattened out."

The news for the motion picture and television industries is not so good. BitTorrent has become far more popular: "We've seen real, dramatic growth in BitTorrent usage," notes Garland. That has resulted in a greater average population of seeders and leechers per torrent. In May 2006, the average torrent had 817,588 people participating. 12 months later, that figure had jumped to 1,357,318 seeders and leechers: a 66 percent year-over-year growth rate.

Curiously enough, Big Champagne is also noticing an increase in music traffic on BitTorrent. "It's the most popular place to download albums," said Garland. Big Champagne has recently noticed an increased number of torrents consisting of rips of HD discs. "There's a quite small, but active population that's downloading the HD features," according to Garland. But when it comes to HD content, TV shows are by far more popular.

The oldest online source for illicit files is Usenet, and Garland says his company has seen more activity there as well. Big Champagne's analysis of Usenet traffic is limited to title-specific analysis, but that venue is "surging," says Garland. "There's increasing interest in and use of newsgroups."

Garland also believes that the population of darknets is on the rise but notes that it's difficult to get a holistic view of what's going on with "underground" networks. He doesn't see a large-scale migration to darknets happening anytime soon, however. "Most people are satisfied by what they find on P2P, even though some of them have had bad experiences with it such as lawsuits and malware," he said. "People are creatures of habit and loath to change."
Same as it ever was

Overall, file-sharing is as popular as ever, and BitTorrent is leading the way as people increasingly look for movies, TV shows, and full albums. Two of the more popular torrent sites, TorrentSpy and IsoHunt, have recently announced plans to begin filtering copyrighted content from their trackers using a hash-based system. Although those two sites are likely to see a dip in traffic if copyrighted content is removed, there are plenty of other torrent sites up and running, including the infamous Pirate Bay.
Big Champagne's data also points out the difficulty that content creators are having in controlling the spread of file-sharing. Despite the hundreds of lawsuits filed by the RIAA, music traffic has yet to show any downward movements. And although IsoHunt and TorrentSpy have plans in place to filter out copyrighted content, that's not likely have much of an effect on overall BitTorrent traffic.

What used to be music industry's problem is becoming the movie and television industry's problem, and it may take some drastic changes to how the studios and networks do business to bring changes about. So far, the industries have shown little or no inclination to do so, setting themselves up for a protracted battle that there are few indications that they can win.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ds-movies.html





Online File Sharing Company Launches Its Free File Sharing Service
Press Release

Online file sharing provider, Driveway (http://www.driveway.com) recently announced the introduction of its free file sharing solution that helps individuals share files effortlessly.

Driveway is a free online file sharing service. Using an Internet enabled computer, users can upload/share files with others. This entirely eliminates the need for complicated registration steps since one can share files by simply logging onto http://www.driveway.com
One cannot but help wonder how file sharing can be made so simple and uncomplicated using the Parkit(TM) links - even for large files of upto 500 MB!

What's more users can enhance their favorite email providers such as Gmail, Hotmail with the power of Driveway - for free.

Driveway creates a short user-friendly Parkit (TM) link that can be posted anywhere including on emails and blog postings.

Says, Ms. Kokila C, a Technical Manager at Driveway, "Sharing files has never been this easy, convenient and effortless. It's the simple concept of "Share it, email it!" One cannot but help wonder how file sharing can be made so simple and uncomplicated using the Parkit(TM) links - even for large files of upto 500 MB!"

Explains Mr. Gokula Prakash H, a Senior Graphics Designer/Architect at Driveway; "Typically most popular email services that are around today have a maximum limit on the size of files one can upload. Driveway helps break this size limit barrier by creating Parkit(TM) links to files of size ranging from a few odd MB to almost 500 MB! This eliminates redundancy and improves file accessibility - irrespective of the size of the file."

The Driveway Advantage
Driveway offers a simple solution to upload or share multiple files with your contacts, anywhere in the world. You can upload, share and download files for viewing and even delete them. Recipients receive an e-mail containing the link with which they can download and use to view the file(s). The core philosophy behind Driveway is to make file sharing simple and remove restrictions on the size of files that are to be shared.

Further information at http://www.driveway.com
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/7/prweb537721.htm





Analysis: The White Lies ISPs Tell About Broadband Speeds
Art Reisman

In a recent PC Magazine article, writer Jeremy Kaplan did a fantastic job of exposing the true Internet access speeds of the large consumer providers.

He did this by creating a speed test that measured the throughput of continuous access to popular Web sites like Google, Expedia, and many others. Until this report was published, the common metric for comparing ISPs was through the use of the numerous Internet speed test sites available online.

The problem with this validation method was that it could not simulate real speeds encountered when doing typical Web surfing and downloading operations. Plus, ISPs can tamper with the results of speed tests -- more on this later.

When I saw the results of PC Magazine's testing, I was a bit relieved to see that the actual speeds of large providers was somewhere between 150 Kbit/s and 200 Kbit/s. This is a far cry from the two, three or even four megabit download speeds frequently hyped in ISP marketing literature.

These slower results were more in line with what I have experienced from my home connection, even though online Internet speed tests always show results close, if not right on, the advertised three megabits per second. There are many factors that dictate your actual Internet speed, and there are also quite a few tricks that can be used to create the illusion of a faster connection.

Before I continue, I should confess that I make my living by helping ISPs stretch their bandwidth among their users. In doing this, I always encourage all parties to be honest with their customers, and in most cases providers are. If you read the fine print in your service contract, you will see disclaimers stating that "actual Internet speeds may vary", or something to that effect. Such disclaimers are not an attempt to deceive, but rather a simple reflection of reality.

Guaranteeing a fixed-rate speed to any location on the Internet is not possible, nor was the Internet ever meant to be such a conduit. It has always been a best-effort mechanism. I must also confess that I generally only work with smaller ISPs. The larger companies have their own internal network staff, and hence I have no specific knowledge of how they deal with oversold conditions, if they deliberately oversell, and, if so, by how much. Common business sense leads me to believe they must oversell to some extent in order to be profitable. But, again, this isn't something I can prove.

A matter of expectations

How would you feel if you pumped a gallon of gas only to find out that the service station's meter was off by 10 percent in its favor? Obviously you would want the owners exposed immediately and demand a refund, and possibly even lodge a criminal complaint against the station. So, why does the consumer tolerate such shenanigans with their ISP?

Put simply, it's a matter of expectations.

ISPs know that new and existing customers are largely comparing their Internet-speed experiences to dial-up connections, which often barely sustain 28 Kbit/s. So, even at 150 Kbits/s, customers are getting a seven-fold increase in speed, which is like the difference between flying in a jet and driving your car. With the baseline established by dial up being so slow, most ISPs really don't need to deliver a true sustained three megabits to be successful.

As a consumer, reliable information is the key to making good decisions in the marketplace. Below are some important questions you may want to ask your provider about their connection speeds. It is unlikely the sales rep will know the answers, or even have access to them, but perhaps over time, with some insistence, details will be made available.

Five Questions to Ask Your ISP

1.) What is the contention ratio in my neighborhood?

At the core of all Internet service is a balancing act between the number of people that are sharing a resource and how much of that resource is available.

For example, a typical provider starts out with a big pipe of Internet access that is shared via exchange points with other large providers. They then subdivide this access out to their customers in ever smaller chunks -- perhaps starting with a gigabit exchange point and then narrowing down to a 10 megabit local pipe that is shared with customers across a subdivision or area of town.

The speed you, the customer, can attain is limited to how many people might be sharing that 10 megabit local pipe at any one time. If you are promised one megabit service, it is likely that your provider would have you share your trunk with more than 10 subscribers and take advantage of the natural usage behavior, which assumes that not all users are active at one time.

The exact contention ratio will vary widely from area to area, but from experience, your provider will want to maximize the number of subscribers who can share the pipe, while minimizing service complaints due to a slow network. In some cases, I have seen as many as 1,000 subscribers sharing 10 megabits. This is a bit extreme, but even with a ratio as high as this, subscribers will average much faster speeds when compared to dial up.

2.) Does your ISP's exchange point with other providers get saturated?

Even if your neighborhood link remains clear, your provider's connection can become saturated at its exchange point. The Internet is made up of different provider networks and backbones. If you send an e-mail to a friend who receives service from a company other than your provider, then your ISP must send that data on to another network at an exchange point. The speed of an exchange point is not infinite, but is dictated by the type of switching equipment. If the exchange point traffic exceeds the capacity of the switch or receiving carrier, then traffic will slow.

3.) Does your provider give preferential treatment to speed test sites?

As we alluded to earlier, it is possible for an ISP to give preferential treatment to individual speed test sites. Providers have all sorts of tools at their disposal to allow and disallow certain kinds of traffic. It seems rather odd to me that in the previously cited PC Magazine test, which used highly recognized Web sites, the speed results were consistently well under advertised connection speeds. One explanation for this is that providers give full speed only when going to common speed test Web sites.

4.) Are file-sharing queries confined to your provider network?

Another common tactic to save resources at the exchange points of a provider is to re-route file-sharing requests to stay within their network. For example, if you were using a common file-sharing application such as BitTorrent, and you were looking some non-copyrighted material, it would be in your best interest to contact resources all over the world to ensure the fastest download.

However, if your provider can keep you on their network, they can avoid clogging their exchange points. Since companies keep tabs on how much traffic they exchange in a balance sheet, making up for surpluses with cash, it is in their interest to keep traffic confined to their network, if possible.

5.) Does your provider perform any usage-based throttling?

The ability to increase bandwidth for a short period of time and then slow you down if you persist at downloading is another trick ISPs can use. Sometimes they call this burst speed, which can mean speeds being increased up to five megabits, and they make this sort of behavior look like a consumer benefit. Perhaps Internet usage will seem a bit faster, but it is really a marketing tool that allows ISPs to advertise higher connection speeds – even though these speeds can be sporadic and short-lived.

For example, you may only be able to attain five megabits at 12:00 a.m. on Tuesdays, or some other random unknown times. Your provider is likely just letting users have access to higher speeds at times of low usage. On the other hand, during busier times of day, it is rare that these higher speeds will be available.

In writing this article, my intention was not to create a conspiracy theory about unscrupulous providers. Any market with two or more choices ensures that the consumer will benefit. Before you ask for a Congressional investigation, keep in mind that ISPs' marketing tactics are no different than those of other industries, meaning they will generally cite best-case scenarios when promoting their products. Federal regulation would only thwart the very spirit of the Internet, which, as said before, has always been a best-effort infrastructure.

But, with the information above, it is your job as a consumer to comparison shop and seek answers. Your choices are what drive the market and asking questions such as these are what will point ISPs in the right direction.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2155140,00.asp





Agency Urges Caution on Net Neutrality

The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday recommended against additional regulation of high-speed Internet traffic.

Deborah Platt Majoras said policymakers should proceed cautiously on the issue of "net neutrality," which is the notion that all online traffic should be treated equally by Internet service providers.

In a statement issued Wednesday, Majoras said that without evidence of "market failure or demonstrated consumer harm, policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area."

In separate remarks before a lawyers' group Wednesday, Majoras said the agency was unaware of any market failure or consumer harm in the high-speed Internet market, according to a written copy of her speech.

Majoras' comments provide support for telecommunications companies such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp., which oppose so-called net neutrality regulation. They would like the option of charging customers more for transmitting certain content, such as live video, faster or more reliably than other data.

Supporters of net neutrality rules, including consumer groups and content providers such as Google Inc., are concerned that Internet access providers could slow or block content in the absence of such rules, particularly as Internet providers offer their own services, such as Internet phone calls.

Majoras also said the agency's report concludes that such competition concerns can be addressed by antitrust law.

The Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice have jurisdiction over high-speed Internet access, while Congress has considered legislation that would mandate network neutrality.

The agency also said in its report that certain practices that would discriminate among Internet traffic, such as prioritizing some data or providing exclusive deals to content providers, "can benefit consumers" as well as harm them.

The report grew out of a workshop the agency held in February on Internet access and net neutrality issues.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan.../D8Q1SNT82.htm





Ex-CIA Man Exposes Hysteria Of Car "Bomb" Terror

London car bombs would not have killed anyone, government using terrorist tactics by hyping fear to morph society
Paul Joseph Watson

Countering the frothing rabid hysteria that is being whipped up by a fervent media in response to three failed car "bomb" attacks in the last few days in the UK, ex-CIA agent Larry Johnson joined Keith Olbermann to underscore the truth behind the madness - that the so-called bombs were primitive at best and would not have killed anybody.

Watch the video.

In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of a Mercedes parked outside a London night club containing up to 60 litres of petrol and a similar second vehicle, authorities claimed that the bombs would have caused "carnage" had they been detonated, killing hundreds of people.

A burning Jeep that was driven into a terminal building at Glasgow Airport yesterday was also believed to contain petrol, but failed to explode beyond simply burning out the interior of the vehicle.

The truth about the "deadly" car bombs that led to airports and other transit systems being closed across the country as well as the UK terror threat level being raised to critical is that they displayed an almost laughable level of proficiency and would not have killed anyone.

"This is not one of the truck bombs or car bombs we see going off in Iraq - what's really striking about this today is that you had two non-bombs in London when we had at least five bombs in Baghdad in which U.S. soldiers were killed in one of those so I think it's just out of proportion - this was an incendiary, this was not a high explosive," said Johnson.

Johnson said that had the gas been ignited properly, there would have been a loud boom that would have split the tank but that no projectiles would have even exited the vehicle.

"If someone was within 20, 30 feet of it they would have ear damage but not much more," said Johnson.

Johnson contrasted how the media glaze over deadly car bombings in Iraq which occur every day "And then you have a non-event in London and we're going to battle quarters and beginning to give the hairy eyeball to every Muslim."

Olbermann called the terrorists, "the graduating Al-Qaeda bomb squad that need remedial work" while attacking the concept that we're fighting them in Iraq so as to not have to fight them over here."

He also called out the so-called counter-terrorism experts who have hyped this non-event on television to enhance the profile of the counter-terror companies that they head up.

As Johnson outlines, fewer than 50,000 people worldwide have died as a result of terror attacks since the 60's, and as we recently highlighted, accident causing deer, swimming pools and peanut allergies have all proven more deadly than international terrorism.

The true extent of the damage that could have been caused by these recent attacks pales in comparison to the overblown exaggerated hype that the authorities have claimed and that the media has willingly parroted.

Similar attacks were a staple of the 60's and 70's but the government and the media downplayed them because they were of minimal threat to anyone and to hype such non-events was handing a propaganda victory to the terrorists.

Since the very definition of terrorism is to influence government policy not by the attack itself but by hyping fear of new attacks, the government of Gordon Brown is engaging in terrorism by strongly intimating that fresh attacks are inevitable.

Brown came to power with an agenda to push through new anti-terror laws including wiretaps being admissible in court and extending the 28-day detention without charge law to 90 days. Though such proposals failed under Blair and Brown was expecting a fight to get them passed, expect them to breeze through Parliament with little opposition following the outright panic that has been generated as a result of recent events.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles...eshysteria.htm





Lieberman Uses Foiled British Terror Plot To Push For Greater U.S. Domestic Spying

Appearing on ABC’s This Week, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) used the foiled terror attempts in London to call for greater domestic spying here in the United States. Lieberman said, “I hope these terrorist attacks in London wake us up here in America to stop the petty partisan fighting going on about…electronic surveillance,” in apparent reference to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subpoenas for documents related to Bush’s NSA warrantless wiretapping program.

Lieberman claimed, “We’re at a partisan gridlock over the question of whether the American government can listen into conversations or follow email trails of non-American citizens.” This is false; the NSA spying program covered the surveillance of American citizens. The “gridlock” exists over whether the administration will cooperate with Congress by explaining why it feels current law is inadequate and why President Bush decided to ignore the law in authorizing a spying program that almost led to mass resignations at the Department of Justice.

Liebermen went further in his calls for greater domestic spying. “The Brits have got something smart going. … They have have cameras all over London. … I think it’s just common sense to do that here much more widely.” Watch it:

In the same interview, Lieberman said of the situation in Iraq, “The surge is working.” He refused to say whether he would back a withdrawal if Gen. Petraeus reports in September that progress is not being made.

Also, Lieberman reaffirmed his previous statements that Democratic candidates do not have “strong and muscular” approaches to foreign policy. Today, he said, “I would say that Democratic candidates, in the larger questions of American security, have been disappointing.”

UPDATE: In Aug. 2006, Lieberman seized on a terror plot in Britain to criticize Ned Lamont’s opposition to the war in Iraq.

UPDATE II: Atrios recalls Lieberman’s claim that a “complete withdrawal is possible by late 2007 or early 2008.”
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/07/01/...omestic-spying





Romney, Torture, and Teens

The former governor's connections to abusive "tough love" camps
Maia Szalavitz

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said he’d support doubling the size of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, he was trying to show voters that he’d be tough on terror. Two of his top fundraisers, however, have long supported using tactics that have been likened to torture for troubled teenagers.

As The Hill noted last week, 133 plaintiffs filed a civil suit against Romney’s Utah finance co-chair, Robert Lichfield, and his various business entities involved in residential treatment programs for adolescents. The umbrella group for his organization is the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS, sometimes known as WWASP) and Lichfield is its founder and is on its board of directors.

The suit alleges that teens were locked in outdoor dog cages, exercised to exhaustion, deprived of food and sleep, exposed to extreme temperatures without adequate clothing or water, severely beaten, emotionally brutalized, and sexually abused and humiliated. Some were even made to eat their own vomit.

But the link to teen abuse goes far higher up in the Romney campaign. Romney’s national finance co-chair is a man named Mel Sembler. A long time friend of the Bushes, Sembler was campaign finance chair for the Republican party during the first election of George W. Bush, and a major fundraiser for his father.

Like Lichfield, Sembler also founded a nationwide network of treatment programs for troubled youth. Known as Straight Inc., from 1976 to 1993, it variously operated nine programs in seven states. At all of Straight’s facilities, state investigators and/or civil lawsuits documented scores of abuses including teens being beaten, deprived of food and sleep for days, restrained by fellow youth for hours, bound, sexually humiliated, abused and spat upon.

According to the L.A. Times, California investigators said that at Straight teens were “subjected to unusual punishment, infliction of pain, humiliation, intimidation, ridicule, coercion, threats, mental abuse… and interference with daily living functions such as eating, sleeping and toileting.”

Through a spokesperson, Lichfield has dismissed the similar charges against WWASPS to The Hill as “ludicrous,” claiming that the teens who sued “have a long history of lying, fabricating and twisting the story around to their own benefit.”

Straight would use virtually identical language in its denials: In the 1990 L.A. Times article cited above, a Straight counselor downplayed the California investigators’ report by saying, “Some kids get very upset and lie and some parents believe them.” Both Straight and WWASPS have repeatedly called their teen participants “liars” and “manipulators” who oppose the programs because they want to continue taking drugs or engage in other bad behavior.

Curiously, however, both programs regularly admitted teens who did not actually have serious problems. In 1982, 18-year-old Fred Collins, a Virginia Tech student with excellent grades, went to visit his brother, who was in treatment for a drug problem at Straight in Orlando, Florida.

A counselor determined that he was high on marijuana because his eyes were red (this would later turn out to have been due to swimming in a pool with contacts on). He did admit to occasional marijuana use, but insisted he was not high at the time, nor was he an addict. Nonetheless, he was barraged with hours of humiliating questions, strip-searched, and held against his will for months until he managed to escape.

He won $220,000 in a lawsuit he filed against the program for false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, assault, and battery. Ultimately, Straight would pay out millions in settlements before it finally closed. However, to this day, there are at least eight programs operating that use Straight’s methods, often in former Straight buildings operated by former Straight staff. They include: Alberta Adolescent Recovery Center (Canada), Pathway Family Center (Michigan, Indiana, Ohio), Growing Together (Florida), Possibilities Unlimited (Kentucky), SAFE (Florida), and Phoenix Institute for Adolescents (Georgia).

Sembler has never admitted to the problems with Straight's methods. In fact, when he recently served as Ambassador to Italy, he listed it among his accomplishments on his official State Department profile. Although all of the programs with the Straight name are closed, the nonprofit Straight Foundation that funded them still exists, though under a different name. It's now called the Drug Free America Foundation, and it lobbies for drug testing and in support of tougher policies in the war on drugs.

One of the plaintiffs in the current case against WWASPS, 21-year-old Chelsea Filer, spoke to me when I was researching a TV segment on the industry. She told me that she was forced to walk for miles on a track in scorching desert heat with a 35-pound sandbag on her back. “You were not allowed to scratch your face, move your fingers, lick your lips, move your eyes from the ground,” she said. When she asked for a chapstick, “They put a piece of wood in my mouth and I had to hold it there for two weeks. I was bleeding on my tongue.”

Why was Filer subject to such punishment? “I had less interest in school and more interest in boys and my mom was worried about me,” she says, explaining that her mother believed that the program was nothing more than a strict boarding school.

Because she has attention deficit disorder, Filer was unable to consistently follow the exacting rules, and repeated small violations were seen as ongoing defiance. “It broke my heart that my mom had no belief in me,” she says, describing how, because WWASPS had told her mother to dismiss complaints as “manipulation,” her mother ignored her pleas to come home.

“I’m not a bad kid,” she continued, “I never used drugs, I was never in trouble, I have no criminal record. I know my mom was worried about me—but so many times I told her that this is too much. I would gladly have gone to prison instead.”

WWASPS is linked with facilities Academy at Ivy Ridge (New York), Carolina Springs Academy (South Carolina), Cross Creek Programs (Utah), Darrington Academy (Georgia), Horizon Academy (Nevada), Majestic Ranch Academy (Utah), MidWest Academy (Iowa), Respect Camp (Mississippi), Royal Gorge Academy (Colorado), Spring Creek Lodge (Montana), and Tranquility Bay (Jamaica).

Although it has settled several lawsuits out of court, the organization has never publicly admitted wrong-doing. However, the U.S. State Department spurred Samoa to investigate its Paradise Cove program in 1998 after receiving “credible allegations of physical abuse,” including “beatings, isolation, food and water deprivation, choke-holds, kicking, punching, bondage, spraying with chemical agents, forced medication, verbal abuse and threats of further physical abuse.” Paradise Cove closed shortly thereafter. That same year, the Czech Republic forced the closure of WWASP-linked Morava Academy following employees’ allegations that teens were being abused.

The former director of the Dundee Ranch Academy Program in Costa Rica went to local authorities after seeing medical neglect and other severe abuse, although human rights abuse charges were ultimately dropped against the owner, Robert Lichfield’s brother Narvin. That program closed in 2003.

Police in Mexico have shut down three WWASP-linked facilities: Sunrise Beach (1996), Casa By The Sea (2004) and High Impact (where police videotaped the teens chained in dog cages).

In 2005, New York’s Eliot Spitzer forced WWASP to return over $1 million to the parents of Academy at Ivy Ridge students, because the school had fraudulently claimed to provide legitimate New York high school diplomas. He fined Ivy Ridge $250,000, plus $2000 in court costs. A civil suit has been filed for educational fraud in New York as well, by a different law firm.

Straight's Sembler currently heads the Scooter Libby Defense Fund, in addition to his work for Romney, and has worked tirelessly to keep the Vice President's former Chief of Staff out of prison, even after his conviction on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. After all, if running programs that impose these kinds of "treatments" on American teenagers is not a prison-worthy offense, why should lying to a court be?

The Romney campaign is aware of the WWASP suits, and should be familiar with the Straight suits. If not, it's worth asking: Does Romney support these types of tactics for at-risk youth? Or does he take the line the organizations founded by his fundraisers take—that these dozens of lawsuits are merely from bad kids who make up lies?

Coming from the man who wants to double the size of Guantanamo, these aren't insignificant questions. If Romney doesn't believe the aggressive tactics he supports for use against enemy combatants ought to be used against troubled teens and youth drug users, he should say so, and show he means it by removing these men from his campaign.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/121088.html





US Appeals Court Orders Dismissal of Spying Suit
AP

A US appeals court on Friday ordered the dismissal of a lawsuit challenging President George W. Bush's domestic spying program, saying the plaintiffs had no standing to sue.

The 2-1 ruling by the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals panel was not on the legality of the surveillance program, but it vacated a 2006 order by a lower court in Detroit. That court had found the post-911 warrant less surveillance aimed at uncovering terrorist activity to be unconstitutional, violating rights to privacy and free speech and the separation of powers.

The American Civil Liberties Union led the lawsuit on behalf of other groups including lawyers, journalists and scholars it says have been handicapped in doing their jobs by the government monitoring.

The case will be sent back to the US District judge in Michigan for dismissal.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satelli...e%2FSho wFull





In Italy, CIA Agents Were Undone By Their Cell Phones
Matthew Cole

The CIA needs to get a Q. James Bond's gadget guru surely would have warned the agency about how easy it is to track calls made via cell phone. Now 25 of its agents are facing trial in absentia in Milan, Italy, this summer — undone by their pathetic ignorance of technology. It seems that cellular data exposed their operation to carry out the "extraordinary rendition" (read: illegal abduction) of an Egyptian cleric suspected of terrorist involvement from a Milan street in 2003.

Cell phones communicate with nearby transmission towers when making and receiving calls. As many criminals know, tower location is recorded with the billing data. The spooks apparently didn't realize this and left a trail of cellular footprints at the crime scene. When an Italian prosecutor pulled the records of phones in the area at the time, the plot became apparent. He was able to identify the agents (by alias), where they had stayed, and even calls they made to northern Virginia (where CIA headquarters is), the US consulate in Milan, a US Air Force base in Aviano, and each other. The cleric, Abu Omar, has been released. But should the operatives — likely back in the States — be found guilty, they won't be able to travel anywhere Interpol operates. Maybe they can telecommute.

How They Did It

Coordinating the abduction
The CIA's snatch team used unsecured mobile handsets to communicate during the kidnapping. By zeroing in on phones in the area that were unusually active at the time of the grab — many calling each other — authorities were able to identify the handsets involved. Soon they knew the agents' aliases, where they had stayed, and who else they had called.

Checking in with headquarters
One of the agents participating in the abduction used his cell phone to call Robert Lady, the CIA station chief in Milan. This provided Italian investigators with the first undeniable link to CIA involvement. Lady has been forced to leave Italy and is now among those facing charges.

Planning the escape
Several phones involved in the operation called an Air Force base in Aviano, both before and immediately after the event. Among the numbers dialed: the mobile phone of a commanding officer at the base. This revealed the getaway. Italian authorities believe the cleric was held at Aviano before being flown to Egypt, where he claims to have been tortured.
http://www.wired.com/politics/securi...e/15-07/st_cia





RIM Unconcerned by BlackBerry Bugging Software
Brett Winterford

Mobile device manufacturer Research in Motion (RIM) is unconcerned about a new release of software that aims to compromise the security of a BlackBerry device.

As reported yesterday, the latest version of legal spying software FlexiSPY enables remote third parties to bug the voice calls, log SMS and mobile e-mail messages and track the location of a BlackBerry user.

Ian Robertson, senior manager of security and research at RIM, said users need not be particularly worried about the capability of FlexiSPY.

"While it's the subject of some debate, I don't consider it a virus nor a Trojan, as it does require conscientious effort from the user to load the program," he said.

Robertson said an average user that maintains good hygiene would never see the software loaded onto their device without their knowledge.

There are some basic steps, he said, that users can take to protect themselves.

First, a user should set a password for their device so that nobody else can physically load the application. "This is the same for any device, be it a laptop or a smartphone," he said.

Second, the user should only load applications from known and trusted sources.

"With those two methods alone, no surreptitious software can be inadvertently loaded onto the device," he said.

Finally, the BlackBerry service comes with a built-in software firewall. "If it isn't enabled already, be sure to have it switched on," Robertson said.

The firewall would, in the case of FlexiSPY being active, prompt the user that something is trying to access the device.

"It would say something like -- this application wants to make a connection to the device -- cancel or allow?"

