Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 29th, ’05

[JackSpratts]

"White men, I will eat your dollars." – Osofia


"It's painful. We've lost millions of dollars of revenue to free online classifieds." – David Schneiderman


"It would be better if they taught students what they should and shouldn't do online rather than take away the primary communication tool of their generation." – Kurt Opsahl


"They call, they write, they send postcards, they show me script changes, they send me pornographic pictures and models of the monsters." – Maurice Sendak


"Babies for sale on China's eBay site." – AAF






































October 29th, 2005





Italian Terror Laws Curb Email Access
Sam Varghese

People who wish to check their email in any internet cafe in Italy have to produce passport photocopies before they do so, according to a report in the Christian Science Monitor.

The requirement is part of the country's new anti-terror laws which were passed shortly after the bombings in London in July.

The CSM said clients at an internet cafe needed to tell the owner their first and last name. The owner then had to document the computer used by each individual and the time at which they logged in and logged out.

It cited the case of one owner who had to spend an extra $US1600 ($A2143) to obtain a new licence for his internet cafe - also a stipulation under the new laws - and buy software to keep track of the users.

The report said this owner had seen business fall off by at least 10 per cent after the passport requirement was introduced.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/...401296946.html





French Gov't Bans Use Of Skype In Universities
Michael Geist

The French government has banned the use of Skype within university computer networks. It claims that Skype is insecure, though the real reason may lie with lost revenues.

French coverage at http://tinyurl.com/cl28m





Catholic School Tells Students To Remove Internet Blogs
Wayne Parry

A Roman Catholic high school has ordered its students to remove personal blogs from the Internet in the name of protecting them from cyberpredators.

Students at Pope John XXIII Regional High School in Sparta appear to be heeding a directive from the principal, the Rev. Kieran McHugh, to remove personal postings about the school or themselves from Web sites like myspace.com or xanga.com, even if they were posted from the students' home computers.

Officials with the Diocese of Paterson say the directive is a matter of safety, not censorship. But constitutional experts say the case raises interesting questions about the intersection of free speech and voluntary agreements with private institutions.

"There was a student who thought he was talking to another teen, and that was not the case," said Marianna Thompson, a diocesan spokeswoman. "Young teens are not capable of consenting to certain things, especially when they're being led along by adults."

She said the student's online contact did not involve sexual activity, but such a possibility led school administrators to convene an assembly for all 900 students about two weeks ago to reinforce the online rules.

Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which champions the rights of bloggers, said there have been several attempts nationwide by private institutions to restrict or censor students' Internet postings.

"But this is the first time we've heard of such an overreaction," he said. "It would be better if they taught students what they should and shouldn't do online rather than take away the primary communication tool of their generation."

Thompson said such a ban has been on the books at all four of the diocese's regional high schools for five years, but is being strictly enforced now. It does not restrict their Web surfing or writing about other topics, she said.

McHugh referred inquiries to the diocese.

Students could be suspended if they flout the rules, but no one has been disciplined in connection with them, Thompson said. A search of both sites Wednesday by The Associated Press found no postings by users who mentioned the school.

Profiles posted by other users on the site include photos and detailed personal information on topics ranging from body measurements to what kind of music they like, their relationships with family members, and their sexual history.

Frank Askin, director of Rutgers University's Constitutional Law Clinic, said the case could be an interesting free speech test if someone took it to court.

"They are a private school, and they can have whatever rules they want," he said. "But students do have rights in this matter, especially in New Jersey. Under our state's constitution, private entities that exercise some kind of dominion over people have to respect their free speech rights."

Thompson said parents of students who enroll in the schools sign contracts governing student behavior, including responsible Internet use.

"It's not a question of legality or censorship," she said. "This is an agreement between us and the parents."

That could dilute the students' free speech claims somewhat, acknowledged Ed Barocas, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.

"The rights of students at private schools are far different than those of public schools because administrators at public schools are agents of government," he said. "That's not the case here."
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wi...,5743150.story





Singapore Blogger Convicted For Racist Posting

A private school student convicted of making racist remarks on his Internet blog titled, "The Second Holocaust", may avoid a jail term on account of his clean record and age, lawyer Edmond Pereira said on Thursday.

"He has learned his lesson," Pereira said of Gan Huai Shi, a 17-year-old San Yu Adventist School student who became the third person to be convicted under Singapore's sedition law for racist comments about Malays and Moslems in his web log.

Between April and July, Gan posted a series of offensive comments about Malays, admitting in one entry that he was "extremely racist", court documents said.

He subsequently mocked the Malay community and ridiculed their Moslem faith.

District Judge Bala Reddy called on Wednesday for a pre-sentencing report to determine if Gan, an ethnic Chinese, could be placed on probation. He is scheduled to return to court on November 23.

Gan pleaded guilty to two counts of sedition. Another five charges were taken into consideration.

Pereira told the court the root of Gan's feelings lay in the death of his one-month- old brother 10 years ago.

Gan blamed the death of the baby on a Malay couple who refused to give up a taxi they had hailed despite the pleas of Gan's mother to let them take the boy to a hospital.

In urging the court to consider Gan's age and clean record and spare him a prison sentence, Pereira said Gan and his mother had to wait another 20 minutes for a taxi and by the time they reached the hospital, it was too late.

Senior District Judge Richard Magnus delivered landmark jail sentences to marketing executive Nicholas Lim, 25, and Benjamin Koh, 27, on October 7 for similar offences.

They were the first people to be jailed under the Sedition Act since 1966.

Koh, an animal shelter assistant, was jailed for one month and Lim for a day.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/breaking_...s.php?id=58296





Vegas Man Gets Probation In Online File-Sharing Case
AP

A man who ran an Internet file-sharing hub where computer users could swap movie, music and software files was sentenced Thursday to three years probation and ordered to use the computer only for personal use.

Jed Frederick Kobles, 34, pleaded guilty in August to a single felony count of conspiracy to commit grand theft. He is the first person in California to be convicted on state charges for illegal file sharing, prosecutors said.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David Horowitz knocked down Kobles' crime from a felony to a misdemeanor and suspended a 180-day jail sentence. Kobles also will appear in an anti-piracy ad for the film industry to be shown in theaters, Deputy District Attorney Jeffrey McGrath said.

``I think he has learned a very good lesson out of this,'' McGrath said. ``When you engage in the illegal trade of these materials, it's not victimless -- it's not free.''

Under the terms of his sentencing, Kobles, who lives in Las Vegas, won't have to report to a probation officer, but if he breaks the law during the next three years, he can be ordered to serve his suspended jail sentence.

Kobles did not speak during the hearing and declined to comment outside the courtroom.

His attorney Paul Kossitch also declined to comment.

When investigators searched Kobles' home in February, he was operating an online file-sharing hub in Los Angeles known as UTB Smokinghouse under the name Raging8. He now works at a 7-Eleven store in Las Vegas.

Over four days in January, Kobles and other unidentified co-conspirators made films like ``Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,'' and ``National Treasure'' available on the Internet for others to download without permission.

To have access to the free content on Kobles' hub, computer users had to have their own selection of content that they were willing to make available. An undercover investigator who gained entry into the file-sharing ring downloaded more than 14 movies, TV shows and music videos, prosecutors said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...printstory.jsp





BitTorrent User Convicted Over Movie Sharing
Karen Gomm

A Hong Kong man has been convicted of copyright infringement for using the BitTorrent service to share firms, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind.

Chan Nai-Ming was found guilty of distributing three Hollywood films using BitTorrent's peer-to-peer file sharing technology, according to Taiwanese English-language newspaper The China Post.

The unemployed 38 year old used the software to distribute the copyrighted films — "Miss Congeniality", "Daredevil" and "Red Planet". He was arrested by customs officers in January 2005.

Nai-Ming pleaded not guilty to copyright infringement but was convicted after a four day trial. He will be sentenced on 7 November, 2005.

BitTorrent is one of the most popular software programs used to acquire large files over the Internet using peer-to-peer file sharing technology. The application was initially written by programmer Bram Cohen and is open source.

BitTorrent allows its users to download fragments of a large file from many other users, rather than just one. BitTorrent had relied on centralised tracker files to manage this process, but in May this year Cohen announced that they were no longer needed. BitTorrent has increasingly become a distribution channel for spyware and adware and has grown into one of the most widely used means of providing large files for download.

File sharing networks are coming under increasing pressure from the law, while increasing traffic has sparked a clampdown by recording companies and movie studios which have sued thousands of peer to peer users for copyright infringement over the past few years. The US Supreme Court ruled in June 2005 that peer-to-peer makers could be sued if they encourage users to copy material without permission.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,3...9233363,00.htm





First Swede Convicted Of Online Piracy
AP

A Swedish court on Tuesday handed down the country's first Internet piracy conviction, fining a man 16,000 kronor ($2,000) for using a file-sharing network to distribute a movie online.

The Vastmanland district court ruled that Andreas Bawer, 28, violated Swedish copyright laws by making a Swedish movie available for others to download.

The verdict was hailed by the entertainment industry as a first step toward stricter enforcement of copyright laws in Sweden, which has been criticized as a safe haven for online piracy. Up to 10 percent of all Swedes are estimated to freely swap music, movies and games on their computers.

File-sharing can be traced by tracking the Internet provider addresses of the computers that download or distribute the illegal file. However, Swedish police can only request Internet operators to reveal who owns a specific IP address if they are suspected of a crime that warrants a prison sentence, said Daniel Westman, who teaches information technology law at Stockholm University.

Still, the verdict is ``a very big step forward,'' said Henrik Ponten, a spokesman for the lobbying group Antipiratbyran, or the anti-piracy agency, which represents the Swedish entertainment industry.

``This sends a very strong signal to file sharers,'' Ponten said. ``Now we have taken the first step toward a functioning copyright law.''

Torbjorn Persson, Bawer's lawyer, said the fine was too big for only uploading one movie.

``This happened on one occasion, and it was one movie,'' Persson said. ``In light of that, this was very harsh.''

He said the verdict may indicate that courts are willing to hand out prison sentences to people who distribute a large number of copyrighted files on their computers.

``I cannot interpret this in any other way,'' Persson said.

He said his client has not yet decided whether he will appeal.

Westman said it is still possible that a court would impose a prison sentence against someone who has distributed a large number of illegal files.

``This verdict is only for one movie, and he is very close to a prison sentence,'' Ponten said. ``I would estimate that five to 10 movies would be enough to get prison.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...printstory.jsp





Bertelsmann to Launch File-Sharing Service
Matt Moore

Bertelsmann AG said Friday it will launch a new service that uses the technology made popular by file-swapping businesses for legal downloads of music and movies.

The service, dubbed GNAB, or "bang" in reverse, is set to be used in Germany by the end of this year, with an eventual rollout to other countries through 2006 and beyond, the company said.

Unlike Bertelsmann's previous foray with the original Napster - which led to a bevy of lawsuits over violations of copyright law - GNAB uses a decentralized peer-to-peer network to offer downloads whose original content is hosted on centralized servers.

"Most of it is ready," said a Gernot Wolf, a spokesman for Arvato AG, the media services unit of Guentersloh-based Bertelsmann.

Unlike other file-sharing programs, Arvato said, GNAB will be licensed to partners who can use it to sell their own downloads, meaning consumers will only get to use it if they go through a particular partner or company.

"We are a service provider and we present the idea and technique of GNAB to others," Wolf said.

The decentralized nature of GNAB's technology makes it feasible for providers to distribute large files like feature films or games without overburdening the centralized servers.

"In addition, we can offer our customers and all users of the platform a maximum of quality and security thanks to our secure file-sharing technology," said Hartmut Ostrowski, chairman and chief executive of Arvato.

Arvato has agreements lined up with several labels, particularly Sony BMG, of which Bertelsmann has a 50 percent stake, giving it access to about 1 million songs.

The service comes amid heightened competition by other companies, notably Apple Computer's ubiquitous iTunes, which is popular in the United States and has local versions operating throughout Europe.

Just this month, iTunes began offering downloads of music videos, short films from Pixar and television shows like "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost." The episodes are available for download the morning after they are on ABC television in the United States.

File-sharing networks that use peer-to-peer sharing have drawn fire from major record companies because they claim that users are sharing the music illegally, depriving them of income.

In a bid to stem such losses, several have cut their own deals with companies to offer the products for sale via download themselves.

According to Arvato's Web site, GNAB adds features that ensure copyrighted material that is downloaded is flagged so that payment for the file, such as a song, can be made.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...customwire.htm





Disney Backs Anti-Piracy Technology For Oscar DVDs
Bob Tourtellotte

Walt Disney Co. on Monday plans to become the first major Hollywood film distributor to back an anti-piracy DVD technology that stirred controversy

last year in advance of the important Oscar race.

Disney said it would release DVD "screeners" -- copies of movies sent to groups that vote on awards -- only for DVD players made exclusively by a Dolby Laboratories unit, Cinea, and engineered to thwart illegal copying.

"We feel like this is a really strong first step in addition to all the other things we do to combat piracy," said Dennis Rice, who heads Disney's Oscar publicity campaign, which will include films such as "Shopgirl" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

Hollywood's awards season is of major importance to the studios because awards help lure moviegoers to theaters, but increasingly screeners have been copied illegally and posted on the Internet or sold in street markets before a film hits theaters.

For years, Hollywood studios have sent screener videos and DVDs to members of voting groups so that if they cannot get to a theater, they can watch the movies at home before they vote.

Two years ago, the studios tried to ban all screeners, but the ban was unsuccessful. Last year, the Cinea players were not sent out soon enough to make an impact, and several nonOscar groups complained that they were not being given the players.

Now Cinea plans to distribute 12,000 players to members of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

The DVD players are encoded with recipients' names, and screeners sent to those people are specifically encrypted so they can be seen only on those particular DVD players.

Larry Roth, vice president of marketing and business development for Cinea, said the company expects to send players to other groups like the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), which awards the Golden Globes. He said details with those other groups were still being worked out.

"We're going to be supporting SAG, their nominating committees, the HFPA and some critics groups," Roth said.

Divided Hollywood

Rice said he hoped other studios would follow Disney's lead, but representatives for Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures Entertainment and General Electric Co.-controlled Universal Pictures said those two studios would not. Others were still considering their options.

Typically, the studios would watermark or otherwise encrypt the DVDs with special software codes allowing any copies to be traced. That policy has worked in recent years as illegal copies have been tracked and the recipients arrested or fined.

The other studios' reluctance to join in the Cinea effort could represent a challenge to Disney's award campaign if Disney's commitment to use only Cinea technology limits the number of award voters who see their films.

Rice said Disney also will promote its films by holding special screenings in theaters for awards' groups. He noted, too, that many members of the U.S. and British academies are members of the other film groups.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





NBC, Time Warner Deal To Let Viewers "Start Over"

NBC Universal and Time Warner Cable said on Monday they reached a broad carriage renewal agreement that includes video on demand rights and new interactive television services.

The General Electric-owned NBC also said its new agreement grants Time Warner Inc. cable operator the right to offer some NBC cable and network programs using its new "Start Over" feature that lets viewers restart shows already in progress.

Some programs from NBC's USA, CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo and SCI FI networks will have "Start Over" features.

Viewers using "Start Over" will not be able to fast forward past commercials, which has been a lure for programmers wary of digital video recorders and video on demand.

"We expect Start Over will help deliver more engaged viewers to our advertisers," David Zaslav, president of NBC Universal Cable, said in a statement.

NBC also will develop interactive TV services for Time Warner Cable and participate in new technology trials, the companies said.

Several NBC programs will be available on-demand as part of the new deal. These shows include NBC News, MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews," CNBC's "Mad Money" and "Closing Bell with Maria Bartiromo".
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





'Doom' No. 1 in Another Slow Movie Weekend
David Germain

The Rock did not meet his doom at the box office, but his latest action flick came in with a light pop instead of a bang during another slow weekend at movie theaters.

