Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 13th, ’06

[JackSpratts]

"P2P sharing has become a helpful tool for us." – Steven Page


"The acoustics in a trailer are terrific. It was unbelievable. ... It was one of the best times that we've had since I was a senator." – Barack Obama, D-IL


"The government's interest in learning who the whistle-blowers were in a case that's finished is less important, than the ability of journalists to protect their confidential sources." – Eve Burton


"Men will do the same stupid thing over and over again and be happy." – Will Wright


"I feel like Apple beat me up and stole my lunch money." – Phil88


"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world." – Surveillance Expert


"Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with Al Qaeda?" – Senator Patrick J. Leahy, D-VT


"We better all hope nothing happens to Arlen Specter, the Republican head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, because he might be all that is standing between us and a full-blown dictatorship in this country." – Jack Cafferty


"It's our government, our government! It's not one party's government, it's America's government!" – Senator Patrick J. Leahy, D-VT


"He only appears to record moments of great change and enormous upheaval. His presence now does not bode well." – Doctor Strange
































What’s the Story

Louis B. Mayer, the legendary manager of the movie studio that bore his name, grew increasingly frustrated with employees who put more and more energy into technique and style and less and less into basic plot and character development. While a proponent of showy technologies like five channel stereo (Just put a speaker where you want the sound!), color film and widescreen lenses, he always believed the story came first. It wasn't easy convincing younger filmmakers seduced by new machinery, but his "Tell me a story!" rants were famous around the halls of the MGM executive suites.

The recording industry fell into the same trap a few decades ago. By the 1960s recording technologies had progressed such that most listeners were unable to tell recorded from live so it was apparent that fi was about as high as it would ever need to be. Unfortunately the record business didn't have its own Louis Mayer to guide it, and being addicted to using increasing advances in recording technology to market albums, it veered off into the nether-world of hyper-fi with dubious processors like the notorious Aphex Aural Exiter, used infamously to produce both Elton John's and America’s mid-seventies greatest hits packages, rendering them into shiny saccharine fields of synthetic chaff. Each guitar pluck, each note, each everything isolated and surrounded by it’s own artificial reality field, where it seemed a listener might hear the artist’s intent in every motion. Startling to say the least and initially breathlessly seductive, but then saddening when one realized it was all just an illusion, an image created by machine to sell more product by shamelessly manipulating the buyer’s emotions. At least the old albums were still around for people to enjoy, not so for the original works increasingly being released with this "new and improved" plasticized sound.

The punkers and the party bands with their minimalist approach to audio production and jumpy three-minute songs were one reaction to the creeping bloat and artificiality of corporate rock. Whatever CBS did (Journey, REO Speedwagon etc) punkers and partiers did the opposite, creating a movement both musical and political that continues today. One up and coming band in that anti-corporate faction was the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

It’s no accident that .avis and .mp3s are popular today. Given a choice consumers will sacrifice a glimmer of surface gloss for the deeper story. Not to say Lossless codecs won't become popular too, but only as they serve to bring listeners closer to the original recordings emotional intent, and not as substitutes for real feelings, unlike the artificial variety oozing out of slick digital signal processors.

While I appreciate any bands efforts at capturing the true sonics of their performance, if it takes a year and a half to "engineer" an album there is probably something missing from the songs to begin with, and groups like the RHCP know better than most that no amount studio post-processing will ever fix that problem (Dark Side of the Moon was recorded in less than half that time for instance). It comes then as a sad surprise that the Chilli Peppers, once celebrated for their hedonistic approach to peppy party songs is now huffily denouncing swappers for passing out less than pristine copies of their latest self-described sacred opus. The Chilli Peppers? Sacred? Apparently so. But seven years after Napster one would suppose a band with their street smarts would have figured out a way to use the internet to their advantage instead of getting sandbagged by it. So we’re led to believe they’ve been caught unaware by a common leak, and it justifies hostility towards their biggest fans. Well those fans are guilty of nothing more than a curiosity so burning it’s intense enough to disregard whatever sterling sonic attributes the secondhand files might lack, and that’s no crime. Most musicians would kill for that kind of adulation. This band’s hyperbolic anti-filesharing rhetoric rings hollow to these ears.















Enjoy,

Jack


















May 13th, ’06






NSA Has Massive U.S. Call Database

Creating a record of every call ever made inside this country
Leslie Cauley

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the sources said. The program is aimed at identifying and tracking suspected terrorists, they said.

The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. In that post, Hayden would have overseen the agency's domestic call- tracking program. Hayden declined to comment about the program.

The NSA's domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA's efforts to create a national call database.

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. "In other words," Bush explained, "one end of the communication must be outside the United States."

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.

Don Weber, a senior spokesman for the NSA, declined to discuss the agency's operations. "Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment on actual or alleged operational issues; therefore, we have no information to provide," he said. "However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities seriously and operates within the law."

The White House would not discuss the domestic call-tracking program. "There is no domestic surveillance without court approval," said Dana Perino, deputy press secretary, referring to actual eavesdropping.

She added that all national intelligence activities undertaken by the federal government "are lawful, necessary and required for the pursuit of al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorists." All government-sponsored intelligence activities "are carefully reviewed and monitored," Perino said. She also noted that "all appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on the intelligence efforts of the United States."

The government is collecting "external" data on domestic phone calls but is not intercepting "internals," a term for the actual content of the communication, according to a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the program. This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it's been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for "social network analysis," the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together.

Carriers uniquely positioned

AT&T recently merged with SBC and kept the AT&T name. Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T are the nation's three biggest telecommunications companies; they provide local and wireless phone service to more than 200 million customers.

The three carriers control vast networks with the latest communications technologies. They provide an array of services: local and long-distance calling, wireless and high-speed broadband, including video. Their direct access to millions of homes and businesses has them uniquely positioned to help the government keep tabs on the calling habits of Americans.

Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.

Qwest's refusal to participate has left the NSA with a hole in its database. Based in Denver, Qwest provides local phone service to 14 million customers in 14 states in the West and Northwest. But AT&T and Verizon also provide some services — primarily long-distance and wireless — to people who live in Qwest's region. Therefore, they can provide the NSA with at least some access in that area.

Created by President Truman in 1952, during the Korean War, the NSA is charged with protecting the United States from foreign security threats. The agency was considered so secret that for years the government refused to even confirm its existence. Government insiders used to joke that NSA stood for "No Such Agency."