Robertson said that it is not entirely true that the FlexiSPY application works without the user knowing they are being spied upon.

"There are ways you can tell if the program is loaded onto the device," he said. "First, the control panel for the application makes use of SMS messages, which don't appear like regular messages. Second, the application is visible if one views the files loaded onto the device."

That's assuming of course, that a user has the technical nous to understand their BlackBerry's control panel.

Robertson said that despite the marketing of sinister applications such as FlexiSPY, BlackBerry users are protected.

"We provide a fantastic platform and rich controls to allow security to be tailored to meet an organisation's needs," he said. "There are over 250 IT policies and complete application control -- far and away beyond anything else in this space."

Concerned users can read white papers on protecting their BlackBerry from malware here.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/securit...9279555,00.htm





Top Secret: We're Wiretapping You
Ryan Singel

It could be a scene from Kafka or Brazil. Imagine a government agency, in a bureaucratic foul-up, accidentally gives you a copy of a document marked "top secret." And it contains a log of some of your private phone calls.

You read it and ponder it and wonder what it all means. Then, two months later, the FBI shows up at your door, demands the document back and orders you to forget you ever saw it.

By all accounts, that's what happened to Washington D.C. attorney Wendell Belew in August 2004. And it happened at a time when no one outside a small group of high-ranking officials and workaday spooks knew the National Security Agency was listening in on Americans' phone calls without warrants. Belew didn't know what to make of the episode. But now, thanks to that government gaffe, he and a colleague have the distinction of being the only Americans who can prove they were specifically eavesdropped upon by the NSA's surveillance program.

The pair are seeking $1 million each in a closely watched lawsuit against the government, which experts say represents the greatest chance, among over 50 different lawsuits, of convincing a key judge to declare the program illegal.

Belew's bout with the Terrorist Surveillance Program began in 2004, when he was representing the U.S. branch office of the prominent Saudi Arabian charity Al-Haramain. Formerly one of the largest charities in Saudi Arabia, Al-Haramain worked to spread a strict view of Islam through philanthropy, missionary work and support for mosques around the world.

Federal officials were investigating the Ashland, Oregon, branch of the group for alleged links to terrorism, and had already frozen the charity's U.S. assets. Belew was one of several lawyers trying to keep Al-Haramain off a U.S. Treasury Department watch list -- an effort that sent much paperwork flying back and forth between the attorneys and the Treasury Department's Washington D.C. headquarters across the street from the White House.

On Aug. 20, 2004, fellow Al-Haramain attorney Lynne Bernabei noticed one of the documents from Treasury was marked "top secret." Bernabei gave the document to attorneys and directors at Al-Haramain's Saudi Arabia headquarters, and gave a copy to Belew. The document was a log of phone conversations Belew and co-counsel Asim Ghafoor had held with a Saudi-based director for the charity named Soliman al-Buthi.

Al-Buthi was a Saudi government employee who volunteered as coordinator for Al-Haramain's North American branches, including the Oregon branch. In a telephone interview with Wired News, al-Buthi says he's now general manager for the environmental department of the city of Riyadh, working on an anti-bird flu project. He denied having any links to terrorism, now or in 2004. "I feel that Islam is best spread by wisdom not by arms or violence," al-Buthi says.

Despite al-Buthi's claims of innocence, al-Buthi and Al-Haramain's American branch were added to the government's public list of terrorists on Sept. 9, 2004, just weeks after the government turned over the call log to the charity's attorneys. It's not clear when officials realized they'd given a highly classified document to an organization they considered terrorist, but the FBI showed up at Belew's office in October and demanded the call log back, advising the lawyer not to attempt to remember the document's contents.

By then, Belew had given a copy of the document to Washington Post reporter David Ottaway, who had been writing about how the government investigated and listed individuals and groups suspected of funding terrorism. Ottaway did not report on the classified call log, and when the FBI called, the Post dutifully handed over its copy.

That might have been the end of it. But in December 2005 The New York Times revealed that the government had been spying on Americans' overseas communications without warrants, and Al-Haramain's lawyers realized why the FBI had been so adamant about getting the document back.

"I got up in the morning and read the story, and I thought, 'My god, we had a log of a wiretap and it may or may not have been the NSA and on further reflection it was NSA," says Thomas Nelson, who represents Al-Haramain and Belew. "So we decided to file a lawsuit."

The lawyers retrieved one of the remaining copies of the document -- presumably from Saudi Arabia -- and used it to file a complaint in U.S. District Court in Oregon in February of last year. They sought damages from the government of $1 million each for Belew and Ghafoor, and the unfreezing of Al-Haramain's assets, because that action relied on the allegedly illegal spying.

The lawsuit is poised to blow a hole through a bizarre catch-22 that has dogged other legal efforts to challenge the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance.

Since the 2005 Times story, and subsequent acknowledgment of the surveillance by the Bush administration, some 50-odd lawsuits have sprung up around the NSA program, taking on the government and various telecom companies who are allegedly cooperating in spying on their customers, including BellSouth, Verizon and Sprint.

Justice Department and phone company lawyers have asserted that the plaintiffs in those cases don't have legal standing to sue, because they have no proof that they were direct victims of the eavesdropping. At the same time, the government claims it doesn't have to reveal if any individual was or was not wiretapped because the "state secrets privilege" permits it to withhold information that would endanger national security.

The tangible document makes Belew's case uniquely positioned to cut through that thicket, says Shayana Kadidal, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents individuals being held in Guantanamo Bay. The center is also suing to stop the surveillance, but lacks Belew's concrete evidence of monitoring -- arguing instead that the possibility of being monitored hampers its legal work.

"The government's line is that if you don't have evidence of actual surveillance, you lose on standing," says Kadidal. "Out of all the cases, this is the only one with evidence of actual surveillance."

That evidence also gives the courts enough to rule immediately on whether the president had the authority to spy on Belew and Ghafoor without a court order, said Jon Eisenberg, one of Belew's lawyers. "We know how many times he's been surveilled," Eisenberg told a judge last month. "There is nothing left for this court to do except hear oral arguments on the legality of the program."

The Justice Department isn't ready to concede that the two attorneys were swept into the NSA's extrajudicial surveillance. "The government has never confirmed or denied whether plaintiffs were surveilled, much less surveilled under the Terrorist Surveillance Program," spokesman Dean Boyd wrote in an e-mail to Wired News.

But if the document is a harmless memo unrelated to NSA surveillance, it's unexpectedly agitating government spooks.

Soon after the lawsuit was filed, the document was whisked out of the courthouse and into a Justice Department-controlled secure room known as a Secure Compartmented Information Facility in Portland, Oregon. According to government filings, it remains classified top secret and contains "sensitive compartmented information" -- meaning information that concerns or is derived from intelligence sources, methods or analytical processes, according to the defense and intelligence communities' own definition.

Even the lawyers who filed the document with the court are no longer allowed to see it; instead, they've been permitted to file declarations, under seal, based on their memory of its contents.

Other aspects of the case also support the plaintiffs' interpretation of the document. Last year, U.S. District Judge Garr King in Portland examined the document and read classified briefs filed by the Justice Department. Then he ordered the government to meet with the plaintiffs to discuss turning over more documents in discovery. It's not likely the court would have permitted the case to continue if the evidence didn't, in fact, indicate that the pair had been under surveillance.

And if the surveillance had been court ordered and lawful, King would have been obliged to dismiss the lawsuit. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, targets of counter-intelligence or counter-terrorism surveillance can only sue the government when no warrant has been issued. Lawyers for Belew and Ghafoor seize on this point. "If there was a FISA warrant, the whole case would have crumbled on the first day," Nelson says. "Its pretty obvious from the government's conduct in the case, there was no warrant."

Justice department lawyers have argued that, even if the pair of lawyers were monitored, judging the president's authority to do so requires looking at the specific reasons why the duo were surveilled. And those facts would be national secrets that would tip off terrorists, so no court can ever rule on the program.

"This is not to say there is no forum to air the weighty matters at issue, which remains a matter of considerable public interest and debate, but that the resolution of these issues must be left to the political branches of government," Justice Department lawyers wrote in a brief on the case.

But the government has a new, and not necessarily friendly, judicial audience for its no-judges-allowed argument. In August, a special court ordered Belew's lawsuit to be consolidated into a single proceeding comprised of 54 other NSA-related lawsuits, before U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco.

Walker has presided over the year-old class-action lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T for the phone company's alleged cooperation with the NSA program. The judge made waves in July when he issued a landmark ruling that allowed the AT&T case to proceed, despite the government's claim that the suit must be thrown out because it involved national secrets. Walker ruled that the state-secrets privilege did not apply to the entirety of the case, because the government had admitted the program existed. (Walker recently rejected a motion filed by Wired News seeking the unsealing of evidence in the case.)

The government has appealed that state secrets decision to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and asked the judge to put a stop to all 55 cases pending that appeal. But Walker, a libertarian-leaning Republican, has kept the cases moving, noting that any decision from the appeals court is likely to wind through the court system up to the Supreme Court -- a process that could take years.

Belew's lawsuit, his lawyers submit, is a chance to short circuit that process entirely.

In a hearing in early February, Eisenberg told Walker that the classified document sets the Belew case apart from the other cases, because the judge has enough evidence to decide whether the warrantless surveillance was illegal, without waiting for the 9th Circuit to decide the state secrets issue.

"You need only read the statutes to decide, 'Does the president have the right to do this without a warrant?'" Eisenberg said.

Walker is expected to rule in March on whether to stay the case or set a hearing date, and the document will likely be moved, under guard, from the Portland secure facility to San Francisco, where Walker can review it.

In the meantime, the NSA program is undergoing changes.

In a separate lawsuit last August, Michigan U.S. District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor found the NSA surveillance program unconstitutional and illegal -- a decision that's now under appeal in the 6th Circuit. Facing that ruling and growing political pressure, in early January, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales essentially announced the end of the warrantless spying, saying the NSA program will continue, but would begin getting "innovative" court orders from the foreign intelligence court.

With the program now reformed, the Justice Department has asked for several of the lawsuits against the government to be dismissed as moot.

Al-Buthi is now a "specially designated global terrorist," according to the Treasury Department, and he's under indictment in the United States for failing to declare $150,000 in travelers checks raised to help Chechnyan refugees when he last flew out of the country. He told Wired News that he had always declared money when entering the United States, but wasn't aware he needed to do the same when leaving. He says he's been interrogated twice by Saudi officials and cleared of any wrongdoing.
http://www.wired.com/science/discove...urrentPage=all





Me and my shadow

Forget about the WGA! 20+ Windows Vista Features and Services Harvest User Data for Microsoft - From Your Machine!
Marius Oiaga

Are you using Windows Vista? Then you might as well know that the licensed operating system installed on your machine is harvesting a healthy volume of information for Microsoft. In this context, a program such as the Windows Genuine Advantage is the last of your concerns. In fact, in excess of 20 Windows Vista features and services are hard at work collecting and transmitting your personal data to the Redmond company.

Microsoft makes no secret about the fact that Windows Vista is gathering information. End users have little to say, and no real choice in the matter. The company does provide both a Windows Vista Privacy Statement and references within the End User License Agreement for the operating system. Combined, the resources paint the big picture over the extent of Microsoft's end user data harvest via Vista.

Reading Between the EULA Lines

Together with Windows Vista, Microsoft also provides a set of Internet-based services, for which it has reserved full control, including alteration and cancellation at any given time. The Internet-based services in Vista "coincidentally" connect to Microsoft and to "service provider computer systems." Depending on the specific service, users may or may not receive a separate notification of the fact that their data is being collected and shared. The only way to prevent this is to know the specific services and features involved and to either switch them off or not use them.

The alternative? Well, it's written in the Vista license agreement. "By using these features, you consent to the transmission of this information. Microsoft does not use the information to identify or contact you."

The Redmond company emphasized numerous times the fact that all information collected is not used to identify or contact users. But could it? Oh yes! All you have to know is that Microsoft could come knocking on your door as soon as you boot Windows Vista for the first time if you consider the system’s computer information harvested. Microsoft will get your "Internet protocol address, the type of operating system, browser and name and version of the software you are using, and the language code of the device where you installed the software." But all they really need is your IP address.

What's Covered in the Vista License?

Windows Update, Web Content, Digital Certificates, Auto Root Update, Windows Media Digital Rights Management, Windows Media Player, Malicious Software Removal/Clean On Upgrade, Network Connectivity Status Icon, Windows Time Service, and the IPv6 Network Address Translation (NAT) Traversal service (Teredo) are the features and services that collect and deliver data to Microsoft from Windows Vista. By using any of these items, you agree to share your information with the Redmond Company. Microsoft says that users have the possibility to disable or not use the features and services altogether. But at the same time Windows update is crucial to the security of Windows Vista, so turning it off is not really an option, is it?

Windows Vista will contact Microsoft to get the right hardware drivers, to provide web-based "clip art, templates, training, assistance and Appshelp," to access digital software certificates designed "confirm the identity of Internet users sending X.509 standard encrypted information" and to refresh the catalog with trusted certificate authorities. Of course that the Windows Vista Digital Rights Management could not miss from a list of services that contact Microsoft on a regular basis. If you want access to protected content, you will also have to let the Windows Media Digital Rights Management talk home. Windows Media Player in Vista for example, will look for codecs, new versions and local online music services.

The Malicious Software Removal tool will report straight to Microsoft with both the findings of your computer scan, but also any potential errors. Also, in an effort to enable the transition to IPv6 from IPv4, "by default standard Internet Protocol information will be sent to the Teredo service at Microsoft at regular intervals."

Had Enough? I Didn't Think So!

Microsoft has an additional collection of 47 Windows Vista features and services that collect user data. However, not all phone home and report to Microsoft. Although the data collection process is generalized across the list, user information is also processed and kept on the local machine, leaving just approximately 50% of the items to both harvest data and contact Microsoft. Still, Microsoft underlined the fact that the list provided under the Windows Vista Privacy Statement is by no means exhaustive, nor does it apply to all the company's websites, services and products.

Activation, Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), Device Manager, Driver Protection, Dynamic Update, Event Viewer, File Association Web Service, Games Folder, Error Reporting for Handwriting Recognition, Input Method Editor (IME), Installation Improvement Program, Internet Printing, Internet Protocol version 6 Network Address Translation Traversal, Network Awareness (somewhat), Parental Controls, Peer Name Resolution Service, Plug and Play, Plug and Play Extensions, Program Compatibility Assistant, Program Properties—Compatibility Tab, Program Compatibility Wizard, Properties, Registration, Rights Management Services (RMS) Client, Update Root Certificates, Windows Control Panel, Windows Help, Windows Mail (only with Windows Live Mail, Hotmail, or MSN Mail) and Windows Problem Reporting are the main features and services in Windows Vista that collect and transmit user data to Microsoft.

This extensive enumeration is not a complete illustration of all the sources in Windows Vista that Microsoft uses to gather end user data. However, it is more than sufficient to raise serious issues regarding user privacy. The Redmond company has adopted a very transparent position when it comes to the information being collected from its users. But privacy, much in the same manner as virtualization, is not mature enough and not sufficiently enforced through legislation. Microsoft itself is one of the principal contributors to the creation of a universal user privacy model.

The activation process will give the company product key information together with a "hardware hash, which is a non-unique number generated from the computer's hardware configuration" but no personal information. The Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) is optional, and designed to improve software quality. Via the Device Manager, Microsoft has access to all the information related to your system configuration in order to provide the adequate drivers. Similarly, Dynamic Update offers your computer's hardware info to Microsoft for compatible drivers.

Event Viewer data is collected every time the users access the Event Log Online Help link. By using the File Association Web Service, Microsoft will receive a list with the file name extensions. Metadata related to the games that you have installed in Vista also finds its way to Microsoft. The Error Reporting for Handwriting Recognition will only report to Microsoft if the user expressly desires it to. Through IME Word Registration, Microsoft will receive Word registration reports. Users have to choose to participate in the Installation Improvement Program before any data is sent over at Microsof.

Ever used a print server hosted by Microsoft? Then the company collected your data through Internet Printing. Network Awareness is in a league of its own. It does not premeditatedly store of send directly information to Microsoft, but it makes data available to other services involving network connectivity, and that do access the Redmond company. Via Parental Controls, not only you but also Microsoft will monitor all the visited URLs of your offspring.

Hashes of your Peer Name tied to your IP address are published and periodically refreshed on a Microsoft server, courtesy of the Peer Name Resolution Service. Every time you install a Plug and Play device, you tell Microsoft about it in order to get the necessary device drivers. The same is the case for PnP-X enabled device, only that Windows Update is more actively involved in this case.

The Program Compatibility Assistant is designed to work together with the Microsoft Error Reporting Service, to highlight to Microsoft potential incompatibility errors. For every example of compatibility settings via the Compatibility tab, Microsoft receives an error report. The Program Compatibility Wizard deals with similar issues related to application incompatibility. File properties are sent to Microsoft only with the item that they are associated with.

You can also volunteer your name, email address, country and even address to Microsoft through the registration process. A service such as the Rights Management Services (RMS) Client can only function in conjunction with your email address.

All the queries entered into the Search box included in the Windows Vista Control Panel will be sent to Microsoft with your consent. The Help Experience Improvement Program also collects and sends information to Microsoft. As does Windows Mail when the users access Windows Live Mail, Hotmail, or MSN Mail. And the Windows Problem Reporting is a service with a self explanatory name.

But is this all? Not even by a long shot. Windows Genuine Advantage, Windows Defender, Support Services, Windows Media Center and Internet Explorer 7 all collect and transmit user data to Microsoft. Don't want them to? Then simply turn them off, or use alternative programs when possible or stop using some services altogether. Otherwise, when your consent is demanded, you can opt for NO.

What Happens to My Data?

Only God and Microsoft know the answer to that. And I have a feeling that God is going right now "Hey, don't get me involved in this! I have enough trouble as it is trying to find out the release date for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows Seven!"

Generally speaking, Microsoft is indeed transparent – up to a point – about how it will handle the data collected from your Vista machine. "The personal information we collect from you will be used by Microsoft and its controlled subsidiaries and affiliates to provide the service(s) or carry out the transaction(s) you have requested or authorized, and may also be used to request additional information on feedback that you provide about the product or service that you are using; to provide important notifications regarding the software; to improve the product or service, for example bug and survey form inquiries; or to provide you with advance notice of events or to tell you about new product releases," reads a fragment of the Windows Vista Privacy Statement.

But could Microsoft turn the data it has collected against you? Of course, what did you think? "Microsoft may disclose personal information about you if required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to: (a) comply with the law or legal process served on Microsoft; (b) protect and defend the rights of Microsoft (including enforcement of our agreements); or (c) act in urgent circumstances to protect the personal safety of Microsoft employees, users of Microsoft software or services, or members of the public," reveals another excerpt.

And you thought that it was just you... and your Windows Vista. Looks like a love triangle to me... with Microsoft in the mix.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Forge...ft-58752.shtml





Dell Warns of Vista Upgrade Challenges

Upgrading from Windows XP to Vista poses significant challenges for IT departments, warns Dell, as it softens its sales stance on the OS

Dell has taken the unusual step — for a PC vendor of its size — of toning down its sales pitch for Microsoft's Vista operating system and warning businesses of the migration challenges that lie ahead for them.

The step is particularly unusual because one of the issues the hardware vendor is warning business about is the extra hardware they will need to buy.

"They need to be looking at the number of images they will be installing and the size of these images," said Dell's European client services business manager, Niall Fitzgerald, on Wednesday. "A 2GB image for each user will have a big impact."

In the past, Microsoft had suggested that a 1GB image was fine for Vista, but Fitzgerald said image sizes of 2GB and larger will be likely.

As a result, said Fitzgerald, Dell is "stepping back" from telling people they must upgrade. "We are set up to give people all the guidance and support they need for this," he said. "We are not here to promote Microsoft and tell people they should buy it. We can show them the advantages of Vista and what they need to put in place to begin to move across."

Application migration is a key area, Fitzgerald said, echoing comments from Gartner on the size of the issue and the need for considerable testing. "You have to allow time for testing," he said. "Vista is big and complex and there is a lot to it. It requires a lot of testing. You can't just shut off XP on Friday and start Vista on Monday morning. There will be training. There are things to learn."

Overall the challenges will be significant and "should not be underestimated", added Fitzgerald. However, he still thinks that business should go ahead with the migration and not wait for Microsoft to release its first service pack.

Last month, Microsoft passed 40 million sales of Vista, but most of those appear to be to consumers rather than businesses, which have been slow to upgrade.

While Fitzgerald accepted that some business are holding back from migrating to Vista, he denied that there is a widespread feeling that it is better to wait for Service Pack 1. "I have heard that, and I don't buy it," Fitzgerald said. "It used to be a thing people did, and it might have been the case with, say, Windows 2000, but not now."
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1...9287855,00.htm





Microsoft to Spend $1.15 Billion for Xbox Repairs
Eric A. Taub

In what may be one of the costliest consumer warranty repairs in history, Microsoft announced on Thursday that it would spend up to $1.15 billion to repair failing Xbox 360 game machine consoles.

While the company would not say how many units were failing, Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division, said that there have been an “unacceptable high number of repairs.” The majority of Xbox 360 owners, he said, have not experienced hardware failure.

Company officials said that Microsoft had sold 11.6 million Xbox 360 units by the end of June, shy of the 12 million units the company had predicted. The Xbox 360, which first went of sale in November 2005, is currently the best-selling game machine in the United States, according to NPD, a market research firm.

The size of the anticipated repair bill suggests that a third to as many as half of the machines are flawed.

Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., said it would take a charge of $1.05 billion to $1.15 billion against earnings in the quarter ended June 30. Consumers know they have a problem if three red flashing lights appear on the console. Gamers on online forums have been referring to the event as “the Red Ring of Death” because the machine then shuts down.

The company declined to explain the nature of the failure, but said that it was not caused by a single problem in the console, which it said contained 1,700 components and 500 million transistors. The company also said there were no health or safety concerns involved. The problem began to appear over the last three to four months, Mr. Bach said, after “significant usage” of the consoles. He said the company has taken steps to correct the problem in new devices.

Microsoft said it would extend the warranty of the game console to three years to customers worldwide. Previously, products sold in the United States were covered by a one-year warranty, while Xbox 360 units sold in Europe had a two-year warranty.

In addition, customers who have had their consoles repaired because of the “three flashing lights” problem will be reimbursed for the cost of the repairs.

Microsoft has succeeded in establishing the Xbox brand against the better known Sony PlayStation and other game machines. The Xbox and its successor, the Xbox 360, was the software maker’s first major foray into hardware. Although sales are small relative to the rest of Microsoft’s revenue, the Xbox has been an important venture for the company and was viewed by many analysts as Microsoft’s attempt to compete with the likes of Sony and Apple for control of electronics and entertainment within homes.

The device can be used to access the Internet and view movies. Microsoft said its entertainment and devices division reported an operating loss of $315 million on $929 million in revenue for the three-month period that ended in March, and analysts have estimated that the company lost about $6 billion getting a foothold in the game machine industry.

A new Xbox 360 with a 20-gigabyte hard drive sells for about $400, but other versions cost about $300.

The announcement comes on the eve of the E3 Media and Business Summit, the video-game industry’s major trade show, to be held next week in Los Angeles. “This is bound to affect discussions between Microsoft and its developers and retailers,” said Richard Doherty, a partner in the research company Envisioneering Group.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/business/06soft.html





MS: Dancing as Fast as it Can to Try to Get Away From GPLv3
Groklaw

Want to laugh? Microsoft Says It Is Not Bound by GPLv3" -- they think they can so declare, like an emperor, and it becomes fiat. It's not so easy. I gather Microsoft's lawyers have begun to discern the GPL pickle they are in. In any case it won't be providing any support or updates or anything at all in connection with those toxic (to them) vouchers it distributed as part of the Novell deal. What a surprise. Novell, still the Microsoft handmaiden, will pick up Microsoft's slack:
This means that Novell will support those technologies licensed under GPLv3, he said, noting that for those customers who obtain their Linux via a certificate from Microsoft in the future, Novell will provide them with a regular SLES subscription, regardless of the terms of the certificate provided by Microsoft.

What are friends for but to try to escape the consequences of the GPL hand-in-hand? So they are backing out too. Well, folks, how do you like dealing with companies that back out of their commitments? You will not get, I gather, what your voucher said you would. Well, well.

These two -- I can't decide if it's an elaborate dance like a tango or more like those games where you place a cloth with numbers on the floor and you have to get into a pretzel with your hands and feet to touch all the right numbers. Whichever it is, Novell and Microsoft keep having to strike the oddest poses to try to get around the GPL. If they think this new announcement has succeeded, I believe they will find they are mistaken.

In other words, not to put too fine a point on it, GPLv3 worked.

Microsoft has partially backed out, then, from the Novell deal, and so has Novell, although they PR it with an emphasis on the parts that remain. That was the purpose of the clause. Novell is sticking to Microsoft like barnacles on the bottom of a boat, even when offered a chance to swim away to safety.

The interoperability work continues, they say, blah blah, but nobody ever minded that, except for the attempted killing off of ODF. The world has been begging and hoping for interoperability with Microsoft for as long as I can remember. The EU Commission ordered it. So interoperate away, by all means, boys.

Of course, just between you and me and the lamp post, I don't think they really mean it, not with respect to ODF, not 100%, or if they do, I've seen no such indications. They'd rather do a translator they've already told us will not work 100% than work with ODF, the international standard that already exists, to make one responsible standard we all can use that will work 100%. No, no, instead of true, two-way interoperability, the whole world has to make do with annoying translators that don't really work so perfectly and are not so user-friendly, so Microsoft can keep its secrets. That's fine, secrets. Just don't call it an open standard if it isn't fully documented and allows for proprietary extensions. And I wouldn't call it interoperability, either. But that's me.

You know what I love about the GPL? Regular lawyers can't understand it. We've seen that over and over. I think it is so different from what they are used to, they can't get their heads around it, brainiacs though they may be. It seems unnatural to them, and I guess they can't believe it means what it says. But it means it. And if they think this is the end of their GPLv3 difficulties, it's not:
Microsoft also said July 5 that its agreement with Novell, as well as those with Linux rivals Xandros and Linspire, were unaffected by the release June 29 of GPLv3 by the Free Software Foundation.

Guess again. Maybe you should reexamine GPLv2 while you are learning on the job. IANAL, but I think those latter deals are probably in violation of v2 as well as v3. Hey, don't go by me. Ask your lawyer. But the bottom line is this: You can't disrespect other peoples' intellectual property and just walk away. As I believe they are going to find out.

Here is the Microsoft statement in full:

**************************

Microsoft Statement About GPLv3

A Microsoft statement about GPLv3.

Published: July 5, 2007

Microsoft is not a party to the GPLv3 license and none of its actions are to be misinterpreted as accepting status as a contracting party of GPLv3 or assuming any legal obligations under such license.

While there have been some claims that Microsoft’s distribution of certificates for Novell support services, under our interoperability collaboration with Novell, constitutes acceptance of the GPLv3 license, we do not believe that such claims have a valid legal basis under contract, intellectual property, or any other law. In fact, we do not believe that Microsoft needs a license under GPL to carry out any aspect of its collaboration with Novell, including its distribution of support certificates, even if Novell chooses to distribute GPLv3 code in the future. Furthermore, Microsoft does not grant any implied or express patent rights under or as a result of GPLv3, and GPLv3 licensors have no authority to represent or bind Microsoft in any way.

At this point in time, in order to avoid any doubt or legal debate on this issue, Microsoft has decided that the Novell support certificates that we distribute to customers will not entitle the recipient to receive from Novell, or any other party, any subscription for support and updates relating to any code licensed under GPLv3. We will closely study the situation and decide whether to expand the scope of the certificates in the future.