"Doom," adapted from the sci-fi video game, debuted as the top movie with a modest $15.4 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. The movie led a lackluster lineup that continued Hollywood's box-office slump, with the top 12 movies taking in $71.3 million, down 27 percent from the same weekend last year.

"Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story," a horse racing family film starring Kurt Russell and Dakota Fanning, opened in second place with $9.3 million.

Charlize Theron's blue-collar drama "North Country," based on the real-life story of a woman who led a sexual-discrimination lawsuit against male co-workers at a mining company, premiered a weak No. 5 with $6.5 million.

"Stay," starring Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling in a thriller about a psychiatrist racing to save a suicidal patient, flopped with a $2.15 million debut.

Films in limited release opened strongly. The romance "Shopgirl," starring Steve Martin, Claire Danes and Jason Schwartzman in an adaptation of Martin's own novella, debuted in eight theaters with $236,000. The comic crime thriller "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang," starring Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer, took in $174,300 in eight theaters.

Both films expand to more theaters over the next couple of weeks.

Hollywood has been in a box-office slide for most of the year, with admissions running about 8 percent below 2004 levels.

Though distributor Universal expects to make its money back on "Doom," the studio had hoped for a bigger opening weekend, said Nikki Rocco, head of distribution.

"I'm very concerned about the marketplace," Rocco said. "There are so many movies out, so much to choose from, yet the marketplace continues to fall, and not just by little amounts."

Other studio executives are sticking to the idea that the industry has simply had a prolonged run of movies that failed to pack in crowds.

"I've been telling people for a long time that I think it's content-driven. I don't think we had a film that jumped out for people this weekend," said Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Warner Bros., which released "North Country."

Warner has a certain blockbuster coming in mid-November with "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." Other big films scheduled through the holidays include "King Kong," "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and "The Producers."

October typically is a slow time for movies. Over the same weekend a year ago, though, the box-office shot up on the unexpectedly strong debut of the ghost story "The Grudge," which opened with $39.1 million.

"In all fairness, this was more of a typical late-October weekend, as opposed to a year ago, when `The Grudge' surprised everyone and made this weekend look pale by comparison," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.


Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. Final figures will be released Monday.

1. "Doom," $15.4 million.

2. "Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story," $9.3 million.

3. "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit," $8.7 million.

4. "The Fog," $7.3 million.

5. "North Country," $6.5 million.

6. "Elizabethtown," $5.7 million.

7. "Flightplan," $4.7 million.

8. "In Her Shoes," $3.9 million.

9. "A History of Violence," $2.7 million.

10. "Two for the Money," $2.4 million.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...=ENTERTAINMENT





Jail Threat Not Deterring Novelist Pamuk
AP

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk is standing behind his controversial remarks about the killing of Armenians and Kurds, even though he could ultimately go to jail.

Pamuk, who is to go on trial in Turkey on Dec. 16 on charges of insulting his country's national character, is this year's recipient of the German Book Trade's annual Peace Prize.

"I repeat, I said loud and clear that 1 million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in Turkey," he told reporters Saturday at the Frankfurt Book Fair, but noted he never said the word genocide. "And I stand by that."

Controversy has surrounded Pamuk since he told a Swiss newspaper in February that "30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it."

He was referring to Kurds killed over the past two decades during Turkey's conflict with autonomy- seeking Kurdish guerrillas, branded as a terrorist group by the U.S. and European Union, and to Armenians killed around the time of World War I. Armenians and several countries consider the World War I killings as the first genocide of the 20th century, which Turkey vehemently denies.

If convicted, he could be sentenced to as long as three years in prison.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...=ENTERTAINMENT





Howard Stern Prepares for Life Without Limits
Jacques Steinberg

When Howard Stern crosses over in January to satellite radio and his own pay-per-view cable channel, he will do so from a new Midtown Manhattan studio loaded with the kinds of accessories that one would expect to find if the Playboy Mansion were given an extreme makeover.

At the touch of a button, a rack will drop from the studio's two-story ceiling to reveal a selection of bikinis, for those guests who can be cajoled out of their street clothes.

A corner of the studio - which is located not at a gentleman's club but on the 36th floor of the McGraw-Hill Building at Rockefeller Center - has been outfitted with water- resistant walls and floors, for any gags that might involve whipped cream.

And just outside Mr. Stern's reach - as well as that of the Federal Communications Commission, which monitored him on commercial radio but no longer will - will be a stripper pole.

While Mr. Stern will also be taking plenty of gadgets with him from his syndicated terrestrial radio talk show - including the Tickle Chair, which is not to be confused with the Tickle Post - he will be leaving one noticeable piece of baggage behind: the increasingly tough restrictions imposed on him in recent years by his bosses (at Infinity Broadcasting) and the F.C.C.

Indeed, executives at Sirius Satellite Radio - which is paying Mr. Stern $100 million a year over five years to produce his own morning show and to program two radio channels - and In Demand Networks, which will package excerpts for pay-per-view, said they had placed no limits on what he could do.

Like a teenage boy suddenly set loose in a school patrolled by neither a principal nor teachers, Mr. Stern said in an interview on Tuesday that he had yet to rule anything out - including the use of his microphones and cameras to record a sex act in his brand-new 4,100-square-foot studio.

"I don't know where we're going to go with this thing," he said. "It's going to be kind of fun to figure that out with the audience. I'll ask them, 'Do we want to go there or not? Are we going to cross this line or that line?' "

Still, the possibility that Mr. Stern, 51, might go from R-rated fare - his current show features interviews with topless guests - to soft-core pornography could just be a tease. He has long been a master barker who can lure listeners under his tent for the sheer thrill of wondering how far he might go.

To that end, Mr. Stern simultaneously dampened such expectations, saying that while none of his new bosses had drawn any boundaries for his new show, he expected to do so.

"I have my own personal lines where I won't go," he said. "It's funny, the people hear 'satellite,' they hear 'on demand,' they think, 'Oh good, there's going to be a beheading every week.' That's not it at all.

"This wasn't about getting on the air and having the freedom to have sex with a woman, necessarily," he said of his move to satellite. Instead, he suggested, "To talk about human sexuality in a way that's adult, or maybe even really super childish, is my prerogative as a comedian."

Scott Greenstein, president of entertainment and sports for Sirius, said, "Howard has a history of knowing where the lines are, and we're confident he'll continue to retain that perspective at Sirius."

Mr. Greenstein added, however, "We want to make sure he gets to do the show he wants."

Which actually could pose a creative challenge for Mr. Stern. To many listeners, he was best when railing against Michael Powell - the former chairman of the F.C.C., which over the years has levied decency fines of more than $2 million on Infinity and the stations that carry his program - and his own squeamish bosses. Just this week, Mr. Stern was reprimanded on the air by Tom Chiusano, general manager of WXRK-FM, his home station, for going too far with a bit that involved the weighing of bodily waste.

Mr. Stern, who signs off WXRK in mid-December, promised an uncensored version on Sirius, which is not subject to FCC regulation.

Asked if he was worried that he might lose his edge without having a foil in a position of authority, Mr. Stern said he was not.

"If you know me, there's nothing that will make me completely happy," he said. "I will find the thorn on the rose every time."

"Come on," he continued. "I'm having this whole love affair with Sirius. Then the other day I started screaming on the air about some of the guys who work there, just because I was blowing off steam."

For Mr. Stern's fans - a national radio audience estimated at about 12 million - the transition toward opening their wallets to listen and watch him (as well as his sidekick, Robin Quivers) will be a gradual one.

Beginning Nov. 18, viewers in 20 million homes in nearly 300 markets (including New York and Los Angeles) will be able to buy access to a channel called Howard Stern on Demand. The introductory price will be $9.99 a month.

What they will see initially will not be from the Sirius show, but instead will be drawn from the 44,000 hours taped during the 11 years that Mr. Stern's program was repackaged for the E! cable channel. Mr. Stern said he retained the rights to that material, much of it originally shown with strategically placed pixilation, if it was ever shown on television at all.

That material will now be shown uncensored by In Demand, a venture of Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner.

Rob Jacobson, president and chief executive of In Demand, said the company would give Sirius three months to broadcast Mr. Stern's new shows exclusively. But beginning April 1, subscribers to the pay-per-view package will have access to those shows, as well as each new show, which will be available the day after Sirius listeners have heard it.

Beginning in January (the exact date has not been announced), Mr. Stern's two Sirius channels will be available to those willing to pay for a receiver (models start at $50) and a monthly fee of $12.95. The same flat fee provides access to dozens of other channels, including those featuring Martha Stewart and Eminem.

Sirius executives have been circumspect about the content of the two Stern channels. But the host, showing he had not lost his knack for tweaking his bosses, provided the most detailed description yet of his plans.

He said that one channel would showcase various free-form spinoffs of his morning show, featuring not only his regular cast (including Gary Dell'Abate, his longtime producer) but also prominent listeners with nicknames like High-Pitched Eric.

The other channel, he said, would be modeled on the "Good Guys" - the lineup of disc jockeys from WMCA, the legendary New York pop station of the late 1960's and 70's - though rather than being "good," Mr. Stern said, the hosts he would hire (some established, some new) would push the bounds of decency in a manner not unlike his.

There will, for example, be plenty of cursing.

"From the absurd basement humor, whatever you call it, locker-room humor, to just riffing about human experiences," he said. "I can't think of a better utopia for me."

"I thanked God today I made this deal a year ago," he said. "I really did. I would have quit radio for good if it hadn't been for this deal."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/20/ar...on/20ster.html





E-voting Won't Be Verified Until 2006
Anne Broache

Electronic voting systems aren't likely to be sufficiently secure even by the 2006 elections, government auditors warned Friday.

Existing systems are rife with problems, the Government Accountability Office said in a 107-page document (click for PDF). The list of vulnerabilities included everything from easily-guessed administrator passwords and voter-verified paper-trail design flaws, to incorrect software installation and system failures on Election Day.

The Election Assistance Commission, created in 2002 to help states and localities implement e-voting systems, has neglected to lay out a clear timeline for addressing those problems, the report said. It also says that it's unrealistic to expect anything to change by next fall.

Even as a dozen or more non-governmental groups have begun drafting their own standards, federal agencies are still in the process of writing their own voluntary guidelines for voting systems and procedures for certifying them, the GAO determined.

The agencies are slated for early 2007 to determine if the laboratories designed to examine voting equipment are fit to do so, but the agencies haven’t started yet. They also haven't set up a proper "clearinghouse" where election officials can share problems they've had with the voting systems.

The agencies also haven't updated the national reference library for voting system software--intended to help state and local election officials ensure they're running the proper software on their machines--since the 2004 elections.

"Without the continuous incorporation of certified software into the library and processes that can be effectively implemented by state and local governments, these entities are likely to face difficulty in ensuring that their tested and operational voting systems are the same as those that were certified," the report said.

Representatives from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform said they were disappointed by what the report findings and suggested that politicians may need to step in.

"It is totally unacceptable that in 21st century America, we would allow faulty machines and systems to rob citizens of their voting rights," said Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat. "While GAO offers some modest recommendations for improvement, it is incumbent upon Congress to respond to this problem and to enact much-needed reforms such as a voter-verified paper audit trail that protects all Americans' right to vote."
http://news.com.com/E-voting+wont+be...3-5907036.html





Tech Companies Are Swimming in Lawsuits
Olga Kharif

I just read some rather startling results from a survey done by law firm Fulbright & Jaworski. The firm asked 354 companies in various industries about their top legal concerns. And it turns out that tech companies are swimming in lawsuits -- particularly if they are in the telecommunications business.

An average U.S. technology company currently faces 42 lawsuits vs. 37 lawsuit for an average company. The tech industry places third, after healthcare and energy companies, in the number of lawsuits it deals with. It's ahead of the insurance industry, for Pete's sake!

Needless to say, that's quite expensive. Nearly a third of these companies spend more than 2% of their gross revenue on legal expenses, according to one of the largest surveys of corporate counsel in America.

That probably has something to do with tech companies having by far the greatest number of in-house attorneys managing litigation - an average of nine per company. The overall average for all companies participating in the survey was 3.7. What are all these attorneys dealing with? Labor and contract work, followed by intellectual property and personal injury litigation.

Though I was astounded by these findings at first, I shouldn't have been. Many tech-related industries are changing fast: The telecom business, for instance, is being transformed by a technology called Voice over Internet Protocol. Lots of legal issues still have to be ironed out.
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thre...nies.html#more





Suit Filed Over Nano Scratches
Ina Fried

Claiming that the iPod Nano has a widespread propensity for scratching easily, lawyers this week filed a class action suit against Apple Computer on behalf of those who have purchased the diminutive music player.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday on behalf of all those who have bought a Nano, alleges that Apple violated state consumer protection statutes, as well as express and implied warranties. The complaint charges that Apple knew that there were design problems with the Nano.

"These Nanos scratch excessively during normal usage, rendering the screen on the Nanos unreadable," according to the complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., by attorneys with Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro in Seattle and Columbus, Ohio-based David P. Meyer & Associates. The suit seeks to have the complaint certified as a class action claim and asks for "damages in the amount of monies paid for Nanos," as well as unspecified actual, statutory and punitive damages.

An Apple representative declined to comment on the suit, but Apple has stated that the Nano is made of the same polycarbonate material that's found in previous iPods and maintained that the scratching problem does not appear to be widespread.

The lawsuit charges, however, that the Nano contains a thinner coating of resin than on previous iPod models.

"The amount and durability of the resin applied as a protective coating during the Nano manufacturing process is clearly defective in that it is not sufficient to adequately protect the face of the Nano from extreme scratching and ultimately irreparable damage," the lawsuit says.

Questions about whether the Nano scratches more easily have been bubbling around Apple message boards since shortly after the product was announced in September.

Apple has confirmed a separate problem affecting less than 1 percent of Nanos, in which devices were shipped with a faulty LCD screen that was prone to cracking.

In its earnings conference call last week, Apple said it sold a million Nanos during the first 17 days the product was on the market and that it has seen significantly more demand than it has been able to meet.
http://news.com.com/Suit+filed+over+...3-5906399.html





Apple: iTunes' Top Competitor Is P2P
Munir Kotadia

Apple Computer's biggest competitors in the digital music downloading market are illegal music file-sharing services such as Kazaa and BitTorrent, said iTunes Vice President Eddy Cue.

On the day Apple launched the Australian version of its music store iTunes, Cue said that people now have an alternative to illegally downloading music and that he believes they are willing to pay a "fair price."

"Our view is that our biggest competitor is illegal music and P2P services. We always thought that if we offered a better alternative, then those customers would be happy to pay," said Cue. "Obviously...we will never be better than 'free.' But we think $1.27 (1.69 Australian dollars) is a very competitive and fair price to pay."

Apple will sell singles at $1.27 per track, and albums will cost around $12.86. Music videos are also available for download at about $2.57 each.

Cue said that none of the other 20 countries where Apple has launched an online music store had previously established a strong legal market for music downloading.

"We have now sold over 600 million songs worldwide and have nearly 80 percent market share in most of the countries we are in," Cue said. "This is our 21st time, and I will say that there is no place that we have ever launched where music downloads have been strong prior to us."

Cue believes that the next generation of music buyers will not know music as anything other than "digital bandwidth."

"It is certainly our belief that digital music buying is the future of music purchasing. Certainly our customers love it, and you can see it in the younger generation. They buy a lot of music now, and they buy it all online. That is what they know music as. They certainly do not know music as a record or as a CD--they know it as digital bandwidth," Cue said.

According to Cue, it was important that the Australian iTunes music store be built for and by Australians because the domestic music industry is so strong.

"A little bit over 30 percent of the music that gets sold in Australia is local music," he said.

The one major music label missing from Apple's iTunes Australia launch is Sony BMG. Although Cue would not discuss the reasons why Sony had not signed up, he explained that setting up such a store is not easy: "We are working with Sony, and we know their artists would like to be a part of the launch and we hope they will join us."
http://news.com.com/Apple+iTunes+top...3-5913461.html





Yahoo Boosts Prices On Music Service
John Borland

Yahoo is boosting the cost of a key part of its digital music subscription service, after launching it six months ago with a price tag startlingly lower than rival offerings.