In 1975, a congressional investigation revealed that the NSA had been intercepting, without warrants, international communications for more than 20 years at the behest of the CIA and other agencies. The spy campaign, code-named "Shamrock," led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was designed to protect Americans from illegal eavesdropping.

Enacted in 1978, FISA lays out procedures that the U.S. government must follow to conduct electronic surveillance and physical searches of people believed to be engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States. A special court, which has 11 members, is responsible for adjudicating requests under FISA.

Over the years, NSA code-cracking techniques have continued to improve along with technology. The agency today is considered expert in the practice of "data mining" — sifting through reams of information in search of patterns. Data mining is just one of many tools NSA analysts and mathematicians use to crack codes and track international communications.

Paul Butler, a former U.S. prosecutor who specialized in terrorism crimes, said FISA approval generally isn't necessary for government data-mining operations. "FISA does not prohibit the government from doing data mining," said Butler, now a partner with the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C.

The caveat, he said, is that "personal identifiers" — such as names, Social Security numbers and street addresses — can't be included as part of the search. "That requires an additional level of probable cause," he said.

The usefulness of the NSA's domestic phone-call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear. Also unclear is whether the database has been used for other purposes.

The NSA's domestic program raises legal questions. Historically, AT&T and the regional phone companies have required law enforcement agencies to present a court order before they would even consider turning over a customer's calling data. Part of that owed to the personality of the old Bell Telephone System, out of which those companies grew.

Ma Bell's bedrock principle — protection of the customer — guided the company for decades, said Gene Kimmelman, senior public policy director of Consumers Union. "No court order, no customer information — period. That's how it was for decades," he said.

The concern for the customer was also based on law: Under Section 222 of the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, telephone companies are prohibited from giving out information regarding their customers' calling habits: whom a person calls, how often and what routes those calls take to reach their final destination. Inbound calls, as well as wireless calls, also are covered.

The financial penalties for violating Section 222, one of many privacy reinforcements that have been added to the law over the years, can be stiff. The Federal Communications Commission, the nation's top telecommunications regulatory agency, can levy fines of up to $130,000 per day per violation, with a cap of $1.325 million per violation. The FCC has no hard definition of "violation." In practice, that means a single "violation" could cover one customer or 1 million.

In the case of the NSA's international call-tracking program, Bush signed an executive order allowing the NSA to engage in eavesdropping without a warrant. The president and his representatives have since argued that an executive order was sufficient for the agency to proceed. Some civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, disagree.

Companies approached

The NSA's domestic program began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the sources. Right around that time, they said, NSA representatives approached the nation's biggest telecommunications companies. The agency made an urgent pitch: National security is at risk, and we need your help to protect the country from attacks.

The agency told the companies that it wanted them to turn over their "call-detail records," a complete listing of the calling histories of their millions of customers. In addition, the NSA wanted the carriers to provide updates, which would enable the agency to keep tabs on the nation's calling habits.

The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA. So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg.

With that, the NSA's domestic program began in earnest.

AT&T, when asked about the program, replied with a comment prepared for USA TODAY: "We do not comment on matters of national security, except to say that we only assist law enforcement and government agencies charged with protecting national security in strict accordance with the law."

In another prepared comment, BellSouth said: "BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority."

Verizon, the USA's No. 2 telecommunications company behind AT&T, gave this statement: "We do not comment on national security matters, we act in full compliance with the law and we are committed to safeguarding our customers' privacy."

Qwest spokesman Robert Charlton said: "We can't talk about this. It's a classified situation."

In December, The New York Times revealed that Bush had authorized the NSA to wiretap, without warrants, international phone calls and e-mails that travel to or from the USA. The following month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T. The lawsuit accuses the company of helping the NSA spy on U.S. phone customers.

Last month, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales alluded to that possibility. Appearing at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Gonzales was asked whether he thought the White House has the legal authority to monitor domestic traffic without a warrant. Gonzales' reply: "I wouldn't rule it out." His comment marked the first time a Bush appointee publicly asserted that the White House might have that authority.

Similarities in programs

The domestic and international call-tracking programs have things in common, according to the sources. Both are being conducted without warrants and without the approval of the FISA court. The Bush administration has argued that FISA's procedures are too slow in some cases. Officials, including Gonzales, also make the case that the USA Patriot Act gives them broad authority to protect the safety of the nation's citizens.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., would not confirm the existence of the program. In a statement, he said, "I can say generally, however, that our subcommittee has been fully briefed on all aspects of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. ... I remain convinced that the program authorized by the president is lawful and absolutely necessary to protect this nation from future attacks."

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., declined to comment.

One company differs

One major telecommunications company declined to participate in the program: Qwest.

According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest's CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA's assertion that Qwest didn't need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers' information and how that information might be used.

Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as "product" in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.

Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest's patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest's refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

In June 2002, Nacchio resigned amid allegations that he had misled investors about Qwest's financial health. But Qwest's legal questions about the NSA request remained.

Unable to reach agreement, Nacchio's successor, Richard Notebaert, finally pulled the plug on the NSA talks in late 2004, the sources said.

Contributing: John Diamond
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...5-10-nsa_x.htm





Bush Says U.S. Spying Is Not Widespread
John O'Neil

President Bush today denied that the government is "mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans," as Democrats expressed outrage over a news report describing a National Security Agency program that has collected vast amounts of telephone records.

The article, in USA Today, said that the agency did not listen to the calls, but secretly obtained information on numbers dialed by "tens of millions of Americans" and used it for "data mining" — computer analysis of large amounts of information for clues or patterns to terrorist activity.

Making a hastily scheduled appearance in the White House, Mr. Bush did not directly address the collection of phone records, except to say that "new claims" had been raised about surveillance. He said all intelligence work was conducted "within the law" and that domestic conversations were not listened to without a court warrant.

"The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities," he said. "Our efforts are focused on Al Qaeda and their known associates."

In the Senate, Democrats denounced the program, citing it as evidence that Congress had failed to carry out its duty to make sure that the intelligence activities did not violate civil rights.

And Senator Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he would call executives of AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon "to see if we can learn some of the underlying facts."

He said he would question them about "what we can't find out from the Department of Justice or other administration officials."

The article named those three companies as cooperating with the security agency's request; it said that Qwest had refused to provide the information. AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon all issued statements declaring that they have always acted within the law.

"BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information without proper legal authority," said a company spokesman, Jeff Battcher.

"AT&T has a long history of vigorously protecting customer privacy," said a spokesman, Selim Bingol. "If and when AT&T is asked to help, we do so strictly within the law and under the most stringent conditions."

And Robert Verettoni, a Verizon spokesman, said, "We do not comment on national security matters, we act in full compliance with the law and we are committed to safeguarding our customers' privacy."

The New York Times reported last December that the agency had gathered data from phone and e-mail traffic with the cooperation of several major telecommunications companies.

But Democrats reacted angrily to the USA Today article and its description of the program's vast size, including an assertion by one unnamed source that its goal was the creation of a database of every phone call ever made within the United States' borders.

"Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with Al Qaeda?" Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the committee's ranking minority member, asked angrily.

Like Mr. Specter, Mr. Leahy made a link between the new charge and the administration's refusal to answer the many of the committee's questions about the security agency's warrantless wiretaps of calls between the United States and overseas in which one person is suspected of terrorist ties.

"It's our government, our government!" he said, turning red in the face and waving a copy of USA Today. "It's not one party's government, it's America's government!"

Other Democrats demanded that the administration officials, including Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, be subpoenaed to testify under oath about both programs.

And they made clear that they thought the new surveillance issue would complicate the nomination of Gen. Michael V. Hayden, a former head of the security agency, to be the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

"I want to ask General Hayden about these programs before we move forward with his nomination, which I was inclined to be supportive of, if he showed the requisite independence," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat and member of the Judiciary Committee.

Republicans urged caution before drawing any conclusions based on the article, and noted that it described the program as collecting information only about phone numbers, not about the contents of conversations.

"It's not a wiretapping program, it's simply a compilation, according to the report here, of numbers that phone companies maintain," said Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who is also on the judiciary panel.

He compared it to "mail covers" and "pen registers," techniques long used by law-enforcement authorities to record the addresses on letters or calls made by individuals under investigation. No warrant is needed for such efforts, but the government must certify with a court that the information likely to be obtained is relevant to an ongoing investigation.

But at least one prominent Republican expressed reservations. "I am concerned about what I read with regard to N.S.A. databases of phone calls," Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House majority leader, told The Associated Press.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is a member of the Intelligence Committee as well as the Judiciary Committee, appeared to confirm at least the gist of the article, while stressing that what was under discussion was not wiretapping. "It's fair to say that what is in the news this morning is not content collection," she said.

Even so, she warned, "I happen to believe that we are on our way to a major Constitutional confrontation on the Fourth Amendment guarantees over unreasonable search and seizure."

Senator Russell D. Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who is also on both the judiciary and intelligence panels, expressed dismay over what he termed the administration's "arrogance and abuse of power." He said the United States can fight terrorism and still protect privacy, "but only if we have a president who believes in these principles."

The Times article disclosing the data mining program last December quoted officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program as saying the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

In the USA Today article, the White House defended its overall eavesdropping program and said no domestic surveillance is conducted without court approval.

"The intelligence activities undertaken by the United States government are lawful, necessary and required to protect Americans from terrorist attacks," said Dana Perino, the deputy White House press secretary, who added that appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on intelligence activities.

The anger among committee members carried over to a number of other related developments. Senator Specter said he was sending a letter to the Justice Department in response to a news report that an investigation by the Justice Department's ethics office into the lawyers who gave approval to the domestic surveillance program was abandoned because the investigators were refused the necessary security clearances.

"It's sort of incomprehensible that that was done," Senator Specter said, adding that he was asking that the clearances be granted so the review could continue.

Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, called the decision "clear evidence of a cover-up within this administration."

Mr. Specter also said that he "had some indication" that Mr. Ashcroft and James Comey, a former deputy Attorney General, had some knowledge about the domestic surveillance program, but said he didn't think it would be "fruitful" to subpoena them to testify.

And Mr. Specter said that he believed he had the agreement of all 10 Republicans on the committee for a bill he has proposed that would ask the special court that handles requests for warrants on foreign intelligence to rule on the Constitutionality of the domestic surveillance program.

But several Democrats indicated that they were not likely to support the bill in the absence of more information about the surveillance the government is conducting in general.

"How can we approve this without knowing much more?" asked Mr. Durbin.

David Stout contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/11/wa... ner=homepage



Wolf Blitzer, CNN Anchor: Let's get some words of wisdom from Jack Cafferty. He's in New York right now -- Jack.

Jack Cafferty, CNN: I don't know about wisdom, but you'll get a little outrage. We better all hope nothing happens to Arlen Specter, the Republican head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, because he might be all that is standing between us and a full-blown dictatorship in this country.

He's vowed to question these phone company executives about volunteering to provide the government with my telephone records and yours and tens of millions of other Americans. Shortly after 9/11, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth began providing the super-secret NSA with information on phone calls of millions of our citizens. All part of the war on terror, President Bush says.

Why don't you go find Osama bin Laden and seal the country's borders and start inspecting the containers that come into our ports? The president rushed out this morning in the wake of this front page story in "USA Today" and declared the government is doing nothing wrong and all this is just fine.

Is it? Is it legal? Then why did the Justice Department suddenly drop its investigation of the warrantless spying on citizens? Because the NSA said Justice Department lawyers didn't have the necessary security clearance to do the investigation.

Read that sentence again. A secret government agency has told our Justice Department that it's not allowed to investigate it. And the Justice Department just says, OK, and drops the whole thing. We're in some serious trouble here, boys and girls.

Here's the question: Does it concern you that your phone company may be voluntarily providing your phone records to the government without your knowledge or your permission? If it doesn't, it sure as hell ought to. E-mail us your thoughts at caffertyfile@CNN.com or go to CNN.com/caffertyfile -- Wolf.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIP...itroom.01.html





With Access Denied, Justice Department Drops Spying Investigation
Scott Shane

An investigation by the Justice Department ethics office into the conduct of department lawyers who approved the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program has been closed because investigators were denied security clearances, according to a letter sent to Congress on Wednesday.

The head of the department's Office of Professional Responsibility, H. Marshall Jarrett, wrote in the letter to Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, Democrat of New York, that "we have been unable to make meaningful progress in our investigation because O.P.R. has been denied security clearances for access to information about the N.S.A. program."

Mr. Jarrett said his office had requested clearances since January, when it began an investigation, and was told on Tuesday that they had been denied. "Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation," the letter said.