As always, Microsoft remains committed to working with the open source software community to help improve interoperability for customers working in mixed source environments and deliver IP assurance. Our partnerships with Novell and other Linux platform and desktop providers remain strong and the IP bridge we built with them, embodied in our collaboration agreements, remains intact. In particular, our technical and business collaboration with Novell continues to move full steam ahead, including our joint development work on virtualization, standards-based systems management, identity interoperability and document format translators. In addition, the patent covenants offered by Microsoft and Novell to each other’s customers are unchanged, and will continue to apply in the same way they did previously.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?s...70705205728953





Feds Snub Open Source for 'Smart' Radios
Anne Broache

Mobile-gadget makers are starting to take advantage of software-defined radio, a new technology allowing a single device to receive signals from multiple sources, including television stations and cell phone networks.

But a new federal rule set to take effect Friday could mean that radios built on "open-source elements" may encounter a more sluggish path to market--or, in the worst case scenario, be shut out altogether. U.S. regulators, it seems, believe the inherently public nature of open-source code makes it more vulnerable to hackers, leaving "a high burden to demonstrate that it is sufficiently secure."

If the decision stands, it may take longer for consumers to get their hands on these all-in-one devices. The nascent industry is reluctant to rush to market with products whose security hasn't been thoroughly vetted, and it fears the Federal Communications Commission's preference for keeping code secret could allow flaws to go unexposed, potentially killing confidence in their products.

By effectively siding with what is known in cryptography circles as "security through obscurity," the controversial idea that keeping security methods secret makes them more impenetrable, the FCC has drawn an outcry from the software radio set and raised eyebrows among some security experts.

"There is no reason why regulators should discourage open-source approaches that may in the end be more secure, cheaper, more interoperable, easier to standardize, and easier to certify," Bernard Eydt, chairman of the security committee for a global industry association called the SDR (software-defined radio) Forum, said in an e-mail interview this week.

The Forum, which represents research institutions and companies such as Motorola, AT&T Labs, Northrup Grumman and Virginia Tech, urged the FCC to back away from that stance in a formal petition (PDF) this week.

Those concerns were endorsed by the Software Freedom Law Center, which provides legal services to the free and open-source software community, staff attorney Matt Norwood said in an interview this week.

Still, in a white paper released Friday, the group says there's also good news for its developers in the FCC's rule: because it focuses narrowly on security-related software, it appears that programmers would not be restricted from collaboration with hardware makers on the many other kinds of open-source wireless applications. (Many 802.11 wireless routers that are under the FCC's control already rely on open-source systems for network management.)

Software-defined radios--also known as "smart" or cognitive radios--are viewed by some as the foundation for the next generation of mobile technology. Traditional radios use electronic hardware to process signals--for example, to transform a particular type of radio waves into a radio station's musical broadcast or to screen out interference.

Expanding radio's scope
But software-defined radios put the brains of the operation into software that manages the signals being sent or received by the radio hardware. With that approach, new software downloads, as opposed to more labor-intensive hardware changes, could let radios do more than ever before.

Imagine, for instance, a single gadget that can deliver TV shows, terrestrial radio stations, cell phone calls and broadband, depending on how it's programmed; or a cell phone equipped with the intelligence to detect the strongest signals in a particular area and change the phone's settings to subscribe to them, regardless of whether they belong to a GSM, CDMA or some other type of network.

Although the software-defined radio industry has generally found welcoming treatment on the FCC's part so far, some security experts said the agency's recent take on open-source software is unjustified.

"Obscurity works best when the hackers can't test their attacks," said Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor who has written about the tensions between closed and open approaches to computer security. "For software like this, used in distributed devices, there should be no extra burden on open source."

There's also no clear evidence that the number of vulnerabilities in open-source software differs dramatically from that of proprietary software, said Alan Paller, director of research for the SANS Institute, which provides computer security training. (Some earlier studies have found that the generally more intensive scrutiny of open-source code can help keep its quality higher and vulnerabilities lower.)

"They should be defining it as software with reliable maintenance or software without reliable maintenance--that's the fundamental security issue," Paller said in a telephone interview. "If I don't have somebody I can call when I find out there's a vulnerability in my software, I'm dead."

Already in military use
The term software-defined radio hasn't exactly made it into public consciousness yet, but the technology has been gaining traction in military and public safety spheres. Perhaps the highest-profile example is the Pentagon's Joint Tactical Radio System project, which is designed to give soldiers in the field the ability to shuttle voice, data and video across multiple networks.

Commercial offerings, however, remain in the early stages. About three years ago, the FCC awarded its first specialized software-defined radio license to a small firm called Vanu. That company went on to produce the first commercially available base station that can support multiple wireless standards--GSM, CDMA, iDEN and others--from a single piece of hardware, which it markets as a more cost-effective, time-efficient approach. According to the FCC, some CDMA mobile phone networks and wireless local area network devices are also using the technology in some form.

The new FCC rule, prompted in part by a petition last June from Cisco Systems, builds on software-defined radio ground rules established in 2001 and 2005.

The FCC has always worried that the technology's flexible nature could allow hackers to gain access to inappropriate parts of the spectrum, such as that used for public safety. So the regulators required manufacturers to submit confidential descriptions showing that their products are safe from outside modifications that would run afoul of the government's rules. Cisco's petition asked the regulators to clarify how use of open-source security software, whose code is by definition public, fit into that confidentiality mandate.

In response, the FCC decreed that open-source security software, too, cannot be made public if doing so would raise the risk that the FCC's rules could be sidestepped. Then the commission added: "a system that is wholly dependent on open-source elements will have a high burden to demonstrate that it is sufficiently secure to warrant authorization as a software-defined radio."

In its filing this week, the SDR Forum asked the FCC to allow radio makers to discuss their code in public, as long as they weren't intending to encourage rule-breaking. The group also urged a neutral stance on the security of open-source software, arguing that "academic inquiry and industry discussion coupled with a market test," not regulators, should decide.

The Cisco representative who petitioned the agency for the rule changes was not available for an interview with CNET News.com this week. Robert Pepper, the company's senior technology policy director, said he believed Cisco was comfortable with the new rule. An FCC spokesman said the commission had received and would review the SDR Forum's filing, but it was unclear when it would respond.

The FCC's latest move isn't the first time the open-source side of software radio has faced potential limits.

A few years ago, the agency issued rules that would have made it illegal to manufacture TV tuners and PCs that did not support the controversial "broadcast flag," an anticopying regime backed by the entertainment industry.

A federal appeals court threw out the rules. But if left in place or revived by Congress, they would threaten the ability of consumers to build their own unrestricted radio signal receivers, using the likes of a free software radio toolkit known as GNU Radio.

An attorney for the Software Freedom Law Center, which provides legal services to free and open-source software developers, said the regulators could have done far worse in their latest rule: the FCC acknowledged that the open-source platform may have "advantages," such as lower costs and development time, and it didn't outright ban open-source applications.

"I was gratified at least to see they've moved away from...all the rhetoric a few years ago about how the GPL is a virus and free software is un-American," said Software Freedom Law Center's Norwood.

The lingering concern from the manufacturers' side is that as long as the FCC discourages open discussions of security tactics, consumers will encounter delays or fewer choices in the new gadgets--or products laced with bugs that could have been caught with more collaboration.

The SDR Forum has cited the Secure Socket Layer (SSL), a widely used technique for securing e-commerce transactions, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)'s public hash algorithms as evidence that open processes often yield the most highly successful security techniques.

Without similar freedoms for software radio makers, "there may be some people that will shy away or may delay some (software radio) pieces that go out there because they have this extra burden they have to go through," said Bruce Oberlies, chairman of the SDR Forum's regulatory committee.
http://news.com.com/Feds+snub+open+s...?tag=nefd.lede





Report: Carlyle May Bid for Virgin Media

The Carlyle Group private equity firm is in discussions with Virgin Media Inc. over a potential bid for the British cable TV company, The New York Times reported Sunday.

The talks are preliminary and may not lead to a bid, the Times said on its Web site, citing a person familiar with the negotiations that the newspaper didn't name.

The offer for Virgin Media, whose largest investor is Richard Branson, would be worth about $19.6 billion including debt, the person said, placing it among the largest ever in Britain.

A spokeswoman for Virgin Media declined to comment. A message was left Sunday evening seeking comment from The Carlyle Group.

Virgin Media, formed by a merger this year between Branson's Virgin Mobile and cable operator NTL Inc. (nasdaq: NTLI - news - people ), reported its seventh consecutive quarterly loss in May after subscribers defected to rival BSkyB.

Virgin Media lost customers earlier this year after it stopped airing basic BSkyB channels, dropping popular programs such as "Lost," "24," and "The Simpsons," as the result of a battle over fees during negotiations to renew a distribution agreement.

BSkyB has long dominated pay TV in Britain, accounting for around 70 percent of the country's pay-TV subscribers. But the arrival of Virgin Media has threatened a shake-up of the status quo, and relations between the two have become increasingly rancorous in recent months.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/...ap3875347.html





The Six Stages of E-Mail
Nora Ephron

Stage One: Infatuation

I just got e-mail! I can’t believe it! It’s so great! Here’s my handle. Write me! Who said letter writing was dead? Were they ever wrong! I’m writing letters like crazy for the first time in years. I come home and ignore all my loved ones and go straight to the computer to make contact with total strangers. And how great is AOL? It’s so easy. It’s so friendly. It’s a community. Wheeeee! I’ve got mail!

Stage Two: Clarification

O.K., I’m starting to understand — e-mail isn’t letter-writing at all, it’s something else entirely. It was just invented, it was just born and overnight it turns out to have a form and a set of rules and a language all its own. Not since the printing press. Not since television. It’s revolutionary. It’s life-altering. It’s shorthand. Cut to the chase. Get to the point.

And it saves so much time. It takes five seconds to accomplish in an e-mail message something that takes five minutes on the telephone. The phone requires you to converse, to say things like hello and goodbye, to pretend to some semblance of interest in the person on the other end of the line. Worst of all, the phone occasionally forces you to make actual plans with the people you talk to — to suggest lunch or dinner — even if you have no desire whatsoever to see them. No danger of that with e-mail.

E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an Instant Message from someone I almost know.

Stage Three: Confusion

I have done nothing to deserve any of this:

Viagra!!!!! Best Web source for Vioxx. Spend a week in Cancún. Have a rich beautiful lawn. Astrid would like to be added as one of your friends. XXXXXXXVideos. Add three inches to the length of your penis. The Democratic National Committee needs you. Virus Alert. FW: This will make you laugh. FW: This is funny. FW: This is hilarious. FW: Grapes and raisins toxic for dogs. FW: Gabriel García Márquez’s Final Farewell. FW: Kurt Vonnegut’s Commencement Address. FW: The Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. AOL Member: We value your opinion. A message from Hillary Clinton. Find low mortgage payments, Nora. Nora, it’s your time to shine. Need to fight off bills, Nora? Yvette would like to be added as one of your friends. You have failed to establish a full connection to AOL.

Stage Four: Disenchantment

Help! I’m drowning. I have 112 unanswered e-mail messages. I’m a writer — imagine how many unanswered messages I would have if I had a real job. Imagine how much writing I could do if I didn’t have to answer all this e-mail. My eyes are dim. I have a mild case of carpal tunnel syndrome. I have a galloping case of attention deficit disorder because every time I start to write something, the e-mail icon starts bobbing up and down and I’m compelled to check whether anything good or interesting has arrived. It hasn’t. Still, it might, any second now. And yes it’s true — I can do in a few seconds with e-mail what would take much longer on the phone, but most of my messages are from people who don’t have my phone number and would never call me in the first place. In the brief time it took me to write this paragraph, three more messages arrived. Now I have 115 unanswered messages. Strike that: 116.

Stage Five: Accommodation

Yes. No. No . No . Can’t. No way. Maybe. Doubtful. Sorry. So Sorry. Thanks. No thanks. Not my thing. You must be kidding. Out of town. O.O.T. Try me in a month. Try me in the fall. Try me in a year. NoraE@aol.com can now be reached at NoraE81082@gmail.com.

Stage Six: Death

Call me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/opinion/01ephron.html





Google Losing "Gmail" Trademark Cases
IFP

A court in Germany today banned Google from using the name "Gmail" for its popular webmail service following a trademark suit filed by the founder of G-Mail.

Daniel Giersch (33), started using the name G-Mail in 2000, four years before Google released "Gmail".

"Google infringed the young businessman's trademark that had been previously been registered," said the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in its judgement.

"As far as the Hanseatic Higher Court is concerned, the legal situation is unambiguous to the extent that it has not allowed an appeal to the Federal Court of Justice," said Giersch's lawyer Sebastian Eble, from the office of Preu Bohling & Associates.

The lawyer claimed that it was It is a legendary victory, because for many Daniels fighting "Googliaths," confidence and financial means run out in the long course of battle.

The battle for the trademark has dragged on for three years and has been fought in a number of State jurisdictions.

Google has filed lawsuits against Giersch in Spain, Portugal and Switzerland.

"Google has announced, at least in writing, to 'fight' my client abroad for as long as it takes before he drops the legal claims lodged in Germany," Eble confirmed.

But a court in Switzerland threw out Google's case and now Giersch will file a suit to prohibit Google from using the name in that country.

"I have made it clear since the beginning that I will never sell the name," Giersch said. "It is my sole intention to realise my idea for a hybrid mail system. I am absolutely convinced of its success. Neither "G-mail" nor myself are for sale."

After the Google lawsuits have ended, Giersch hopes to focus his energies into the further development of "G-mail," which he touts as a new "standard of communication on the Internet."

"My hybrid mail system 'G-mail' is an ingenious blend of innovative and well-tried communications solutions," he said. "It
is subject to the principles of the sanctity of the post. Google, on the other hand, scans the content of e-mails to blend in adverts. Criticism about this from data protectors that Google has to deal with harms my business. My employees and I are involved in mix-ups on an almost daily basis."
http://pressesc.com/01183582507_gmail





South Koreans Connect Through Search Engine
Choe Sang-Hun

Park Hye Ran, a 15-year-old high school student, wanted to know the shortest route from a bus terminal in the southern port city of Busan to a fish market to the east.

That is precisely the kind of question that Cho In Joon, 50, a seller of lottery tickets in Busan, loves to answer.

Sitting at a computer installed at his street kiosk, Mr. Cho posted a reply for Ms. Park — and for other Naver.com users who might one day ask the same question — with instructions on where she should switch trains, which station exit she should take and how long it would take to walk from there to the market. He even attached a map of the market area.

Thanks to Mr. Cho and tens of thousands of other volunteer respondents, Web users in one of the world’s most-wired countries seldom “Google” anything. They “Naver” it.

Tapping a South Korean inclination to help one another on the Web has made Naver.com the undisputed leader of Internet search in the country. It handles more than 77 percent of all Web searches originating in South Korea, thanks largely to content generated by people like Ms. Park and Mr. Cho, free of charge.

Daum.net, another South Korean search portal, comes in second with a 10.8 percent share, followed by Yahoo’s Korean-language service with 4.4 percent.

Google, the top search engine in the world, barely registers in the country’s online consciousness, handling just 1.7 percent of South Korean Web searches, according to KoreanClick, an Internet market research company.

“No matter how powerful Google’s search engine may be,” said Wayne Lee, an analyst at Woori Investment and Securities, “it doesn’t have enough Korean-language data to trawl to satisfy South Korean customers.”

When NHN, an online gaming company, set up the search portal in 1999, the site looked like a grocery store where most of the shelves were empty. Like Google, Naver found there simply was not enough Korean text in cyberspace to make a Korean search engine a viable business.

“So we began creating Korean-language text,” said Lee Kyung Ryul, an NHN spokesman. “At Google, users basically look for data that already exists on the Internet. In South Korea, if you want to be a search engine, you have to create your own database.”

The strategy was right on the money. In this country, where more than 70 percent of a population of 48 million use the Internet, most of them with high-speed connections, people do not just want information when they log on; they want a sense of community and the kind of human interaction provided by Naver’s “Knowledge iN” real-time question-and-answer platform.

“When people I have never met thank me, I feel good,” Mr. Cho, the lottery ticket seller, said. “No one pays me for this. But helping other people on the Internet is addictive.”

Each day, on average, 16 million people visit Naver — the name comes from the English words neighbor and navigator — keying 110 million queries into its standard Google-like search function. But Naver users also post an average of 44,000 questions a day through Knowledge iN, the interactive Q.&A. database. These receive about 110,000 answers, ranging from one-sentence replies to academic essays complete with footnotes.

The format, which Naver introduced in 2002, has become a must-have feature for Korean search portals. The portals maintain the questions and answers in proprietary databases not shared with other portals or with search engines like Google. When a visitor to a portal does a Web search, its search engine yields relevant items from its own Q.&A. database along with traditional search results from news sites and Web pages.

Naver has so far accumulated a user-generated database of 70 million entries. Typical queries include why North Korea is building a nuclear bomb, which digital music player is best, why people have cowlicks and what a high school boy should do when he has a crush on a female teacher.

Naver lacks the full-time editorial oversight found on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, and some entries are of dubious veracity and attract vigorous rebuttals. But many respondents, eager to build and maintain an online reputation, do careful research to provide useful answers.

NHN, which employs 27,000, is now the most profitable Internet company in South Korea. The company posted 299 billion won, or $325 million, in profit on 573 billion won in sales last year. It has a market value of more than $8 billion.

The company still runs its popular online gaming site, but its search engine, which sells advertisements and search-generated links to commercial Web sites, generated 52 percent of its revenue last year.

When Daum, Naver’s largest local competitor, began making a big push into the Korean search market last year, it turned to its 6.7 million virtual Internet cafes, which are not physical structures but online user groups built around shared interests.

The cafes create pools of material supplied by people who, for example, went to the same school, support or oppose a free trade agreement with the United States or share an interest in hiking in the mountains. The biggest of the cafes have up to three million members.

By opening its cafes to its search engine, Daum’s market share increased by nearly 30 percent in two years. It took in 22.8 billion won in ad revenue in the first quarter of this year, up 42 percent from a year ago.

Google, which started its search service in the Korean language in 2000, introduced an upgraded Korean-language service in May.

The new version deviates from Google’s celebrated bare-bones style. In South Korea, people prefer portal sites that resemble department stores, filled with eye-catching animation and multiple features.

“It’s obvious to me that Korea is a great laboratory of the digital age,” Eric E. Schmidt, the chairman of Google, said in Seoul at the introduction of the new search service.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/05/te.../05online.html





A Rat Chef Leads Way at Box Office
Brooks Barnes

The rodents of “Ratatouille” and the fireworks of “Live Free or Die Hard” joined at the box office this weekend to narrowly reverse Hollywood’s recent slump, good news for studios as they near the summer movie season’s midway mark.

Pixar’s “Ratatouille,” about a rat who becomes a chef, sold $47.2 million in tickets, enough to make that animated movie No. 1. The revival of a Bruce Willis franchise, “Live Free or Die Hard,” sold an estimated $33.2 million over the weekend (for a total of $48.2 million since it opened Wednesday). “Evan Almighty” ($15.1 million) was No. 3, followed by “1408” ($10.6 million) and “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer” ($9 million).

The performances — along with a healthy per-screen average for the Weinstein Company’s documentary “Sicko” — delivered a 1 percent increase in box office revenue for the weekend over last week, according to Media by Numbers. The last four weekends notched declines of up to 12 percent.

“We’re elated,” Harvey Weinstein said. “It’s been a rough year for documentary.” Michael Moore’s “Sicko” grossed $4.5 million on 441 screens.

The summer box office isn’t shaping up as Hollywood had hoped, despite record-setting releases like “Spider-Man 3.” From May 1 to yesterday, box office revenue climbed 2 percent over the same period last year, to $1.89 billion, according to estimates. But attendance fell 1.4 percent during that period, compared with the same time last year.

“To have four down weekends in a row and have attendance lagging is a surprise,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Media by Numbers. Gridlock is an issue. Films are losing audiences as one or more big-budget movies are released every weekend. “We need more movies with legs,” Mr. Dergarabedian said.

Walt Disney’s Pixar is hoping “Ratatouille” falls into that category. Despite its No. 1 rank, “Ratatouille” has some work to do. Its gross was low in comparison with other Pixar blockbusters. Last summer’s “Cars,” for instance, posted a $60 million opening. Chuck Viane, Pixar’s president for distribution, said “Ratatouille” had performed in line with expectations. “It’s like saying Steven Spielberg has to make ‘E.T.’ every time,” Mr. Viane said. “Every movie is different.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/movies/02offi.html





SoundExchange and DiMA Negotiating New Minimum Online Radio Fees
Eliot Van Buskirk

The Copyright Royalty that set the new online radio royalty rates apparently didn't understand that webcasters such as Pandora and Live365 offer thousands of streams, each of which would cost $500 a month under the new rates, killing both sites immediately.

SoundExchange issued a press release saying that it would be willing to limit this minimum-per-channel charge to $2,500 per month until 2008.

DiMA responded immediately that it would agree to this, but only if the term for the new arrangement were extended to 2010 -- or, preferably, forever. Said DiMA head Jon Potter,

"A billion-dollar 'minimum fee' is equally absurd in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 or 2010. It should be eliminated – period."

Whatever they decide on, it will have to happen soon, because the new rates go into effect in 16 days. It'd be a shame to see Pandora, Live365, and other multi-stream webcasters eliminated.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/06/...xchange-a.html





Media Rights Technologies Petitions Librarian of Congress to Revoke Statutory Broadcasting Licenses
Press Release

Today, Dr. James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress was petitioned by Media Rights Technologies (MRT) to revoke all statutory internet broadcasting licenses granted under Section 114 of U.S. Copyright law for webcasters who are in violation of that section by willfully distributing their content as an interactive service. These webcasters, including Yahoo, Clear Channel, iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, MSN Music, Pandora, and Live 365, all enable the public to receive program transmissions that can be unlawfully recorded and deaggregated for purposes of redistribution.

CEO Hank Risan, states: "Every broadcast delivered from these services can easily be stream-ripped by the public, downloaded to a user's hard drive on a song by song basis and uploaded onto iPhones and P2P networks. This type of piracy is in clear violation of the performance rights granted to these distributors of copyrighted material under Section 114. MRT believes that the Librarian of Congress will exercise his fiduciary duty and put a stop to this rampant form of digital piracy by immediately revoking their licenses."
http://www.broadcastnewsroom.com/art....jsp?id=158272





Lasers Speed up Hard Drives by 10,000 Percent
Matt Loney

Researchers in the Netherlands say they have come up with a way of using lasers to speed up magnetic hard drives -- and they expect to have a prototype by 2010.

A paper published by Daniel Stanciu of the Institute for Molecules and Materials at Radboud University Nijmegen describes a method of using ultrarapid pulses of polarised light to heat up areas on a hard disk and, crucially, using the same light to change the polarity of those areas. The polarity of the disk storage medium is reversed by reversing the polarity of the laser pulses, according to a report in Science.

Stanciu was not available for comment, but in the abstract accepted for publication by the Physical Review Letters, he wrote, "We experimentally demonstrate that the magnetisation can be reversed in a reproducible manner by a single 40-femtosecond circularly polarised laser pulse, without any applied magnetic field."

This optically induced, ultrafast magnetisation reversal, he said, was previously believed impossible, and it is the combined result of femtosecond laser heating of the magnetic system to just below the Curie point, and circularly polarised light simultaneously acting as a magnetic field.

Similar effects have previously been used in magneto-optical storage devices, but those used a magnetic field applied by conventional means, not by the laser.

According to Science, Stanciu expects to see a working prototype within a decade.
http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa...9279612,00.htm





In a Bid for Dow Jones, an Entrepreneur Again Finds Murdoch as Rival
Brad Stone

In the continuing saga of Rupert Murdoch’s quest for Dow Jones & Company, perhaps the strangest turn is the rival offer from Brad Greenspan, a former chief executive of Intermix Media, the onetime parent company of the social networking service MySpace.

The 34-year-old Internet entrepreneur, based in Los Angeles, leads an investment group (although he won’t divulge his backers) that he says is willing to spend $1.25 billion to buy 25 percent of Dow Jones for $60 a share.

The News Corporation is offering the same price for all 85 million shares, but Mr. Greenspan believes his bid guarantees editorial independence for The Wall Street Journal and presents potential opportunity for investors who hang onto their shares.

“There’s a lot of upside for the company, the shareholder and the stock based on rolling out and executing the online strategy that I’ve outlined,” Mr. Greenspan said in an interview.

Mr. Greenspan has already had a colorful, even turbulent career in business, one punctuated by fallouts with partners and by lawsuits. And while Mr. Greenspan styles himself as a founder of MySpace, there are fundamental disagreements over his role in the company, as there are over other aspects of his career.

The bankers representing the Dow Jones controlling shareholders, the Bancroft family, appear to be taking his offer seriously, however. On Thursday, Mr. Greenspan met with representatives of Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, which represent the Bancroft family.

But Mr. Greenspan’s bid is unusual for several reasons, not the least of which is that he has sparred with Mr. Murdoch before.

Mr. Greenspan owned 10 percent of Intermix Media when it was purchased by the News Corporation for $580 million in July 2005. He bitterly fought the deal and attempted to mount a rival bid. Later, he claimed that the company was worth more, and subsequently filed a lawsuit in California state court against Intermix and its management, charging that they undervalued MySpace and ignored competing bids.

Although a judge dismissed the case in December (Mr. Greenspan is considering an appeal) the market, at least, has confirmed his essential judgment. News Corporation got a bargain when it picked up the social networking site, and the deal is now viewed as one of the smartest in Internet history.

But Mr. Greenspan insists his attempt to outmaneuver Mr. Murdoch this time is not personal.

“It’s a business transaction and I see a huge upside for the investors I’m bringing into this,” he said. “And I love the Wall Street Journal brand.” But there were also unique forces at work behind the scenes of the News Corporation’s acquisition of Intermix, some of them set into motion by Mr. Greenspan.

In the late 1990s, Mr. Greenspan founded Intermix, then known as eUniverse, a loose collection of online businesses engaged in entertainment and online marketing. While he led eUniverse, he purchased an online marketing company called ResponseBase. Two of its employees, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, are now considered the co-founders of MySpace and work for the News Corporation.

But Mr. Greenspan says he directed the effort inside eUniverse to create a clone of Friendster, an early social networking site, although at least one former board member at Intermix has disputed that account.

In 2003, Nasdaq delisted Intermix, saying that the company had failed to comply with accounting regulations. That same year the company received an infusion of capital from venture capitalists. Deep disagreements with the board followed, and Mr. Greenspan left the company, waging a proxy battle the following year to try to regain control.

In April 2005, the New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, sued Intermix for putting the difficult-to-remove advertising software known as spyware onto the computers of Internet users without their permission. The looming investigation, and the shareholder lawsuits against Intermix that followed, added pressure for the company’s board to sell the firm. (Intermix settled with Mr. Spitzer’s office that year for $7.5 million.)

Mr. Greenspan concedes that the spyware business started under his watch.

“In hindsight it was an area that was probably not as consumer-friendly as we could have been, compared to our other products we were working on,” he said. But he says Intermix’s spyware problem worsened after he left.

In mounting his offer to Dow Jones, Mr. Greenspan has talked about putting together an online financial channel using the company’s assets.

“I have the credibility for knowing how to create great assets and what’s going to be the next big thing,” he said. He has also emphasized his belief in the editorial independence of The Journal.

Mr. Greenspan has, in the past, made his views clear about news articles that he disagrees with. In March, this reporter wrote an article about MySpace’s increasingly restrictive policy on third-party software tools. The article did not mention yet another lawsuit that Mr. Greenspan has filed against the News Corporation, claiming the company was restricting free speech on the site by blocking such software. Mr. Greenspan wrote in an e-mail message, “How did you miss the boat so badly?”