The company sent an e-mail message to subscribers late Thursday night saying the cost of its portable subscription service--the plan that lets listeners download an unlimited amount of music per month and transfer it to compatible portable devices--would effectively double at the end of the month.

The decision reduces some of the pressure on rivals such as Napster and RealNetworks, which had seen their $15 a month services dramatically undercut by Yahoo's initial $6.99 a month offer. Yahoo said it would raise its monthly price for the portable subscriptions to about $12 as of Nov. 1.

Yahoo declined to give specific reasons for the price hike and said in a statement that it remained "committed to offering our customers the most competitive pricing possible for digital music." It previously had said its initial pricing for the service was a temporary promotional offer.

The release of Yahoo's cut-rate subscription service shook up the market considerably last spring, but actual effects on that market have been harder to judge.

Yahoo has not released subscriber figures, and on its recent earnings call executives said only that they were "pleased with the growth rate" of the service.

RealNetworks has said in its own previous earnings calls that Yahoo's pricing had no appreciable impact on its growth. Company Senior Vice President Dan Sheeran said Friday that Yahoo's announcement was "very much consistent with what we expected."

Analyst firm Oppenheimer upgraded RealNetworks from a "neutral" to a "buy" recommendation on the news.

In its e-mail to subscribers Thursday night, Yahoo stressed that only the price for portable subscriptions was changing, to $11.99 per month, or $9.99 per month for customers who sign up for a year of service. Subscribers who have already locked in a $4.99 per month discounted annual fee, which is still available through November, will keep that price until next year.

Subscribers who want only to listen to music on their computers, without taking it to a portable device, can keep the $6.99 monthly fee, or the $4.99 per month annual discounted cost.
http://news.com.com/Yahoo+boosts+pri...3-5906973.html





Small Company Makes Big Claims On XML Patents
Martin LaMonica

A small software developer plans to seek royalties from companies that use XML, the latest example of patent claims embroiling the tech industry.

Charlotte, N.C.-based Scientigo owns two patents (No. 5,842,213 and No. 6,393,426) covering the transfer of "data in neutral forms." These patents, one of which was applied for in 1997, are infringed upon by the data-formatting standard XML, Scientigo executives assert.

Scientigo intends to "monetize" this intellectual property, Scientigo CEO Doyal Bryant said this week.

Rather than seek royalties itself, Scientigo has forged a tentative agreement with an intellectual-property licensing firm that will handle contracts with third parties, Bryant said. A final agreement could be announced early next week, he said.

"We're not interested in having us against the world. We're just looking for ways to leverage an asset; we have pretty concrete proof that makes us feel comfortable saying it is an asset," Bryant said.

Scientigo's claims are the latest to crop up in an industry that is sharply divided over the role of patents.

Advocates argue that the patent system protects intellectual property as intended. Detractors, including those who call for the elimination of software patents, say that patents make it simpler for businesses--sometimes pejoratively dubbed "patent trolls"--to legally prey on unsuspecting software users.

Bryant said that Scientigo over the past several months has had discussions with 47 companies regarding the patents, including large software providers Microsoft and Oracle.

Based on these talks, Bryant said he is confident that the company's patents will command royalties from software companies and other large organizations, such as Amazon.com, which use XML.

Vast ramifications The ramifications of such a licensing request could be vast. XML has become a widely used method for storing and sharing information in many forms, from purchase orders to information in Web pages.

Most software companies use XML in some way, as do individual developers and corporate customers. The standard itself is developed at the World Wide Web Consortium, which published an initial draft of XML in late 1996 and proposed XML version 1.0 in December 1997.

Patent lawyer Bruce Sunstein, a co-founder of Boston-based Bromberg & Sunstein, viewed Scientigo's patents and concluded that the company will have difficulty in enforcing claims over XML.

Sunstein noted that XML is derived from SGML, which dates back to the 1980s. SGML, in turn, is based on computing concepts from the 1960s. If Scientigo's claims were ever litigated, the company would have to address all the prior work on data formats.

"You can wish them good luck if you want, but there is a lot of history this patent will have to deal with, and the fat lady has not finished singing on this one yet," Sunstein said.

Companies respond
A representative from IBM said that its intellectual property lawyers had not yet heard of Scientigo's claim.

Microsoft declined to say whether it has spoken to anyone from Scientigo. In general, though, the company minimized the effect of patent claims on something as legally well-protected as XML.

"XML has been around a long time, and people shouldn’t assume any one patent has broad implications. Often, patents are quite narrow and mostly irrelevant to the industry at large," David Kaefer, a Microsoft director of business development in charge of IP licensing.

Meanwhile, the World Wide Web Consortium has not been contacted by Scientigo, according to spokeswoman Janet Daly.

Daly noted that companies or even individuals often make patent claims on XML. For example, Microsoft, which uses XML as the foundation of many of its products, was awarded a patent for programming techniques related to XML.

"Regularly there are small companies or even individuals who have one or two or 10 patents. And when the company doesn't do very well, the patents become a means of revenue," Daly said.

Scientigo does fit the profile of companies looking to buttress their finances by better commercializing their intellectual property.

The company, once known as Market Central, went through a complete overhaul this year after the arrival of Bryant as CEO. It sold off its call center business, eliminated debt, and focused its product development on content management software.

Hue and cry
As part of the restructuring, company executives decided to try to draw revenue from its patents--including the two in question that came through Scientigo's acquisition of the assets of a Texas company called Pliant Technologies.

Bryant does not dispute the company's interest in potentially huge revenue from these patents. A multimillion-dollar annual royalty from Amazon.com, for example, would not be onerous to Amazon and yet would help revitalize Scientigo, Bryant said.

"This could be a pretty significant income stream for us," Bryant said.

He declined to indicate which company he is negotiating with to handle licensing.

Bryant did, however, detail the outside firms he enlisted to examine Scientigo's patents and formulate its IP strategy. Those companies include law firms Sterne Kessler Goldstein & Fox and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati. Another is Inflexion Point Strategy, which describes itself as an intellectual property investment bank set up to buy and sell IP.

Even with the aid of an outside licensing firm, Scientigo will face a great deal of difficulty extracting royalties from XML users, said Andrew Updegrove, a partner at Gesmer Updegrove and attorney for the standards body Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

OASIS is one of several standards bodies and organizations that uses XML as the basis for its work, noted Updegrove, who runs the ConsortiumInfo.org site that tracks industry standards. With so many people heavily invested in XML, any patent claims over portions of XML would be challenged, much the way the Eolas patent claim against Microsoft was reviewed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

"The world has learned that you don't mess with the Internet, the Web, or anything crucial to its operation. Mighty will be the hue and cry against any assertion of patents against XML in any kind of broad sense or even in any sense at all. There will be a call for re-examination of the patents, and there will also be refusals to license that will lead to litigation if the patent owner chooses to sue," Updegrove predicted.

Bryant defends the company's plan, saying it's the "right move to make" for his company and shareholders.

On Friday, he intends to fly to the West Coast and finalize an agreement with an IP licensing firm, a move he hopes will validate Scientigo's claims.
http://news.com.com/Small+company+ma...3-5905949.html





Taiwan To Ignore Flu Drug Patent

Taiwan has responded to bird flu fears by starting work on its own version of the anti-viral drug, Tamiflu, without waiting for the manufacturer's consent.

Taiwan officials said they had applied for the right to copy the drug - but the priority was to protect the public.

Tamiflu, made by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, cannot cure bird-flu but is widely seen as the best anti-viral drug to fight it, correspondents say.

Bird flu has killed at least 60 people in Asia since December 2003.

Scientists fear the lethal H5N1 strain of the virus could combine with human flu or mutate into a form that is easily transmissible between humans, triggering a flu pandemic.

Several countries have asked Roche for the right to make generic copies of Tamiflu.

'Cheaper, faster production'

Taiwan will produce six kg of its version of Tamiflu - enough, according to the government, to renew its stocks.

The government has said it will not market the drug commercially.

Production of the drug on a small scale has already started.

A top health official said Taiwan had demonstrated its goodwill to Roche in talks - and the country hoped it would eventually secure permission to copy
the drug.

"We have tried our best to negotiate with Roche," Su Ih-jen told Reuters news agency.

"It means we have shown our goodwill to Roche and we appreciate their patent. But to protect our people is the utmost important thing," he said.

A generic version of the drug produced by the island's National Health Institute is said to be 99% akin to the Tamiflu produced by Roche.

Officials say they can make their version of the drug more quickly - and at a lower cost - than Roche does.

Although Taiwan has not had a serious outbreak, the virus has killed thousands of poultry - and scores of people who came into contact with the birds - in nearby countries.

It has also now spread to Europe, with the latest possible case reported in an imported parrot in the UK.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ic/4366514.stm





How ATM Fraud Nearly Brought Down British Banking
Charles Arthur

This is the story of how the UK banking system could have collapsed in the early 1990s, but for the forbearance of a junior barrister who also happened to be an expert in computer law - and who discovered that at that time the computing department of one of the banks issuing ATM cards had "gone rogue", cracking PINs and taking money from customers' accounts with abandon.

The reason you're hearing it now is that, with Chip and PIN cards finally in widespread use in the UK, the risk of the ATM network being abused as it was has fallen away. And now that junior barrister, Alistair Kelman, wanted to get paid for thousands of pounds of work that he did under legal aid, when he was running a class action on behalf of more than 2,000 people who had suffered "phantom withdrawals" from their bank accounts. What you're about to read comes from the documents he submitted last week to the High Court, pursuing his claim to payment.

"Phantom withdrawals" were a big mystery when the banks and building societies began to join their ATM networks together in the 1980s. Kelman at that time was a barrister (who argues cases in front of a judge, rather than only slogging away in legal chambers) specialising in intellectual property law. He got interested in computing in the 1980s when the National Computing Centre asked him to advise the Midland Bank on its computer system.

What quickly became clear was that the law needed a system to provide proof that events had happened so that legal cases could be made. You might say that "the computer debited the account", but to a barrister (and more importantly, a judge) that's not enough. Did the computer do it at random? In that case it's like a tree branch falling - an accident. Or did a person program it to do so? In which case the person must be able to testify about the precise circumstances when a debit could happen. Sounds daft, but the law rests on proving each step of an argument irrefutably.

In February 1992 Kelman got a call from Sheila MacKenzie, head of the Consumers' Association (which publishes Which? magazine), who said that members were complaining by the dozen about phantom withdrawals, and was he interested? Kelman was, and met MacKenzie, with two of the association's members, Mr and Mrs McConville from Liverpool, who had had a number of phantom withdrawals from their Barclays account. They already had a solicitor, but needed someone with computer expertise in the law to make their case. Kelman at this time was able to charge £1,750 per hour - each hour being broken into six- minute chunks. Oh, and don't forget VAT too. That's £206.62 per six minutes.

He showed his value pretty quickly, pointing out that banks must have a legal mandate to debit someone's account. If they take it away from a customer without a mandate, they must refund it. So the legal point of phantom withdrawals hinged on the question: if a PIN is typed into an ATM with a card that matches an account number, is that a mandate by the customer for the bank to debit their account?

As long as you didn't breach the terms of the contract by leaving your card lying around (which would give implicit authority for use), then you, as the customer, could simply say that the withdrawal was not mandated, and demand your cash back.

How could the banks respond? They'd have to give all the phantom withdrawal money back where they could not show that the customer had typed in the PIN - unless, that is, they claimed that their systems were infallible. Yes, only by going where no computer system had ever gone before could the banks deny that phantom withdrawals were (1) taking place and (2) their responsibility to refund.

You'd think it would be open and shut. You haven't dealt much with banks, have you? Kelman took the case on legal aid and decided to bundle up more than 2,000 peoples' cases into a single class action against all the high street banks taking part in the ATM network. He trawled newsgroups for information on how crackers might decode ATM cards.

He also met two key people in the course of his research. The first, early on, was Andrew Stone, an ex-con who had been done for fraud, who claimed to had taken £750,000 from ATMs by combining techniques such as shoulder-surfing and grabbing receipts from ATMs (which in those days often had the full account number on them). Stone - who was soon back in prison - was proof in himself that criminals could make "phantom" withdrawals.

Professor Ross Anderson (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/), a cryptography and security expert who was an expert consultant to Kelman on the case, explains: "Stone had been working with building access systems using cards with magnetic stripes, and one day he thought he'd see what it could read of his ATM card. Then he tried it with his wife's." Stone figured that the stream of digits was probably an encrypted PIN.

"Then, because you can change the content of the magnetic strip, he wondered what would happen if he changed the number on his card to match his wife's. He found he could get money out using his old PIN." The high street bank Stone used (The Register knows which one) had not used the account number to encrypt the PIN on the card - meaning that any card for that bank could be changed and used to make withdrawals on any other account in it, providing you knew the right details (such as branch sort code and account number. The name of the card holder of course was unimportant, because it was not on the stripe.)

"After that," says Professor Anderson, "it was just a question for Stone of collecting as many account numbers as he could." Until the police caught up with him, at least.

In September 1992 Kelman met a woman he called the "Lotus Lady", because she worked for Lotus at a time when he was considering buying some groupware to organise the rapidly-growing class action; he had already put the names and other details of all the litigants into a relational database to search for patterns in victims and withdrawals. The Lotus Lady was interesting because her ATM card didn't debit her account. It gave her money, but heaven knew where from.

Kelman thought for a moment and realised that there must be thousands of such cards - and after a little more thought, how it had happened.

How could there be thousands of such cards? Because the chances of any two random people meeting in the UK population at that time were 25 million to 1. For one of them to have the only card in existence that debited other peoples' accounts was absurd. He'd been on the case for six months, met - say - 3,000 people through it - and one of them had such a card. The odds only work if thousands of people are walking around with cards like that, or potentially could be. They had the wrong magnetic stripe on the card: the front was embossed with the holder's details, but the account and PIN encrypted on the stripe pointed somewhere else. How wouldn't that be spotted?

Simple: dummy accounts. To do their testing in an environment where the bank systems had to work all the time, the computing teams set up a parallel universe of dummy banks, dummy branches and dummy accounts. But they generated real ATM cards for them, and could take out real money - authorised by the banks. Some people were getting dummy cards.

But equally, Kelman saw, it would be possible for a "rogue" computing department to start tweaking the cards to take money from innocent customers.

By this time the legal process was underway. Kelman had issued (but not served) a writ on the banks in July 1992. Four days later four men appeared in court following the seizure by police of more than 200 forged ATM cards in Sydenham, south London. Even so, the banks refused to deal.

In August 1992 the writ was served. The banks suggested that the class action shouldn't be a class action, but should be 2,000 small claims actions. Divide and conquer, of course.

Things ground on, until in April 1993 the banks - through the Association of Payment Clearing Services, Apacs - changed their rules. Customers would only be liable for the first £50 of any disputed or "phantom" withdrawals; the sum could be waived completely if the customer had a good enough case that they had not given away their PIN. This effectively killed the ATM class action, because the banks had accepted liability - in a roundabout way.

The Writ that Kelman had served on the banks was then wrapped up in a two-day hearing in May 1993, in which the solicitors for the banks were obliged to stand up and admit one by one that their systems were not, after all, infallible.

On 22 June 1993, Judge Hicks gave judgement, mostly in favour of the motion by Kelman, who expected the banks to simply settle.

But a few days later Kelman heard something that worried him deeply. The computing staff at one bank - the Rogue bank - had discovered through the dummy accounts how to fix the PIN generator so that it would only generate three different PINs in all the PINs issued. By creating a number of dummy accounts and getting new PINs issued for them, they could capture the sequence. Then all that was needed was to recode the cards so they would point to different account numbers, try the three PINs (ATMs gave you three chances) and they were away.