Mr. Hinchey said the denial of clearances was "hard to believe" and compounded what he called a violation of the law by the program itself, which eavesdrops without court warrants on people in the United States suspected of ties to Al Qaeda.

Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said that the N.S.A. program was "highly classified and exceptionally sensitive" and that "only those involved in national security with a specific need to know are provided details about this classified program." He said the legality of the eavesdropping program had been reviewed by other Justice Department offices and by the N.S.A. inspector general.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/11/wa.../11secure.html





Beatles Lose Suit Against Apple Computers
Jennifer Quinn

Apple Computer Inc. is entitled to use the apple logo on its iTunes Music Store, a judge ruled Monday, rejecting a suit filed by Apple Corps Ltd., the guardian of The Beatles' commercial interests.

Apple Corps, which claimed that the computer company had broken a 1991 agreement in which each side agreed not to enter into the other's field of business, said it would appeal.

Judge Edward Mann of Britain's High Court ruled that Apple Computer used the fruit logo in association with the store, not the music, and thus did not breach the agreement.

"I conclude that the use of the apple logo ... does not suggest a relevant connection with the creative work," Mann said in his written judgment. "I think that the use of the apple logo is a fair and reasonable use of the mark in connection with the service, which does not go further and unfairly or unreasonably suggest an additional association with the creative works themselves."

Though Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs said he was "glad to put this disagreement behind us," the case appears far from over. Neil Aspinall, the manager of Apple Corps, said his company would immediately appeal.

"We felt that during the course of the trial we clearly demonstrated just how extensively Apple Computer has broken the agreement," Aspinall said in a statement.

Apple Computer has sold more than 1 billion songs through the iTunes Music Store, which is available throughout Europe as well as in the United States, Canada, Australia and Japan. Though there are more than 3 million tracks available for purchase in the U.S. - and 2 million in Britain - there are no Beatles' songs listed. The band's catalog is not available on iTunes.

In his brief statement, Jobs said he hoped the ruling would help rectify that situation: "We have always loved the Beatles, and hopefully we can now work together to get them on the iTunes Music Store."

Apple Corps attorney Nick Valner says the 1991 agreement between the two companies should have prevented any more legal action.

Lawyers for Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple Computer had argued that the company was conducting its business legally and consumers are smart enough to tell the difference between the logos. Apple Corps uses a shiny green apple as its logo, while Apple Computer has a cartoon-like apple with a neat bite taken out.

Lawyers for each side tussled during the hearing over advertisements for iTunes featuring musical acts U2, Eminem and Coldplay, using the logo. The judge confessed early on that he owned an iPod.

The 1991 agreement ended previous lengthy litigation over the logo. Apple Computer told the court that it paid the Fab Four's company $26.5 million as part of the 1991 out-of-court settlement, and in return had received "a considerably expanded field of use." The terms of the deal were kept confidential at the time.

Mann refused Apple Computer's application for an immediate interim payment of 1.5 million pounds ($2.8 million) from Apple Corps toward its legal costs, pending further hearings. Apple Corps faces a similar bill for its own legal expenses.

While the case may have seemed glamorous because of the litigants, it really came down to the interpretation of a contract - the 1991 agreement - said Jonathan Riley, an intellectual property lawyer with London firm Lawrence Graham.

"It was watched with interest, but also some distance, because I don't think it's hugely significant for either the computer industry or the music industry," he said.

Apple Corps was started by the Beatles in 1968 and is still owned by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, the widow of John Lennon and the estate of George Harrison. Apple Computer was formed in 1976, when college dropouts Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak filed partnership papers on April Fools' Day.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFA ULT





Blubster, Piolet, now this

Manolito Strikes Back
Thomas Mennecke

Everything is about BitTorrent these days. It’s taken over as the leading file-sharing network, has become synonymous with obtaining information over the Internet, and has nearly consolidated P2P development under one roof. Is there any hope for the P2P simpleton?

There is, and comes as the rejuvenation of the Manolito P2P (MP2P) network.

The MP2P network is the work of Pablo Soto and his associated Optisoft company in P2P friendly Spain. Based loosely on the Gnutella network, Pablo created one of the most successful file-sharing networks. During its early days, the MP2P was spearheaded by the Blubster client and became popular under the self-contained 1.2.3 version.

Soon after its release in the summer of 2001, Blubster immediately began mustering an impressive, albeit modest, user base. With the collapse of Napster imminent and Gnutella not quite mature enough to accommodate the masses, the MP2P network saw its network grow to over 3,000 users by February 2002. At the time, its competition was the rapidly expanding FastTrack network with 500,000 users, iMesh with 165,000, eDonkey2000 with just over 100,000 and Gnutella with a population of approximately 60,000 simultaneous users.

Yet these powerhouse networks were out of reach for the fledgling MP2P network. More humble competition took the form of the now defunct SongSpy and FileNavigator networks. MP2P would have significant work ahead to remain competitive, as SongSpy and FileNavigator boasted populations of over 8,000 users.

However the relatively small MP2P network maintained one distinct advantage – decentralization. Before the MGM vs. Grokster decision, the music industry successfully negated P2P networks by forcing the shutdown of their centralized indexing servers. The tactic worked against Napster, Scour Exchange and AudioGalaxy. Just about any network that resembled the Napster or Scour architecture quickly fell, including SongSpy and FileNavigator.

The inability of these networks to adapt to the rapidly changing P2P world facilitated their demise. While FileNavigator was already fading by early 2002, the promising SongSpy P2P community was struck down by mid summer and absorbed by IMG Entertainment on July 31, 2002. The new owners of SongSpy attempted to reintroduce the application as a legitimate resource, however this never materialized.

With most of the smaller file-sharing networks now removed, MP2P now had the distinction of being the leading mediocre P2P network. Although middling at best, the lack of small scale competition gave MP2P the opportunity to reveal its potential. This mediocrity would slowly dissolve into credibility, as by September 2002 M2P was topping 20,000 simultaneous users. By November MP2P was topping 50,000 simultaneous users. With a burgeoning community poised to strike at the major networks, it seemed nothing would stop this network from reaching its potential – perhaps with the exception of internal politics.