Asked about the e-mail message now, Mr. Greenspan said he may have been “cranky” that day.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/bu...span.html?8dpc





Is Intellectual Property the Key to Success?
Jeffrey Tucker

One of the greatest tragedies of intellectual property law is how it generates intellectual confusion among successful businesspeople. Many are under the impression, even when it is not true, that they owe their wealth to copyrights, trademarks, and patents and not necessarily to their business savvy.

For this reason, they defend intellectual property as if it were the very lifeblood of their business operations. They fail to give primary credit where it is due: to their own ingenuity, willingness to take a risk, and their market-based activities generally. This is often an empirically incorrect judgment on their part, and it carries with it the tragedy of crediting the state for the accomplishments that are actually due to their own entrepreneurial activities.

Certainly there is no shortage of narratives ready to back up this misimpression. Countless business histories of the US observe how profits come in the wake of patents and thereby assume a causal relationship. Under this assumption, the history of American enterprise is less a story of heroic risk and reward and more a story of the decisions of patent clerks and copyright attorneys.

As a result, many people think that the reason the United States grew so quickly in the 19th century was due to its intellectual property protection, and assume that protecting ideas is no different from protecting real property (which, in fact, it is completely different).

A clue to the copyright fallacy should be obvious from wandering through a typical bookstore chain. You will see racks and racks of classic books, presented with beautiful covers, fancy bindings, and in a variety of sizes and shapes. The texts therein are "public domain," which isn't a legal category as such: it only means the absence of copyright protection.

But they sell. They sell well. And no, the authors are not misidentified on them. The Bronte sisters are still the authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Victor Hugo still wrote Les Miserables. Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer. The much-predicted disaster of an anti-IP world is nowhere in evidence: there are still profits, gains from trade, and credit is given where credit is due.

Why is this? Quite simply, the bookstore has gone to the trouble of bringing the book to market. It paid the producer for the book and made an entrepreneurial decision to take a risk that people will buy it. Sure, anyone could have done it, but the fact is that not everyone has: the company made the good available in a manner that suits consumer tastes. In other words, with enterprise comes success. It is no more or less simple than that. IP has nothing to do with it.

So it would be in a completely free market, which is to say, a world without IP. But sometimes businessmen themselves get confused.

Let's consider the case of an ice-cream entrepreneur with a hypothetical brand name Georgia Cream. The company enjoys some degree of success and then decides to trademark its brand name, meaning that it now enjoys the monopoly on the use of the name Georgia Cream. And let's say that the company creates a flavor called Peach Pizzazz, which is a great success, so it copyrights the recipe such that no one can publish it without the company's permission. It then realizes that the special quality of its ice cream is due to its mixing technique, so it applies for and achieves a patent on that.

So this company now has three monopolies all sewn up. Is that enough to ensure success? Of course not. It must do good business, meaning that it must economize, innovate, distribute, and advertise. The company does all these things and then goes from success to success.

If you suggest to the founder and CEO that we should get rid of intellectual property law, you will elicit a sense of panic. "That would completely destroy my business!" How so? "Anyone could just come along and claim to be Georgia Cream, steal our recipe for Peach Pizzazz, duplicate our mixing technique, and then we'd be sunk."

Do you see what is happening here? A small change that would threaten the very life of the business is indirectly being credited, by implication, for being the very life of the business. If that were true, then it would not be business prowess that made this company, but government privilege, and that is emphatically not true in this case. The repeal of intellectual property legislation would do nothing to remove from the business its capacity to create, innovate, advertise, market, and distribute.

The repeal of IP might create for it an additional cost of doing business, namely efforts to ensure that consumers are aware of the difference between the genuine product and impersonators. This is a cost of business that every enterprise has to bear. Patents and trademarks have done nothing to keep Gucci and Prada and Rolex impersonators at bay. But neither have the impersonators killed the main business. If anything, they might have helped, since imitation is the best form of flattery.

In any case, the costs associated with keeping an eye on imitators exists whether IP is legally protected or not. To be sure, some businesses owe their existing profits to patents, which they then use to beat their competitors over the head. But there are costs involved in this process as well, such as millions in legal fees.

Big companies spend millions building up warchests of patents that they use to fight off or forestall lawsuits from other companies, then agree to back down and cross-license to each other after spending millions on attorneys. And no surprise, just as with minimum wage or pro-union legislation, the IP laws don't really hurt the larger companies but rather the smaller businesses, who can't afford million-dollar patent suit defenses.

The Internet age has taught that it is ultimately impossible to enforce IP. It is akin to the attempt to ban alcohol or tobacco. It can't work. It only succeeds in creating criminality where none really need exist. By granting exclusive rights to the first firm to jump through the hoops, it ends up harming rather than promoting competition.

But some may object that protecting IP is no different from protecting regular property. That is not so. Real property is scarce. The subjects of IP are not scarce, as Stephan Kinsella explains. Images, ideas, sounds, arrangements of letters on a page: these can be reproduced infinitely. For that reason, they can't be considered to be owned.

Merchants are free to attempt to create artificial scarcity, and that is what happens when a company keeps it codes private or photographers put watermarks on their images online. Proprietary and "open-source" products can live and prosper side-by-side, as we learn from any drug store that offers both branded and generic goods inches apart on the shelves.

But what you are not permitted to do in a free market is use violence in the attempt to create an artificial scarcity, which is all that IP legislation really does. Benjamin Tucker said in the 19th century that if you want your invention to yourself, the only way is to keep it off the market. That remains true today.

So consider a world without trademark, copyright, or patents. It would still be a world with innovation — perhaps far more of it. And yes, there would still be profits due to those who are entrepreneurial. Perhaps there would be a bit less profit for litigators and IP lawyers — but is this a bad thing?
http://www.mises.org/story/2632

[JackSpratts]

Capitalism Makes Men Sick
Mira Oberman

COMMUNISM may be oppressive, but it seems as though capitalism is bad for men's health, according to a recent US study which found significant increases in mortality rates after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The life expectancy for men freed from the Iron Curtain dropped by six years between 1991 and 1994 amid social disruption, physical hardships and economic instability.

The degree to which men were affected depended upon how rough the transition to capitalism was and how much income inequality increased, the new study from the University of Michigan found.

And they were significantly more likely to be impacted by the transition than women, the study found.

"The inequalities in status and resources that can come with capitalism does lead males to behave in ways that are detrimental to men's health,'' said lead author Daniel Kruger.

Increased competition can create an environment that encourages risk-taking behaviour that results in fatal accidents, he said.

An increase in social and economic stress can manifest itself in suicide or homicide and can also cause physical strains which can lead to heart attacks.

"It seems as though there is a physiological embodiment of stress from being in a competitive environment,'' Kruger said.

Kruger compared the mortality rates of men and women in 14 post Soviet countries.

Male mortality from intentional causes - homicides and suicides - doubled in the region, although it varied significantly by country.

Poland, which had a relatively smooth transition, saw the rate increase just 15 per cent while Estonia, which was much more unstable, saw violent deaths increase 238 per cent.

More significantly, Kruger said, was that the gap between the male and female mortality rates grew an average of 9.3 per cent which showed that "this economic changed was more damaging to men than to women.''

"The impact was really for men who are in their economically prime years,'' Kruger said.

"If you were an adolescent or young adult they may have seen this as an opportunity but those who are, say, 45 and settled into a routine, they might see this as a threat.''

The countries most affected were Romania, Estonia, Latvia and Albania, which saw the gap widen by 14 to 30 per cent in the first five years after the fall of communism.

The gap grew by eight to 12 per cent in Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and East Germany. It grew a modest one to six per cent in Slovenia, Czech Republic, Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary.

The study was published in the current issue of Evolutionary Psychology.
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegrap...006007,00.html





Heil Marko

Fascist Overtones From Blithely Oblivious Rock Fans
Nicholas Wood

On a hot Sunday evening in June, thousands of fans in a packed stadium here in the Croatian capital gave a Nazi salute as the rock star Marko Perkovic shouted a well-known slogan from World War II.

Some of the fans were wearing the black caps of Croatia’s infamous Nazi puppet Ustashe government, which was responsible for sending tens of thousands of Serbs, Gypsies and Jews to their deaths in concentration camps.

The exchange with the audience is a routine part of Mr. Perkovic’s act, and the gesture seemed to lack any conscious political overtones. The audience — most of whom appeared to be in their teens and early 20s — just seemed to be having a good time. But Mr. Perkovic’s recent success among a new generation — many of them apparently oblivious to the history of the Holocaust — has prompted concern and condemnation from Jewish groups abroad and minority groups in Croatia.

[Despite those objections, the concert — his biggest ever, with an estimated 40,000 fans in the soccer stadium — was shown in prime time on Sunday night on state-owned television, prompting further protests from Jewish and Serbian groups.]

“We don’t want to pay for something that strikes fear into my children, or distances them from their friends or neighbors,” said Milorad Pupovac, leader of the largest Serbian political party in Croatia, referring to the plan for the broadcast.

What has shocked those groups more, though, is that in the ensuing debate, many senior politicians and journalists have said that they see no problem with the imagery or salutes.

“They just don’t seem to get it,” said Efraim Zuroff, the Jerusalem director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who has urged President Stipe Mesic to ban future concerts and help outlaw the use of extremist symbols and slogans.

The Croatian government has been trying to improve its image so it can join the European Union, and it did issue a statement after the concert criticizing the open display of Ustashe memorabilia and slogans. But much of Croatia’s political establishment cannot understand what all the fuss is about.

“You can’t see any anti-Semitism here,” Dragan Primorac, Croatia’s education minister, said in an interview. He said he had planned to attend the concert, before rain caused it to be postponed by a day. Others who did get there, though, included a former foreign minister and two Croatian basketball stars.

“At most, you could blame four to five people,” Dr. Primorac said, for wearing Ustashe regalia, or giving the Nazi salute during the concert. He emphasized, too, that Croatia was a good friend of Israel and pointed to a photograph on his mantelpiece of himself with the Israeli elder statesman Shimon Peres as evidence.

Over the last three years the conservative prime minister, Ivo Sanader, has to some extent managed to shed the country’s image as a nationalist state that once harbored war criminals. The effort has been successful enough that Croatia is a favorite to join the European Union. What was seen for much of 1990s as a war-torn nation is now widely perceived as a prime tourist destination, with 10 million tourists a year and visitors flocking to its Adriatic coast.

Photographs and memorabilia from the Ustashe period are no longer sold openly in Zagreb’s city center. Restaurants no longer display photographs of Ustashe units on their wall. But souvenir shops do still sell key rings and baseball caps with the Ustashe U, as well as the slogan used in Mr. Perkovic’s concerts, “Za Dom: Spremni!” or, “For the Homeland: Ready!”

And many Croats still display an insensitivity to Holocaust issues. Mr. Perkovic’s public affairs manager, Albino Ursic, has a large poster that he designed in 1994 on the wall of his office with the words “final solution.” The poster shows a package of cigarettes marked with a large Swastika and labeled “Adolf Filters,” poking out of a black leather jacket. “It’s an antismoking picture,” he said.

“It won an award in Lisbon,” he added, emphasizing that he viewed himself as left of center. As for Mr. Perkovic’s performance, Mr. Ursic said, the fascist salute is made by soccer hooligans across Europe who have little understanding of it. “It is just teenage rebellion,” he said.

Mr. Perkovic’s patriotic — and sometimes violently nationalistic — songs first became popular here during the Balkan wars, when he fought in the Croatian Army. Most Croats know him better by his stage name, Thompson, given to him during the war, when he carried the British-made submachine gun of the same name. He, too, has recently sought to distance himself from the Ustashe association. In an interview, the soft-spoken singer said he had never raised his own arm to make a fascist salute. Nor, he said, did he encourage people to wear Ustashe uniforms. As for the Ustashe slogan he uses, he claims it is a traditional Croatian salute that predates World War II.

Others are unapologetic. Vedran Rudan, a columnist with the Croatian center-right daily Nacional, accused Mr. Zuroff of “extreme arrogance” for writing a letter to the president of Croatia asking the government to bar future Thompson concerts.

She also accused him of branding Croatian youths fascists while ignoring the activities of a well-known ultranationalist member of Parliament, who has close ties with Israel.

“Why do Jews forgive him everything, and the beardless youth and Thompson do not have right to mercy?” Ms. Rudan wrote.

But rights groups here say there is a fundamental problem. While Croatia is now seeking to move away from the nationalist period of the 1990s, the current generation of young people has largely been schooled to believe that the Ustashe government’s actions were no worse than those of Communist leaders in Yugoslavia during the same period.

“They want to put them on an equal footing,” said Danijel Ivin, the president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights. “The education about the recent history of Croatia is not adequate.”

Dr. Primorac said that was slowly beginning to change and pointed out that since 2004, Croatian schools had dedicated a day each year to studying the Holocaust.

Others do not think it is changing quickly enough. “It is an issue,” said Tomislav Jakic, an adviser to President Mesic. “It is far from Ustashe nostalgia that was 15 years ago, when the ghost was first let out of the bottle. But the ghost is still here and it will be for years to come.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/wo...02croatia.html





Cliff Richard Songs Scare off Yobs

IF you want to get rid of troublemaking youths, play them some Cliff Richard songs, a funfair has found.

According to bosses from Carter's Steam Fair, playing tracks by the 66-year-old pop veteran such as Living Doll on all their rides was enough to scare off some "hoodies" and other troublemakers who had descended on the fair last Saturday in north London.
"It was amazing, just like a scene from (the film) Mars Attacks when the aliens were driven away by the sounds of Slim Whitman," said the fair's Seth Carter said.

"From now on if we do have any trouble we have found the perfect deterrent and it comes in the shape of the Peter Pan of pop."

"Who needs ASBOs (anti-social behaviour orders) when we've got our Cliff Richard records?"

Perhaps the fair organisers were inspired by an Australian example

Last year the southern Sydney council of Brighton Le Sands played Barry Manilow songs to discourage young hoons hanging around car parks.
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegrap...rom=public_rss





Record Labels Try the Honey Strategy
Eric Benderoff

CHICAGO – When The New Pornographers’ fourth album goes on sale in August, ardent fans will have already streamed the songs on their computers and received extra tracks that won’t be on the album. And sometime in the fall, they will own a live recording from the band’s coming tour.

The band’s label, New York’s Matador Records, hopes that an extra dose of songs – some available now and some when the cool weather returns – will help stem the flow of illegal copies of the new album and drum up a bit of extra revenue.

Call it the summer of promotional love for music fans, as record labels launch campaigns to lure consumers with downloads, bonus videos, special vinyl versions and music that hasn’t been recorded yet.

“The people who go out to the record stores on the first day of a release deserve something extra,” said Paul Cardillo, who handles sales for North Carolina-based Merge Records, whose top-selling artists include the Arcade Fire and Spoon. “And for those people who may be interested in a record, you want to give them a reason not to download it illegally.”

It’s no secret music sales are in a funk. Year-over-year sales for the first quarter of 2007 are down 20 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

To slow the slide, record labels are adopting programs that offer additional content to those who buy the CDs.

On June 19, Warner Bros. released multiple formats of the White Stripes’ latest album, “Icky Thump.” The CD is priced at $15, vinyl at $30. Two special-edition USB thumb drives are offered for $57.50 each. One thumb drive looks like singer-guitarist Jack White, the other like drummer Meg White.

Earlier, before the release, the label used an application on social networking Web site Facebook. com that allowed people to stream singles.

“You could hear their new song, then when the video was available, we streamed that,” said Robin Bechtel, head of new media at Warner Bros. On the release date, the “entire album was available through the app.”

The extras for The New Pornographers’ release are considerable.

“We are being very aggressive,” said Patrick Amory, Matador’s general manager. “It seems we have to reinvent our business plan every six months, maybe even with every new release.”

The Buy Early, Get Now promotion is offered for $5 on top of the album’s retail price if buyers prepay for the “Challengers” album. The “executive edition” includes a streamed version available now, two months before the Aug. 21 release, and a box set of bonus material: B-sides, alternate mixes, videos, photos and a concert CD titled “Live from the Future.”

In addition to trying to halt piracy, the label is doing the promotion in an effort to take advantage of the publicity a band gets before an album is released.

“At the time we are promoting the record, when the biggest buzz is going on about the record, people can’t buy it,” Amory said. “But they can often download it for free” from file-sharing sites.

Review copies of highly anticipated albums are shipped three months before release to help magazines meet deadlines.

At the same time, singles are released to radio stations to add to the buzz.

But this early exposure can come at a steep price: New albums start popping up on illegal file-sharing sites shortly after review copies are distributed.

Touch and Go, which will release a new album from punk favorites the Mekons in August, is preparing “a lot of cool footage,” Sinkovich said, “as part of the bonus material we will be offering to online retailers.”
http://www.thenewstribune.com/busine...ry/100338.html





Classical Music Imperiled: Can You Hear the Shrug?
Edward Rothstein

The sounds of a dying tradition are painful, particularly if the tradition’s value is still so apparent, at least to the mourners, and still so vibrant to a wide number of sympathizers. Those melancholic strains can sometimes be sensed only on the edge of awareness, sounding like faint drones, heard only in moments of silence. But they are all the more distressing if the imminent demise seems a result of previous carelessness or willful neglect.

That is how I often think of the Western art-music tradition — the classical tradition — these days, and though I once tended to whine about its problems with cranky optimism, now even a stunning performance seems like a spray of flowers at a funeral.

O.K., this is a bit too melodramatic. There is no need after all to act like an extra in “A Song to Remember,” or any other cinematic biopic from an era when names like Chopin or Beethoven could still command box-office attention, an era when émigré film-score composers imported the symphonic tradition into Hollywood.

I also don’t idealize the idolatry that once enshrined the long 19th century of music (roughly 1785-1915) that forms the heart of the Western art-music tradition. But it is astonishing how little is now sensed about what might well be lost with it. And traditions do come to an end. The reading of ancient Greek and Latin — once the center of an educated person’s life — now seems as rarefied as the cultivation of exotic orchids.

The title of Lawrence Kramer’s new book, in fact, is exactly right: “Why Classical Music Still Matters” (University of California). It is the kind of title that would not have been used a generation ago, when debates about the musical scene might have involved titles more like “Why Contemporary Composers Don’t Matter” or “Why Audiences Are Stuck in the Past.”

What has changed is not how much the tradition means to its devotees, but how little it means to everyone else. From being the center of cultural aspiration, art music has become almost quaintly marginal; from being the hallmark of bourgeois accomplishment (“Someday you’ll thank me”), music lessons have become optional attempts at self-expression; from appearing on newsmagazine covers, maestros now barely rate boldface in gossip columns.

Prescriptions have been plentiful, but so many years have gone by without significant music education in the schools and musical commitment in the homes, and so many ears have gotten used to different sounds and minds to different frames of references, that the question has changed from “What can be done?” to “Why should anything be done at all?”

Why, in other words, should we care? After decades of arguments asserting that different cultures just have different ways of expressing themselves, that distinctions and assertions of value are tendentious, and that Western art music deserves no pride of place in a multicultural American society, it may be that even the problem is no longer clearly seen. The premises have shifted.

Unfortunately I don’t think the answers Mr. Kramer gives will make the difference, if any answers even can. Mr. Kramer — who teaches English literature and music at Fordham University and whose lyrical and suggestive studies of music and 19th-century culture have been fascinating contributions to recent musicology — sees the problem clearly enough. But in trying to explain the value of this repertory and its unique status he writes more like an introverted lover than an extroverted judge, more like someone gazing at its marvels from within than someone determined to articulate its virtues to a skeptical outside world.

“No other music tells us the things that this music does,” Mr. Kramer writes, but those things don’t entirely become clear in his retelling. This is not his weakness alone. When proselytizing for a nonverbal tradition, something is always lost in translation, and Mr. Kramer is sometimes too precious and allusive, given the magnitude of the task.

Nevertheless it is worth giving him close attention, and getting acquainted with his modes of expression (“Classical music allows us to grasp passing time as if it were an object or even a body”), because of the strength of his insights. He sees the ways melody (a “treasured, numinous object”) and its troubled fate become the focus of attention in so much of this music, the ways dramas of loss and recovery seem to be played out again and again, and the ways music and film reveal each other’s preoccupations.

He suggests, for example, why Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto plays so central a role in the film “Brief Encounter.” (It portrays “a deep subjectivity immune from manipulation or constraint by external forces,” he says, expressing the yearning of the narrator who recalls her star-crossed love affair.)

In Mr. Kramer’s explorations, though, one thing becomes clear: how many kinds of narratives can be extracted from the classical repertory. Theodor W. Adorno’s criticism serves as a model, examining music as an emotional, intellectual and political drama in sound. A Beethoven symphony becomes an account of attitudes toward political authority and war, or an exploration of subjective feeling in a threatening world. “An American in Paris” by Gershwin has an “undertone of dissatisfied reflection” underneath the “prevailing high spirits,” suggesting the fading spirit of the Jazz Age. The music Mr. Kramer calls classical becomes a kind of philosophical program music, recounting complex interactions between ideas and feelings.

The music’s ability to sustain these kinds of readings — and be illuminated by them — is a more profound achievement than it might seem. Music of this period is shaped in the form of a narrative. Even technically — in terms of harmonic movement or (as Mr. Kramer suggests) melodic processes — a 19th-century composition is literally a story in sound, telling the picaresque adventures of a theme. But it is a story so abstract that it can attract extraordinarily different metaphorical retellings. It reaches so widely because of this openness; it reaches so deeply because of its taut construction.

The stories this music tells — which involve, as Mr. Kramer notes, tales of fate and circumstance, loss and confrontation — are dramas in which listeners have found their personal experiences and sentiments echoed in sound. Many compositions are public demonstrations, displaying all the grand scale and force of communal ritual, and were written for the newly developing concert halls.

There, for the first time, the bourgeois audiences could hear something of their own lives enacted in symphonic splendor — the dramas of desirous, independent citizens, yearning, struggling, loving, brooding, recognizing, regretting, learning — ultimately bound into a single society by the more abstract society of intertwined sounds reaching their ears. Those musical stories are still our own, although in the tradition’s waning years we may, unfortunately, no longer feel compelled to listen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/ar...ic/02conn.html





China Unicom Tests Music Service with Songs from 23 Companies

China Unicom Ltd., the country's No. 2 mobile phone carrier, said Tuesday it has started testing a music download service offering subscribers songs from 23 record companies.

The move comes as music and telecommunications firms try to raise sales and curb piracy by providing convenient channels for consumers to buy legitimate music.

The trial service, called Xuan Qu in Chinese, allows subscribers to download songs to mobile phones for 3-5 Chinese yuan (US$0.39-US$0.66; euro0.29-euro0.49) each, said Tong Xiaoyu, China Unicom's general manager for value-added services.

The service protects copyrights by preventing users from transferring the music to other mobile phones or computers, he said.

Record companies offering songs on the download service include EMI Group PLC, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group Corp. and Universal Music Group, Tong said.

The trial started June 28 and will continue until the end of September. China Unicom will then review and refine the service for a second trial, which will likely start in October, said Tong.

China's telecom firms _ like telecom companies elsewhere in the world _ have been exploring ways to increase revenue from data services, such as music downloads or mobile phone Internet access, as charges for phone calls have fallen amid intense competition among themselves and from less expensive alternatives, such as Ebay Inc.'s Internet-based calling software Skype.

China's larger mobile carrier, China Mobile Ltd., bought a 19.9 percent stake in Phoenix Satellite Television Holdings Ltd. (8002.HK) last year as part of its expansion in value-added services.
http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp...13&sec=apworld





Cut the Misogyny and We’ll Extend Musicians’ Copyright
Adam Sherwin

David Cameron yesterday offered the music industry a unique deal – cut the glorification of materialism, misogyny and guns in hits and the next Conservative government would back an extension of the copyright on sound recordings from the current 50-year period to 70 years.

The change, which must be agreed at a Europe-wide level, means that musicians and singers would be guaranteed to receive royalty payments for their work for most of their lives.

Addressing the British Phonographic Industry annual meeting, Mr Cameron said: “Most people think these are all multimillionaires living in some penthouse flat. The reality is that many of these are low-earning session musicians who will be losing a vital pension.”

Rejecting a report commissioned by Gordon Brown, which said that there was no case for extending copyright, Mr Cameron quoted research which found that the change could boost the music industry by £3.3 billion over the next 50 years.

He argued that extending the term would give an “incentive to the music industry to digitise both older and niche repertoire which more people can enjoy at no extra cost”.

Sir Cliff Richard, The Who and Sir Paul McCartney backed the campaign to extend the 50-year term, as the first rock’n’roll era recordings begin to fall out of copyright.

But in return for the commitment, and a promise that a Tory government would crack down on illegal file-sharing, Mr Cameron said that the music industry must demonstrate a wider social responsibility.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle2028741.ece





A Summer Camp Where Fireworks Are the Point
John Schwartz

Camp Winnigootchee was never like this.

A group of high school students stood at the edge of a limestone quarry last month as three air horn blasts warned that something big was about to go boom. Across the quarry, with a roar and a cloud of dust and smoke, a 50-foot-high wall of rock sloughed away with a shudder and a long crashing fall, and 20,000 tons of rock was suddenly on the ground.

The campers laughed.

“That’s cool!” said Ian Dalton, a student from Camdenton, Mo.

Austin Shoemaker, a student from Macon, Mo., concurred. “It was baad!” he said. “Do it again!”

There aren’t many wholesome explosions in the news these day, but those are what Summer Explosives Camp provides. It is just a louder, and arguably more exciting, version of the kind of summer experiences designed to recruit students to the quieter academic disciplines. The University of Iowa, for example, has a summer program in microbiology; Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., offers a one-week program in robotics; Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa, offers Neuroscience Camp, which includes a trip to a cadaver laboratory to see a brain and spinal cord.

But do those programs, whatever their merits, let the participants blow things up? No, they do not. This program, which does, is set up to draw students to a program at the University of Missouri-Rolla engineering school that feeds industries like mining and demolition.

Imelda Reyes of Kansas City, Mo., a 16-year-old, said she considered attending a more conventional summer program, but, she said, “Watching stuff blow up is better than summer school.”

Students with a passion for all things explosive and proof of United States citizenship pay a $450 fee that covers food, lodging and incidentals like dynamite. In the course of a week, the 22 students at this session set off a wall of fire, blasted water out of a pond, blew up a tree stump and obliterated a watermelon. They set off explosive charges in the school’s mine and finished off the week by creating their own fireworks show for their parents.

“We try to give them an absolute smorgasbord of explosives,” said Paul Worsey, a professor in the department of mining engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla, the only university in the country that offers an academic minor in explosives engineering. More than six billion pounds of explosives are used each year in this country by civilian commercial industry for things like mining and demolition.

While fun is the goal of the camp, safety is the first priority, Barbara Robertson, its administrator, said. “So far, we haven’t had anybody lose any fingers or toes,” she said, “so we’re doing fine.”

Much of the classroom and field time is devoted to explaining how explosives are used in real life. Before the quarry blast, Dr. Worsey, a stocky Briton with a puckish air, explained to the students that they would be disappointed if they expected to see a Hollywood explosion, with boulders flying and flames leaping.

“We don’t look to throw rock through the air,” Dr. Worsey said. “When you do that, you’re wasting energy.” Instead, they calculate a “shoot” to use just enough explosive to do the job. “It’s all controlled,” he said.

Dr. Worsey said he created the camp, now in its fourth year, to try to boost the ranks of the aging population of mining and explosives engineers.

Carol Raulston, a spokeswoman for the National Mining Association, said the number of graduates of engineering schools with training in explosives cannot keep up with the demand in the mining industry, the leading employer of explosives engineers, and the current population of engineers in the field is aging toward retirement.

“We’re going to see a whole class of retirees moving out soon that we’re trying hard to replace,” Ms. Raulston said.

“You need to get people in, get them properly trained before you lose a lot of the experience that’s been in the mines for years,” she added.