This "gave me major concern," says Kelman. "The security of the entire ATM network upon which the UK banking system was based was predicated on nobody knowing your PIN." He could see that if this reached the media, people would begin comparing PINs, and on finding identical ones would tell others, and the security system used by the banks would collapse overnight. Then there would be a dramatic run on the banks (http://www.globalear.com/ index.cfm?sector=news&page=read&newsid=260) as everyone tried to take their money to a safer place, such as under the mattress.

And there wasn't time for the banks to fix the problem if anyone went public with it. Their MTBU was too short. MTBU? That’s “Maximum Time to Belly Up”, as coined by the majestic Donn Parker of Stanford Research Institute. He found that businesses that relied on computers for the control of their cash flow fell into catastrophic collapse if those computers were unavailable or unusable for a period of time. How long? By the late 1980s it had fallen from a month to a few days. That’s not a good thing; it meant that a collapse of the computers that any UK clearing bank relied on would destroy it in less than a week.

After dwelling on the problem for 48 hours, Kelman finally decided there was only one way out: use the Bank of England’s "show and tell" session, held secretly every month, where banks had to own up to their vulnerabilities, so that risks to the British economy could be identified. Kelman suggested the creation of an "Office of ATM Security", which would deal with any complaint of phantom withdrawal, and analyse it on a time-and-geography database, and get the customer to give their PIN, which would be encoded on a one-time cipher and compared with previous records. Details of customers with identical PINs would point the police to further lines of inquiry. Anthony Scrivener – lately appointed defence counsel to Saddam Hussein – was strongly behind this.

But before he could do this, Kelman was dismissed from the case by the solicitor representing the McConvilles, who had originally hired him. They wanted to pursue the case to the bitter end, rather than get the settlement Kelman felt was in the offing.

Kelman was stuck. He couldn’t say what he had learned; it would leak. He couldn’t complain to the Law Society or Bar Council; it would leak. He couldn’t tell the banks, because he had no authority now, having been de-instructed. So he drew up his fee note. It was a lot less than he could have earned in the City, he says.

"Fortunately for the UK banking system and the British people, nobody else did discover what I found about the activities of the Rogue Bank," Kelvin notes. Two years later, though, he had corroboration of what he had learnt: "the computing staff at the [Rogue] bank were completely out of control and engaged in multiple frauds."

He reckons that his fees – just shy of £200,000 over 15 months – probably “saved the UK banking system”, and that by using his database suggestion, the UK banks could have saved £200 million over the past 12 years.

And why is he telling this explosive story now? Because chip and PIN has been deployed across the UK ATM network. "The vulnerability in the UK ATM network was still there to be exploited – if someone had chanced upon it."

Only now, with chip and PIN widely deployed, does Kelman feel that the risk of subversion of the PIN system, "as performed by the computing staff of the Rogue Bank" (his capitals) "been eliminated". (Professor Anderson agrees, but says many other loopholes remain.) Kelman thinks that during the 1990s, “the UK banking system was gravely at risk of collapse at all times because of this substantial security flaw."

Apacs said it was unaware of Kelman's case and so had no comment on Kelman's allegations. Link, which operates the UK's largest ATM network, had no comment ahead of this story.

And the price of silence? He could not take silk – that is, become a QC (Queen’s Counsel, the highest level of barrister) – because he felt he could not talk about the risks to the UK banks.

But the real losers, he suggests, are the McConvilles, "an ordinary working-class couple whose money was stolen from them by criminals at [a high street] Bank." They're now dead. But any time that you, or someone you know, has money siphoned from their account by a cloned card you have the McConvilles to thank when it's repaid.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10...ms_and_rogues/





Extortion Virus Makes Rounds In Russia

It encrypts files then seeks money for the data to be decoded
Jeremy Kirk

Two new versions of a virus first reported in May are staging renewed attacks against computers in Russia, encrypting files and then extorting money from victims to decode the files.

After an infection, the Russian- language instructions let victims know how many of their files have been encrypted. Translated, the warning says, "If you want to get these damn files in the decrypted format" then write to the e-mail address given. The message goes on to say, "P.S. And be thankful that they were not completely erased!"

The viruses, called JuNy.A and JuNy.B, search for more than 100 file types by extension, according to a warning issued by Websense Inc. The renewed attack was first reported on a weblog published by Kaspersky Lab Ltd.

So far, the viruses appear to be limited to Russia, and it's not known how many computers have been affected. The viruses are similar to one that struck in May called "gpcode," said David Emm, senior technology consultant for Kaspersky in the U.K. The gpcode included an e-mail address where presumably a fee for the decoder would be negotiated, he said.

"As I understand, this thing was progressive, and it would gradually encrypt more and more stuff," Emm said.

Left alone, the virus would encrypt everything but a text file, Emm said. It's suspected that the virus enters a computer after a user visits a certain Web site and then exploits a vulnerability, Emm said. Another theory is the virus is activated after a user runs some type of executable code containing the virus, Emm said.

But it isn't easy tracing the origins of the viruses because "by the time you get to hear of these things it's kind of erasing information on the host machine," Emm said.

Virus writers who seek to extort money from victims are nothing new and have been around since at least 1989, Emm said. In the last couple of years, however, virus writers have moved away from writing malicious code simply to display their skills and are increasingly trying to make money, he said.
http://computerworld.com/printthis/2...105706,00.html





'I Will Eat Your Dollars'

To the cyber scammers in Nigeria who trawl for victims on the Internet, Americans are easy targets. But one thief had second thoughts.
Robyn Dixon

As patient as fishermen, the young men toil day and night, trawling for replies to the e-mails they shoot to strangers half a world away.

Most recipients hit delete, delete, delete, delete without ever opening the messages that urge them to claim the untold riches of a long-lost deceased second cousin, and the messages that offer millions of dollars to help smuggle loot stolen by a corrupt Nigerian official into a U.S. account.

But the few who actually reply make this a tempting and lucrative business for the boys of Festac, a neighborhood of Lagos at the center of the cyber-scam universe. The targets are called maghas — scammer slang from a Yoruba word meaning fool, and refers to gullible white people.

Samuel is 19, handsome, bright, well-dressed and ambitious. He has a special flair for computers. Until he quit the game last year, he was one of Festac's best-known cyber-scam champions.

Like nearly everyone here, he is desperate to escape the run- down, teeming streets, the grimy buildings, the broken refrigerators stacked outside, the strings of wet washing. It's the kind of place where plainclothes police prowl the streets extorting bribes, where mobs burn thieves to death for stealing a cellphone, and where some people paint "This House Is Not For Sale" in big letters on their homes, in case someone posing as the owner tries to put it on the market.

It is where places like the Net Express cyber cafe thrive.

The atmosphere of silent concentration inside the cafe is absolute, strangely reminiscent of a university library before exams. Except, that is, for the odd guffaw or cheer. The doors are locked from 10:30 p.m. until 7 a.m., so the cyber thieves can work in peace without fear of armed intruders.

In this sanctum, Samuel says, he extracted thousands of American e-mail addresses, sent off thousands of fraudulent letters, and waited for replies. He thinks disclosure of his surname could endanger his safety.

The e-mail scammers here prefer hitting Americans, whom they see as rich and easy to fool. They rationalize the crime by telling themselves there are no real victims: Maghas are avaricious and complicit.

To them, the scams, called 419 after the Nigerian statute against fraud, are a game.

Their anthem, "I Go Chop Your Dollars," hugely popular in Lagos, hit the airwaves a few months ago as a CD penned by an artist called Osofia:

"419 is just a game, you are the losers, we are the winners.

White people are greedy, I can say they are greedy

White men, I will eat your dollars, will take your money and disappear.

419 is just a game, we are the masters, you are the losers."

"Nobody feels sorry for the victims," Samuel said.

Scammers, he said, "have the belief that white men are stupid and greedy. They say the American guy has a good life. There's this belief that for every dollar they lose, the American government will pay them back in some way."

What makes the scams so tempting for the targets is that they promise a tantalizing escape from the mundane disappointments of life. The scams offer fabulous riches or the love of your life, but first the magha has to send a series of escalating fees and payments. In a dating scam, for instance, the fraudsters send pictures taken from modeling websites.

"Is the girl in these pictures really you?? I just can't get over your beauty!!!! I can't believe my luck!!!!!!!" one hapless American wrote recently to a scammer seeking $1,200.

The scammer replied, "Would you send the money this week so I may buy a ticket?"

"Aww babe. I don't have the money yet. I will get it, though. Don't you worry your pretty lil head, hun," the victim wrote back.

The real push comes when the fictional girlfriend or fiancee, who claims to be in America, goes to Nigeria for business. In a series of "mishaps," her wallet is stolen and she is held hostage by the hotel owner until she can come up with hundreds of dollars for the bill. She needs a new airline ticket, has to bribe churlish customs officials and gets caught. Finally, she needs a hefty get-out-of-jail bribe.

The U.S. Secret Service estimates such schemes net hundreds of millions of dollars annually worldwide, with many victims too afraid or embarrassed to report their losses.

Basil Udotai of the government's Nigerian Cybercrime Working Group said 419 fraud represents a tiny portion of Nigerian computer crime, but is taken seriously by authorities because of the damage it does to the country's reputation.

"The government is not just sitting on its hands," he said. "It's very important for the international community to know that Nigeria is not glossing over the problem of 419. We are putting together measures that will tackle all forms of online crime and give law enforcement agencies opportunities to combat it."

Asishana Okauru, acting director of financial intelligence for the government's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, said $700 million relating to 419 crime had been seized in the two years since the establishment of the EFCC. There have been 12 convictions in such cases brought during that time, he said. Okauru said he felt this was a good result given the sluggishness of Nigeria's legal system, but critics say the courts are too slow and corrupt.

Nigerian authorities, extremely sensitive about 419 crime, say the scammers are mostly from other countries, and that any Nigerians who participate do so because of high unemployment and, above all, the greed of victims.

When Samuel, at age 15, sat down in a cyber cafe and started drilling away at the keyboard, he had no idea he was being watched by one of Festac's cyber-crime wizards. After noting Samuel's speed and skill, the crime boss, nicknamed Shepherd, invited him to his mansion to try extracting e-mail addresses using search engines. Then, to make Samuel feel special, he took him shopping for designer clothes.

"He's fun to be with. When you're around him he makes you feel you have no problems," Samuel said. Shepherd hooked him with the same bait he uses for maghas.

"He said every hour I spent online I could be making good money," Samuel recalled. "He said, 'The houses I own, I got it through all this.' And they're not just ordinary houses. They're big, made of marble. He's got big-screen TVs, a swimming pool inside. He lives like a prince. He's the biggest guy in this town."

A teenager who didn't really know about the scams, Samuel was "a bit confused" when Shepherd offered him 20% of the take. "But I looked at everything he had, and it got into my head, actually. The money he had, the cars."

Eager to impress his new boss, Samuel worked for six-hour stretches extracting e-mail addresses and sending off letters that had been composed by a college graduate also working for Shepherd.

He sent 500 e-mails a day and usually received about seven replies. Shepherd would then take over.

"When you get a reply, it's 70% sure that you'll get the money," Samuel said.

Soon he was working for two bosses, Shepherd and Colosi, both well known to authorities but neither of them bothered in a place where police involvement in the scams is widely alleged.

"Most of the time you look for American contacts because of the value of the dollar, and because the fraudsters here have contacts in America who wrap up the job over there," Samuel said. "For example, the offshore people will go to pose as the Nigerian ambassador to the U.S., or as government officials. They will show some documents: This has presidential backing, this has government backing. And you will be convinced because they will tell you in such a way that you won't be able to say no."

After a scam letter surfaced this summer bearing the forged signature of Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, police raided a market in the Oluwole neighborhood of Lagos, one of six main centers that provide documents used in the 419 scams. They seized thousands of foreign and Nigerian passports, 10,000 blank British Airways tickets, 10,000 U.S. money orders, customs documents, fake university certificates, 500 printing plates and 500 computers. A stolen U.S. passport fetches $2,500 on the black market here.

The scams often involve bogus Internet sites, such as lottery websites, or oil company, bank or government sites. The scammers sometimes use London phone prefixes to make victims think they are calling Britain.

Though the fraud is apparent to many, some people think they have stumbled on a once-in-a-lifetime deal, and scammers can string them along for months with mythical difficulties. Some victims eventually contribute huge sums of money to save the deal when it is suddenly "at risk."

Stephen Kovacsics of American Citizen Services, an office of the U.S. Consulate, spoke to a victim who had lost $200,000.

Kovacsics says he is awakened several nights a week by Americans pleading for help with an emergency, such as a fiancee (whom they have only met in an online chat room) locked up in a Nigerian jail. He has to tell them that there is probably no fiancee, no emergency.

Kovacsics said victims can't believe that a scammer would spend months of internet chat just to net $700 or $1,000, not realizing that is big money in Nigeria and fraudsters will have many scams running at the same time.

By 2003, Shepherd was fleecing 25 to 40 victims a month, Samuel said. Samuel never got the 20%, but still made a minimum of $900 a month, three times the average income here. At times, he made $6,000 to $7,000 a month.

Samuel said Shepherd employs seven Nigerians in America, including one in the San Francisco Bay Area, to spy on maghas and threaten any who get cold feet. If a big deal is going off track, he calls in all seven.

"They're all graduates and very smart," Samuel said. "Four of them are graduates in psychology here in Nigeria. If the white guy is getting suspicious, he'll call them all in and say, 'Can you finish this off for me?'

"They'll try to scare you that you're not going to get out of it. Or you're going to be arrested and you will face trial in Nigeria. They'll say: 'We know you were at Wal-Mart yesterday. We know the D.A. He's our friend.' "

"They'll tell you that you are in too deep — you either complete it or you'll be killed."

Samuel said his mother, widowed when he was 16, was devastated when she saw him in the street with Shepherd and realized what he was up to.

"She tried to force me to stop, but the more force she applied, the more hardened I became. I said: 'You can't give me what I want. I want a good life.' "

But Samuel began having second thoughts when a friend was arrested after ripping off a boss for $17,000.

The friend was badly beaten before disappearing into the depths of the labyrinthine Nigerian justice system. Samuel thought of his mother and how she would be left alone if something happened to him.

When he gave up cyber crime at the end of last year, he said nothing to his mother. But she noticed.

"She said she was happy and she could sleep well," he said. "Actually, I started crying. I couldn't control myself. I realized there was more to life than chasing money."

Now when he sees Shepherd in the streets, his former boss just grins.

"He says: 'Don't worry. You'll come back to me.' "

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The many forms of 419 scams

Advance-fee frauds, also known as 419, appear to offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get rich or find the girl of your dreams. The scams can involve phony websites, forged documents and Nigerians in America posing as government officials. Here are some of the most popular:

• The "next of kin" scam, tempting you to claim an inheritance of millions of dollars in a Nigerian bank belonging to a long-lost relative, then collecting money for various bank and transfer fees.

• The "laundering crooked money" scam, in which you are promised a large commission on a multibillion-dollar fortune, persuaded to open an account, contribute funds and sometimes even travel to Nigeria.

• The "Nigerian National Petroleum Co." scam, in which the scammer offers cheap crude oil, then demands money for commissions and bribes.

• The "overpayment" scam, in which fraudsters send a bank check overpaying for a car or other goods by many thousands of dollars, persuading the victim to transfer the difference back to Nigeria.

• The "job offer you can't refuse" scam, in which an "oil company" offers a job with an overly attractive salary and conditions (in one example, $180,000 a year and $300 per hour for overtime) and extracts money for visas, permits and other fees.

• The "winning ticket in a lottery you never entered" scam — including, lately, the State Department's green card lottery.

• The "gorgeous person in trouble" scam, in which scammers in chat rooms and on Christian dating sites pose as beautiful American or Nigerian women, luring lonely men into Internet intimacy over weeks or months then asking them to send money to get them out of trouble.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi... =1&cset=true





Web of Fear: Net Surfers Cut Back
Wired News Report

As identity theft has grown, so has fear of being victimized through high-tech means. A new study finds some computer users are cutting back on time spent surfing the internet. Some have also stopped buying altogether on the web.