The shareholders of this community, Optisoft; and Pablo Soto, the lone developer, saw different visions for Blubster. The inability for the two sides to reconcile their visions led to Pablo’s departure in late 2002. The exact details of this split are unclear, however it’s widely believed Optisoft was pushing for a more commercialized product, while Pablo was looking to keep such commercialism to a minimum. Optisoft retained the right to distribute Blubster by purchasing the licensing rights to the MP2P technology. Out of the Optisoft picture yet still in control of the underlying technology, Pablo went on to found Piolet (pronounced Pee-oh-lay) on January 3, 2003.

The shakeup appeared to have little effect on the already established network. Piolet was readily accepted as the successor to Blubster and by the end of January 2003 the MP2P network was topping 100,000 simultaneous users. With over 200,000 by mid-2003, it yet again seemed nothing would stop this network. It survived the shakeup of Optisoft and the rebranding of Blubster – but not WinMX syndrome.

Like many file-sharing applications and networks, Piolet and the MP2P network appeared to spiral into self-destruct during its peak. The last version, 1.05, was released in March 2003. The MP2P community would not see another update until August 2004. With over a year between updates and absolutely no news in 2005, MP2P was largely considered dead despite a reunification with Optisoft. It continued to function reasonably well into late 2004 and early 2005, however rapid advancements with Gnutella and BitTorrent rendered MP2P nearly irrelevant.

However MP2P wasn’t neglected because of a lack of interest. Rather, personal health problems in 2005 prevented Pablo from concentrating on his nearly five year old project. Healthy again in 2006, Pablo has reinvigorated the MP2P project. MP2P fans were surprised this week to see the Piolet.com homepage renovated, with the release of a new product: Manolito.

Currently, the Manolito client contains no appreciable differences from the latest version of Piolet. Many changes are coming however, as Pablo now has a team of developers working on the project with him. In addition, the Manolito homepage promises “anonymity” for the end user – details of which should be released by the development team soon.

The new Manolito client maintains many of the attributes of its predecessor, such as being free from spyware and adware – an attribute that will maintain throughout its future. Like LimeWire or BearShare, there is the standard free version and the more “enabled” $19.99 version.

However the current Manolio homepage lacks the community feel of the old Blubster.com. Although more utilitarian in appearance than the spit and polish Manolito.com, it laid an excellent foundation for the MP2P community to interact, grow and prosper. Manolito shows promise, yet if it wishes to fulfill its never obtained potential, it needs to reestablish this community architecture.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1182





Warner To Start Movie Downloads
Peter Bowes

Warner Brothers is to start selling film downloads via the internet using the same technology once blamed for helping people swap illegal copies.

The Hollywood studio has reached a deal with the web company Bit Torrent, which uses peer-to-peer technology to allow the quick distribution of large files.

Warner says users will be able to buy downloads of films and TV shows on the same day they become available on DVD.

Pricing for a feature film will be about the same as the DVD release.

The cost of a television show could be as low as a dollar.

Rivals to follow?

Warner added that whether a TV show or feature film, it will only play on the initial computer used to make the download.

The downloads will not therefore work on other PCs or standard DVD players.

Other Hollywood studios are now likely to launch similar services.

They believe movie fans will prefer to pay a reasonable price for a legal downloaded movie rather than risk illegally swapping a computer file that could contain viruses or be a poor quality copy of a film.

Peer-to-peer connections enable people to quickly swap files between their computers without having to go via an internet server.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ss/4753435.stm





Click Fraud Concerns Hound Google
Michael Liedtke

John Thys still hasn't figured out how much his company has paid Google Inc. for bogus sales referrals caused by "click fraud" - a sham aimed at a perceived weakness in the Internet search leader's lucrative advertising network.

But Thys says he has uncovered enough of it to conclude that Google is trying to shortchange his company and thousands of other advertisers by offering refunds totaling $60 million to settle a lawsuit.

"It's almost like an insult that they expect us to take this token money," said Thys, director of Internet marketing for Radiator.com.

Google also expects to pay $30 million to the lawyers who settled the case on behalf of advertisers, raising the settlement's total value to as high as $90 million. Still, that's a fraction of the more than $10 billion in cash held by the Mountain View, Calif.-based search company.

An Arkansas judge is expected to consider the proposed class-action settlement in late July.

The refunds, which will be provided in the form of advertising credits, are meant to compensate Google's customers for undetected click fraud, which contributed to the $13.3 billion in ad revenue that has poured into the company since 2001.

Google's offer works out to a $4.50 refund on every $1,000 spent in its vast advertising network over the past 4 1/4 years.

Meanwhile, independent studies assert that anywhere from $100 to $400 of every $1,000 stems from click fraud. If those estimates prove correct, Google might be on the hook for $1 billion to $5 billion in advertising refunds.

Click fraud takes different shapes, but the end result is usually the same: Merchants are billed for fruitless traffic generated by scam artists and mischief makers who repeatedly click on an advertiser's Web link with no intention of buying anything.

Based on a monthlong analysis of the traffic that Google ads referred to Radiators.com, Thys suspects click fraud may have accounted for 35 percent of the Web site's $20,000 ad bill.

After reviewing Thys' evidence, Google said its internal safeguards had spotted the suspicious activity as it occurred and never billed Radiators.com for fraudulent clicks. But Thys said the search engine didn't provide him with any data to back up its findings in an e-mail signed simply by "Ray" from Google's click quality team.

Google maintains its class-action settlement represents a fair offer that underscores how well it has shielded advertisers from the costs of click fraud.

The class-action settlement of the Arkansas lawsuit will likely test advertisers' faith in Google. The company is supposed to send out notices of the settlement later this month, giving advertisers until late June to reject or protest the refund offer. Radiators.com already has decided to reject the offer.

If the entire deal is rejected, lawyers then go back to the negotiating table; individual advertisers can also declare they won't participate, freeing them to file their own lawsuits seeking better deals or join a separate one pending in California.

Miller County Circuit Court Judge Joe Griffin is scheduled to decide whether to approve the settlement in a two-day hearing beginning July 24.

Meanwhile, Yahoo Inc. - owner of the Internet's second-largest advertising network - continues to fight similar click fraud allegations in the same Arkansas court as well as a federal court in California. A click-fraud lawsuit filed against Google in that same federal court has been suspended while its Arkansas settlement is reviewed.

The Google settlement, announced in early March, already has focused more attention on click fraud.

The shady activity produces revenue for Google, Yahoo and a long list of Web sites that display the ads because the clicks trigger sales commissions even if a referral doesn't produce a sale.