To say that these students are enthusiasts understates the case significantly. Kris Rolek was one of the students who really, really enjoyed making things go boom and splat. In the setup time before the quarry shoot, he excitedly discussed the comparative technologies for building potato guns with Dan Montrose, a 6-foot-8-inch military explosives specialist who volunteers as a teacher for the camp. Potato guns, which are pipe-based cannons that can fire a spud, are a favorite do-it-yourself project for the explosively inclined.

Kris, 16, who said he was on his fourth potato gun, suggested that lantern strikers, which are available in camping stores, served nicely as an igniter of the hairspray or other propellant used in the gun, though he believed that stun guns could provide more energy. He and Mr. Montrose agreed that the heavy-duty black plastic tubing sold in hardware stores was far preferable to white PVC plastic, which might shatter. Mr. Montrose advised him that a potato gun was in “a legal gray area,” and gave a no-nonsense warning, “Do not under any circumstances make your self a potato gun out of steel or aluminum,” because the metals might shatter into shrapnel.

“That will get you killed,” Mr. Montrose said.

Kris, of O’Fallon, Ill., said he came by his interest in explosives from his earliest moments — he was born on July 4. “That’s why I’m looking into this as a career,” he said.

Dr. Worsey said that he saw his role in part as helping these students avoid the troubles that a fascination with explosives can bring. Many people who have been drawn to the camp, he said, have already made things like potato guns and flamethrowers. They could be one fumble away from injury or serious trouble with the law. And the camp, Dr. Worsey said, can give a nudge in the right direction.

His fatherly message, he said, is “maybe hold off on some of this stuff until they get the opportunity to come to college and do it properly.”

To drive home the safety issues, the week starts with a demonstration of the kind of damage even small amounts of explosives can do. Dr. Worsey ties a blasting cap, which is about the size of a quarter and is used to set off high explosives, to a chicken wing, and sets it off. The resulting mess underscores the message of caution; a hand, after all, is meat and bone as well.

The course gives insight into the lifestyles of explosives mavens. Keith Henderson, a representative of Dyno Nobel, a major manufacturer of explosives and the company that performed the blast at the quarry, told the students, “There’s a lot of opportunity out there for people in the mining industry — you’ll never go hungry.”

But, he added, explosives have became a sensitive topic since the attacks of Sept. 11. He recalled being pulled out of the airport line, he said, by security officers who asked, “Sir, do you realize that we checked your baggage and it tested positive for three types of explosive?”

He recalled replying, “That doesn’t surprise me,” and showed them a card that identified him as a licensed explosives worker. After his lecture, he handed the students Dyno Nobel T-Shirts that said on the back, “I ♥ Explosives,” but suggested that they not wear them to the airport.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/sc...boom.html?8dpc





T-Rays vs. Terrorists

If you're of a certain age, you may remember those miraculous-sounding "X-ray specs" advertised in comic books. They'd let you see through walls, boxes, and--best of all, for a teenager, anyway--clothing. They were bogus, of course. But technology is finally on the verge of giving us all those capabilities, and more, albeit in a package too big to perch on the bridge of your nose.

The key advances are devices and circuitry that emit and sense radiation in the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum, which extends from the upper edge of microwaves to the near infrared. The rays are reflected by metal but go through most other materials. Water soaks up the radiation, so human tissue, which is mostly water, absorbs it. But unlike X-rays, terahertz rays are thought to be harmless. Terahertz radiation ("T-rays") can't penetrate much past your skin, and it lacks the energy to ionize molecules in human tissue the way X-rays do, so it cannot cause cancers by smashing up your DNA.

T-ray technology will probably find its first big uses in security-related applications, now an enormously fast-growing business because of recent high-profile terrorist attacks, write John F. Federici, Dale Gary, Robert Barat, and Zoi-Heleni Michalopoulou in the July issue of IEEE Spectrum. In a terahertz image, a gun or a knife shines through whatever clothing it's concealed in. Even a plastic knife shows up, because of the way its sharp edges scatter the radiation.

But some terahertz images have another ability, one not even claimed by the comic-book specs: not only can they see hidden objects, but they can tell what those objects are made of, write Federici and his colleagues, who are all professors at New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark. Many explosives, including all the plastic explosives popular with terrorist groups, reflect and transmit a characteristic combination of terahertz waves that make them distinguishable from other materials, even those that might seem identical to the eye and hand. That same chemical-discriminating capability also applies to pharmaceuticals and drugs. In essence, different materials appear as different colors to the terahertz imaging system. So future screening devices should be able to tell whether that's plastique in your pocket or just Play-doh, a package of sugar or an envelope of methamphetamines.

Some short-range imagers available now can also do spectroscopy, although the imaging rate is currently too slow for use in a walk-through scanner. But as the literally hundreds of engineers and scientists working on new terahertz sources and devices push the technology's limits, the article's authors expect to see a machine within the next five years that can do both imaging and spectroscopy at 50 meters or more.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/531195/?sc=swtn





Pirate Party USA – The Second Year
Andrew Norton

On July 4th, the Pirate Party of the USA will be a year old. As with any organisation that wishes to strive and grow, there is to be some turnover of personnel, as we learn, adapt and prosper. For this reason, we the party, are holding an IRC meeting on Tuesday July 3rd at 9PM eastern (6pm pacific)

This meeting is open to all, and we will be discussing how to move on. As always volunteers are desperately sought, and all offers of help are gratefully received, so if you have any ideas, suggestions or questions, please do stop by.

The basic idea of the Pirate Party is simple - the government should encourage, rather than smother, creativity and freedom.

Copyrights are now stretching into the hundreds of years, and fair use is under constant attack by attorneys who exploit the vagueness of the law. Creativity has come to a standstill in this country for those who wish to work within, and benefit from, the confines of the law. Whereas 50 years ago there was no great uproar at creative "pirating" of works without the permission of the original artist (Mickey Mouse was made as a parody, but Disney prosecutes all similar parodies of their Mickey Mouse symbol), similar legitimate creative derivative works are now smothered by the excessive terms, restrictions and punishments of our copyright system.

But it is not just Copyrights that need reform. Patents are suppressing innovation in the digital age by making it possible to monopolize methods and practices. Hundreds of thousands of patents sit on a shelf somewhere, never to be implemented, their ideas shut out from the rest of the world. That our law not only allows this, but enables this, is a travesty and a crime against innovators everywhere.

Lastly, the routinization of privacy violations in the digital age must be halted. Never before has a Citizen faced so many opportunities to have their identity stolen, data misused, or personal information collected without their knowledge. This is done by not only identity thieves, but also the Government, and corporations. Using today's latest technologies enables these entities to act on a wholesale scale that is unheard of in past times. This alarming trend shows no sign of slowing down.

Those of us in the Pirate Party want to change that. We've chosen to adopt the Pirate name so as to pay homage to the creative artists of the past, or as they would now be known, Pirates, thieves, and copyright infringers. We do not support nor condone any unlawful distribution of copyrighted works.
http://www.pirate-party.us/main





Weekly Piracy Report
27 June-3 July 2007

The following is a summary of the daily reports broadcast by the IMB's Piracy Reporting Centre to ships in Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Ocean Regions on the SafetyNET service of Inmarsat-C from 27 June to 3 July 2007.

ALERT

Chittagong anchorage, Bangladesh
Fifty two incidents have been reported since 28.01.2006. Pirates are targeting ships preparing to anchor. Ships are advised to take extra precautions.

Suspicious crafts

• 18.04.2007: 2320 LT: Entrance Cartagena Colombia.
A container ship, while disembarking her pilot on the port side noticed, on radar, one unlit suspicious boat approaching from the stbd side at high speed. The master alerted the crew. The boat came very close to the vessel (about 10 m from the hull). On seeing the alert crew on ship's side, the boat retreated and disappeared into the darkness. The master informed the Centre to alert other vessels calling Cartagena, Colombia.

Recently reported incidents

• 21.6.2007: 2302 LT: Posn 04:15N – 05:35E, Pennington, Nigeria.
A tanker undergoing cargo operations at a SBM was attacked by armed pirates. The pirates boarded the standby tug at the stern of the vessel and contacted the ship via VHF demanding to be let on board or they would sink the ship. The crew mustered, cargo operations were stopped and the vessel disconnected from the SBM. The tug was cast off and the ship proceeded at full speed to sea. All attempts to contact the authorities and the Nigerian navy were futile.

• 25.06.2007: 1820 LT: Posn 01:51.5S – 105:02.8E Dep Tanjung Ular Port, Palembang, Indonesia.
Around eleven pirates, armed with long knives and shotguns boarded a tanker underway. On sighting the pirates, crew ran inside the accommodation and closed all doors. On taking the head count master realised one oiler was being held hostage. Master contacted the shore authorities. The pirates opened fire but there were no injuries to crew. The pirates escaped in a small speedboat. Coast guard arrived to investigate. No stores missing.

• 23.06.2007: 2145 LT: Pulau Lima, Kota Tinggi, Malaysia.
Six robbers armed with long knives and pistols boarded a product tanker while she was alongside. One of the crew was hit on the head with the machete. Another crewmember stood up to the robbers. In the struggle, he fell overboard but managed to swim to the shore and contacted the police with assistance from the local fishermen. The robbers spent around 30 minutes ransacking and robbing the crews’ personal effects, before escaping. The injured crews were sent to the hospital

Piracy prone areas and warnings

S E Asia and the Indian Sub Continent

• Bangladesh : Chittagong anchorage and approaches. The area is listed as very high risk.
• Indonesia : Belawan, Tanjong Priok (Jakarta) / generally in other areas.
• Malacca straits
• Singapore Straits

Africa and Red Sea

• Africa : Lagos (Nigeria) / generally other areas in Nigeria, Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania)
• Gulf of Aden / Red Sea : Numerous pirate attacks have been reported by ships and yachts in the Gulf of Aden. Some of the vessels were fired upon.
• Somalian waters : Eastern and North-eastern coasts are high-risk areas for attacks and hijackings. Ships not making scheduled calls to ports in Somalia should keep as far away as possible from the Somali coast, ideally, more than 200 nautical miles.

South and Central America and the Caribbean waters

• Brazil - Santos
• Peru – Callao

http://www.icc-ccs.org/prc/piracyreport.php





History of the Compact Disc
Joshua Coventry

The inventor of the compact disc, the most popular medium in the world for playing back and storing music, is often disputed as one individual did not invent every part of the compact disc. The most attributed inventor is James Russell, who in 1965 was inspired with a revolutionary idea as he sketched on paper a more ideal music recording system to replace vinyl records; Russell envisioned a system which could record and replay sounds without any physical contact between parts. By the time his invention had been refined and further developed, it was actually a merger and adaptation of many different technologies including the laser (1960), digital recording (1967) and optical disc technology (1970s). Russell struggled to attract interest from investors at first but eventually Sony and other companies realized the potential and purchased licenses of the CD-ROM technology.

Development

With support from large corporations, the technology was further improved and enhanced to ensure it was ready for the market. In 1978, Polygram, a division of Philips, decided polycarbonate as the material of choice for the CD. Many other decisions were made that year, such as the disc diameter (115m) and the type of laser to be used by CD players. It was also decided that data on a CD would start at the center and spiral outwards to the edge. In 1979, a prototype CD system was demonstrated in Europe and Japan; Sony then agreed to join into the collaboration and both Sony and Philips compromised on the standard sampling rate of 44.1 kHz, and the choice to use 16-bit audio. The disc diameter was changed from 115m to 120mm to allow for 74 minutes of playback with the sampling rate and quality chosen.

The compact disc first surfaced the public eye's scope 15 years after its invention when Philips made an announcement on May 17, 1978. The new standard was proposed by Philips and Sony in 1980 as 'Red Book', which was a set of color-bound books containing the technical specifications for all CD and CD-ROM formats. The standard is not free, and a license (known as an IEC 60908 document) must be obtained from Philips for US$210 as a PDF. In 1981, Matsushita accepted the new CD standard, but the collaboration between Sony and Philips ended as the two companies had products ready for 1982.

CDs are made from 1.2 mm thick polycarbonate plastic, weighing about 16 grams. A thin layer of aluminum is applied to the surface, making it reflective and then protected by a film of lacquer. The most common printing method for compact discs is screen-printing. The data on a CD is stored as tiny indentations encoded in a spiral track moulded into the top layer of polycarbonate. Digital data on a CD begins at the center and proceeds outwards to the edge, allowing for flexibility as many different sizes of CDs can be made; the most common being 12 cm in diameter (known as maxi singles when used for storing music). A CD is read using a semiconductor laser which focuses through the bottom of the polycarbonate layer.

Introduction

Sony introduced the CDP-101, the first CD audio player for market on October 1, 1982 at $900. As the first players surfaced the market that year, the compact disc format began to attract widespread usage and popularity in Japan and Europe. Compact discs themselves were at first extremely expensive at $30 each. CDs were manufactured at only two facilities in the entire world, each owned by Philips and Sony. The manufacturing process was tedious and required masked technicians in labs.

There were soon six factories, and the price per disc dropped to $25, and then to $20. As venture capital poured in, there were soon forty factories manufacturing discs. Hitachi also released their first CD players in 1982, selling about 6,000 units, whilst Sony sold over 20,000 CD players. In 1982, a mere 50 different music titles were available on the new format from CBS/Sony and Epic/Sony; these mostly included classical, jazz, rock, pop and karaoke. The first CD title was 52nd Street by Billy Joel. By the end of the year, 100 CD titles were available.

The new technology was introduced into the US in the Spring of 1983; when CD-ROM prototypes were shown to the public. That year, growth soared as 30,000 players and 800,000 CDs were sold in the US alone.

Portable CD players

Portable CD players were first introduced in the mid 1980s but were not popular until the 1990s when anti-skip technology was introduced. Sony's first portable CD player, the Discman D-50, was introduced in November 1984. At first, the D-50 was not profitable but as the product gained popularity, it soon became profitable and Sony began to create a portable CD market. The Discman range was later re-named to CD Walkman. Many other manufacturers soon followed in Sony's footsteps to offer portable CD players for consumers; however the major popularity in these devices came in 1997 because of Electronic Skip Protection, making them possible for heavy usage.

The CD-ROM and Computers

The sales and production of LPs began to suffer in the 1988 as CD production surpassed that of vinyl records. With the work of Sony and many others, the CD finally an industry standard format for audio data and as the 1990s emerged, it would soon deliver multimedia content to millions through personal computers. In June 1985 the CD-ROM was introduced and the CD-R in 1990, these were also developed by Sony and Phillips jointly. In September 1987, Microsoft shipped its first software on CD-ROM, the Microsoft Bookshelf. In January 1991, Commodore released the CDTV (Commodore Dynamic Total Vision) which featured a CD-ROM player and cost just $1000. Apple's first Macintosh to use a CD-ROM drive was the Macintosh IIfx in 1992.

Throughout the remainder of the 1990s, CD-ROM drives became a standard on personal computers and CD-ROMs were increasingly used for multimedia purposes for software such as atlases, dictionaries and encyclopedias. Macromedia's Director application was a large part of this as it allowed companies to easily create interactive multimedia CD-ROMs with many features. Computer magazines also moved from distributing floppy disks to CD-ROMs instead, boasting the 700MB capacity.

With the advent of music downloads in the early 2000s and the introduction of the iTunes Music Store in 2003, the CD is decreasing in popularity yearly as music downloads experience rapid growth. The convenience of music downloads in combination with digital audio players like Apple's iPod leave little reason to keep CDs and a CD player. Although CDs still control the market for music, they are no longer used as much for storing computer data since the introduction of DVDs in the early 2000s.
http://siliconuser.com/?q=node/15





Europe Steps Up Probe of New DVD Formats

Competition of Blu-ray, HD to secure studios' support arouses antitrust concerns
Merissa Marr and Sarah McBride

In a move that could be key to determining the future of home cinema, European antitrust regulators are stepping up their probe into possible anticompetitive practices in the format war over high-definition DVDs.

Hollywood's studios are racing to dig up files, emails and records of telephone conversations related to the competing Blu-ray and HD DVD formats after the European Commission sent out letters last month demanding evidence of their communications and agreements on the new generation of DVD formats.

The European Commission, the European Union's executive body, appears to be particularly interested in the activities of the Blu-ray group because of its dominance in Hollywood, according to people familiar with the situation. The commission is investigating whether improper tactics were used to suppress competition and persuade the studios to back their format.

Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for the commission, confirmed that it had sent letters to the studios in mid-June trying to establish whether they have restrictive agreements to use one or the other of the standards.

Blu-ray, which is supported by Sony Corp. and partners, is in a fierce combat with the Toshiba Corp.-led HD DVD group to set the standard for the next generation of DVD. High-definition DVDs promise sharper picture quality and better sound than traditional DVDs, but they require new players. (Neither of the new formats is compatible with traditional DVD players, but traditional DVDs can be viewed on both Blu-ray and HD DVD players.)

While the HD camp has had some success in its partnership with Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 videogame consoles and by offering lower-priced machines, the Blu-ray camp has gained the upper hand in Hollywood, with more studios backing its format. Blockbuster Inc. also recently said it would exclusively stock DVDs using the Blu-ray format.

The HD DVD camp has been lobbying the commission to draw attention to Blu-ray's tactics in the movie capital in a bid to force more studios to put their product on HD DVD, according to people familiar with the situation. One issue the Commission has raised with some studios is statements made at the Consumer Electronics Show in January in Las Vegas about the exclusivity of studios to Blu-ray, according to people familiar with the situation.

Blu-ray is supported by every major studio except NBC Universal's Universal Pictures, which is backing HD DVD exclusively. Five studios are exclusive to Blu-ray: Sony Pictures Entertainment, Walt Disney Co., News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox, Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. and MGM, which is owned by a consortium including Sony. Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. are backing both. In its formal request to at least one studio, the commission has asked for documents related to any decision to release movies on Blu-ray exclusively and not HD DVD, as well as communications on both formats with certain individuals associated with Blu-ray.

Both new formats offer old and recent titles.

The European Commission launched a broad inquiry into the competing formats a year ago. The commission said at the time that it had sent a letter to Blu-ray and HD to request information about their licensing practices. However, the commission's recent letter to the studios signals a shift in focus to the studios and possibly Blu-ray specifically.

The battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD is expected to reach a fever pitch in the fourth quarter of this year. The run-up to the Christmas period is traditionally the most important period for DVD sales. There is a lot at stake: Whichever camp wins the battle stands to make huge profits from selling both players and DVDs.

Both camps have significantly stepped up their efforts in recent weeks. Blu-ray announced a summer promotion that gives consumers five free Blu-ray movies if they purchase a new Blu-ray player by Sept. 30. Toshiba recently announced HD DVD players would sell for as little as $299, far less than comparable Blu-ray players.

The market for next-generation DVDs of either stripe is tiny so far, though. Through June, Blu-ray had sold about 1.8 million discs, compared with 1.3 million for HD DVD, according to consultancy Adams Media Research. A top title such as Warner Bros.' "The Departed," which was out in both formats, shipped 85,000 copies in Blu-ray and 60,000 in HD DVD, compared with 7.7 million for regular DVDs.

These days, Blu-ray discs are outselling HD DVDs at a rate of about two to one, says Tom Adams, president at Adams Media. But that doesn't mean HD DVDs can't reclaim the advantage if more studios start releasing movies in both formats.

Once either format hits about two million homes, it will create a large enough incentive for any studio not releasing titles in that format to reconsider, Mr. Adams says. Currently, about 105,000 homes have Blu-ray players, and about 150,000 have HD DVD players. An additional 1.5 million homes have PlayStation 3 devices, which also play Blu-ray movies, although fewer gamers are using the machines to play movies than had been hoped for. About 160,000 consumers have bought add-on devices for Xbox machines that allow them to play HD DVDs.

The studios want a new revenue stream to compensate for slowing DVD sales. When consumers switched from the VHS tape format to DVD, it created a sales bonanza as consumers replaced their old tapes with crisper DVDs. Studios are hoping for the same sort of upgrade for new format DVDs.

But many consumers say the difference in quality between the new DVDs and the old ones isn't as impressive as the difference between VHS tapes and DVDs, prompting them to drag their feet on replacing their equipment. In addition to buying new players, consumers need expensive high-definition televisions to play the new discs.

Consumer groups have slammed the studios and the electronics companies for creating another product in which two incompatible technologies battle for supremacy in the marketplace. The situation harks back to the battle between VHS and Betamax in the 1980s. VHS tapes eventually won, but not until millions of consumers bought Betamax machines, which became obsolete.

For DVDs, the studios and electronics companies worked together to avoid a similar mess. As two competing formats for next-generation DVDs emerged, the companies involved talked about merging the formats or picking one over the other, but this time compromise proved elusive.

-- Adam Cohen contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118341745768555943.html





Postal Worker Steals Thousands Of DVDs

Netflix Notified Post Office About High Number Of Missing DVDs

A federal judge in Houston has ordered a year and a-half in prison for a now-former postal clerk in a DVD-by-mail theft investigation.

Authorities accused 53-year-old Anthony Zuniga of Houston of swiping thousands of movies from the mail system.

Zuniga was convicted of two counts of mail theft by a postal employee. He also was sentenced Monday to three years probation and must pay a $4,000 fine.

Netflix last year notified the U.S. Postal Service about an unusually high number of DVDs missing from a certain post office box.

Investigators said Zuniga was stationed at that center. Prosecutors said surveillance showed Zuniga stealing 122 DVDs from the post office.

On Aug. 3, 2006, inspectors observed Zuniga dumping a tub of Netflix and Blockbuster DVDs into a plastic bag and then leaving the postal facility with the plastic bag. Zuniga's vehicle was stopped as it was exiting the parking lot and inspectors found the plastic bag containing the DVDs on the floor of the vehicle. The bag contained 122 DVDs.

After an interview with postal inspectors, Zuniga consented to a search of his home. Inside the home, inspectors found 8,177 stolen pieces of mail -- including 5,937 Netflix DVDs and 1,497 Blockbuster DVDs.

Zuniga, who had been a Postal Service employee since 1974, resigned his job after being caught stealing the DVDs.
http://www.local6.com/news/13612024/...p=irresistible





VIDEO: Consumerist Catches Geek Squad Stealing Porn From Customer's Computer

The Consumerist's 3-month sting operation snared a Geek Squad technician stealing porn from our hard drive, and we've got the work-safe video and logfiles to prove it.

UPDATE: Why We're Not Telling Geek Squad CEO Which Agent Stole The Porn

To investigate claims by current and former Geek Squad techies (see "The 10 Page Geek Squad Confession - "Stealing Customers' Nudie Pics Was An Easter Egg Hunt"), we loaded a computer with porn and rigged it to make a video of itself. We captured every cursor movement, every program opened, every file accessed. Everything that the user saw and did, we recorded.

We took it to around a dozen Best Buy Geek Squads and asked them to perform simple tasks, like installing iTunes. Most places were fine, sometimes doing the job right on the counter, sometimes even for free.

Then we caught one well-seasoned Geek Squad Agent copying personal and pornographic images and video from our computer to his company-issued thumb drive (see video above, or the logfiles).

Reached for comment, Geek Squad CEO Robert Stephens expressed desire to launch an internal investigation and said, "If this is true, it's an isolated incident and grounds for termination of the Agent involved."

This is not just an isolated incident, according to reports from Geek Squad insiders alleging that Geek Squad techs are stealing porn, images, and music from customer's computers in California, Texas, New Jersey, Virginia and elsewhere. Our sources say that some Geek Squads have a central server set up where everyone dumps their plunder to share with the other technicians.

If our techie readers were right about the Geek Squad doing this, then perhaps they're right in saying it happens at other computer repair places as well.

And by the time your computer breaks, it's too late to hide anything you wouldn't want someone to find, and steal for their own purposes. We advise encrypting sensitive files in advance with a program like TrueCrypt (WIN) or making an encrypted disk image (MAC, be sure to skip step 6). Or, you could just keep it all on an external hard drive.

Who knew that when you hand over your computer to a repair technician, you could be giving a stranger a veritable Pandora's box?

NEXT: How To Make Your Computer Catch People Stealing Your Porns

PREVIOUSLY:
Geek Squad Confession: "Stealing Customers' Nudie Pics Was An Easter Egg Hunt"
We're Always Looking For Porn On Customer's Computers, Techies Confirm
http://consumerist.com/consumer/inve...ter-271963.php





MySpace Fiend Sentenced to 20 Years
AP

A 23-year-old Vernon man was sentenced to 20 years in prison Monday after pleading no contest to sexually assaulting teenage girls he met on the MySpace.com social networking Web site.

David Leonard also must serve 15 years of probation after the prison time and register as a sex offender, under the sentence imposed by New Britain Superior Court Judge Patrick Clifford. He will be subject to random searches of his computer and will be prohibited from taking part in any Internet chats or messaging, except for school or work.

Leonard was also expected to enter pleas to several other cases Tuesday in Rockville Superior Court.

He was accused of having sexual contact with several girls between 12 and 15 years old whom he met through MySpace.com.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1058291





Websites Betrayed by Unfaithful Users

A survey has revealed the ‘promiscuity’ of many members of social networking sites and raised doubts over surging valuations
Rhys Blakely

Social networks are spawning a generation of internet tarts, research suggests: online consumers with little brand loyalty and no qualms about keeping several sites on the go at once.

Users of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are “chronically unfaithful”, a survey by Parks Associates, the analysts, has found. Half of users regularly use more than one site, most of which are free. One in six actively uses three or more.

This phenomenon of “network promiscuity” extends across web commerce. Analysts say that it is symptomatic of a new consumer scepticism over traditional branding.

Robert Jones, of Wolff Olins, the brand consultants, says: “Grand operatic brands no longer work. Think of the ultimate model ‘old brand’ – the Marlboro man, a myth selling you an item that slowly killed you. It just doesn’t work online. As people become better informed, brands become less about emotion and more about functionality.”

User infidelity in the social networking sector, made up of about 300 competing sites, is challenging once-accepted dot-com maxims, such as the importance of first-mover advantage and the strengths implicit in scale.

It also raises doubts over the surging valuations being attached to the sector’s “superbrands”, amid evidence that they will be forced to evolve constantly to retain young users determined to play the field.

Akready, warning signs have emerged: the latest figures from Nielsen//NetRatings showed that MySpace, the market leader, recently lost users in Britain.

The dip coincided with the news that News Corporation, the MySpace owner, had held early talks with Yahoo! over a possible sale of the network that could have valued MySpace at more than $10 billion (£5 billion). News Corp is the parent company of The Times.

The number of British visitors to MySpace dipped to 6.5 million in May, from 6.8 million in April. The fall, which comes as Facebook, its rival, experiences a huge surge in visitors, was the first to hit MySpace since it signed a deal with Google last summer, under which the social network stands to reap about $900 million in advertising revenues. It was only the second dip since News Corp bought MySpace for $580 million two years ago.

MySpace has achieved the traffic targets underpinning its deal with Google with ease, but, according to Nielsen, over the past six months Facebook’s audience in the UK has grown at 19 times the rate of MySpace’s, surging 523 per cent to 3.2 million.

Alex Burmaster, a Nielsen analyst, said: “MySpace is, by far, still the most popular social network. However, if last month’s growth rates were to remain consistent . . . Facebook would catch MySpace in September.”

The pattern was repeated in the United States, MySpace’s largest market, where traffic to the site fell to 56.6 million in May, from 57 million a month earlier.

MySpace has pointed out that traffic figures from different research firms differ, but admits that it will have to evolve new content and tools to remain relevant. It also takes issue with the idea that switching between free sites involves no cost to users.

“MySpace users invest huge amounts of time building up their profiles as part of our community. That means they are massively loyal,” a spokesman said.

Yet the Nielsen figures confirm that network promiscuity is a factor, showing that 444,000 Britons visited all three of the leading rivals – MySpace, Facebook and Bebo – in May.

Even the biggest internet brands – of which Google is the leader – may not be immune to the digital generation’s lack of loyalty, analysts say. The eight-year-old search engine was judged to be the fourteenth-biggest global brand last year by Interbrand, the consultants. It was the biggest riser in a top 50 of which half are more than 50 years old.