The report from Consumer Reports WebWatch finds nearly a third of those surveyed say they've reduced their overall website use.

Some 80 percent of internet users say they're at least somewhat concerned someone could steal their identity from personal information on the internet. A majority of users asked say they've stopped giving out personal information on the web and a quarter say they've stopped buying online.

The survey was of 1,500 U.S. web users aged 18 and older.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,69365,00.html





Once It Was Direct to Video, Now It's Direct to the Web
John Anderson

IT was a late night in Seattle. It was probably raining. Scilla Andreen was still haunting the offices of her as-yet-to-be-started Internet movie company, IndieFlix, when the phone rang. It was - no surprise - a young filmmaker.

"He thought we were a local production company," said Ms. Andreen, 43, a filmmaker herself, as well as an Emmy-nominated costume designer. "Or a distribution company that might buy his film."

What the young fellow had found in his efforts to support his movie - which he'd financed by selling his late grandmother's ring - wasn't a distribution company, not in the traditional sense, but instead, the latest wrinkle in the dissemination of independent film.

As cheaper technology and a seemingly inexhaustible hipness quotient have led to more filmmakers and films being produced, theatrical distribution has become more expensive, the outlets more cautious, and the returns on investments more dubious. The Internet has absorbed some of the spillover, although the bigger success stories - notably, the political films of Robert Greenwald ("Uncovered: The War on Iraq," "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism"), or "Faster," a highly lucrative motorcycle documentary narrated by Ewan McGregor - have been niche movies with a core audience.

So what about more general fare with no stars, budgets or hope? That's where IndieFlix, founded by Ms. Andreen and her business partner, the filmmaker Gian-Carlo Scandiuzzi, comes in. Directors submit their films, which are then posted on the Web site (www.indieflix.com). When users log on and click to buy the films that capture their interest, IndieFlix burns them onto a DVD and ships them out. The price for a feature-length film is $9.95.

Ms. Andreen's motto: "Own a movie for less than a movie ticket."

At a time when audiences are ebbing, piracy is threatening profits and at-home downloading takes gas mileage out of the movie-going equation, a company that helps filmmakers and audiences find each other on the Internet may be as natural a step in the evolution of cinema as portable DVD players or reserved seats. It may also be as close to a no-risk deal as filmmakers are likely to find: all they need provide is proof that the rights to their film have been cleared, and a master to be copied. And unlike traditional or even online distribution deals, the filmmakers retain all the rights.

IndieFlix represents "a platform to present their work to an audience that under normal circumstances wouldn't be available to them," said the actress Whoopi Goldberg, who is on the company's advisory board. "As one who works inside and outside the system, I've come to understand the distribution is a key component. And from a purely economical standpoint, if there's a way for folks to participate" it would be "a win-win for everybody involved." But Peter Broderick, president of the Los Angeles-based Paradigm Consulting and a longtime adviser to distributors and filmmakers, cautioned that price really doesn't have much to do, he said, with the attraction of buyers to on- line indie films.

"It's apples and oranges," he said. "If you have a film that has a core audience, it doesn't matter if it's $9.95 or $29.95. If your movie is about something that matters to people, they'll buy it. Just as you can't compare Tom Cruise and 'War of the Worlds' to what somebody buys online."

And to many filmmakers, success online will always be a very far cry from success in the theaters. "That's our art - and we think it needs to be bigger than life, on the screen, the group experience in the dark," said Ms. Andreen. "All filmmakers want that."

"That's the weird thing about filmmakers," she added. "It just repeats itself. It doesn't evolve. So we just said, 'It's time to evolve.' "

She speaks from experience. "First and foremost, we're filmmakers," she said. "Carlo has made more movies than I have." They have made two films together, including the feature "Outpatient," and several shorts. The "game" as she calls it, is the same "whether you're making art or schlock."

They made what they called "artful" movies that got good reviews, and several awards, and grand jury prizes "and we had distribution offers from Artisan and Lions Gate and various other name companies and realized that the terms were so horrible. They wanted the rights for 20 years; we got them down to 7." She said that the terms were so ridiculous "you'd have to make $10 million before you begin to see a penny, and then they still wanted you to go out and do this grassroots campaign and marketing and publicity for our own movies, even after we had to do all that other stuff. And that was a good deal."

They opted instead to raise the money themselves, on the Web. They were following the model of Bob Berney - the man who orchestrated the unorthodox distribution strategies of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," "Memento" and "The Last Temptation of Christ." Now at Picturehouse, Mr. Berney approves of their innovation. "Considering how difficult it is to do it on your own, either theatrically or on DVD, it's a good idea," he said. "If you're at that stage where you haven't gotten any interest - and no one believes you when you say, 'If only people had a chance to see my film, they'd love it ... If only people knew ...' - IndieFlix is like 'No more excuses.' "

It also takes the shelf-space argument out of retail DVD sales, he said, because the major retailers only have room for very little other than the blockbusters.

"But the other question," he said, of IndieFlix, "is: how are people going to hear about it?"

A recent weekend found Ms. Andreen in an Indian casino in Temecula, Calif., at the Temecula Valley International Film & Music Festival, where IndieFlix was awarding cash prizes - something the company had also done on Long Island at last summer's at the Stony Brook Film Festival at the State University - to the audience-choice award winners. A thousand dollars for a feature, $500 for the documentary, $250 for shorts.

"It's not a lot," Mr. Scandiuzzi acknowledged. "We can't do very much. I mean, I know that TriBeCa is doing something like that, and much bigger, but they have millions of dollars from American Express. It's more about the gesture."

That gesture, however, can count for a lot. IndieFlix may be the movie director's version of the Last Chance Saloon. "We might be the last stop on the track," said Ms. Andreen, "but our goal is that eventually filmmakers will go out with their little mini-DVD cams and make a movie for practically nothing, specifically to sell it on Indieflix because it costs them nothing. And we give them the publicity tools, the marketing tools and we make it for them, and deliver it in a timely manner."

"We feel every film has an audience" she added.

"I have reached a point in my life where my main focus has shifted to wanting to give something back to the community. I'm not rolling in dough. I'm not famous. And I have so many kids" - six, including 6-year-old twins - "that I don't exactly have a lot of spare time. As filmmakers, Carlo and I had become so frustrated with the limitations of standard distribution and disheartened with the way it squelches creativity. So, after much thought and careful planning, we started IndieFlix and suddenly it felt like the shackles came off."

"It's also good," she added, "to see other companies sprouting up that offer a similar deal. It validates what we are doing and how quickly the world is changing."

John Anderson is co-author of the forthcoming "I Wake Up Screening: What to Do When You've Made That Movie."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/movies/23ande.html





European Report Threatens Consumers' Rights

EFF Urges Fresh Inquiry Into Ramifications of DRM
Press Release

London - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has criticized a European Commission group for assuming that digital rights management (DRM) is the only way to foster development of the home audiovisual market.

In comments filed last week, EFF European Affairs Coordinator Cory Doctorow took the Networked Audiovisual Systems and Home Platforms (NAVSHP) group to task for its report on developing a harmonized system of DRM requirements. Doctorow urged NAVSHP to explore approaches grounded in empirical research, not industry mythology.

"DRM is already widely deployed without a hint of success and the NAVSHP group has the opportunity to learn from its well-known failures," said Doctorow. "NAVSHP should take a new look into how DRM affects the public, artists, and industry."

So far, DRM has failed to reduce unauthorized copying or enrich content authors and performers, and instead has curtailed competition and sacrificed user-rights for the benefit of entertainment giants. A fresh inquiry could examine why otherwise law-abiding citizens have resorted to finding unrestricted material on peer-to-peer networks and look at technological systems that might encourage new artistic works and new business models.

"The EU and the world are experiencing a revolution in creativity thanks to the Internet," said Doctorow. "An entire generation of remixers, talented amateurs, and Creative Commons enthusiasts have created works that do not require DRM to thrive. NAVSHP should produce recommendations for systems that embrace unrestricted distribution methods in support of these new Internet-native business models. These European creators deserve every bit as much attention from the EU as do American film studios and other incumbents."
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_10.php#004064





New Web Software a Challenge to Microsoft
Anick Jesdanun

A quiet revolution is transforming life on the Internet: New, agile software now lets people quickly check flight options, see stock prices fluctuate and better manage their online photos and e-mail.

Such tools make computing less of a chore because they sit on distant Web servers and run over standard browsers. Users thus don't have to worry about installing software or moving data when they switch computers.

And that could bode ill for Microsoft Corp. and its flagship Office suite, which packs together word processing, spreadsheets and other applications.

The threat comes in large part from Ajax, a set of Web development tools that speeds up Web applications by summoning snippets of data as needed instead of pulling entire Web pages over and over.

"It definitely supports a Microsoft exit strategy," said Alexei White, a product manager at Ajax developer eBusiness Applications Ltd. "I don't think it can be a full replacement, but you could provide scaled-down alternatives to most Office products that will be sufficient for some users."

Ironically, Microsoft invented Ajax in the late 90s and has used it for years to power an online version of its popular Outlook e-mail program.

Ajax's resurgence in recent months is thanks partly to its innovative use by Google Inc. to fundamentally change online mapping. Before, maps were static: Click on a left arrow, wait a few seconds as the Web page reloads and see the map shift slightly to the left. Repeat. Repeat again.

"It's slow. It's frustrating," said frequent map user Fred Wagner, a petroleum engineer in Houston. "We're all getting spoiled with wanting things to happen."

So he sticks with Google Maps these days. There, he can drag the map over any which way and watch new areas fill in instantly. He can zoom in quickly using an Ajax slider.

No more World Wide Wait.

"Everybody went, `Ooooh, how did they do that?'" said Steve Yen, who runs a company developing an Ajax spreadsheet called Num Sum. "It turns out the technology's been there for awhile."

Jesse James Garrett, an Adaptive Path LLC usability strategist who publicly coined the term `Ajax' 10 days after Google Maps launched in February, said such examples "convinced a lot of Web designers to take another look at something they may have previously dismissed as experimental."

Also contributing are faster Internet connections, more powerful computers and better browsers able to handle Ajax, which is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.

Consider e-mail.

Until recently, Web mail meant sending forms back and forth online. Check an item to delete and hit a button. A remote mail server receives instructions and responds with an entirely new page, which is missing only the one deleted item.

Enter Yahoo Inc. and an interface it is testing using technology from an Ajax pioneer it bought, Oddpost. Delete an item this time, and Ajax reconfigures the page immediately without waiting for a response.

Open a message to read, and the browser fetches only the message's body - it already has the subject line and other header information and doesn't have to waste time duplicating that data.

Yahoo also is developing an Ajax tool that instantly updates flight options as travelers narrow their choices of airports, airlines and travel times.

This summer, Time Warner Inc.'s America Online Inc. started using Ajax to let users rearrange, display and switch photo albums with fewer clicks.

And last week, Dow Jones & Co.'s MarketWatch began embedding news articles with stock quotes updated several times a second, blinking green and red as prices fluctuate.

"A Web page takes longer to load than that," said Jamie Thingelstad, MarketWatch's chief technology officer. "Your computer would just be hung."

Microsoft, which uses Ajax in a new map offering and an upcoming Hotmail upgrade, is even starting to build new tools to promote Ajax development - even as it pushes a next-generation alternative.

The alternative technology, known as XAML, will permit even richer applications over browsers. Alas, unlike Ajax, it will run only on Microsoft's Windows computers - no Macs, no Linux.

Startups, meantime, are embracing Ajax for Office-like tools. Such applications won't replace Office but could find a niche - parents collaborating in a soccer league could jointly update a Num Sum spreadsheet with scores, while users too poor to buy Office or students always on the go could compose a letter from anywhere using Writely word processor.

Scott Guthrie, who oversees the Microsoft Ajax tools called Atlas, believes Ajax has a future but not one at odds with Microsoft's.

"Ultimately when you want to write a word processing document or manage a large spreadsheet, you are going to want the capabilities ... that are very difficult to provide on the Web today," Guthrie said.

Computer-intensive applications like Adobe Systems Inc.'s Photoshop image editor and high-end games won't come to browsers anytime soon.

Even Google had to create desktop mapping software, called Google Earth and requiring a download, to permit 3-D and advanced features.

"Ajax cannot do everything," said Bret Taylor, who oversees Google's mapping products. "Web applications have a way to go."

Other limitations are intentional. For security reasons, a browser cannot seamlessly access files or other programs on a computer. And, of course, Web applications require a persistent Internet connection - making work difficult on airplanes.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen also worries that loss of productivity - a minute here, a minute there, multiplied by thousands of employees - will offset any savings in installation costs.

"When you do a lot of transactions, you want something that's optimized for the transaction, not something optimized for information browsing," he said.

Among other criticisms, developer tools for Ajax aren't as mature as those for one of its chief rivals, Macromedia Inc.'s Flash. And many Ajax programs don't work well beyond Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox browsers.

Yet Web-based applications are increasingly appealing at a time separate computers for home, work and travel are common and people get used to sharing calendars and other data with friends and relatives.

Ajax can make those experiences richer.

"There's a lot of power sitting on that Web browser ... that people are just tapping into," said White of eBusiness Applications. Web developers "are beginning to push its limits in terms of creative uses and new applications."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS





Adelphi Charter On Creativity, Innovation And Intellectual Property

Humanity's capacity to generate new ideas and knowledge is its greatest asset. It is the source of art, science, innovation and economic development. Without it, individuals and societies stagnate.

This creative imagination requires access to the ideas, learning and culture of others, past and present.

Human rights call on us to ensure that everyone can create, access, use and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and societies to achieve their full potential.

Creativity and investment should be recognised and rewarded. The purpose of intellectual property law (such as copyright and patents) should be, now as it was in the past, to ensure both the sharing of knowledge and the rewarding of innovation.

The expansion in the law’s breadth, scope and term over the last 30 years has resulted in an intellectual property regime which is radically out of line with modern technological, economic and social trends. This threatens the chain of creativity and innovation on which we and future generations depend.

We call upon governments and the international community to adopt these principles.

1. Laws regulating intellectual property must serve as means of achieving creative, social and economic ends and not as ends in themselves.
2. These laws and regulations must serve, and never overturn, the basic human rights to health, education, employment and cultural life.
3. The public interest requires a balance between the public domain and private rights. It also requires a balance between the free competition that is essential for economic vitality and the monopoly rights granted by intellectual property laws.
4. Intellectual property protection must not be extended to abstract ideas, facts or data.
5. Patents must not be extended over mathematical models, scientific theories, computer code, methods for teaching, business processes, methods of medical diagnosis, therapy or surgery.
6. Copyright and patents must be limited in time and their terms must not extend beyond what is proportionate and necessary.
7. Government must facilitate a wide range of policies to stimulate access and innovation, including non-proprietary models such as open source software licensing and open access to scientific literature.
8. Intellectual property laws must take account of developing countries' social and economic circumstances.
9. In making decisions about intellectual property law, governments should adhere to these rules:

* There must be an automatic presumption against creating new areas of intellectual property protection, extending existing privileges or extending the duration of rights.

* The burden of proof in such cases must lie on the advocates of change.

* Change must be allowed only if a rigorous analysis clearly demonstrates that it will promote people's basic rights and economic well- being.

* Throughout, there should be wide public consultation and a comprehensive, objective and transparent assessment of public benefits and detriments.