Suspected motives vary. Sometimes Web merchants try to deplete a rival's advertising budget. In other instances, the owners of small Web sites participating in the marketing networks run by Google and Yahoo are believed to click on ads to generate more commissions for themselves.

Complicating the click fraud issue even further, search engine advertising isn't subjected to independent auditing like the advertising done in newspapers, magazines and broadcast media.

In search advertising, Web site owners sign contracts obligating them to pay for all valid clicks - and the search engine has discretion over what is valid.

Google is examining ways to make its fraud-fighting efforts more transparent without revealing crucial information that might help swindlers elude detection, said Shuman Ghosemajumder, the company's product manager for trust and safety.

Outside help also may be on the way.

The class-action settlement requires a report from a yet-undisclosed independent expert to verify that Google has made reasonable efforts to weed out click fraud.

Separately, Minneapolis-based Fair Isaac Co. is studying the issue, drawing on its years of helping lenders fight fraud.

San Antonio-based Click Forensics Inc. recently set up a free service that intends to issue quarterly reports on the frequency of click fraud, compiling information from more than 1,000 advertisers.

The index's initial findings, released in late April, estimated Google and Yahoo suffered a click fraud rate of 12 percent, translating to more than $1.5 billion of Google's ad revenue.

Given those findings, the settlement amount in the Arkansas class action "was very surprising to us," said Tom Cuthbert, Click Forensics' chief executive. "If I were an advertiser, I would take great care in studying that settlement."

Attorneys suing Google in the California case say they will do everything possible to persuade advertisers to reject the Arkansas settlement.

"Google's motto is 'do no evil,' but it's not following its own advice by entering into this kind of settlement," lawyer Brian Kabateck said.

If enough advertisers balk, it might derail the deal. Google has the right to nullify the settlement if advertisers that supplied more than 5 percent of its revenue since 2001 reject the agreement.

Google spokesman Barry Schnitt said Kabateck and his colleagues are trying to rally opposition to the Arkansas settlement so they can revive the California lawsuit in an attempt to drum up more fees for themselves.

Stephen Malouf, a Dallas lawyer who negotiated the Arkansas settlement, doubts advertisers can get a better deal than what Google has offered. "It's easy to take cheap shots now, but what is the alternative and what are the chances of success?"
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Yahoo Is Unleashing a New Way to Turn Ad Clicks Into Ka-Ching
Saul Hansell

When Yahoo finally switches on the new search-advertising software code-named Project Panama this summer, users of its search engine will hardly notice a difference. But if Yahoo's project was worth the two years and tens of millions of dollars it cost — far more money and time than it expected — users will find the text ads adjacent to the main search results just a little more interesting, luring them to click on those ads a little more often.

Those clicks should immediately turn into a lot more cash for Yahoo. It will not say how much. But Jordan Rohan, an analyst for RBC Capital Markets, estimates that if the strategy works, Yahoo will increase search-advertising revenue at least 20 percent right away — about $125 million in the fourth quarter of this year and $600 million next year.

That is a big impact from new software, and it speaks to the complex art and science of running a search engine. When hundreds of thousands of advertisers bid for the attention of hundreds of millions of searchers, little changes can have big results.

It is also a sign of how well Google, Yahoo's rival, has mastered those nuances. Mr. Rohan estimates that Google's ability to draw more advertisers and show the right ads to searchers lets it earn about 40 percent more from every search than Yahoo does.

Yahoo realized that its existing software had limitations shortly after it paid $1.6 billion in 2003 to buy Overture Services, the company that invented search advertising. But its effort to rebuild the software was delayed as it shifted its resources to creating its own Web search engine.

Daniel L. Rosensweig, Yahoo's chief operating officer, says he does not regret putting the search-advertising system behind the main search engine.

"We have been very clear that the goose that laid the golden egg is the audience," he said.

When the company turned its full attention to search-advertising software in late 2004, the task was bigger than it initially expected, partly because Yahoo wanted the system to be able to handle ads with graphics and video eventually, not just text.

But now the software is almost done. Today, Yahoo is releasing the technical specifications so that its customers can prepare for changes that will affect many millions of individual advertisements. At an analyst presentation on May 17, the company will offer more details about the introduction and financial impact of Project Panama.

In the meantime, Yahoo's existing system is straining to keep up with the search market. It is harder for advertisers and their agencies to use than Google's, and it has suffered from a series of embarrassing disruptions, leaving paying customers unable to buy ads. Yahoo also faces emerging competition from Microsoft, which has been developing its own search-advertising system.

"Yahoo has taken a lot of bumps and bruises," said Peter Hershberg, a managing partner of Reprise Media, a New York search-advertising agency. "We would get notification every day that data was not available, and that made it very challenging to manage our campaigns." He added that these problems had been cleared up in recent weeks.

Yahoo says the new system is more stable and is built for much higher volume. It hopes to make the system easier to use, both for small businesses and for giant marketers.

Most important, it is building a far more sophisticated system to determine the order in which it displays advertisements. That is crucial because users have a strong propensity to pick from among the top few ads.

When Overture began as Goto.com, an advertising-only search engine, it introduced what turned out to be two powerful innovations: Customers paid for an advertisement only when users clicked on it; and the price of an ad was set by a computerized auction. Thus, the advertiser that bid the most per click was listed first, and so on.

When Google got into the search-advertising business in 2002, it realized that Goto had made a critical mistake. Its system allowed obscure advertisers to gain a prominent position, even if they were not appealing to users and were unlikely to be clicked on. So Google found a way to predict the popularity of ads in order to put the ones that would bring in the most dollars on top.

Google's models have become quite sophisticated, trying to take into account that different ads may appeal to users in different locations at different times. Indeed, Google asserts that a supercomputer network of 100 machines evaluates more than a million variables in milliseconds to pick which to display each time someone searches.

Yahoo is building a cadre of mathematicians and economists to build similar models. But it acknowledges that it does not yet analyze as many data elements as claimed by Google.

Late last month, there was a clear sense of urgency at the headquarters of what is now called Yahoo Search Marketing in Burbank, Calif., near Los Angeles. Amid a sea of Yahoo's trademark purple cubicles, there were signs with "Panama: Are you ready?" written in big letters.

Under them was a mosaic of color-coded notations, tracking the work of 28 teams in three locations that are building the system. On other walls, more signs coordinated another effort, known as Roosevelt, a series of technological bandages meant to keep the old system running until the new one is ready.