Rita Clifton, the chairman of Interbrand, said: “The internet has allowed a brand-building process that would have once taken decades to be achieved in a fraction of that. There is a downside, of course: what goes up quickly can descend just as fast.”

The dangers are illustrated by the fate of Friendster. The social network accrued more than 20 million users after its launch in 2003. Late last year that figure had fallen to less than one million as users migrated to sites with better music and video tools.

There are also suggestions that, while the internet makes the world a smaller, “flatter” place, personal online services do not suit traditional global branding campaigns.

Mr Jones said: “McDonald’s can have the same golden arches in every city, but social networking is a very personal thing and is susceptible to cultural differences. Using one of these sites does not bear comparison with eating a hamburger.” Already, Google has been forced to change its brand in China to “Gu Ge”. Despite the switch, the search engine trails local rivals by a huge margin.

Orkut, the social networking site run by Google, has gained about 50 million users, but despite its massive popularity in Brazil, it remains little known in America and Britain.

Mindful of the hurdles facing them, sites are already making moves aimed at winning and locking in users. MySpace, which has been criticised for failing to innovate, sought to reinvigorate its user base last week when it announced the launch of a new video-sharing service. MySpaceTV will compete with YouTube, owned by Google. Last month Facebook launched a new platform that allows outside developers to create free and paid-for online services that can offered to users.

Park Associates says that the mercurial behaviour of social net-workers could open opportunities for new sites and developers who build software that links different networks. User infidelity need not spell the end for social networking superbrands, it suggests.

John Barrett, who led the group’s research, said: “MySpace is a growing ecosystem and one that, ironically, now extends beyond MySpace itself.”

Social services

MySpace 6.5 million UK users, up 28 per cent in six months. Average time spent on site by user in a month: 96 minutes

Bebo 4 million UK users, up 49 per cent in six months. Average time by user in a month: 152 minutes

Facebook 3.2 million UK users, up 523 per cent in six months. Average time by user in a month: 143 minutes Source: Nielsen//NetRatings
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle2017224.ece





The Tricky Part of an E-ZPass Economy
David Leonhardt

There is a stretch of the Garden State Parkway that used to feel like the tollbooth capital of America. In a span of 100 miles — from Pascack Valley, in northern New Jersey, to Barnegat, along the coast — eight different toll plazas greeted drivers. In much of the rest of the country, you wouldn’t find any tolls on a 100-mile stretch.

I spent a good part of my childhood summers at the Jersey Shore, and the tollbooths on the parkway always seemed to be a cruel final obstacle between me and the beach. Every 15 minutes or so, our car would have to stop yet again to drop a measly quarter in a bucket.

The ride is very different today, thanks mostly to the electronic toll system known as E-ZPass. At four of the tolls along the Garden State, the system is so sophisticated that cars barely have to slow down. A little box attached to the car’s windshield sends a message to a computer reader looming over the road, and money is then deducted from an electronic account.

I imagine that some of the children being driven to the Jersey Shore today won’t even look away from their DVD players as they glide through a toll. And I’m quite certain that very, very few of them will remember, decades from now, how much the Garden State tolls cost back when they were young. As a result of E-ZPass and its ilk, even many adults don’t notice the cost of a toll.

Which raises an interesting question: If you don’t know how much you’re paying for something, will you notice when the price goes up? Or has E-ZPass, for all its benefits, also made it easier for toll collectors to take your money?

A young economist named Amy Finkelstein started thinking about these issues a few years ago when she and her fiancé were driving back and forth between Boston, where they were living, and New York, where they were going to be married. So she collected decades of toll records from around the country and found a clear pattern.

After an electronic system is put in place, tolls start rising sharply. Take two tollbooths that charge the same fee and are in a similar setting — both on highways leading into a big city, for instance. A decade after one of them gets electronic tolls, it will be about 30 percent more expensive on average than a similar tollbooth without it. There are no shortage of examples: the Golden Gate Bridge, the George Washington Bridge and the Tappan Zee Bridge, among them.

“You may be less aware you’re paying the toll,” said Ms. Finkelstein, now an associate professor at M.I.T., “but you’re paying a higher toll than you used to.”

The implications of this go well beyond highways. We increasingly live in an E-ZPass economy, in which bills are paid online, corporate cafeterias are going cashless and people take along their debit card, instead of cash, when they leave the house. Last year, 55 percent of consumer spending was done electronically, mainly with credit and debit cards, while checks accounted for less than 25 percent and cash only 20 percent, according to Visa. As recently as 2003, only 45 percent of spending was done electronically.

The E-ZPass economy is indisputably more convenient. It saves time and frustration. But the old frustrations that came with cash also brought a hidden benefit: they forced you to notice that you were spending money. With electronic money, it’s much easier to be carefree.

Marketers understand this dynamic well, which is a big reason they promote refillable gift cards and other forms of money that don’t feel like money. Part of what’s so intriguing about Ms. Finkelstein’s work is that it suggests that government officials may be coming to understand the dynamic, too.

The idea that hidden taxes — and tolls are really a kind of tax — could lead to higher taxes goes back decades. Milton Friedman famously came to regret his role in creating the withholding system for income taxes during World War II, because it eventually made people forget how much they were paying in tax. “It never occurred to me at the time,” he wrote in his autobiography, “that I was helping to develop machinery that would make possible a government that I would come to criticize severely as too large, too intrusive, too destructive of freedom.”

Even economists who don’t share Mr. Friedman’s political views agree with the larger point that how taxes are collected, and not just the underlying tax rate, matters. “We need to take seriously the possibility that people are not paying attention to the tax code,” said Raj Chetty of the University of California, Berkeley, who has been conducting some fascinating experiments on semi-hidden taxes.

Mr. Chetty argues that the complexity of today’s tax code ends up aggravating inequality. Both rich and poor families face a dizzying spectrum of tax laws, from carried-interest rules to the earned-income tax credit. But affluent families are better able to navigate the system, often by hiring an accountant. Also, the little day-to-day taxes, like highway tolls, mean a lot more to a moderate-income family.

Ms. Finkelstein obviously can’t prove that electronic tolls cause prices to rise by making drivers less aware of them. Neil Gray, the head of government affairs at the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association, disputes her argument and says setting tolls is more complicated than Ms. Finkelstein suggests.

But she makes a spirited case for her conclusion. She has considered a number of alternate explanations for the increases and says the evidence doesn’t support them. At the very least, electronic systems do seem to make it easier for toll collectors to increase prices.

There is one notable exception to the trend, though: the good old Garden State. Tolls on the parkway itself have increased only once in the last 50 years, back in 1989, when they were raised to 35 cents. (In the last few years, the price at each tollbooth has doubled, but highway officials have also removed half of the tolls, keeping the effective price unchanged.) Even after E-ZPass, the Garden State Parkway remains a relative bargain.

Of course, Ms. Finkelstein discovered that tolls don’t usually rise as soon as an electronic system arrives. The increases tend to come a number of years later, once electronic payment becomes old hat.

On the Garden State, the first E-ZPass system was installed in 1999. And guess what New Jersey’s governor, Jon S. Corzine, has recently been talking about? Raising the tolls on the parkway for the first time in almost 20 years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/04/bu...nhardt.html?hp





'Contactless Payments' About to Explode, But are They Secure?
Joel Hruska

As contactless payment systems begin to gain traction across the country, questions are mounting over whether or not the security backing the RF-based technology is sufficiently advanced to prevent account fraud and the theft of personal information. With contactless payment systems about to get even more popular in the United States, there are fears that the wireless technology behind those systems is not secure enough for widespread adoption, despite assurances from Visa, MasterCard, and other major players.

Contactless payments on the rise

Concerns over the security of contactless systems were heightened last week by a Federal Reserve decision that will allow for even more casual, low-cost purchases to be made across the country. In recent years, credit card companies have waived their signature requirements for so-called "small ticket" items in order to get a slice of the action. Visa, for instance, doesn't require your signature for purchases at or below $25.

The Federal Reserve sets rules for receipts, and last week the Feds said that purchases of $15 or less don't even require a receipt now, let alone a signature. The rule change will usher in a wave of vending machines and other automated payment systems, and many of them will support wireless, contactless payments.

Security on the radar

At the moment, contactless payments account for only a fraction of account transactions, but that number is expected to grow as more companies roll out RF-compatible readers and equipment. And let's face it: those little buggers are extremely convenient. The question is: are they also worrisome?

Infoworld reports that the topic was debated at a meeting of the Boston Federal Reserve last May, with representatives from both security firms and major backers of the new payment system on hand. Security researchers independent from credit card companies are sounding alarms, while the credit card companies themselves believe that they have the right balance of security and functionality.

According to the work of security researcher and University of Massachusetts professor Kevin Fu, a number of RF cards in use today transmit credit card account numbers "in the clear" without any encryption. He suggests that the solutions could be far more robust and that it should be an open system that security researchers can examine for flaws. Closed systems cannot be evaluated properly, he says. (This PDF slide show discusses the numerous flaws in the first generation of cards.)

The credit card industry does not consider credit account numbers alone to be personally identifiable information, however. The industry says it has collectively invested in a substantial backend solution designed to dynamically validate contactless payments on the fly using card verification numbers (CVCs) that are securely generated and transmitted along with account information. How this system works exactly is not known to the public, and that makes security researchers like Fu very nervous. The credit companies say it's secure, but that's Fu's point: he shouldn't have to rely on what they say.

As things stand, card providers and security firms are in talks to improve security, but it's clear that the two sides have a different perception of risk, and the work between the two is somewhat antagonistic. Contactless payment developers have emphasized the need to keep security developments secret; they perceive many instances of fraud as stemming from careless actions by cardholders and are committed to RF as a system that fundamentally makes payments more secure.

Security researchers, on the other hand, have professed a desire to see more open evaluation of the systems and methods contactless payment developers have created, even if that means being more open about flaws within an existing system. This particular debate has played itself out in many contexts, but at least these two sides appear to be working together to implement a safer RF system, even if they differ on some of the particulars.

One thing is certain: the "small ticket item" business is worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the US alone, so it's no surprise that the credit card players have what appears to be a lower threshold for risk than do some security experts. Unless the government steps in—and it's unlikely that it will at this late date—contactless payments will continue to receive most of their security testing in the wild and in the line of fire.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ey-secure.html





SAP Admits Data Was Taken From Oracle
Kevin J. O’Brien

SAP, the world’s largest maker of business software, acknowledged today that employees at an American subsidiary made “’inappropriate” downloads from the Web site of Oracle, a competitor, but denied using the information for commercial gain.

In its response to a lawsuit filed by Oracle in the United States in March, SAP conceded that employees at its TomorrowNow unit, a Texas company that SAP bought in January 2005, downloaded Oracle data last year as Oracle had claimed in a lawsuit in March. But in a conference call from SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany, Henning Kagermann , SAP’s chief executive, said the information was not shared with or used by executives at SAP America, SAP’s United States headquarters in Newtown Square, Pa. Mr. Kagermann declined to describe the data that TomorrowNow employees had downloaded.

“’SAP did not have access to Oracle materials downloaded by TomorrowNow,” Mr. Kagermann said. “’However, some TomorrowNow activity went beyond what is appropriate and contravened our high standards and business procedures.”

Mr. Kagermann apologized for the impropriety and said he had ordered an investigation into the incident and installed a top manager to oversee compliance issues at TomorrowNow.

Mr. Kagermann said SAP and TomorrowNow had also received subpoenas from the United States Department of Justice for documents in the case. He did not say whether the subpoenas were in connection with a civil or criminal investigation.

TomorrowNow, which had 157 employees and $15.7 million in sales last year, provides maintenance for business software systems sold by Oracle and by companies Oracle has acquired, including PeopleSoft, a maker of personnel management software, and Siebel Systems, a maker of customer relations software for sales forces.

In its legal response, SAP denied it had stolen business secrets and said Oracle was trying to intimidate SAP in the increasingly competitive software maintenance business. “’This case is really about competition and a customer’s right to choose its software services providers,” SAP said in its affidavit.

Stefan Kuppen, a software analyst in London at JPMorgan, said Oracle was clearly trying to maximize public relations gains with its lawsuit against SAP, whose TomorrowNow unit has been successful at luring Oracle customers. Mr. Kuppen said the lawsuit could probably be settled out of court for a sum that could reach millions but would not materially affect the value of SAP.

“’On one hand, SAP is admitting it did something wrong,” Mr. Kuppen said. “’On the other hand, this is the latest installment from a couple of companies that are pretty good at fighting P.R. battles.”

While they did not start out as direct rivals, SAP and Oracle have increasingly gone head to head in the lucrative business of providing all-inclusive corporate software systems to large multinational companies. SAP’s comprehensive enterprise systems became the corporate standard and market leader in the 1990s.

But over the last decade, the competition has increased as Oracle, which began as a database software maker, constructed a similar top-to-bottom package after buying PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems, both leaders in their respective niches.

After detecting the downloads, Oracle, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., filed a suit against SAP in federal court in San Francisco, alleging industrial espionage.

In a legal response filed Monday evening in California, SAP cast the downloads as the actions of a few renegade employees. Mr. Kagermann said SAP had set up a computer ’firewall’ when it acquired TomorrowNow that had prevented the transfer of inappropriate data to SAP’s United States headquarters.

Oracle, however, said Mr. Kagermann’s admission proved its case.

“Henning Kagermann has now admitted to the repeated and illegal downloading of Oracle’s intellectual property,” Geoff Howard, a lawyer for Oracle at the law firm Bingham McCutchen, said in a statement. “’Oracle filed suit to discover the magnitude of the illegal downloads and fully understand how SAP used Oracle’s intellectual property in its business.”

Barring an out-of-court settlement, lawyers for Oracle and SAP plan to meet in United States District Court in San Francisco on Sept. 4 to lay out a legal timetable for the case.

One reason Oracle has made a big deal about the downloads is that through the TomorrowNow subsidiary, SAP has had access to large corporate customers of Oracle. As the software industry has matured, and most major corporate clients have already bought and installed vast internal software systems, software makers like TomorrowNow are trying to get an edge by selling support for products made by their competitors.

Besides providing revenue, the maintenance contracts also give software makers access to potential new long-term customers. Even Oracle last fall began selling discounted, 24-hour maintenance for Suse Linux operating systems sold by Red Hat, a rival based in Raleigh, N.C., that is the leader in open-source software.

Under their maintenance contracts, TomorrowNow’s customers gave the company their passwords to Oracle’s Web site, which TomorrowNow used to obtain software updates and fixes, Mr. Kagermann said. But during late 2006, according to SAP’s legal filing, TomorrowNow employees representing contracts with Honeywell, Merck, OCE, SPX, Metro Machine and Yazaki performed downloads from Oracle Web sites that exceeded those authorized by Oracle.

Some industry analysts downplayed the significance of Oracle’s lawsuit, noting that the downloads were probably for application fixes and updates for discontinued Oracle software — nothing of a nature that would give SAP a competitive advantage.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/04/bu...racle-web.html





Online Customized Ads Move a Step Closer
Louise Story

Yahoo will announce new tools for online advertising today that could pull the company ahead in the race for what is called “behavioral targeting,” that is, the ability to better tailor online advertisements to the people most likely to buy.

The product, Yahoo SmartAds, would help marketers create custom advertisements on the fly, using information on individual buyers and information on real prices and availability from the vendors. For example, a person who had recently searched for information about blenders might see an ad from Target that gives the prices for the blenders that are on the shelves in the store closest to that person’s home.

The Internet has long promised this kind of one-to-one marketing, but it has often been difficult for advertisers to customize display advertisements with a broad reach.

“Ad agencies have been really struggling with how to scale the value proposition of the Internet,” said Todd Teresi, senior vice president of display marketplaces at Yahoo. “We now can get scaleable one-to-one marketing.”

The announcement of SmartAds also comes while Yahoo is recovering from an extensive reshuffling in the executive offices, including the departure of its chief executive, Terry S. Semel, and Wenda Harris Millard, the company’s longtime chief sales officer. Yahoo has struggled to catch up with Google in search advertising and has disappointed investors with its ad sales the past few quarters.

SmartAds is one attempt to catch up. Although the technology is complex, the goal of SmartAds is simple: show the right advertisement to the right person at just the moment that he is about to pull out his wallet to make a purchase.

SmartAds is being tested on Yahoo’s network of sites — which includes local newspapers as well as its own portal — by two major airlines, although Mr. Teresi would not name them. He said the system will be offered to other industries in the coming months, including automobile companies and retailers in the fall.

The technology will also be applied for free across advertisements bought on Right Media, the online ad exchange that Yahoo purchased this spring (although the deal is still pending). The new feature may give Right Media a competitive advantage over other exchanges — like a new one created by DoubleClick, the online company that Google agreed to purchase for $3.1 billion in April. (The Google-DoubleClick merger is pending an antitrust review by the Federal Trade Commission.)

This is how Yahoo’s new system works: the advertiser (or its agency) would provide Yahoo with the components of its display ads — including the logos, tag lines and images. The retailer would share information from its inventory databases that track the items on the shelves in each of its stores. Next, Yahoo would combine that data with the information it has about its users’ demographics and actions online to create a product-specific advertisement.

For airlines, SmartAds uses Yahoo’s information about its Web surfers to create display advertisements for each person that feature ticket offers with actual prices listed. In time, Yahoo plans to offer rich media advertisements where users can buy the ticket at that price right within the ad unit, rather than having to click through to another Web site.

Mr. Teresi said Yahoo hopes to work directly with creative agencies as they design their online advertisements. Large advertisers, he said, can buy entire sites, and Yahoo will step in to create the right advertisement for individual consumers.

“We’re doing real-time creative assembly that leverages what we know about our audience,” Mr. Teresi said. “You can buy the entire Wall Street Journal site, and when a female shows up, we will create a different ad or when someone from New York shows up, another one.”

Display advertisements have lagged behind search and text advertisements in the ability to send consumers specific product messages. Instead, much of display advertising online has been brand messaging. Yahoo’s new product may help ad agencies begin thinking of display ads differently, said David W. Kenny, chairman and chief executive of Digitas, a digital agency in the Publicis Groupe.

“This fills a need that some advertisers have needed for a while — applying personalization to display ads, so they work like search and listing ads,” Mr. Kenny said. “Yahoo has a real advantage in SmartAds because of the data from their big and engaged audience, the combination of deep display and improving search capabilities, and the new changes to work with us at the technology level instead of just selling inventory.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/te...y/02yahoo.html





Engaging at Any Speed? Commercials Put to Test
Louise Story

In new experiments for NBC, people are hooked up to sensors as they watch television, and researchers observe changes in their heart rate, palm sweat, eye movement and breathing patterns.

But the panelists are not watching just NBC programs. They are watching commercials — in fast-forward mode.

So far, the findings have been just what NBC hoped: judging from the biological reactions, the test subjects were just as engaged while watching fast-forwarded advertisements as they were while viewing opening scenes from the NBC show “Heroes” at regular speed.

And that conclusion — which is still preliminary — could have big implications for NBC and other networks as they negotiate rates for air time with advertisers. Although advertisers have steadfastly refused to pay the networks for viewers who fast-forward commercials, as more households buy digital video recorders like TiVo, the networks may one day argue that this system should change.

When it comes to fast-forward advertisements, “the assumption has always been that they have no economic value, that they have no communication value,” said Alan Wurtzel, president for research at NBC Universal. “But the fact of the matter is we’re learning that they are valuable.”

The thesis flies in the face of the assumption among advertisers that their ads have no effect when played at a high speed on a DVR. Over the last month, as advertising agencies and television networks negotiated billions of dollars in deals for commercials during next year’s season, executives who buy commercial time did not waver in their position that people who zap past the ads are of no value to them.

“Would we pay when they’re fast-forwarding? No,” said Jason Maltby, president and co-executive director for national broadcast at MindShare North America, an agency in the WPP Group that buys advertisements. “You’ve created a message that in theory requires 15 seconds or 30 seconds to get that selling message across. On a high-speed DVR, 30 seconds gets pushed down to 1.5 seconds with no audio. It just wouldn’t work.”

For decades, advertisers have paid for advertisements based on how many people see them — or how many “impressions” an advertisement receives, in industry terms. Now that technology has reshaped people’s viewing habits, advertising executives are looking for other ways to quantify their audiences and gauge the impact of messages.

Some researchers said efforts like NBC’s to find alternative measurements are a step in the right direction.

“Whether people watch or not is not a useful measure of anything,” said Joe Plummer, chief research officer for the Advertising Research Foundation. “Exposure has very, very weak correlation with purchase intent and actual sales, whereas an engagement measure has high correlation and are closer to what really matters, which is brand growth and creating brand demand.”

Media executives have long discussed the potential of using physical reactions and brain scanning to track their messages, and advances in medical research in the past few years have made this more practical. NBC is working with Innerscope Research, a small company in Boston that uses wearable sensors to translate physical responses into what the company calls “emotional engagement.”

Panelists wear black-netted vests with tubes running out of them. Sensors on fingers measure sweat or “skin conductance,” as the researchers like to say. A monitor picks up on heartbeats, and an accelerometer tracks movement when panelists wiggle in their seats or chuckle. A respiratory band can tell if the abdomen and chest stop moving — noticing when someone holds their breath, for example, in a scene of suspense.

Innerscope has developed its own scale for engagement that combines the biometric factors that it tracks. On a scale of 1 to 100, a 50 is neutral, and above 60 is engaged. In Innerscope’s test for NBC, viewers of the first 20 seconds of live advertisements clocked in with a 66 engagement score and those fast-forwarding scored 68.

“People don’t turn off their emotional responses while they’re fast-forwarding,” said Carl Marci, the chief science officer of Innerscope. “People are obviously getting the information.”

Innerscope is working on a second study for NBC that will try to pin down which types of commercials generate the most engagement in fast-forward mode. Innerscope will monitor things like how often brands are shown during the advertisement, how quickly the camera cuts to new images, and whether audio is important in the storyline.

From there, NBC may be able to offer tips on how to make commercials stand out, even at rapid speeds.

“We can then go through our advertisers and help them optimize a commercial for fast-forwarding, while also not denigrating the quality while watched live,” Mr. Wurtzel said.

Millward Brown, an advertising research company in the WPP Group, has also studied physical responses to television commercials. The company found that people who have already seen an advertisement will tend to experience the same emotional response when seeing the same advertisement again in fast-forward mode.

Fast-forwarding should not scare advertisers because consumers are engaged to some degree, just by the act of pushing the button, said Nigel Hollis, chief global analyst for Millward Brown.

“We probably pay more attention to doing that than we do when watching a regular TV program,” Mr. Hollis said. “You’re sitting there saying, ‘when is the program coming back on?’ You are actually attending to it.”

But even if physiological measures become more accepted, media buyers said they do not see them replacing viewership ratings anytime soon.

“I can’t imagine the logistics of actually buying and selling commercial time based on physiological responses,” said Steve Sternberg, executive vice president of audience analysis for Magna Global, an agency that buys ads in the Interpublic Group. “We need data that is projectable.”

Mr. Wurtzel of NBC acknowledged it was early in the research process. But over time he hopes to expand bio-testing of commercials to the facilities NBC has used to test potential television programs in front of an audience. General Electric, the parent of NBC, has worked on security technology that can track people’s facial expressions and follow eye movements. He said he may also put that to use.

In time, he said, he hopes to shift NBC away from discussing advertisements based on eyeball counts to something incorporating physiological measures and engagement. But advertising executives said they plan to go only so far.

“I would say I’m not ready to jump on cost per perspiration,” said Mr. Maltby of MindShare.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/bu...ia/03adco.html





Seagate Joins The Terabyte Disk Club
Chris Mellor

Seagate is a launching a pair of 1TB capacity disks with advanced power-saving technology. This could save up to a quarter of the power consumed by normal drives. It has also announced a ruggedized 2.5-inch drive holding 80G bytes. Hitachi was first to market with a 1T byte drive a month or so ago.

The Barracuda 7200.11 is a 3.5-inch format drive, spinning at 7,200rpm and holds 500GB, 750GB or 1TB of data. Its sustained data rate of 105MB/s is the highest ever attained for a desktop drive and it is also the world's quietest desktop drive. Conceptually the 1TB drive is four 250GB platters using Seagate's 2nd generation perpendicular recording technology. The interface is serial ATA (SATA) II running at 3GB/s.

The Barracuda ES.2 is the enterprise version of the drive with improved mean time before failure of 1.2 million hours compared to the consumer version's 1 million hours. It has both SATA and SAS (serial attached SCSI) interfaces and comes in 250GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB configuration.

Seagate has added a power-saving technology, branded PowerTrim, to these drives. Their electronics are managed by new firmware and hardware that monitors what the drive is doing and switches off power to unused parts of the drive electronics. If the drive is reading then separate read electronics can be switched off. Ditto for the write electronics if the drive is reading data. If there is no data being transferred then the cache and memory can be switched off and/or refresh cycles delayed.

This micro-control of power within the drive yields an average power saving of about 25 percent over a drive without the technology. That translates into quite a substantial power saving in an array of such drives. It generates a 125GB/watt rating compared to the previous ES generation's 80GB/watt.

The drives come with either SATA (for consumers and enterprises) or SAS (for enterprises) interfaces and have an MFRP of US$399, which is the same as competitor Hitachi GST's 1TB drive.

Hitachi's 5-platter 1TB drive does not come with an SAS interface making it less attractive to enterprise customers.

Seagate has also announced the ES25.2, a hardened 80GB, 2.5-inch, SATA drive built to operate in rough environments with hostile temperature, vibration, humidity, shock and altitude conditions. It can withstand more vibration than any other stand-alone drive and comes with a 5-year warranty.
http://storage.itworld.com/4650/0706...e/pfindex.html





Sony Patents Liquid Airbag
Bryan Betts

Sony has filed for a U.S. patent on a liquid airbag for electronics - in particular, for hard disks. The idea is that the electronics will be wrapped in a fluid-filled bag so if the outer case suffers a shock, the liquid acts as a cushion.

The technology is intended for use in mobile devices such as cameras and media players, and could also find its way into business-orientated technology such as smartphones and laptops.

Sony's engineers said that while the use of liquids to absorb shock has been suggested before, previous versions depended on floating the electronics between two immiscible fluids, or using a gel-like viscous substance. They argued that those systems would be difficult to configure and may not provide enough absorption to deal with heavy shocks.

The new scheme proposes that the fluid-filled inner skin will also contain "biasing units" to keep the electronics central, and a system of irises that adjust their resistance to liquid flow according to the force of impact.

The irises are created by protrusions - the patent calls them convex portions and apertures -- aligned opposite each other on the inside walls of the fluid bag. As the walls converge under pressure, the protrusions come closer together and provide increased resistance to the flow of fluid, thereby absorbing more shock.

The liquid used could be water or silicon oil, the Sony boffins said. They added that the electronics would of course be in a liquid-tight case.
http://storage.itworld.com/4619/070702sony/page_1.html





In depth

iPhone Review
Ryan Block and Chris Ziegler

The last six months have held a whirlwind of hype surrounding the iPhone the likes of which we've rarely seen; an unbelievable amount of mainstream consumer electronics users -- not just just Engadget-reading technology enthusiasts -- instantly glommed onto the idea of a do-it-all smartphone that's as easy to use as it is powerful. The fact is, there's only a very short list of properly groundbreaking technologies in the iPhone (multi-touch input), and a very long list of things users are already upset about not having in a $600 cellphone (3G, GPS, A2DP, MMS, physical keyboard, etc.). If you're prepared to buy into the hype, and thusly, the device, it's important that purchase (and its subsequent two year commitment to AT&T) not be made for features, but for the device's paradigm-shifting interface.

The hardware

Industrial design
We're just going to come out and say it: the iPhone has the most beautiful industrial design of any cellphone we've ever seen. Yes, it's a matter of taste, and while we imagine some won't agree, we find it hard to resist the handset's thoughtful minimalism and attention to detail.