We call upon governments and the international community to adopt these principles.

http://www.adelphicharter.org/adelphi_charter.asp





Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism:
The Internet as a Tool for Influencing Foreign Policy
Dorothy E. Denning
Georgetown University

Paper Sponsored by the Nautilus Institute

Internet and International Systems:
Information Technology and American Foreign Policy Decisionmaking Workshop

The conflict over Kosovo has been characterized as the first war on the Internet. Government and non-government actors alike used the Net to disseminate information, spread propaganda, demonize opponents, and solicit support for their positions. Hackers used it to voice their objections to both Yugoslav and NATO aggression by disrupting service on government computers and taking over their Web sites. Individuals used it to tell their stories of fear and horror inside the conflict zone, while activists exploited it to amplify their voices and reach a wide, international audience. And people everywhere used it to discuss the issues and share text, images, and video clips that were not available through other media. In April, the Los Angeles Times wrote that the Kosovo conflict was "turning cyberspace into an ethereal war zone where the battle for the hearts and minds is being waged through the use of electronic images, online discussion group postings, and hacking attacks."1 Anthony Pratkanis, professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion, observed, "What you're seeing now is just the first round of what will become an important, highly sophisticated tool in the age-old tradition of wartime propaganda.... The war strategists should be worried about it, if they aren't yet."

Just how much impact did the Internet have on foreign policy decisions relating the war? It clearly had a part in the political discoursetaking place, and it was exploited by activists seeking to alter foreign policy decisions. It also impacted military decisions. While NATO targeted Serb media outlets carrying Milosovic's propaganda, it intentionally did not bomb Internet service providers or shut down the satellite links bringing the Internet to Yugoslavia. Policy instead was to keep the Internet open. James P. Rubin, spokesman for the U.S. State Department, said "Full and open access to the Internet can only help the Serbian people know the ugly truth about the atrocities and crimes against humanity being perpetrated in Kosovo by the Milosevic regime."2 Indirectly, the Internet may have also affected public support for the war, which in turn might have affected policy decisions made during the course of the conflict.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the Internet is altering the landscape of political discourse and advocacy, with particular emphasis on how it is used by those wishing to influence foreign policy. Emphasis is on actions taken by nonstate actors, including both individuals and organizations, but state actions are discussed where they reflect foreign policy decisions triggered by the Internet. The primary sources used in the analysis are news reports of incidents and events. These are augmented with interviews and survey data where available. A more scientific study would be useful.

The paper is organized around three broad classes of activity: activism, hacktivism, and cyberterrorism. The first category, activism, refers to normal, non- disruptive use of the Internet in support of an agenda or cause. Operations in this area includes browsing the Web for information, constructing Web sites and posting materials on them, transmitting electronic publications and letters through e-mail, and using the Net to discuss issues, form coalitions, and plan and coordinate activities. The second category, hacktivism, refers to the marriage of hacking and activism. It covers operations that use hacking techniques against a target=s Internet site with the intent of disrupting normal operations but not causing serious damage. Examples are Web sit-ins and virtual blockades, automated e- mail bombs, Web hacks, computer break-ins, and computer viruses and worms. The final category, cyberterrorism, refers to the convergence of cyberspace and terrorism. It covers politically motivated hacking operations intended to cause grave harm such as loss of life or severe economic damage. An example would be penetrating an air traffic control system and causing two planes to collide. There is a general progression toward greater damage and disruption from the first to the third category, although that does not imply an increase of political effectiveness. An electronic petition with a million signatures may influence policy more than an attack that disrupts emergency 911 services.

The paper





information aesthetics

blog impact visualization



an interesting force-directed visualization demonstrating how two-thirds of the websites & blogs devoted to France's recent referendum about the European Constitution favoured the 'No' campaign. the original dataset contained 12.000 sites, of which only 295 sites commented on the referendum. the graph shows the hierarchy of hyperlinked connections between those blogs, & explores the potential influence of blogs on the referendum & it.

http://infosthetics.com/archives/200...mpact_vis.html





The Amorality Of Web 2.0
Nicholasg Carr

From the start, the World Wide Web has been a vessel of quasi-religious longing. And why not? For those seeking to transcend the physical world, the Web presents a readymade Promised Land. On the Internet, we're all bodiless, symbols speaking to symbols in symbols. The early texts of Web metaphysics, many written by thinkers associated with or influenced by the post-60s New Age movement, are rich with a sense of impending spiritual release; they describe the passage into the cyber world as a process of personal and communal unshackling, a journey that frees us from traditional constraints on our intelligence, our communities, our meager physical selves. We become free-floating netizens in a more enlightened, almost angelic, realm.

But as the Web matured during the late 1990s, the dreams of a digital awakening went unfulfilled. The Net turned out to be more about commerce than consciousness, more a mall than a commune. And when the new millenium arrived, it brought not a new age but a dispiritingly commonplace popping of a bubble of earthly greed. Somewhere along the way, the moneychangers had taken over the temple. The Internet had transformed many things, but it had not transformed us. We were the same as ever.

The New New Age

But the yearning for a higher consciousness didn't burst with the bubble. Web 1.0 may have turned out to be spiritual vaporware, but now we have the hyper-hyped upgrade: Web 2.0. In a profile of Internet savant Tim O'Reilly in the current issue of Wired, Steven Levy writes that "the idea of collective consciousness is becoming manifest in the Internet." He quotes O'Reilly: "The Internet today is so much an echo of what we were talking about at [New Age HQ] Esalen in the '70s - except we didn't know it would be technology-mediated." Levy then asks, "Could it be that the Internet - or what O'Reilly calls Web 2.0 - is really the successor to the human potential movement?"

Levy's article appears in the afterglow of Kevin Kelly's sweeping "We Are the Web" in Wired's August issue. Kelly, erstwhile prophet of the Long Boom, surveys the development of the World Wide Web, from the Netscape IPO ten years ago, and concludes that it has become a "magic window" that provides a "spookily godlike" perspective on existence. "I doubt angels have a better view of humanity," he writes.

But that's only the beginning. In the future, according to Kelly, the Web will grant us not only the vision of gods but also their power. The Web is becoming "the OS for a megacomputer that encompasses the Internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds ... We will live inside this thing."

The revelation continues:

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment.

We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don't. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age of religion. Few world religions were born after this time. Similarly, the great personalities converging upon the American Revolution and the geniuses who commingled during the invention of modern science in the 17th century mark additional axial phases in the short history of our civilization.

Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.

This isn't the language of exposition. It's the language of rapture.

The Cult of the Amateur

Now, lest you dismiss me as a mere cynic, if not a fallen angel, let me make clear that I'm all for seeking transcendence, whether it's by going to church or living in a hut in the woods or sitting at the feet of the Maharishi or gazing into the glittering pixels of an LCD screen. One gathers one's manna where one finds it. And if there's a higher consciousness to be found, then by all means let's get elevated. My problem is this: When we view the Web in religious terms, when we imbue it with our personal yearning for transcendence, we can no longer see it objectively. By necessity, we have to look at the Internet as a moral force, not as a simple collection of inanimate hardware and software. No decent person wants to worship an amoral conglomeration of technology.

And so all the things that Web 2.0 represents - participation, collectivism, virtual communities, amateurism - become unarguably good things, things to be nurtured and applauded, emblems of progress toward a more enlightened state. But is it really so? Is there a counterargument to be made? Might, on balance, the practical effect of Web 2.0 on society and culture be bad, not good? To see Web 2.0 as a moral force is to turn a deaf ear to such questions.

Let me bring the discussion down to a brass tack. If you read anything about Web 2.0, you'll inevitably find praise heaped upon Wikipedia as a glorious manifestation of "the age of participation." Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia; anyone who wants to contribute can add an entry or edit an existing one. O'Reilly, in a lucid new essay on Web 2.0, says that Wikipedia marks "a profound change in the dynamics of content creation" - a leap beyond the Web 1.0 model of Britannica Online. To Kevin Kelly, Wikipedia shows how the Web is allowing us to pool our individual brains into a great collective mind. It's a harbinger of the Machine.

In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a higher consciousness. In reality, though, Wikipedia isn't very good at all. Certainly, it's useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper.

Take, for instance, this section from Wikipedia's biography of Bill Gates, excerpted verbatim:

Gates married Melinda French on January 1, 1994. They have three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (born April 26, 1996), Rory John Gates (born May 23, 1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (born September 14, 2002).

In 1994, Gates acquired the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci; as of 2003 it was on display at the Seattle Art Museum.

In 1997, Gates was the victim of a bizarre extortion plot by Chicago resident Adam Quinn Pletcher. Gates testified at the subsequent trial. Pletcher was convicted and sentenced in July 1998 to six years in prison. In February 1998 Gates was attacked by Noël Godin with a cream pie. In July 2005, he solicited the services of famed lawyer Hesham Foda.

According to Forbes, Gates contributed money to the 2004 presidential campaign of George W. Bush. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Gates is cited as having contributed at least $33,335 to over 50 political campaigns during the 2004 election cycle.

Excuse me for stating the obvious, but this is garbage, an incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids (who the heck is "famed lawyer Hesham Foda"?) that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts.

Here's Wikipedia on Jane Fonda's life, again excerpted verbatim:

Her nickname as a youth—Lady Jane—was one she reportedly disliked. She traveled to Communist Russia in 1964 and was impressed by the people, who welcomed her warmly as Henry's daughter. In the mid-1960s she bought a farm outside of Paris, had it renovated and personally started a garden. She visited Andy Warhol's Factory in 1966. About her 1971 Oscar win, her father Henry said: "How in hell would you like to have been in this business as long as I and have one of your kids win an Oscar before you do?" Jane was on the cover of Life magazine, March 29, 1968.

While early she had grown both distant from and critical of her father for much of her young life, in 1980, she bought the play "On Golden Pond" for the purpose of acting alongside her father—hoping he might win the Oscar that had eluded him throughout his career. He won, and when she accepted the Oscar on his behalf, she said it was "the happiest night of my life." Director and first husband Roger Vadim once said about her: "Living with Jane was difficult in the beginning ... she had so many, how do you say, 'bachelor habits.' Too much organization. Time is her enemy. She cannot relax. Always there is something to do." Vadim also said, "There is also in Jane a basic wish to carry things to the limit."

This is worse than bad, and it is, unfortunately, representative of the slipshod quality of much of Wikipedia. Remember, this emanation of collective intelligence is not just a couple of months old. It's been around for nearly five years and has been worked over by many thousands of diligent contributors. At this point, it seems fair to ask exactly when the intelligence in "collective intelligence" will begin to manifest itself. When will the great Wikipedia get good? Or is "good" an old-fashioned concept that doesn't apply to emergent phenomena like communal on-line encyclopedias?

The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity. Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call "the mainstream media." Here's O'Reilly: "While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls 'we, the media,' a world in which 'the former audience,' not a few people in a back room, decides what's important."

I'm all for blogs and blogging. (I'm writing this, ain't I?) But I'm not blind to the limitations and the flaws of the blogosphere - its superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological extremism and segregation. Now, all the same criticisms can (and should) be hurled at segments of the mainstream media. And yet, at its best, the mainstream media is able to do things that are different from - and, yes, more important than - what bloggers can do. Those despised "people in a back room" can fund in-depth reporting and research. They can underwrite projects that can take months or years to reach fruition - or that may fail altogether. They can hire and pay talented people who would not be able to survive as sole proprietors on the Internet. They can employ editors and proofreaders and other unsung protectors of quality work. They can place, with equal weight, opposing ideologies on the same page. Forced to choose between reading blogs and subscribing to, say, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the Economist, I will choose the latter. I will take the professionals over the amateurs.

But I don't want to be forced to make that choice.

Scary Economics

And so, having gone on for so long, I at long last come to my point. The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Of course the mainstream media sees the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. The layoffs we've recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.

In "We Are the Web," Kelly writes that "because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture." I hope he's wrong, but I fear he's right - or will come to be right.

Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It's a set of technologies - a machine, not a Machine - that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn't care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn't care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn't care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let's can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/20...morality_o.php





Source vs. Force: Open Source Meets Intergovernmental Politics
Kenneth Neil Cukier

As in national and municipal contexts, the role of open source has begun to be debated in and, in some cases, advanced by intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). This marks a significant development in the relationship between open source and public policy. In some respects, it creates opportunities for national actors to offer “stealth support” to open source in settings where they face less direct pressure from proprietary software firms, and where the multilateral environment can diffuse accountability for controversial stands. The different missions, operational constraints, degrees of autonomy, and outside scrutiny that characterize the IGOs offer a range of new niches for open source politics.

This contribution analyzes the growth of the open source debate within intergovernmental organizations, focusing on three venues where open source has become an important and divisive topic: United Nations agencies (particularly the United Nations Development Program); the World Intellectual Property Organization; and the World Summit on the Information Society. It examines the politics of national actors operating in this sphere, and describes lines of support and resistance that coalesce around open source proposals. Finally, it examines the benefits and drawbacks of encouraging intergovernmental organizations to address open source software explicitly. Working at this level brings dynamics into play that are different than those of national and municipal policy, or of the marketplace.

Table of contents [hide]

1 Introduction: National Governments and Open Source

2 Open Source @ Intergovernmental.Org
2.1 United Nations Development-Related Agencies
2.1.1 UN Development Program (UNDP)
2.1.2 UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)
2.1.3 UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
2.1.4 UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA)

2.2 World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)

2.3 UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)

3 The Empire Strikes Back: Reaction by States and Software Firms

4 Conclusion: The Value of Intergovernmental Forums for Open Source

5 Notes

6 References

The paper





Surveillance

FBI Papers Indicate Intelligence Violations

Secret surveillance lacked oversight
Dan Eggen

The FBI has conducted clandestine surveillance on some U.S. residents for as long as 18 months at a time without proper paperwork or oversight, according to previously classified documents to be released today.

Records turned over as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit also indicate that the FBI has investigated hundreds of potential violations related to its use of secret surveillance operations, which have been stepped up dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but are largely hidden from public view.

In one case, FBI agents kept an unidentified target under surveillance for at least five years -- including more than 15 months without notifying Justice Department lawyers after the subject had moved from New York to Detroit. An FBI investigation concluded that the delay was a violation of Justice guidelines and prevented the department "from exercising its responsibility for oversight and approval of an ongoing foreign counterintelligence investigation of a U.S. person."

In other cases, agents obtained e-mails after a warrant expired, seized bank records without proper authority and conducted an improper "unconsented physical search," according to the documents.

Although heavily censored, the documents provide a rare glimpse into the world of domestic spying, which is governed by a secret court and overseen by a presidential board that does not publicize its deliberations. The records are also emerging as the House and Senate battle over whether to put new restrictions on the controversial USA Patriot Act, which made it easier for the government to conduct secret searches and surveillance but has come under attack from civil liberties groups.

The records were provided to The Washington Post by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group that has sued the Justice Department for records relating to the Patriot Act.

David Sobel, EPIC's general counsel, said the new documents raise questions about the extent of possible misconduct in counterintelligence investigations and underscore the need for greater congressional oversight of clandestine surveillance within the United States.

"We're seeing what might be the tip of the iceberg at the FBI and across the intelligence community," Sobel said. "It indicates that the existing mechanisms do not appear adequate to prevent abuses or to ensure the public that abuses that are identified are treated seriously and remedied."

FBI officials disagreed, saying that none of the cases have involved major violations and most amount to administrative errors. The officials also said that any information obtained from improper searches or eavesdropping is quarantined and eventually destroyed.

"Every investigator wants to make sure that their investigation is handled appropriately, because they're not going to be allowed to keep information that they didn't have the proper authority to obtain," said one senior FBI official, who declined to be identified by name because of the ongoing litigation. "But that is a relatively uncommon occurrence. The vast majority of the potential [violations] reported have to do with administrative timelines and time frames for renewing orders."

The documents provided to EPIC focus on 13 cases from 2002 to 2004 that were referred to the Intelligence Oversight Board, an arm of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board that is charged with examining violations of the laws and directives governing clandestine surveillance. Case numbers on the documents indicate that a minimum of 287 potential violations were identified by the FBI during those three years, but the actual number is certainly higher because the records are incomplete.

FBI officials declined to say how many alleged violations they have identified or how many were found to be serious enough to refer to the oversight board.

Catherine Lotrionte, the presidential board's counsel, said most of its work is classified and covered by executive privilege. The board's investigations range from "technical violations to more substantive violations of statutes or executive orders," Lotrionte said.