"We are flying an airplane while rebuilding it," said David Henke, whom Yahoo hired last year as group vice president for engineering in the search-advertising group. "This is a bigger project than we expected because we are doing it in parallel with our existing systems. It required additional personnel and expertise."

Still, he said he had the complete support of Terry S. Semel, Yahoo's chief executive, and Susan L. Decker, its cost-conscious chief financial officer. When he asked earlier this year for a "gigantic" amount of money to buy a big portion of the thousands of servers and other machines that Panama requires, the approval came back in six hours.

"They said, 'Go figure what it takes and do it right,' " Mr. Henke said.

Gigantic for Yahoo, however, may well be pipsqueak compared with its free-spending competitors. Google plans to spend at least $1.5 billion this year on servers, networking equipment and the facilities to house them, and it is hiring 1,000 people each quarter, many of them engineers. Microsoft plans to spend $2 billion on search and Internet technology this year.

Ellen Siminoff, a former Yahoo executive who now runs Efficient Frontier, a search-advertising agency in Mountain View, Calif., said Yahoo had to recognize that it was in a technological arms race.

"Yahoo hires a lot of smart people, and they can do this if they want to," she said. "The big issue for them is their willingness to spend and keep up with Google's R.& D."

While the underlying Panama system has a lot of capabilities, the first version will present only a subtle difference from what Google offers. Advertisers will simply enter the keywords they want their ad to appear next to and the maximum price they are willing to pay for a click. The most significant option will be to specify a certain geographic region in which the ads will be shown, a feature Google also offers.

Microsoft, in contrast, has sought to distinguish itself by allowing advertisers to enter bids based on the sex, age and other characteristics of the ad viewer. Even though Yahoo could do the same, it says that for now such an approach is not helpful to advertisers.

"The system is built to handle many variables," said Tim Cadogan, the vice president who runs the business side of Yahoo's Web search operation. "We don't want to go overboard" and confuse customers with too many choices.

Yahoo says the main distinction from Google will be in providing information about how a given ad is displayed. Google is often criticized by advertisers as a black box: they do not really know how a given bid will affect the placement of their ads. Yahoo isn't going to tell advertisers either — as its computers will keep experimenting to get the highest ad revenue.

But as advertisers enter each bid, they will see an estimate of how many clicks they will receive each day. More important, a graph will show how many more clicks they can expect for each increased bid.

"One of the primary complaints we get is users can't explain to their bosses what they could get for spending the next $1,000," said Steve Mitgang, the Yahoo senior vice president who oversaw the development of Project Panama. "Now they can take this to their bosses to justify spending more."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/08/te...y/08yahoo.html





Music Swapping The Old-Fashioned Way
Hiawatha Bray

It may be a crime to swap digital music over the Internet, but there is no law against doing it through the Postal Service. That is the theory behind La La Media, a start-up company that encourages music lovers to trade tunes by mail.

"People just really love La La because it helps them discover so much music," said Bill Nguyen, founder of the company, which is based in Hillsborough, California.

The lala.com Web site charges its members a small fee to barter actual music disks among themselves.

Members publish "have" lists of the music CDs they own. Because so many music lovers copy their CDs to their computers, lala.com provides software that can generate a list of albums on a computer's hard drive.

In addition, users can log into the La La Web site and type in the names of the albums in their collections. Users also create "want" lists of CDs they would like to own. La La members can then search each other's lists. Members also get postage-paid mailing envelopes for shipping CDs.

When a member sees a desired disk, he puts in a request for it. If he or she is willing, the owner of the disk addresses it to the other member and mails it. The recipient pays La La $1, plus 49 cents for postage. There is no annual membership fee. Lala.com gives each member a credit for every disk sent to another member. Members can save credits for later use and use them to trade with any other La La member. Lala.com will not open to the general public until summer.

The music industry has not taken a stand on the legality of Lala.com. But Jim Gibson, director of the Intellectual Property Institute at the University of Richmond Law School, said Lala.com was on the right side of the law.

"It seems to be perfectly legal," Gibson said, for the same reason that retailers can buy and sell used books and CDs. "If you are the owner of a particular physical copy of a CD or a book or anything that's copyrighted, you have the right to dispose of that CD or book any way you wish."

Of course, a La La member could swap away his old CDs while keeping digital copies on his hard drive or portable music player - and that probably would be a violation of copyright law. La La cannot prevent people from doing this, but in a message on the Web site, Nguyen urges customers to delete their digital copies of albums they have traded away. "I ask you to do your part by doing the right thing: remove songs from your iPod or PC if you've agreed to send the CD to another member," he writes.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/...iness/swap.php





New 'Mission' Opens Weaker Than Expected
Sharon Waxman

Paramount Pictures and its leading star, Tom Cruise, failed to live up to expectations this weekend when "Mission: Impossible III" opened to weak numbers at the domestic box office despite a barrage of public appearances by Mr. Cruise to promote the film.

The poor opening followed nearly a year of public mocking of Mr. Cruise, Hollywood's most reliable star and the centerpiece of Paramount's biggest franchise, across the pop culture landscape — by Internet bloggers and late-night comedians and constantly on tabloid covers — after his public, over-the-top wooing of the actress Katie Holmes and his outspoken remarks against psychiatry and antidepressant medications last year.

Opening in 4,054 theaters, "Mission: Impossible III" had estimated ticket sales of $48 million for the weekend, according to Exhibitor Relations, almost $10 million less than the second "Mission: Impossible" movie in 2000, which opened in 385 fewer theaters and at lower ticket prices. Based on market research, the film had been expected to reach about $65 million at the box office.

Many in Hollywood had been watching expectantly to see if the negative publicity surrounding Mr. Cruise would have an effect at the box office, and this weekend — as "Mission: Impossible III" kicked off the film industry's peak summer moviegoing period — it appeared as if it had.

Paramount reported that "Mission: Impossible III" took in $118 million worldwide in 55 countries, doing well in Asia, Latin America and Britain and poorly in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, where there is public opposition to Mr. Cruise's championing of his religion, Scientology.

But Paramount executives said that Mr. Cruise's public image did not hurt the film. "I don't believe that is a factor in how the movie opened," said Rob Moore, Paramount's president for worldwide marketing, distribution and operations. He noted that the opening domestic figure was close to that of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" last summer, which starred Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, and said the "Mission" franchise was struggling against the fact that it had been six years since the previous installment.