The edges of the beautiful optical-grade glass facade fit seamlessly with its stainless steel rim; the rear is an incredibly finely milled aluminum, with a hard, black plastic strip at the bottom, covering the device's antenna array, and providing small, unsightly grids of holes for speaker and mic audio. On the rear is the slightly recessed 2 megapixel camera lens, a reflective Apple logo, and some information about the device (IMEI, serial, etc.) in nearly microscopic print. (Sorry, iPhone engravings don't seem to be available yet for online customers.)

The iPhone's curves and geometry make it incredibly comfortable to hold. It fits well in the hand horizontally and vertically (completely one-handed operation is a snap in portrait mode), and its slim profile lets it slip into even a tight pocket with little effort. The device feels incredibly sturdy and well balanced -- no end seems any heavier than another. Every edge blends perfectly with the next (which will probably help fight gunk buildup over time), and holding the device to one's ear is comfortable enough, although not as comfortable as, say, the HTC Touch.

Our only real complaint with the device's design isn't one we take lightly: Apple went to the trouble of giving the iPhone a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, but the plug is far too recessed to use most headphones with -- we tested a variety, and were highly unimpressed with how many fit. What's the point of a standard port if it's implemented in a non-standard way? Apple might have at least included an extender / adapter for this, but didn't. Luckily, the iPhone earbuds sound very decent, and also include a minuscule, clicky in-line remote / mic -- but that's not going to alleviate the annoyance for the myriad users with expensive Etys or Shures who have to pay another $10 for yet another small part to lose.

The display

The iPhone features the most attractive display we've ever seen on a portable device of this size, by far and bar none. While its 160ppi resolution isn't quite photorealistic, the extremely bright 3.5-inch display does run at 480 x 320, making it one of the highest pixel-density devices around today (save the Toshiba G900's mind-popping 3-inch 800 x 480 display). But pixel density doesn't necessarily matter, it's how your device uses the screen real estate it's got. Instead of printing microscopic text, as Windows Mobile often does with high resolution displays (see: HTC's Universal and Advantage), iPhone text looks smooth and natural in every application -- everything on-screen is eminently readable.

The screen also provides an excellent outdoor viewing experience. With optical properties reminiscent of transflective displays, the iPhone remains completely readable (if a only bit washed out) even in direct sunlight. Unfortunately, the display's viewing angle left a little something to be desired, and the rumors about the glass face being an absolute fingerprint magnet are totally true: this thing picks up more smudges than almost any touchscreen device we've ever used. Honestly though, we'd attribute this to the fact that unlike most other smartphones, you are exempt from using a stylus on the iPhone's capacitive display, meaning you must touch it with your bare finger to do almost anything.

Thankfully, like the rest of the phone, the glass face feels extremely sturdy, and one should have absolutely no hesitation in wiping it off on their jeans or sleeve -- we've yet to produce a single scratch on the thing, and we understand others testing under more rigorous circumstances (like deliberately trying to key its face up) have also been unable to mar its armor.

The sensors
One of the more unique features in the iPhone is its trio of sensors (orientation, light, and proximity -- the latter two are behind the glass right above the earpiece) which help the device interact with its user and the world at large. Some of these sensors are more useful than others. The light sensor (for dimming the backlight) is great for saving power, but its use doesn't compare to the the other two sensors, which worked like champs. The proximity sensor, which prevents you from accidentally interacting with the screen while the iPhone is pressed against your ear, switches off the display at about 0.75-inches away; the screen switches back on after you pull away about an inch. This very useful automatic process took a little getting used to from us oldschool touchscreen users, who have long since grown accustomed to diligently turning off the screen while on a call, or holding our smartphones to our ear ever so gently.

The orientation sensor also worked well enough. Although you can't turn the phone on its head, when browsing in Safari you can do a 180, jumping quickly from landscape left to landscape right. The iPhone would occasionally find itself confused by the odd angles one sometimes carries and holds devices at, but in general we didn't expect the orientation sensor to work as well as it did.

Button layout

Despite the iPhone's entirely touchscreen-driven interface, all of its external buttons are mechanical and have a distinct, clicky tactility. There is, of course, the home button on the face, which takes you back to the main menu; along the left side of the unit is the volume up / down rocker (which is clearly identifiable by touch), and a ringer on / off switch -- something we wish all cellphones had, but that far too few actually do. Turning off the ringer briefly vibrates the device to let the user know rings are off; it's worth noting that turning the ringer off doesn't turn off all device audio, so if you hit play on a song in iPod mode, audio will still come out the speaker if you don't have headphones inserted.

On the top of the unit is the SIM tray (each unit comes pre-packaged with an AT&T SIM already inserted), which pops out by depressing an internal switch with a paperclip. Finally, the largest perimeter button is the sleep / wake switch, which does as you'd imagine. Press it (and swipe the screen) to wake up the device, or press it to put it to sleep; hold it (and swipe the screen) down to shut it off completely. (You can also use it turn off the ringer - -one click -- or shunt a call to voicemail -- two clicks -- if someone rings you.)

The headphones

The iPhone comes bundled with a standard set of iPod earbuds, but there are two differences from the kind that comes with your regular old iPod. First, these earbuds don't have the small plastic cable separator slide that helps keep your cables from getting tangled. Second, on the right channel cable about halfway up you'll find a very slim, discreet mic / music toggle. When listening to music, click it once to pause, or twice to skip tracks; when a call comes through, click it once to pick up, and again to hang up.

That same in-line piece also picks up your voice for the call, and it sounds pretty good -- some people on the other end of the line said it sounds even better than the iPhone's integrated mic. For those worried that there would be issues with interference, put your mind at ease. We heard absolutely no cell radio interference over the headset, even when we wrapped it four times around the iPhone antenna, and sandwiched it between a second cellphone making a call. The headphones are an essential and amazing accessory that makes the seamless media and phone experiences of the device possible. We only wish Apple managed to integrate an inline volume switch in there too, since that's really the only essential control it lacks.

Unfortunately for us, iPod headphones just don't fit our ears, so no matter how good they may sound, they're unusable since we can't seem keep them in longer than 30 seconds. (We typically prefer canalphones, they can't really go anywhere.) Since the included headphones are the only ones on the market right now that can interact with the iPod function, have an inline mic, and, of course, listen to audio, you're kind of stuck with Apple's buds if you want to get the most out of your iPhone. The same also applies to the expensive phones you invested in, which probably won't fit in the recessed jack anyway: even if you get an adapter, you still won't get the full experience.

Apple's included headphones are about 42-inches long (3.5 feet), just about the perfect length to reach from your pocket to your head with a little extra slack. You'd be surprised how many cellphone manufacturers screw this up with bundled headphones that are way too long, or way too short.

The dock, charging

The included dock is up to par for Apple's typically high standards -- it feels very solid and sturdy with no visible mold lines, and is capped on the bottom by a solid rubber base (with a nearly hidden vent for letting sound in and out of the iPhone's speaker and mic) to keep it in place. On its rear is the usual cable connector and line out. We thought the dock props the iPhone way too vertically -- about 80°, significantly more upright than the stock iPod dock we compared it to. If you're using it on a desk, you'll probably wish Apple angled it back a little so you're not leaning over to fumble with your phone like some miniature monolith.

Charging the iPhone as an easy enough affair. Pulling power from its adapter (and not a computer's USB), we were able to quick-charge it from 0% to 90% in just under two hours, but it took us almost another hour and a half to get that last ten percent. We also twice ran into this weird bug, where charging the iPhone from 0% power would deactivate the screen. The only way to recover was to soft-reset the phone. No big deal, just irritating.

Other accessories
Apple also includes a microfiber polishing cloth -- a welcome addition, but the device's sturdy glass will stand up to rubs on most of your clothes, so don't bother carrying it along if you're planning to just brush off some dust or residue left by your face / ears / fingers, etc. Also included is an extremely small power brick, and USB connector cable. Worth noting: the iPhone connector cable doesn't include tensioned clips, like most iPod connectors -- just pull it out, nothing messy to get caught and broken, and fewer moving parts in general.

User interface

If there's anything revolutionary, as Apple claims, about the iPhone, it's the user interface that would be nominated. Countless phones make calls, play movies and music, have maps, web browsers, etc., but almost none seem able to fully blend the experience -- which is part of the reason people flipped out at the idea of an iPhone. The device's user interface does all this with panache, but it's not without a number of very irritating issues. Before we get into those issues, however, we should quickly rundown the functions of the iPhone's primarily gesture-based input system.

iPhone gestures
Drag - controlled scroll up / down through lists
Flick - quickly scrolls up / down through lists
Stop - while scrolling, tap and hold to stop the moving list
Swipe - flick from left to right to change panes (Safari, weather, iPod) and delete items (mail, SMS)
Single tap - select item
Double tap - zooms in and out (all apps), zooms in (maps)
Two-finger single tap - zooms out (maps only)
Pinch / unpinch - zoom in and out of photos, maps, Safari

As you can probably already tell, gestures in the iPhone are by no means consistent. By and large one can count on gestures to work the same way from app to app, but swipes, for example, will only enable the delete button in mail and SMS -- if you want to delete selected calls from your call log, a visual voicemail message, world clock, or what have you, you've got to find another way. Swiping left to right takes you back one pane only in iPod, and two-finger single tap only zooms out in Google maps -- none of the other apps that use zooming, like Safari, and photos.

These kinds of inconsistencies are worked around easily enough, but add that much more to the iPhone learning curve. And yes, there is definitely a learning curve to this device. Although many of its functions are incredibly easy to use and get used to, the iPhone takes radically new (and often extremely simplified and streamlined) approaches to common tasks for mobile devices.

Another rather vexing aspect of the iPhone's UI is its complete inability to enable user-customizable themes -- as well as having inconsistent appearances between applications. Users can set their background (which shows up only during the unlock screen and phone calls), but otherwise they're stuck with the look Apple gave the iPhone, and nothing more. This is very Apple, and plays right into Steve's reputation as a benevolent dictator; he's got better taste than most, but not much of a penchant for individuality.

Even still, Apple's chosen appearance varies from app to app. Some apps have a slate blue theme (mail, SMS, calendar, maps, Safari, settings), some have a black theme (stocks, weather), some have a combination blue / black theme (phone, iPod, YouTube, clock), some have a straight gray theme (photos, camera), and some have an app-specific theme (calculator, notes). Even the missing-data-background is inconsistent: checkerboard in Safari, line grid in Google maps. There's little rhyme or reason in how or why these three themes were chosen, but unlike OS X's legacy pinstripes and brushed metal looks, there's really no reason why the iPhone should have an inconsistent appearance between applications.

Keyboard

Since its announcement, the iPhone's single biggest x-factor has been its virtual keyboard -- primarily because the quality of its keyboard can make or break a mobile device, and of the numerous touchscreen keyboards released over the years, not one has proven a viable substitute for a proper physical keyboard. We've been using the keyboard as much as possible, attempting to "trust" its auto-correction and intelligent input recognition, as Apple urges its users to do in order to make the transition from physical keys. (The iPhone uses a combination of dictionary prediction and keymap prediction to help out typing.)

The whole idea of a touchscreen is a pretty counterintuitive design philosophy, if you ask us. Nothing will ever rid humans of the need to feel physical sensations when interacting with objects (and user interfaces). Having "trust" in the keyboard is a fine concept, and we believe it when people say they're up to speed and reaching the same input rates as on physical keyboards. But even assuming we get there, we know we'll always long for proper tactile feedback. That said, we're working on it, and have found ourselves slowly growing used to tapping away at the device with our stubby thumbs.

As for the actual process of typing, one hindrance we've had thus far is that despite being a multi-touch system, the keyboard won't recognize a second key press before you've lifted off the first -- it requires single, distinct key presses. But the worst thing about the keyboard is that some of the methods it plies in accelerating your typing actually sacrifice speed in some cases. For example, there is no period key on the main keyboard -- you have to access even the most commonly used symbols in a flipped over symbols keyboard. This is almost enough to drive you crazy. (We really, REALLY wish Apple would split the large return button into two buttons: one for return, one for period.)

Caps lock is also disabled in the system by default, but even if you enable it in settings (and then double-tap to turn it on), you still can't hold down shift for the same effect -- it's either caps on, or you have to hit shift between each letter. Also, whether you're in upper or lower case, the letters on the keyboard keys always look the same: capitalized. (This makes it difficult to see at a glance what case of text you're about to input, especially since when using two thumbs your left thumb always hovers over the shift key.) Oh, and don't hit space when typing out a series of numbers, otherwise you'll get dropped back into the letter keyboard again.

We also found the in-line dictionary tool to be more cumbersome than helpful. Supposedly, to add a word that's not in the dictionary, type in your word, then when you get an autocorrect value, just press on that word and the word you typed will be added to the dict file (uhh, ok). But you can also accidentally add words to your dictionary by typing out a word, dismissing the autocorrect dropdown by adding another letter, then backspacing over it. Yeah, for some reason that adds a word to the dictionary file, too. And believe it or not, this confusing little problem caused us to add a number of bum words to the dict file (which you can only keep or clear in its entirety -- and no you can't back it up, either).

On the up side, the horizontal keyboard (which is only enabled when typing into Safari while browsing horizontally) is a much more palatable experience. The keys are far larger, resulting in drastically fewer typing mistakes. (We sincerely hope Apple will enable horizontal input for all its iPhone apps that require keyboard input.) The horizontal web keyboard also has very convenient previous / next buttons for tabbing through fields. The keyboard you're given when entering URLs is one of the most brilliant bits we've seen in the device, and is an incredible time-saver. Since there are almost never spaces in URLs, instead users have shortcuts to ".", "/", and ".com". Finally, the magnification loupe is the best touchscreen cursor positioning method we've seen to date in a mobile device. Too bad you can't highlight and cut / copy / paste text with the iPhone.

So what's the long and short of the keyboard story? We're still getting used to it, but for a touchscreen keyboard it could have been a lot worse -- and a whole lot better. Some among the Engadget staff have been able to pick it up quickly, others, not so much -- your mileage may vary. We have to wonder though, what would it take to get Steve to give us a proper physical keyboard for this mother, anyway? (We already smell the cottage industry brewing.)

Phone and contacts

Apple broke rank during its ubiquitous iPhone advertising campaign in the last few weeks -- typically the company doesn't go out of the way to highlight the specific functionality of its devices, instead choosing to sell products with iconography and emotion. But the bottom line Apple made is that the iPhone must live up to it's name: before anything else, it's a phone. And it has to be, because if it's an awful phone, no one's going to use it as their phone, get it? Well, Apple obviously succeeded here. We found nearly everything about making and receiving calls on the iPhone to be dead simple -- scratch that, pleasurable, even. It's almost enough to make us call home every weekend. (Almost.)

While finding contacts might have been improved, calling contacts is as far from a chore as we've seen on a mobile. What the iPhone contact app most needs is use of the keyboard to hone in on names, like Windows Mobile's excellent Smartdial feature -- even the device's own SMS app has a keyboard-based contact finder. Instead, you're given just two options for finding your pals' contact cards: flicking up and down the list, or using the alphabet column on the right side, which makes short work of scrolling through hundreds of names.

However, the pleasure of the elastic scroll-drag motion isn't to be underestimated. Despite the fact that the iPhone has no haptic feedback, traversing lists of emails, text, and songs has a nearly tactile feel due to the interface's "rubber band" effect. You can swing through about 60 contacts with a quick swipe -- traversing long lists without a scroll wheel is feasible, but if you've got a few hundred people in your address book, you'll probably soon be jonesing for keyboard-based contact search.

Call functions are organized into five categories

Favorites - Apple's take on speed dial. A simple list of your favorite contacts. Adding favorites is very simple -- every non-favorite contact has a huge button allowing you to add them to the list. The list can be re-ordered by tapping edit, then using an icon on the right to drag each entry around.
Recents - Shows a list of all or missed calls, and the call time / date. Incoming and outgoing calls are not differentiated, annoyingly. Missed calls are highlighted in red. Like some phones, unknown numbers have the region of call origin displayed (i.e. if you missed a call from a 415 area code number, beneath the digits it says "San Francisco, California" -- very handy!).
Contacts - Your contact list, with your phone number listed at the top. (Having your number listed at the top is deceptively clever -- how many times have you needed to show someone your phone number in a loud area? For us, often.) Users can select to show all their synced contacts, or just select groups. (Creating contacts on the iPhone easily syncs back to the desktop.) Pushing against the final contact does not return the user to the top of the list, as is the typical expected behavior.
Dialpad - The usual 12-key. You aren't presented with contact list-assisted dialing, but if you punch in a known number the device will give you a small prompt confirming who it is you're dialing (i.e. "Ryan Block, mobile"). From this pane users can add a dialed-in number to a new or existing contact -- users can also add numbers from the contacts pane, with the added option of plus and pause dialing. Note: numbers dialed in during calls are lost -- so prepare to take down proper notes in your phone, you can't just dial them in and save them for later, like some phones.
Voicemail - Visual voicemail pane. Visual voicemail allows for email-like voicemail interaction, using caller ID and small voicemail files (transmitted to the phone automagically in the background). Visual voicemail quality leaves a lot to be desired, but we'd argue the functionality itself supersedes the audio fidelity, poor though it may be. Also in the VV pane: a speakerphone toggle and voicemail greeting option pane where you can select and locally record a new VM greeting (and transmit it back to AT&T for playback). Sorry, you can only set a single outgoing message; you can't record multiple and swap them out for various occasions (i.e. on vacation, or whatever).

Dialing a number is extremely simple: in a contact card (or in an email, or anywhere else) tap the number you want to call and it dials. That's it. In-call functions are also very simple: users are presented with just a few common options: mute, keypad, speakerphone on / off, add call (which brings up the contact list), pause, and contacts (presumably for finding someone's contact info to read into phone). Incoming calls present obvious prompts: ignore, hold call & answer, and (in a huge red button) end call & answer. Users can conference up to five calls on a single line -- the sixth call gets put on hold.

Using a Bluetooth headset is also super easy. If it's paired and powered up you'll be prompted with an audio source button instead of the speakerphone button. Tap that and you can choose which audio source you'd like to use. Note: if your iPhone headphones are plugged in, that takes priority over all other audio sources.

Call quality
As GSM handsets go, the iPhone's voice quality can only be described as "unremarkable." Not bad, but not particularly stellar, either. Anyone stepping down from a UMTS handset will likely notice a slightly more "compressed" sound than they're used to, but the call clarity is good -- we noticed virtually no static hiss in the background. We were able to get decent volume out of the speakerphone's bottom-facing grill (particularly when set on a hard surface) but even at full volume the earpiece was a little soft for our liking. Realistically, we could've used a couple more notches -- the ability to turn it up to 11, if you will -- for use in loud environments.

Likewise, folks on the other end of the call reported decent, if not good, sound quality from us. Background noise was within acceptable limits -- something that's more often a problem for candybar devices than for clamshells -- and we were coming through with plenty of volume. If anything, the most chintzy aspect of the iPhone's voice is its inability to use data while talking, and vice versa (no Class A EDGE or 3G, hint hint), but we digress.

Ringtones and vibration
We're still kind of bummed you can't (yet) add custom ringtones or even use MP3 ringtones with the massive library of tracks your iPhone is walking around with, but the default sounds are all pretty good. In fact, as far as ringtones go, they're definitely above average. (We have a feeling we're going to be hearing a LOT of "Marimba" in the coming years.) When you turn the ringer off with the side switch, the device enters vibration mode (duh); we found the iPhone's vibration totally suitable for pocket use -- both standing up, moving, and sitting down. But in-bag use is a whole 'nother game, and few phones (including this one) could rattle enough to catch our attention from inside a sack.

Mail

There's no other way than to come out and say it: we are extremely disappointed in the iPhone's email app. So much so, in fact, that despite the keyboard and the rest of the things the iPhone lacks in the features department, its mail support may be the largest factor in killing its status as a productivity device. Don't get us wrong, the application is just fine for anyone who wants to do light email, but it lacks the power and convenience that frequent-emailers require.

For starters, if you've ever been out for an hour or two and checked your mail from your phone only to find a good 50 messages waiting for you, your iPhone nightmare has just begun. Scrolling through messages is just as easy as in other lists, but opening even a small, simple message has a noticeable delay -- the same kind of delay you get moving from one message to the next (with the up / down arrows), or deleting each message with the trash can button (which only appears with the message open).

One may take it for granted, but mobile email deletion can be a serious problem. The only other methods of message deletion is a swipe over the message to be deleted, then tapping the delete button; or tapping the edit button, then tapping the minus button, then tapping the delete button for each message to be erased. Maybe this doesn't sound too extrarodinary, but using the swipe-delete or edit-minus-button-delete on even a dozen or so messages is incredibly tedious.

We suspect even a moderate email user won't be able to delete 20 emails on their phone without fantasizing about throwing their iPhone across the room. If you can delete 50 emails in one sitting, you deserve to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Oh, and you have to manually delete all these messages again from the trash, there's no empty trash button (only an auto-delete option buried deep within settings, which removes deleted emails never, or after a day, a week, or a month). We kid you not.

Which brings us to our next serious email matter: the iPhone's complete lack of integration with Mail.app, OS X's powerful-enough mail client. We expected that if you're an email user, when you plug in your iPhone and iTunes says it's "syncing your mail accounts," that means it's actually comparing and moving messages between the device and Mail.app. Not so. In fact, the iPhone does not interact in any meaningful way with Mail.app, other than to simplify the setup on the iPhone by copying account settings over from the desktop client's settings. Specifically:

• The POP mail you read on your iPhone does not show up as read in Mail.app after sync.
• Sent messages on your iPhone are not synced to Mail.app's sent folder (you can automatically CC, but not BCC, yourself on every outgoing iPhone message, though).
• Filters in Mail.app are not applied to incoming mail on the iPhone.
• The iPhone keeps its own set of non-contact addresses you manually enter -- these are not copied over from Mail.app.

What's more, the iPhone mail application has a number of other harsh shortcomings:

• There is no BCC.
• Messages on IMAP cannot even be marked as read.
• No ability "mark all / selected" as read.
• No empty trash option.
• There is a save to draft, but there is no spellcheck. (We suppose that's because Apple thinks spellcheck should be inline with auto-correction as you type.)
• Users can only download and view the latest 200 messages from their server -- there is no "retrieve all" messages option. This is a very bad thing when you just got off a trans-continental flight and it's time to triage some serious email.

If we haven't already driven the point home, for heavy email users such as ourselves, the iPhone didn't even come close to cutting the mustard. Email is, in fact, the weakest aspect of the whole device. While the Yahoo push-IMAP worked beautifully (and we do mean flawlessly -- push mail was delivered instantaneously), the Gmail integration requires POP access, and basically has similar issues with fetching messages, magnified by the different organizational requirements the web mail service has. One Engadget editor called the Gmail integration "a crime against humanity" -- and let's be frank, it's not "years ahead of everything else," it's actually years behind even the simple Java Gmail app Google released a while ago.

To us, a productivity device is anything that helps us Get Things Done while we're out and about, and email, web, and SMS are the holy trinity on a smartphone device. If any part of that trifecta is crap, the whole device may as well be crap. And unfortunately for us, even if you can put up with the keyboard, the Mail client is so awful it actually makes us wish Apple made a Foleo for the iPhone. An iFoleo, if you will. Anyway, if you're anything like us, this is a major, major dealbreaker.

Safari

Ease of use aside, there's no question that the iPhone's build of Safari serves up the most true-to-PC web browsing experience available for a phone today. Opera Mini and S60's native browser (which happens to be based on the same core as Safari, coincidentally) do commendable jobs, but the iPhone has taken it to the next level. Anyone who has used the Nokia 770 or N800 internet tablets will be roughly familiar with what the iPhone is trying to do here: render a page faithfully without trying to work any fit-to-screen magic, and give the user convenient options for zooming in on text.

Of course, it could be argued that the iPhone shouldn't even be trying to present a PC-like rendering of pages because it necessitates zooming. Emphasis on "necessitates" here -- you really can't go to any mainstream site on the iPhone and expect to glean useful information from it without dragging, double tapping, pinching, and unpinching your way around. Zooming in on a page produces an interesting transient display artifact: everything looks really fuzzy for just a moment, as though you've overzoomed on a low-resolution picture. (Microsoft's new Deepfish browser has a similar effect on zoom-in.) The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Granted, after a while the browsing motions become a little more natural, and we'd always prefer to have the option of seeing and interacting with sites that don't have dedicated mobile versions. WAP is supported, but Safari isn't detected as a mobile browser, so you need to specifically navigate to the WAP version if the site you're trying to visit has automatic browser detection.

Bookmarks are supported and automatically synchronized with Safari on the host computer; adding a new bookmark is a simple matter of hitting the "+" button in the address bar, naming the bookmark, selecting a destination folder, and hitting Save. Mobile Safari's meager four-button toolbar along the bottom edge dedicates a button for this, along with forward, backward, and tabs. The tab implementation is pretty clever -- all you see on the tab button is a count of the number of tabs currently open (or nothing if your current page is the only tab). Tapping the button takes you to a Cover Flow-esque display that shows a small view of each tab; flicking left and right changes tabs and tapping opens a tab. A red X in the upper left and corner of each tab's display allows you to close it.

Of all the iPhone's wares, Safari most thoroughly implements rotation detection, which makes sense considering that most sites are designed with a landscape display in mind. The phone can be held vertically, 90 degrees clockwise, or 90 degrees counterclockwise, and the currently displayed page will be rotated (complete with a nifty animation, naturally) to fill up the screen. Safari is also the only iPhone app to implement the horizontal keyboard, which some will find far easier to use than its more ubiquitous vertical counterpart. One small complaint we have here is that if you have the keyboard up and rotate the phone, the page and keyboard won't reorient -- you have to manually close the keyboard with the Done button, at which point the page will do its thing and you can bring up the keyboard again in the correct orientation.

On the iPhone, Safari is boiled down to the very most basic set of features necessary to do its thing, but the rendering engine is true to the original, for better or for worse. Take Gmail, for example; just like Safari on the desktop, there's a screwy looking little box immediately to the left of the subject line of each email in the inbox if you have personal level indicators enabled. It works, but it's a very Safari-esque experience -- Safari users will feel right at home, but folks coming from other browsers might run into the occasional surprise when hitting up sites optimized for Internet Explorer or Firefox.

On the subject of Gmail, Ajax-enabled sites are hit or miss. One gotcha is that there's no gesture to simulate a double-click, so it's impossible to open up a new IM window in Meebo by double-tapping a contact, for example (though we were able to initiate one using the IM Buddy button on the buddy list). Google Documents worked okay for reading text and spreadsheets, but we weren't able to edit anything. A good rule of thumb here: if it's not designed specifically for the iPhone, keep your expectations to a minimum until you try it out yourself.

Unfortunately, Safari seems to share more than just a rendering engine with its distant S60-based cousin. Specifically, we've had some problems with stability -- the browser will often unceremoniously disappear from time to time. We have no problem opening it back up (and the offending page works the second time more often than not), but it's still a pain in the ass. It seems like the number of open tabs (and hence, memory consumption) might be at least one of the culprits, but we've yet to find any reproducible scenarios. Mobile browsers aren't typically the most stable pieces of software around, so we've gotta say we're not terribly surprised. Here's hoping future firmware updates shore up the goods just a little bit.

iPod / media functionality

Historically, we haven't been huge fans of the iPod. We've found its interface generally simple, but irritating to navigate; its lack of numerous basic features other devices have long since had, like the ability to create multiple playlists on the go, has persisted as the iPod has undergone very conservative functionality additions through the years. Whereas our biggest complaint about the iPod -- its dire lack of codec support -- hasn't been addressed in the iPhone, its user interface definitely has.