Most such cases involve powers granted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs the use of secret warrants, wiretaps and other methods as part of investigations of agents of foreign powers or terrorist groups. The threshold for such surveillance is lower than for traditional criminal warrants. More than 1,700 new cases were opened by the court last year, according to an administration report to Congress.

In several of the cases outlined in the documents released to EPIC, FBI agents failed to file annual updates on ongoing surveillance, which are required by Justice Department guidelines and presidential directives, and which allow Justice lawyers to monitor the progress of a case. Others included a violation of bank privacy statutes and an improper physical search, though the details of the transgressions are edited out. At least two others involve e-mails that were improperly collected after the authority to do so had expired.

Some of the case details provide a rare peek into the world of FBI counterintelligence. In 2002, for example, the Pittsburgh field office opened a preliminary inquiry on a person to "determine his/her suitability as an asset for foreign counterintelligence matters" -- in other words, to become an informant. The violation occurred when the agent failed to extend the inquiry while maintaining contact with the potential asset, the documents show.

The FBI general counsel's office oversees investigations of alleged misconduct in counterintelligence probes, deciding whether the violation is serious enough to be reported to the oversight board and to personnel departments within Justice and the FBI. The senior FBI official said those cases not referred to the oversight board generally involve missed deadlines of 30 days or fewer with no potential infringement of the civil rights of U.S. persons, who are defined as either citizens or legal U.S. resident aliens.

"The FBI and the people who work in the FBI are very cognizant of the fact that people are watching us to make sure we're doing the right thing," the senior FBI official said. "We also want to do the right thing. We have set up procedures to do the right thing."

But in a letter to be sent today to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sobel and other EPIC officials argue that the documents show how little Congress and the public know about the use of clandestine surveillance by the FBI and other agencies. The group advocates legislation requiring the attorney general to report violations to the Senate.

The documents, EPIC writes, "suggest that there may be at least thirteen instances of unlawful intelligence investigations that were never disclosed to Congress."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...102301352.html





Biometrics Firm Seeks To Foil Fraudsters
Joris Evers

Spiking somebody's eyeball on a pencil tip to trick a retinal scanner may be over the top, but biometrics companies are serious about foiling fraud.

Viisage said Tuesday it has patented a way to prevent the tricking of facial scanners. The Billerica, Mass., company also this week announced tools to combine scans of the face and fingerprints into a single, more secure application of biometrics.

Biometrics--using the body as authentication--is still nascent, but increasingly topical. Around the world, governments are looking at including biometric data in passports to prevent fraud. Also, biometrics are seen as a way to add a level of security for access to buildings or computer systems, for example.

But although biometrical data might be unique to a person, the systems are not infallible.

In facial scanning, a person is identified by a camera scanning his or her face from a distance. The system could be tricked simply by showing the camera a picture or a sketch, Viisage found. The company calls this problem "spoofing" and has been working to solve it, said Mohamed Lazzouni, chief technology officer at Viisage.

"Not unlike in the IT world, it is an attempt by which you try to defeat the system in order to get unprivileged access," Lazzouni said. Spoofers would show the camera a picture and move it around to make it seem like the actual person and get access.

To solve the problem, Viisage has developed what it calls "live-ness detection." A camera will actually be able to determine that the face it is recording is authentically that of a live human being.

"We look for natural facial movements such as the closing and opening of eyelids or twitching," Lazzouni said. "These are intrinsic movements that a camera can see, analyze, parse and get a good mapping that this is, in fact, live skin and a live human being."

A patent was granted on the technology in July, but Viisage did not announce it until earlier this week. The company believes its technology beats that of rivals, which have sought to foil spoofers by looking for reflectance typical of photo paper, for example, Lazzouni said.

Additionally, Viisage on Tuesday released tools that let developers combine scans of the face and fingerprints into a single, more secure application of biometrics. The combination of both should provide more accurate identification and make it easier to offer multifactor, biometric authentication, Lazzouni said.

"The main idea behind this is that multifactor authentication is the proven security best practice," Lazzouni said.

Viisage's rivals in the biometrics market include Identix and Cognitec Systems.
http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_210...3-5905230.html





Digital Fingerprint Cracks The Case
Nigel Carson

Last month, when Australian Federal Court Judge Murray Wilcox ruled that Kazaa is illegally authorising copyright infringement, he put Australia on the world map of landmark intellectual property cases - related cases against Kazaa in the US had previously failed.

The looming billion-dollar damages claim against six respondents, including Sharman Networks (Kazaa), is likely to make global headlines. It is certain to capture the attention of the millions of people around the world who have illegally used Kazaa's popular file-swapping software to share millions of music, movie and pornography files since 2001. It may even cause sleepless nights for the internet service providers now starting to recognise their legal liability in hosting illegal content or simply providing the vehicle for such activity.

But Wilcox's finding has also put Australia on the map for another reason. Wilcox relied on crucial digital evidence from forensic computer specialists. In a situation where there was no smoking gun, these specialists were able to build a solid case on purely digital evidence.

The Kazaa case has come at a crucial time in the development of the relatively young science of computer forensics, and the Australian verdict has captured the attention of computer forensic investigators around the world.

The case was an important step in the continuing evolution of computer forensics as a solid science. Little more than a decade old, the science of computer forensics is evolving in parallel with the transition from paper-based documents to digital media storage. Unlike traditional forensic sciences, it does not have the benefit of centuries of research and testing and is somewhat vulnerable to courtroom attacks, where the infancy of the discipline and the lack of recognised training and formal qualifications have been used as an excuse to question the expertise of its practitioners.

In the recent court cases, extremely valuable evidence was found in the statistical performance logs and charts derived from the web server itself, providing insights into the breadth and depth of traffic to the site from various parts of the world. This evidence strengthened the argument that the service provider would almost certainly have known the nature of the site. The data may also provide a useful statistical framework for assessing damages.

Also extremely valuable was the use of "packet capture tools", which preserve every communication that crosses the network interface from a computer. Popular among hackers, packet capture tools are sometimes used to intercept clear text passwords - plucked with ease from the sea of background noise on the Internet.

In the Kazaa case, these tools were used to determine the covert interactions the Kazaa software was making to other Kazaa sites and helped investigators determine the importance of supernodes within the system. The tools were also activated to monitor the process of running the Kazaa software, searching for a song and downloading it. The resulting packet-capture files provided a reliable copy of the entire communication between forensic computers and the other Kazaa users sharing files.

Also critical to the cases was the physical location of possible sites for search and seizure of additional evidence. For the Kazaa matter in particular - with more than 20 possible search sites identified - there was a pressing need to be accurate in identifying the physical location of the specific internet addresses. Relying purely on network analysis, computer forensic investigators were able to identify the specific faculty in a university from which a Kazaa supernode was operating, and that site was ultimately a target in the Kazaa raids. Anton Pillar orders allowing seizure of computers were eventually granted for 13 sites in three states.

A side effect of the successful litigations is that commercial viability of peer-to-peer systems is now in doubt. File-sharing operators are reconsidering their position. The RIAA has mailed out several cease-and-desist orders to file-sharing operators. Already one other major operator, WinMX, has shut down. Others are likely to follow.

With each battle won by the music industry, the propagation vehicle for file sharing becomes increasingly decentralised, making it harder for legitimate businesses to benefit from the file-sharing masses. Legitimate service providers and file-sharing networks cannot simply turn a blind eye to content. As the act of illegal file trading is pushed further underground, it will open the way for legitimate online music sales, and for recording artists to reclaim some of their lost revenue.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/...06062539.html#





Tighter Oversight of F.B.I. Is Urged After Investigation Lapses
Eric Lichtblau

Civil rights advocates called on Monday for Congress to increase its oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's surveillance of suspects in intelligence investigations, in light of newly disclosed records indicating that the F.B.I. had violated the law.

But the bureau defended its record, saying it had been diligent in policing itself and in correcting lapses that it considered to be largely technical and procedural.

The debate was prompted by a set of internal F.B.I. documents made public on Monday that disclosed at least a dozen violations of federal law or bureau policy from 2002 to 2004 in the handling of surveillance and investigative matters.

Expanding on that data, the bureau said on Monday that internal reviews had identified 113 violations since last year that were referred to a federal intelligence board.

In several cases, the documents released on Monday showed, F.B.I. agents extended investigations and surveillance operations for months without getting approval from supervisors or giving notification.

In another case, an F.B.I. agent still on probation gained access to banking records without getting needed approval, in violation of federal privacy restrictions. In a separate episode, an agency outside the F.B.I., apparently the Central Intelligence Agency, was improperly allowed to conduct a physical search in the United States, without the target's consent, as part of a counterintelligence investigation.

"New agent didn't understand/know rules," read a handwritten note related to one inquiry that was referred to the Intelligence Oversight Board for further action.

While most of the cases appeared to be related to intelligence and national security investigations in field offices around the country, the bureau blacked out virtually all details about the exact nature of the investigations. The documents were obtained through a public records act request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a group that lobbies for greater privacy rights and civil liberties, and were first reported on Monday in The Washington Post.

Officials at the privacy center said the documents suggested abuses of authority by the F.B.I. under the expanded powers granted under the USA Patriot Act, the antiterrorism law that Congress is to consider extending in coming weeks. The privacy group said Congressional oversight committees had never been properly informed of the possible violations, and it called on Congress to exercise greater oversight.

"These are instances of alleged abuse in domestic intelligence investigations by the F.B.I., and we consider the failure to report these issues to Congress to be a really serious one," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the privacy center.

But F.B.I. officials said in interviews that few of the cases cited in the public records documents related directly to the bureau's expanded powers under the antiterrorism law. Internal reports of suspected violations have dropped since last year, the bureau said. It said the lapses cited in the internal reports reflected not an abuse of power, but rather an unfamiliarity by some agents with new protocols on intelligence investigations after the Sept. 11 attacks. Many agents were transferred to counterterrorism and national security investigations who had never worked on such cases before, and they were given new powers and procedures under both the antiterrorism law and changes in Justice Department guidelines on how investigations should be handled.

"You have a very steep learning curve," said John Miller, a spokesman for the F.B.I. "The rules changed in midstream, and agents have had to learn how to report these things out and where the lines are. This is probably something that will get better with experience and time, but right now, we're in a period of transition and people are learning."
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dl...510250432/1012





Groups Head To Court Over Wiretap Rule For Internet Calls
AP

A new federal regulation making it easier for law enforcement to tap Internet phone calls is being challenged in court.

Privacy and technology groups asked the federal appeals court in Washington on Tuesday to overturn a Federal Communications Commission rule that expands wiretapping laws to
cover Internet calls -- or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

Law enforcement agencies already can obtain a subpoena for the contents of VoIP calls from Internet access providers. But the FBI and others want the ability to capture the technology live and they want systems designed so it would be easy to do that.

``The whole process of innovation on the Internet would be seriously damaged,'' said John Morris, staff counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

To meet the rule's requirements, Internet call providers would have to rewire networks at great cost, Morris said. In addition, there is fear the rule would stifle development of new technologies by placing more regulatory burdens on innovators.

Justice Department spokesman Paul Bresson says court-authorized electronic surveillance is a critical law enforcement tool. ``As communications technologies develop, we must ensure that such progress does not come at the expense of our nation's safety and security,'' he said.

The FCC declined comment on the legal challenge.

The Center for Democracy and Technology was joined in its court petition by several groups, including CompTel, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Separately, the American Council on Education, which represents about 2,000 colleges and universities, filed an appeal of the rule on Monday in federal court in Washington.

The rule, approved by the FCC in August, requires that providers of Internet phone calls and broadband services ensure their equipment can allow police wiretaps.

The rule applies to VoIP providers such as Vonage that use a central telephone company to complete Internet calls. It also applies to cable and phone companies that provide broadband services. The companies must comply by May 2007.

The education group said schools are willing to cooperate with the FBI, but that there are other ways to assist law enforcement rather than rewiring networks.

``We fear that the FCC order will make every college and university replace every router and every switch in their systems,'' said council senior vice president Terry Hartle. ``The cost of doing that is substantial.''

For example, he said, the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently rewired its network as part of its regular upgrade of computer systems. The cost, he said, was $18 million.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...printstory.jsp





Parents Fret That Dialing Up Interferes With Growing Up
Mireya Navarro

KATHERINE KELIHER, 9, of Lakeville, Minn., could sleep an extra hour every weekday morning if she wanted to. But she would rather get up early, sit down at her computer and spend that time trading instant messages with her best friends, five girls she will soon see at school.

"We just talk about, like, 'What are you going to do today?' and stuff like that," Katherine said.

Her mother, Judy Keliher, says she isn't looking to deprive Katherine of her messaging access. "For fourth graders this is critical," she said, understanding that video games, cellphones, iPods and other high-tech gear are just part of growing up in a digital world. But Ms. Keliher is concerned about the amount of time her children, including a son, Matthew, 14, spend there.

So she is asserting some control. She says she will allow only one computer in the house and limits Matthew's and Katherine's screen time each night. "I don't like them to be home and be lazy, not at the expense of doing other things that need to get done," said Ms. Keliher, 43, who is divorced and works full time as the manager of a hardware store. "I just put it into the whole scope of a healthy lifestyle."

In interviews and surveys many parents say that their children spend too much time in front of computers and on cellphones. Some parents worry that long, sedentary hours spent at a computer may lead to weight gain, or that an excess of instant and text messaging comes at the expense of learning face-to-face social skills. Some complain of having to compete for their childrens' attention more than ever.

A report on teenagers and technology released this summer by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that teenagers' use of computers has increased significantly. More than half of teenage Internet users go online daily, up from 42 percent in 2000, the report said; 81 percent of those users play video games, up from 52 percent.

Instant messaging has become "the digital communication backbone of teens' daily lives," used by 75 percent of online teenagers, according to the Pew report. "Parents are really struggling with this," said David Walsh, the president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, a nonprofit educational organization in Minneapolis that began a program this year to help families reduce screen time and increase physical activity. "As the gadgets keep evolving, they keep consuming more and more of our kids' time. Our kids need a balanced diet of activity, and the problem is that it's getting out of balance. I don't think as a society we're dealing with it yet."

Technological advances have produced generational conflicts before, of course, whether the gadget was a rabbit-ear television set, a transistor radio or a personal computer. The young would find the latest thing exciting and freeing. Parents would worry that it was distracting and cramping academic and social development. So it goes today. Only now it is not a single high-tech wonder that concerns parents but a seemingly constant and ever-more-sophisticated tide of them.

As new technological devices beckon - Apple recently rolled out an iPod that can play video - young people are not necessarily shedding old media. A survey of 8- to 18- year-olds by the Kaiser Family Foundation this year found that the total amount of media content young people are exposed to each day has gone up by more than one hour over the past five years, to eight and a half hours.

But because they are multitasking, young people are packing that content into an average of six and a half hours a day, including three hours watching television, nearly two hours listening to music, more than an hour on the computer outside of homework (more than double the average of 27 minutes in 1999) and just under an hour playing video games.

Neither the Kaiser nor the Pew report found evidence of impending doom in all that exposure. The Pew report noted, for example, that despite their great affection for technology, teenagers still spent somewhat more time socializing with friends in person than on the telephone or through e-mail or instant and text messaging. And as teenagers get older, the report found, they tend to be less interested in diversions like online games and more inclined to use the Web for information.

"It's not something I think is a crisis," said Elizabeth Hartigan, the managing editor of L.A. Youth, a newspaper and Web site for high school students in Los Angeles. "Teen pregnancy is a crisis."

For a great number of young people, Ms. Hartigan said, high-tech gear was not an issue because their families can't afford much beyond a television set. Others are just not that interested. "Some kids get really into it, but some kids are obsessed with fashions or boyfriends or cars," she said.

Ariel Edwards-Levy, 16, a staff writer with L.A. Youth, agreed that computer use is "a sedentary activity, and if you let yourself be obsessive, it's an issue."