Playing back music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, etc. has never been easier on an iPod, or more more seamlessly integrated into a phone. Most of the iPod interface has been revised to take advantage of the iPhone's massive touchscreen, so navigating artists and albums in lists is simple, where before it was a tedious, thumb-joint-popping experience. Tilting the device horizontally allows you to browse your music in Cover Flow mode, a novelty of breakthrough proportions. Tapping an album in Cover Flow mode lets you select which track to play.

When browsing in list mode, you get the same alphabet column on the right as you do with contacts. Again, keyboard search would have been nice here, but it's still far more livable than the click wheel. If you put your iPhone in sleep while listening to music, when waking it up instead of your usual background on the unlock screen you'll see the cover art of the album you're listening to, and the name of the track beneath the current time -- an extremely useful bit of glanceable information, saving you from having to dig through your mobile to see what's playing.

The media integration with the rest of the device is obviously far better than on any mobile we've seen to date -- but it's not without its issues. It's wonderful seeing SMS messages pop up while watching movies, for instance, but if you load up a YouTube video while listening to music, the audio automatically fades out when the video starts, but doesn't come back when the video ends. This is counter to the phone experience, where an incoming call pauses your music and brings it back when the call is over. We also noticed that even while under heavy load multitasking, the music would never skip or falter, just crash.

We managed to continuously crash the iPod app while listening to music and doing other things, namely browsing. We wouldn't call it incredibly unstable, but we wouldn't say it's rock solid, either. Movie playback did seem very stable though, even when skipping around and playing video for long periods of time. (It may also be of note that even when playing video for hours on end the device hardly ever even got warm to the touch.) The biggest upshot we found on the media playback, though, was the iPhone's Herculean battery life. We've seen other reviews' media playback results vary, but ours seemed to jump far ahead of even Apple's lofty expectations.

Playing relatively high bitrate VGA H.264 videos, our iPhone lasted almost exactly 9 freaking hours of continuous playback with cell and WiFi on (but Bluetooth off). Yeah, we had to pick our jaws up off the floor, too. So by our tests, you could watch a two hour movie and drain off a little more than 22% of the battery -- totally acceptable for trip-taking and the like.

Our music testing showed similarly outstanding results. Playing back 160-192Kbps MP3s, our iPhone pushed about 29 hours and 30 minutes music playback. To put that in perspective, the Apple claims the iPod nano gets about 24 hours playback on a full charge, and the iPod a scant 14 - 20 hours.

To do a little simple math, you could watch two hours of video, listen to 8 straight hours of music, and still have only drained off less than half your device's capacity -- that is, if your iPhone's battery works as well as ours. (Read: your battery life may differ.) Still, if that's a good estimate of what users can expect from their device's power drain, you should have little issue making the iPhone your music and video player, in addition to your cellphone.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/03/i...face-keyboard/





iPhones iPlenty: the Sell-Out That Wasn't
Ken Fisher

Doesn't it seem like January 9th of this year was much, much more than just a half year ago? In the nearly six months since it was announced, the iPhone has dominated the technology press. Coverage online reached such a feverish pitch that smitten geeks felt like they had one option: brave the crowds and the lines on June 28... or give up any hopes of getting an iPhone anytime soon. It was sure to be a sellout.

Except it didn't happen this way; not exactly. There were lines and crowds—a mixture of eBayers, the techno chic and the techno geeks—but once the dust had settled, once the fog of war had cleared... there were still giant piles of iPhones left. I imagine Phil Hartman on a giant mountain of Colon Blow, except it's Steve Jobs laughing maniacally on top of a hill of iPhones. Only Steve Jobs could get people to wait in line for something that, well, you didn't need to wait in line for. And talking to a bunch of new iPhone owners, most don't seem to care! Smitten, indeed. (It's ok to be smitten, of course.)

24 hours ago, few thought it would be like this. Mad people were lining up in New York City days in advance of the sales. People camping out, people trying to sell their place in line for hundreds of dollars. And then there's "Mike," who I met at the North Shore Mall (just north of Boston), who walked in and bought his iPhone and accessories this morning, without so much as waiting in line 5 minutes. Mike told me that he had been informed that there were hundreds left at the store. My own attempt to find out how many were left was met with the classic "we don't know" line, which is apparently what Apple has instructed its staff to say (this is the answer I get calling around, too). Mike could be full of it, but there were plenty of boxes in the store, that's for certain.

Jacqui with the goods

Call the massive amounts of stock left the result of overblown hype of an insanely expensive device, and the Apple faithful will say nay: the great Steve Jobs wanted to have as many phones as possible out there, and that's why there's so many phones waiting for an iBuyer. In fact, the AAPL aficionado will tell you that this is how every new Apple product launch should be, so Apple should be patting itself on its back.

The truth is, we don't have any idea of the real scope of this launch (yet), but sources are telling us that Apple moved more than 2,000 phones through its Chicago Michigan Ave. store last night alone. It's certainly not the case that people aren't buying. Blackfriar's Marketing did their own informal headcount and number crunching, and they suggest "peak physical sales in Apple Stores on the order of 30,000 an hour." That's amazing, if true.

We've heard from readers who were standing in lines all over the country; those same readers are reporting that there are loads of iPhones left in NYC, San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Indianapolis, and everywhere else.

According to Apple's iPhone locator, nearly every one of their stores ended sales last night (at midnight in most locations) with plenty of stock. Calls around the Boston area today show that both the 4GB and 8GB models are readily available in the region, and AT&T stores also had phones, although one mall location would not actually reveal their stock to us, which was rather strange.

Some AT&T stores did sell out of iPhones according to readers, as they appear to have been given a much smaller allotment. Whatever you do, don't bother with vouchers if you have an Apple Store near you. Trust us, they have plenty even if the AT&T stores don't. In any case, Apple is providing a better shopping experience, as you can get in and out without a sales pitch on the plan you might choose for the phone, or without a credit check, which is going down at most AT&T locations.

Of course, it hasn't been all smiles. Starting late last night, the activation process for the iPhone became bogged down, and several readers told us that they were waiting four or more hours for activation to take effect. Things appear to have almost caught up now, as we ourselves have activated now three different phones: two last night and one today.

In the coming days we're going to be continuing work on our iPhone review, and trust us, we're going to actually use the phones before we review them. We bought a few phones ourselves, and we also have a review unit from Apple. If you want to see us test any particular aspect of the iPhone, let us know in the comments. Yes, we're going to stress-test it, but you knew that already.

Clint and Jacqui have posted their first impressions, including video coverage. Check it out.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...hat-wasnt.html





iPhone Futures Prove to Be a Bad Investment
Katie Hafner

David Flashner thought he had it wired: buy two iPhones last Friday when they first went on sale, keep one and sell the other at a profit so big it would pay for most of the first one.

Mr. Flashner wasted no time. He began advertising the extra phone while still in line at an Apple store in Burlingame, Calif., south of San Francisco. During his 21-hour wait, he posted half a dozen different ads to Craigslist — with prices ranging from $800 to $1,200 — and waited for the calls to come in.

But no calls came because consumers expect that stores will soon have phones in stock. He continued to advertise the extra phone through the weekend, and ended up with just one call, which went nowhere. On Wednesday, he returned the phone.

Mr. Flashner, 25, who manages an audio-visual equipment rental company, is not the only would-be iPhone reseller whose plan failed to follow the script. “I haven’t heard of a single person who sold one,” he said.

Across the nation, people looking to make a quick and easy profit bought one, two or as many phones as they could by recruiting friends to stand in line with them. Many of them were the first to get in line, camping overnight outside the stores. But now they are finding that the iPhone is much more like a Harry Potter book than a hard-to-find Wii video game machine: a great thing to be one of the first to own, but not high in resale value because supply is not constrained.

Last Friday, just after the first iPhones were sold, thousands of listings showed up on eBay and Craigslist, with prices of $1,000 for the 8-gigabyte phone, a $400 markup. Some bold sellers were asking $2,000. But as it became clear that supply was meeting demand, they found themselves stuck. Few of the phones have sold for more than $700, which after sales tax, is not a remarkable profit margin.

Corey Spring, a columnist at newsvine.com who analyzed eBay auctions, estimated that a significant number of sellers “were only making their money back, even closing at a loss.” Most Apple stores in the United States have no phones available, but the most determined customers seem to have been able to buy a phone. Few people seem willing to pay even $100 over the retail price.

Some frustrated resellers say they will keep trying, then return their extra phone or phones within the 14-day return period.

D. J. Ostrowski is typical. Mr. Ostrowski, a 20-year-old college student who lives in Carol Stream, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, stood in line “in the hot sun” outside an Apple store for nine hours and talked a friend into joining him.

Like other resellers, Mr. Ostrowski was hoping the iPhone demand would duplicate the Xbox, PlayStation and Wii crazes. Lines are still long for the Wii gaming console, because Nintendo misjudged demand. Devices sell on eBay for around $100 more than the $250 retail price. In his ad, Mr. Ostrowski offered to “rendezvous anywhere,” or even deliver the phone. The only call he got was from another unsuccessful reseller, asking if he had had any luck.

Mr. Ostrowski had used a day off from his job at a hookah bar to stand in line. Now, he said, after factoring in the money he spent on gas and the waste of a free day, he views the entire venture as a net loss. “I’m probably better off getting a side job,” he said.

A few people got lucky. Trevor Lyman, 21, a senior at Temple University in Philadelphia, sold an 8-gigabyte phone on eBay for $1,300 while waiting in line last Friday afternoon to buy it. He has sold two more, but for far less than the first one.

Demand for the phone was remarkably strong in the first days. Analysts estimate that Apple and AT&T stores have sold around 500,000 phones so far. One analyst ventured a guess as high as 700,000. But Apple appears to have anticipated demand and contracted with manufacturers in Asia to build far more. Apple has said it expects to sell as many as 10 million phones by the end of 2008.

Over the last few weeks, Apple stirred a great deal of speculation about inventory levels by shrouding them in secrecy. As a result, resellers decided to take a chance. The company declined to comment on the rush to resell the phones, and on the status of iPhone inventories. On Wednesday night, on the Apple Web page that lists the phone’s availability, only two Apple stores were listed as having phones available Thursday: Tigard, Ore., and the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

Jim Fazio, 41, an entrepreneur in Fort Collins, Colo., said he had seen people make huge profits off the PlayStation 3 last Christmas and decided to jump into the iPhone market. “I took a chance that the prerelease hype would create a supply-demand imbalance, but obviously that scenario didn’t play out this time,” said Mr. Fazio, who advertised his iPhone on eBay for $1,200. “I pity the poor goobers that camped for these things.”

On Tuesday, when Mr. Fazio failed to sell his phone at a reduced price of $850, he took the phone back to the Apple store, which was out of 8-gigabyte phones. The instant he returned it, another customer in the store bought it.

“It’s a lot easier with tickets,” said Aron Honig, a 23-year-old equity research analyst who lives in Boston and has had more success selling Yankees and Red Sox tickets. Mr. Honig bought one 4-gigabyte phone and advertised it for $700 on both eBay and Craigslist, but heard only from people he assumed were scam artists, offering to wire him the money. “I think it’s the last time I’m going to do any kind of electronics product,” he said.

Some resellers are amused, if not wealthier. Jack Boyce, 62, a graphic designer in Boston, bought two 8-gigabyte phones last Friday, after waiting four and a half hours in line. Mr. Boyce took his computer with him and was able to do a little work. He charges clients $100 an hour and calculates that he lost three and a half billable hours.

Still, Mr. Boyce said, he “had a ball” waiting outside the Apple store in Cambridge, Mass. “The people around me were wonderful,” he said. “We took pictures of each other.”

And he remains optimistic that someone might still pay him $950 for his extra phone, pointing out that only a few Apple stores have iPhones in stock, and none of the AT&T stores do. “So my wish may be coming true,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/te.../06iphone.html





Chasing the iPhone
Martin Fackler

While Americans have been blitzed with news about the iPhone’s debut, many in South Korea’s and Japan’s technology industries initially greeted Apple’s flashy new handset with yawns.

Cellphones in these technology-saturated countries can already play digital songs and video games and receive satellite television. But now that analysts and industry executives are getting their first good look at the iPhone, many here are concerned that Asian manufacturers may have underestimated the Apple threat.

Analysts and executives in South Korea say that the iPhone, with its full-scale Internet browser and distinctive touch screen with colorful icons, is more than just another souped-up cellphone. They fear this Silicon Valley challenger could leap past Asian makers into the age of digital convergence by combining personal computing and mobile technologies as no device has before.

“Apple’s impact will be bigger than Asian handset makers think,” said Kim Yoon-ho, an analyst in Seoul at Prudential Securities. “The iPhone is different from previous mobile phones. It is the prototype of the future of mobile phones.”

The fear now is that Apple may repeat in wireless communications what it accomplished in portable music with the iPod: changing the industry. And just as when the iPod came out six years ago, big Asian manufacturers like Samsung Electronics and Sony could find themselves wondering what hit them, say analysts and industry executives.

Here in South Korea, manufacturers are taking the threat seriously, and are rushing out their own iPhone-like handsets. By the end of the year, Samsung, South Korea’s biggest cellphone maker, will unveil its Ultra Smart F700, with a large touch-controlled screen displaying rows of icons, much as the iPhone does.

LG Electronics, another large Korean handset maker, has begun selling a smartphone in Italy that can view full-size Web pages. Pantech, which sells most of its phones in the United States under the carriers’ brand names, will also unveil its first touch-screen smartphone this fall.

Sony Ericsson plans this fall to introduce its latest Walkman phone, the W960i, which will feature a touch screen and memory space for 8,000 songs. Nokia of Finland, whose N95 is probably the closest competitor to the iPhone in the United States, said it also plans a touch-screen cellphone called the Aeon, though the company has not said when it will go on sale.

Motorola, based in Schaumburg, Ill., plans to sell this summer the Razr 2, the successor to its once-popular Razr upgraded with a Linux operating system and full-scale Web browser.

“If the iPhone changes the rules in the cellphone market, then we have to adapt as soon as possible,” said Yi Seung-soo, a cellphone designer at Pantech. “We can take advantage of being a follower,” he said.

It’s the same method Korean manufacturers have used before — quickly developing similar products that are cheaper but which contain a few more features than Apple, he said. That strategy has not diminished iPod’s dominance in the music-player market in the United States, but makers in Asia have fared a bit better in their home markets.

For the time being, their concern is over the handset market in the United States, where the iPhone went on sale Friday. Apple will not sell its new phone in Asia until next year, and there are also doubts whether iPhone will catch on in markets like South Korea, where consumers often pay for small, sleek phones packed with functions. Bulkier smartphones and BlackBerrys have so far failed to sell well here.

But even if iPhone’s success is limited to America, it could be a setback for South Korean electronics companies, which export heavily to the United States. In particular, say analysts, Apple could end up seizing much of the top end of the American cellphone market, where a handset that cost $100 or more offers the highest profit margins.

That segment of the American market represents about a quarter of America’s 250 million cellphone subscribers, according to Strategy Analytics, a market research firm based in Newton, Mass. In contrast with cellphone users in Asia, more than half of American subscribers paid $50 or less for their cellphones.

Apple, whose biggest challenge may be persuading Americans to spend $500 or $600 for an iPhone, has said it wants to have the devices in the hands of 1 percent of the world’s cellphone users, or about 10 million people, by the end of next year.

For its part, Samsung says it is ready for Apple’s challenge, offering a far broader range of high-end products. Some of Samsung’s recent products in this segment in the United States include the BlackJack, a $200 smartphone that uses Windows Mobile, and the UpStage, a phone on one side and an MP3 player on the other.

“Samsung is not a one-hit wonder,” said Pete Skarzynski, senior vice president of strategy at Samsung Telecommunications America. “We offer many different products, for all different market segments, and not just one blanket product.”

For a glimpse of what Samsung may offer Americans in the future, step into one of its Anycall cellphone stores in South Korea. One new device, the SCH-B450, fits in the palm of a hand, yet it packs a 2-megapixel camera, MP3 player, satellite TV receiver and an English-Korean dictionary with 330,000 words. Its biggest selling point: Plug it into a TV to turn it into a mini game console, allowing the user to play video games with the phone itself serving as controller.

“Oh, it’s a phone, too,” said Lee Eun-jung, manager at an Anycall cellphone store in the Shinchon neighborhood of Seoul. She said the phone, which costs the equivalent of $700, is popular among college-age Koreans. Ms. Lee herself owns a different model with an additional function that appeals to mothers in education-obsessed Korea. It shows animated fairy tales in four languages, helping children learn not only their native Korean, but also English, Japanese and Chinese.

“I use this phone to baby-sit my children,” she said.

Samsung employees insist, and analysts agree, that Samsung handsets offer better durability and higher performance than the iPhone. But if the iPhone succeeds, the lesson will be that engineering alone is not enough to win consumers, say analysts and others in the industry.

Analysts and executives say that Apple is leading the cellphone industry into a new stage, where success depends on features that are outside the phone, such as the ease of downloading music and video content and an easy-to-use operating system.

“Tech-wise, the iPhone is not so advanced,” said S. Jay Yim, vice president of overseas marketing at Pantech. “But Apple makes up for that in content and software. As handsets look more like PCs, software gets more important.”

Indeed, Dr. Yim said that riding on Apple’s coattails may turn out to be the best business strategy for Pantech, which recently underwent a bank-led revamping. He said the hype around iPhone may open more Americans to the idea of paying more for cellphones, including the function-packed phones that Korean makers excel at building.

“In the past, U.S. consumers were unwilling to pay $300 for a phone,” Dr. Yim said. “If Apple can change their buying habits, then that would be good for us, too.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/te...cellphone.html





For iPhone, Some Shortages and Activation Problems
John Markoff

Apple’s long awaited iPhone began selling briskly on Friday evening, but press officers at both Apple and AT&T acknowledged that some customers have had problems activating their phones to connect to the AT&T cellular network.

An AT&T spokesman said on Sunday morning that many of the AT&T stores had sold out quickly, but declined to offer details on the number of stores that were out of stock or the number of phones sold.

“This is a dynamic situation, and I don’t think it would be helpful to say this many had sold out,” said Mark Siegel of AT&T. He said the stores that had run out of stock had permitted customers to place orders for phones that would be shipped to their homes or offices.

Apple’s Web site had a list of which of its stores were sold out on Sunday morning. Eighteen of the company’s 36 California stores were listed as being sold out of iPhones, but all of its New York stores still had phones available.

On Saturday evening, an employee at one of the company’s two stores in Palo Alto, Calif., said that the location had sold out on Friday, but received new stock the next morning and that more phones were expected on Monday morning. Other stores reported that they had the less-expensive 4-gigabyte version that sells for $500, but were running short of the 8-gigabyte machine that sells for $100 more.

Both companies acknowledged that they heard customers’ complaints about the new activation process. Rather than activate the phones in the store, buyers are required to activate them via an Internet-connected personal computer.

Those who reported problems in online discussion groups included AT&T business customers who found that they were unable to transfer their new phones quickly to a business account. Others were customers who switched from a rival service who said that the transfer process had disconnected their existing cellular service but had not turned on their iPhones.

Glenn S. Tenney, a computer industry consultant in San Mateo, Calif., said that he had spent more than three hours on the phone on Saturday, mostly on hold, only to be told that AT&T requires that he switch his account to a more expensive plan designed for the iPhone.

He said his phone had still not been activated and that he was planning to insist that AT&T honor his existing account. “If they wanted to have exceptions to what they advertised, they should have said so,” he said. “It seems like false and misleading advertising, or bait and switch — I’m not sure which.”

On Friday evening, a number of customers found that they needed to wait overnight before their phones were activated, and several said they were still waiting despite long phone calls with AT&T representatives.

The AT&T spokesman said the complaints were minimal. “What we are seeing is that the overwhelming majority are activating in minutes with no difficulty at all,” Mr. Siegel said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/te.../02iphone.html





iPhones Offline as AT&T Buckles

AT&T's network went down for most of yesterday, leaving as many as 500,000 new iPhone owners without internet access
Jonathan Richards

Apple was counting the cost today of choosing a slower network on which to run its new iPhone in the US after new owners reported being unable to access the internet on the device for most of yesterday.

Across the breadth of the country - from Hawaii to Illinois - there were reports that AT&T network was down, apparently as a result of intense use of the phone by the more than 500,000 people who are reported to have bought it since it went on sale Friday.

A spokesman for AT&T said that the problems experienced on its EDGE network, which carries all "data", such as internet pages, requested by iPhone users, were not connected with the new phone, and by evening the situation was beginning to right itself, but not before websites had been deluged with complaints by owners unable to use their new toy.

"It was near impossible to connect either to get my e-mail or access a website," Phil, a user in San Diego, wrote on the Engadget website. "I tried my AT&T BlackBerry (8800), which uses the same network and it worked fine."

Another, based in San Fransisco, wrote: "There seems to be no real explanation as to why the US carriers suck so bad — they are some of the most profitable operators in the world, yet they just don't seem to be able to build out their networks enough so that there's ubiquitous coverage."

Difficulties were also experienced by users in Texas, Colorado and the state of Washington.

Apple's decision to have the iPhone run on EDGE, which is slower than 3G networks but has better geographic coverage in the US, was described by a reviewer in The Wall Street Journal as a "major drawback" of the device.

Some users also reported having difficulty activating their phones over the weekend, a problem that AT&T attributed to initial overload which had now, the network said, been rectified.

"There is a small percentage of iPhone customers who have had a less than perfect activation experience,” an Apple spokeswoman said.

Alan Brown, an analyst specialising in wireless technology at Gartner, said: "It's a bit like New Year's Day phone calls. A network will make certain provisions to cope with high volumes, and once that's exceeded, it's likely the network will fall over."

Mr. Brown said that the uptake of the iPhone would have "stretched" AT&T more than any other new handset — partly as a result of the unlimited internet usage that comes with all iPhone price plans, but that it was possible there were other sources of the outage than the wireless or "air" network, such as servers or other telecommunications equipment.

If, as has been widely predicted, Apple brings out a 3G version of the iPhone in Europe, it was likely that the networks would be better equipped to cope with high data volumes, Mr Brown said, although there would still be concern about "buckling", particularly because of the bullish forecasts about early sales.

Faster download speeds could be guaranteed by including a higher-end 3G chipset in the phone, but that would depend on whether Apple was willing to increase the cost of the handset by as much as 50 per cent, he said.

In a separate development, it emerged today that at least one British company had secured contracts to supply parts to the iPhone.

Wolfson Microelectronics, an Edinburgh-based firm, is supplying Apple with a sound component known as an audio codec.

ARM Holdings, based in Cambridge, is reported to have licensed some of its microprocessor designs to other iPhone suppliers, such as Samsung, but the company declined to confirm this.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle2020484.ece





Brute-forced in 16 seconds

iPhone Root Password Cracked in Three Days
Nick Gibson

It's been out just three days, but already the Apple iPhone has been taken apart both literally and figuratively. The latest: inquisitive Apple fans have hacked into the firmware and discovered the master root password to the smart phone.

The information came from an official Apple iPhone restore image (rename as a zip file and extract). The archive contains two .dmg disk images: a password encrypted system image and an unencrypted user image. By delving into the unencrypted image inquisitive hackers were able to discover that all iPhones ship with predefined passwords to the accounts 'mobile' and 'root', the last of which being the name of the privileged administration account on UNIX based systems.

Hackers used the simple UNIX program 'strings' to extract a list of human readable character strings from the disk image, which contained a list of user accounts and their corresponding encrypted passwords (equivalent to the /etc/passwd file on UNIX and Linux systems). A call was then made out on the Full Disclosure mailing list for someone to run the popular password cracking tool John the Ripper on the encrypted passwords.

It took one replier just sixteen seconds to extract the passwords for both accounts -- both passwords were simple six letter words of lower case letters.

Having the passwords will not do anybody any good for the moment. The iPhone has no console or terminal access, so there is no way to log in as either account. In fact, nobody even seems certain that the accounts access the machine at all, some Internet commentators suggesting that the password file was left over from early development work, or was intentionally included to throw hackers off the scent.
http://www.builderau.com.au/blogs/by...tm?p=339270810





iPhone Independence Day
Jon Lech Johansen

I’ve found a way to activate a brand new unactivated iPhone without giving any of your money or personal information to AT&T NSA. The iPhone does not have phone capability, but the iPod and WiFi work. Stay tuned!

Update:

Magic iTunes numbers:

Offset 2048912: 33C0C3

Offset 257074: 28

Offset 257013: 33C9B1

Add “127.0.0.1 albert.apple.com” to c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Download Phone Activation Server v1.0 to activate your iPhone for iPod+WiFi use. Note that this application will not do anything unless you understand the magic numbers as well as add the hosts entry. Phone Activation Server (PAS) requires that you have the MS .NET Framework 2.0 installed.

Download PAS v1.0 Source Code.

Unbricking the iPhone

I’ve been playing with a friend’s iPhone to see how the activation process works (there are people who want an iPhone to use it as an iPod and WiFi device without having to enter into a 2-year AT&T contract).

The following pieces of information are used to activate an iPhone:

» DeviceID
» IMEI
» ICCID

Unfortunately, the activation data is cryptographically signed. The following certificate (”Apple iPhone Activation”, issued by “Apple iPhone Certification Authority”) is used to verify the signature:
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MIIDZzCCAk+gAwIBAgIBAjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQUFADB5MQswCQYDVQQGEwJV UzET
MBEGA1UEChMKQXBwbGUgSW5jLjEmMCQGA1UECxMdQXBwbGUgQ2VydGlmaWNh dGlv
biBBdXRob3JpdHkxLTArBgNVBAMTJEFwcGxlIGlQaG9uZSBDZXJ0aWZpY2F0 aW9u
IEF1dGhvcml0eTAeFw0wNzA0MTYyMjU1MDJaFw0xNDA0MTYyMjU1MDJaMFsx CzAJ
BgNVBAYTAlVTMRMwEQYDVQQKEwpBcHBsZSBJbmMuMRUwEwYDVQQLEwxBcHBs ZSBp
UGhvbmUxIDAeBgNVBAMTF0FwcGxlIGlQaG9uZSBBY3RpdmF0aW9uMIGfMA0G CSqG
SIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQDFAXzRImArmoiHfbS2oPcqAfbEv0d1jk7G bnX7
+4YUlyIfprzBVdlmz2JHYv1+04IzJtL7cL97UI7fk0i0OMY0al8a+JPQa4Ug 611T
bqEt+njAmAkge3HXWDBdAXD9MhkC7T/9o77zOQ1oli4cUdzlnYWfzmW0PduOxuve
AeYY4wIDAQABo4GbMIGYMA4GA1UdDwEB/wQEAwIHgDAMBgNVHRMBAf8EAjAAMB0G
A1UdDgQWBBShoNL+t7Rz/psUaq/NPXNPH+/WlDAfBgNVHSMEGDAWgBTnNCouIt45
YGu0lM53g2EvMaB8NTA4BgNVHR8EMTAvMC2gK6AphidodHRwOi8vd3d3LmFw cGxl
LmNvbS9hcHBsZWNhL2lwaG9uZS5jcmwwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEFBQADggEBAF9q mrUN
dA+FROYGP7pWcYTAK+pLyOf9zOaE7aeVI885V8Y/BKHhlwAo+zEkiOU3FbEPCS9V
tS18ZBcwD/+d5ZQTMFknhcUJwdPqqjnm9LqTfH/x4pw8ONHRDzxHdp96gOV3A4+8
abkoASfcYqvIRypXnbur3bRRhTzAs4VILS6jTyFYymZeSewtBubmmigo1kCQ iZGc
76c5feDAyHb2bzEqtvx3WprljtS46QT5CR6YelinZnio32jAzRYTxtS6r3Js vZDi
J07+EHcmfGdpxwgO+7btW1pFar0ZjF9/jYKKnOYNyvCrwszhafbSYwzAG5EJoXFB
4d+piWHUDcPxtcc=
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

http://nanocr.eu/2007/07/03/iphone-without-att/


















Until next week,

- js.



















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