"But some parents don't understand that it's a different medium," she said. "It's mostly just a tool, and it can be used very well. The resources online are amazing. You can meet people and reconnect with people."

Many parents say they are limiting screen time, checking their children's Web-surfing histories and using filters to block objectionable material. Another strategy is to keep only one computer in the house and to place it in a common area, like the family room, better to monitor children's online habits.

Paula Hagan Bennett, a lawyer from the San Francisco Bay area, says she uses a variety of methods to manage how and when her four boys - ages 16, 14, 12 and 5 - are connected. For the two older boys that means controlling the use of their cellphones. "It's not for them to be chattering," said Ms. Bennett, 48, who insists that calls are for contacting parents, not friends, and should last no longer than three minutes.

For the 12-year-old it means limiting computer screen time and disabling the instant messaging function. He was unhappy about it, she said, and had no trouble reinstalling it when she wasn't looking. (Ms. Bennett prevailed.) But she said she views instant messaging as she does most cellphone conversations among young people.

"It's a waste of time," she said, "because most of the time they're talking about nothing." As for her 5-year-old, technology is not yet an issue, but Ms. Bennett said that in affluent Marin County, where she lives, she has seen young children watching "Barney and Friends" on portable DVD players in the backs of cars.

Linda Folsom, a media producer for the Walt Disney Company theme parks, decided to stick to a "motherly nag mode" rather than impose restrictions on her 14-year-old daughter, Alana, who "tends to be constantly on the I.M.," Ms. Folsom said.

While doing homework Alana will write a paragraph, respond to an instant message, then go back to her schoolwork, her mother said. "She says the I.M. is related to the project she's working on," Ms. Folsom said. "But if I hear giggling, I put in a comment: 'It doesn't sound like homework to me.' "

But Ms. Folsom, 46, and her husband, Scott, 57, a PTA leader in Los Angeles, said they had no reason to crack down on Alana because she earned good grades and behaved well. But they have insisted that she eat dinner with them and that she practice her clarinet and play soccer.

Alana sees her instant chatting as harmless. "It's just rambling," she said. And it is fun to be able to have a five-way chat with friends, she said. But she said she knows when it's time to type the message: "I'm doing homework. Leave me alone."

"If it starts controlling you rather than you controlling it, that's when you stop," Alana said.

Ms. Folsom said she felt that the technology was robbing her of her daughter's company more and more. There was a time, she said, when father, mother and child would listen to the same music in the car. "Now she plays the iPod, and she's in her own music world," Ms. Folsom said.

David Levy, a University of Washington professor who studies high-tech communications and quality of life, acknowledges that the young have become adept at managing multiple sources of information at once, but he questions whether the ability to multitask has curbed their "ability to focus on a single thing, the ability to be silent and still inside, basically the ability to be unplugged and content."

"That's true for the whole culture," he said. "Most adults have a hard time doing that, too. What we're losing is the contemplative dimension of life. For our sanity, we need to cultivate that."

Some parents seem to be getting that message. When the National Institute on Media and the Family went looking for a few hundred families in Minnesota and Iowa to participate in a research project this year that calls for reducing the amount of time third to fifth graders spend in front of a computer or television screen, 1,300 families signed up.

Ms. Keliher, a Lakeville school board member, is one of the participants. She thought the project would help 9-year-old Katherine "acknowledge the amount of time she spends on the screen."

But as parents try to monitor their children's habits, some said there is also a need to be realistic. "We as parents tend to overreact a little bit to this," Mr. Folsom said. "This is the virtual playground. It's part of growing up."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/fa...es/23TECH.html





Broadband Net Goes Stratospheric

The latest broadband delivery system has seen researchers looking to the skies to provide super-fast internet access via airships.

Airships in the stratosphere beaming back broadband capable of speeds up to 120Mbps may seem like fantasy.

But tests in Sweden have suggested it could become a reality within three to five years.

A successful trial of the technology has been conducted by researchers, led by the University of York in the UK.

Trials using a 12,000 cubic metre balloon, flying at an altitude of around 24 kilometres for nine hours, have proved it can successfully operate a data rate link of 11Mbps.

"Proving the ability to operate a high data rate link from a moving stratospheric balloon is a critical step in moving towards the longer term aim of providing data rates of 120Mbps," said Dr David Grace, the project's principal scientific officer.

Broadband on the move

The Capanina research consortium consists of 14 worldwide partners, including BT's research wing, and is partly funded by the European Union.

High Altitude Platforms (Haps), such as airships, offer a very real alternative to current broadband infrastructures, all of which come with their own limitations.

Broadband via telephone lines has speed limitations while satellite is expensive and can support only a limited number of users.

Balloons hovering in the stratosphere could become an attractive alternative as consumers demand ever higher bandwidth, said Alan Gobbi, the marketing manager of the York Electronic Centre.

The centre is the commercial unit of the University of York and the body charged with co-ordinating the project.

"One business model could be an alternative to wired access in suburban areas where costs of roll out are high. It could be offered on high-speed trains and in remote areas," he told the BBC News website.

Stacked up against satellite the cost is likely to be attractive, he said.

"The launch cost of the infrastructure is likely to be one-tenth that of satellite and one airship can support a user density one thousands times that of satellite," he said.

During the trials, the researchers managed to send data via wi-fi at at distances ranging up to 60 kilometres.

Trials of the technology will continue in Japan next year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/4354446.stm





OOLa La

Dolans Pull Plan to Take Cablevision Private
Vikas Bajaj

The Dolan family said today it had withdrawn its $7.9 billion offer to take Cablevision private and to spin off its media and entertainment assets after failing to reach a deal with the company's board of directors.

The powerful and fractious New York family's plans for the cable company that it founded appear to have fallen apart over disagreements with the board over "the terms of our proposal," the Dolans said in a statement. Instead, the family is now recommending that the board issue a special $3 billion dividend to shareholders.

In a brief statement, the board said it was considering the latest proposal by the Dolans but had not made a decision.

Shares of Cablevision fell $3.78, or 13.6 percent, to $24.02 this morning, reducing the company's market capitalization by about $1 billion, to $7.1 billion.

This is the second time this year that at least some members of the Dolan family have been turned down by the board. In April, the board and James F. Dolan overruled his father Charles F. Dolan and brother Thomas C. Dolan in voting to shut down the company's money-losing satellite-TV business.

The company, which is based in Bethpage, N.Y., and operates the cable TV system on Long Island, and the Dolans have had an eventful year that included successfully fighting Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plans for a new football stadium on Manhattan's West Side. Cablevision owns Madison Square Garden, which would have faced more competition had a new stadium been built on railyards just west of it.

It is unclear what the board and the Dolans' latest disagreement will mean for the company and the family's role at it. Charles Dolan is the company's chairman and James Dolan is its president and chief executive.

In attempting to take the company private, the family had argued that Wall Street was not valuing the company highly enough. The family's proposal would have also split off the company's entertainment assets, which include the cable networks American Movie Classics and the Independent Film Channel, into a separate, publicly traded venture.

"We continue to have full faith and confidence in the near and long-term prospects o the company and remain committed to the goal of providing value to all shareholders," Charles and James Dolan said in a statement.

The Dolan's negotiated with a special transaction committee of the board's directors, which was advised by Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley. Its counsel was Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP. The family was being advised by Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, and hired Debevoise & Plimpton as its counsel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/bu... ner=homepage





Cable Companies, Sprint Near Wireless Pact
WSJ

A consortium of cable operators including Comcast Corp., Cox Communications Inc., and Time Warner Inc. are close to an agreement to sell cellular services using the wireless network of Sprint Nextel Corp., the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the talks.

The deal, expected to be announced in the next few weeks, would give cable operators another weapon in their battle with telephone companies, the paper said.

Representatives of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox and Sprint declined to comment, the paper said.

Since early last year, as big cable operators rolled out landline phone services, competition between cable and telephone companies has heated up.

Verizon Communications recently started offering television services in a single market, and SBC Communications is expected to begin rolling out television by the end of the year.

Unlike some of the other deals that Sprint has struck with companies allowing them to use its network for cellular service, Sprint's brand name will still be used in this offering, the Journal reported.

The cable operators and Sprint have ambitions to go beyond that. The companies have discussed Sprint selling a cellphone that, when inside a home, would operate using the cable modem line and a wireless connection with Wi-Fi technology.

As part of the deal with Sprint, the cable operators will also have the ability to use a collection of radio spectrum owned by Sprint, the paper said, citing people familiar with the talks.

The spectrum has been the subject of much speculation since Sprint and Nextel Communications merged this year, as it brought together a nearly nationwide collection of unused, valuable airwaves.

That deal would start to allow cable companies to compete with telephone companies on their wireless "3G" offerings, which provides Web access over cellular networks.

However, it is unclear when Sprint is going to build a network to make use of those airwaves -- sometimes referred to as MMDS or BRS spectrum -- and thus when the service from cable companies would be available, the paper reported.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





Cell Phone Market To Exceed 800 Mln Units –Surveys

The world's mobile phone makers are expected to sell more than 800 million units this year, up from earlier estimates of around 775 million handsets, the

world's top cell phone market researchers said on Tuesday.

Booming demand in emerging markets and replacement sales in rich countries pushed third-quarter sales to 209 million units. Global shipments for the first nine months were 566 million handsets ahead of the traditionally strong fourth quarter, said Strategy Analytics.

"We're fairly confident it will exceed the 800 million this year," said analyst Neil Mawston.

Main market research rival Gartner said it would also increase its market forecast in coming days, but declined to give details.

"In any case, it will be higher than 800 million," said analyst Carolina Milanesi.

Last year's sales were around 680 million units, and analysts have been forced to upgrade their market forecasts throughout the year as a result of strong sales, fueled partly by very cheap models that have opened up new customer segments in developing nations who could previously not afford a phone.

Average selling prices per phone have fallen 11 percent to $146 in the third quarter compared with the year-ago period, due to the emphasis on cheaper models and competition.

The cell phone market is on track for $120 billion in total annual wholesale revenues this year, Strategy Analytics said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...S-HANDSETS.xml





Skype Targets Businesses As Growth Accelerates

Internet telephony firm Skype, which is being bought by eBay, reported accelerating subscriber growth on Tuesday and said it is adding a new service that makes

it easier for employees to make all calls over Skype.

Skype is adding 170,000 new subscribers every day to its 61 million person user base, up from 150,000 a day until September, when Skype announced it was to be taken over by eBay for up to $4 billion.

"We definitely, coming out of the summer, have seen an acceleration of subscriber additions," said Saul Klein, vice president for marketing.

"Coming out of the summer it was 140,000 to 150,000. Now it's 170,000 a day," Klein said in a telephone interview.

"eBay is definitely one of the factors," he said, adding that eBay's home base of the United States was just one of the regions from where it saw above-average subscriber growth.

The company has almost doubled its number of registered users in the last six months.

A new service launched on Tuesday, Skype Groups, enables companies to set up Skype accounts for employees -- 30 percent of subscribers already use Skype for business calls.

With the new service, a person in a company can pick up the bill for all Skype users in an organization.

Until now, every Skype user had to individually purchase credits for calls to normal telephone numbers.

Skype calls are free when other Skype users are called over the Internet, but when normal telephone numbers are called Skype charges a few cents per minute because it uses the normal telephony network to deliver the call over the last few miles.

New toolbars for email programs and Internet browsers, introduced last week, allow employees to call their contacts straight from their PC with a few clicks, using Skype.

A survey among 400 subscribers who used Skype Groups in the trial period showed that 63 percent used it for business, abroad, avoiding expensive international calls, and almost half of them used it for free conference calls.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





The VoIP Backlash
Steven Cherry

The convergence of telephony and the Internet is a great thing for consumers. It makes voice- over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) services, such as Vonage, Packet8, and Skype, possible.

In particular, Skype Technologies SA, in London, looms as a dagger poised to cut your phone costs—and your local phone company's profits. With its SkypeOut service, a call anywhere in the world costs about 3 US cents per minute. And when the recipient is also a Skype user, the call is absolutely free.

In some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, regulations protect a phone company's revenues, prohibiting customers from saving money by making phone calls using any service other than the national carrier, Saudi Telecom, based in Riyadh. Skype users there have gleefully flouted those regulations, paying cheap local tariffs to access the Internet and use it for their calls, instead of directly using Saudi Telecom's expensive long-distance and international calling services.

Although these Skype calls travel along Saudi Telecom's network, the national carrier had been helpless to prevent the practice—VoIP phone calls were just ordinary data packets, indistinguishable from Web and e-mail traffic. Until now.

A seven-year-old Mountain View, Calif., company, Narus Inc., has devised a way for telephone companies to detect data packets belonging to VoIP applications and block the calls. For example, now when someone in Riyadh clicks on Skype's "call" button, Narus's software, installed on the carrier's network, swoops into action. It analyzes the packets flowing across the network, notices what protocols they adhere to, and flags the call as VoIP. In most cases, it can even identify the specific software being used, such as Skype's.

Narus's software can "secure, analyze, monitor, and mediate any traffic in an IP network," says Antonio Nucci, the company's chief technology officer. By "mediate" he means block, or otherwise interfere with, data packets as they travel through the network in real time.

Another of Narus's Skype-blocking customers is Giza Systems, a consulting company that specializes in information technologies. Giza, which is based in Cairo, Egypt, installed Narus's software on the network of a Middle Eastern carrier in the spring. Nucci wouldn't say which one, but presumably it is Telecom Egypt, the national phone company. Narus already has a close relationship with the carrier, having written the software for its billing system.

The desire to block or charge for VoIP phone calls extends far beyond the Middle East. According to Jay Thomas, Narus's vice president of product marketing, it can be found in South America, Asia, and Europe. International communications giant Vodafone recently announced a plan to block VoIP calls in Germany, Thomas says. A French wireless carrier, SFR, has announced a similar plan for France.

Nor is it just Skype that's at risk. Most international telephone calling cards also use VoIP technology.

In the United States and many other countries, a phone company's common carrier status prevents it from blocking potentially competitive services.

"But there's nothing that keeps a carrier in the United States from introducing jitter, so the quality of the conversation isn't good," Thomas says. "So the user will either pay for the carrier's voice-over-Internet application, which brings revenue to the carrier, or pay the carrier for a premium service that allows Skype use to continue. You can deteriorate the service, introduce latency [audible delays in hearing the other end of the line], and also offer a premium to improve it."

U.S. broadband-cable companies are considered information services, which by law gives them the right to block VoIP calls. Comcast Corp., in Philadelphia, the country's largest cable company, is already a Narus customer; Thomas declined to say whether Comcast uses the VoIP-blocking capabilities.

In August, a Federal Communications Commission ruling gave phone companies the same latitude for DSL.

Narus's software does far more than just frustrate Skype users. It can also diagnose, and react to, denial-of-service attacks and dangerous viruses and worms as they wiggle through a network. It makes possible digital wiretaps, a capability that carriers are required by law to have.

However, these positive applications for Narus's software may not be enough to make Internet users warm to its use. "Protecting its network is a legitimate thing for a carrier to do," says Alex Curtis, government affairs manager for Public Knowledge, a consumer-interest advocacy group in Washington, D.C. "But it's another thing for a Comcast to charge more if I use my own TiVo instead of the personal video recorder they provide, or for Time Warner, which owns CNN, to charge a premium if I want to watch Fox News on my computer."

Public Knowledge advocates a set of principles of "network neutrality." One is open attachment—the right to connect that TiVo, or any Internet-enabled hardware, to a network. Another is a right of openness to all application developers, such as Skype, and information providers. "Consumers have come to expect a lot from the Internet —to be able to get to any site, for example, or any service, like VoIP," Curtis says. "Without Net neutrality, that goes out the window."

Such concerns used to be largely academic, because carriers had no way of restricting the activities of their customers anyway. Software such as Narus's, with its ability to do what the company euphemistically calls "content-based billing," puts the issue front and center.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org.nyud.net:8090/oct05/1846