Others disagreed, noting that Mr. Cruise personally spearheaded the marketing campaign. He visited four countries in rapid succession ahead of the opening — going to Rome, Paris, London and Mexico City — and on Friday attended four different premieres in Manhattan alone, traveling by helicopter, fire truck, subway and boat in a promotional blitz across the city.

"I can't fault the marketing campaign; I can't fault the trailers," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, which tracks the box office, adding that the film, directed by J. J. Abrams, received strong reviews. "The only X factor here is the Tom Cruise factor."

The derision of Mr. Cruise began last spring when he embarked on his relationship with Ms. Holmes just as both actors were preparing to release big-budget movies, "War of the Worlds" for Mr. Cruise and "Batman Begins" for Ms. Holmes. The news media and fans expressed skepticism at the public nature of the romance, which intensified even as the formerly private Mr. Cruise increasingly involved Scientology in his business affairs.

Since then, Mr. Cruise has evolved into a kind of cultural punch line. In "Scary Movie 4," which is still in theaters, one scene is a parody of Mr. Cruise's couch-jumping appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" last May.

Several reviews of "Mission: Impossible 3" pointed out that Mr. Cruise's public persona had become a distraction when watching him on the big screen. "It's impossible to watch 'M:I-3' without asking: Do we still, you know, like Tom Cruise?" the critic Owen Gleiberman wrote in Entertainment Weekly, while Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times: "It would be a stretch to say that Tom Cruise needs a hit. What this guy needs is an intervention."

In addition to being the kickoff for the summer movie season, "Mission: Impossible III" was the first major release that had been given a green light by Paramount under Brad Grey, who took over as chairman in early 2005. Mr. Grey caused a stir last year when the studio threatened to pull the plug on the movie just ahead of production unless the budget was cut and Mr. Cruise — who is also a producer of the film — cut his fee.

As a result of that stand, the budget was trimmed to $165 million from about $200 million, and Mr. Cruise agreed to take about 25 percent of the movie's gross revenue, several percentage points less than his original deal, according to a senior Paramount executive.

Paramount executives said that exit polls this weekend showed the film's audience to be mainly over 25, adding that they hoped strong word-of-mouth would help drive a younger audience to the film as the summer continued. But market research ahead of the movie's release also showed that Mr. Cruise had lost ground among an important part of his fan base, female moviegoers.

In Hollywood many were left this weekend pondering the future of star power and looking ahead to the next test case, "The Da Vinci Code," starring Tom Hanks, on May 19. As Mr. Dergarabedian put it, "It shows you the importance of the star and their public image."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/08/movies/08impo.html





Hauling In The Hollywood Hackers

How undercover FBI agents nab the bootleggers who threaten the movie biz

Under the predawn sky on June 29, 2005, federal agents armed with arrest warrants and Glock handguns banged on the door of the house at 38244 Hastings St. in Fremont, Calif. "FBI!" they shouted. Their target was a heavyset 24-year-old biker named Chirayu Patel, alleged to be a leader of the "Boozers" and a handful of other underground gangs that illegally copy and load onto the Internet blockbuster movies such as Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith and Batman Begins. Patel's dad answered the 6 a.m. wake-up call, FBI officials say. Ten agents swept the house, guns drawn. Patel was found in his bedroom, where he was cuffed and arrested.

In nearby San Francisco, FBI special agent Julia B. Jolie was pacing through the "op center," a 30-foot-by-30-foot room with photos and handwritten rap sheets pinned to the walls for Patel and 25 other digital pirates who were being arrested that morning. As head of the sting, dubbed Operation Copycat, Jolie had just given the "go" order to agents in the field. Video pirates, who are often clean-shaven and hold professional jobs, certainly don't look dangerous. But the manpower committed to the case demonstrates how seriously the feds take them. "Are these big bad mafia types? No," Jolie says later. "But this is a huge criminal activity."

Welcome to Hollywood's Napster moment. If movie studios hope to dodge the fate of the music industry, whose growth was cut short in part by illegal downloading, they need to come up with a solution to illegal copying. Part of that is to develop a model for legal movie downloads over the Net. Hollywood has taken baby steps in that direction. Studios have two Web sites, Movielink.com and CinemaNow.com, that offer movies via the Net. But downloads are slow, and the movies, which cost a few dollars to rent and $20 to own, can't be burned to a DVD. So studios also are prodding the feds to put some fear into pirates. The goal: stem the $6.1 billion that the industry estimates was lost to illegal copying in 2005. (Worldwide box-office sales were $23.5 billion.) Half of pirated material is in DVDs sold on street corners, but $3 billion comes from pirates stealing digital movies and posting them online. And stolen movies are also sent via the Net to facilities where the illicit DVDs are made. So, "the Internet is very much involved in all forms of piracy even if you're talking about street piracy," says Dan Glickman, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

That's why federal prosecutors and undercover sleuths have labored for the past two years to put some muscle behind the warning that's so familiar to home movie viewers ("Federal law provides severe civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized reproduction, distribution or exhibition of copyrighted motion pictures..."). The California sting is part of a global investigation that is methodically targeting piracy rings from Chicago to Charlotte, N.C., to China. To date, the California investigation has won 24 convictions. Five more arraignments are expected in May, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Krotoski, who is prosecuting the case. Sentencing begins late this summer.

The picture that emerges from these investigations is of loosely knit cybergangs, driven more by competitive zeal than profit motive. A skilled "cammer," who records movies in a theater and sends them off for uploading to the Net, can make up to $2,000 per film. But most pirates, such as Patel, are in it for the thrill of proving their coding skills.

Think of piracy as a pyramid. The power sits at the top, where guys like Patel enable others to get content. By the time a movie shows up on peer-to-peer Internet networks, it can be downloaded, often for free, by anyone capable of typing "Mission: Impossible" into a search engine. That's why the feds zero in on the most sophisticated pirates and mostly ignore end users. "Targeting the top tier is a key way to catch these industry parasites," says intellectual property attorney Alan Fisch of Kaye Scholer LLP in Washington.

Quick Study
Video pirates aren't easily duped. It takes the FBI months to infiltrate groups. But they do have one vulnerability: All gangs need a place to store the massive amounts of media content they gather. (In the Copycat case, stolen movies, games, and other software grew to 27 terabytes of data, more than three times the contents of a typical video store.) That creates an opening for law enforcement.

The aspiring thief has to set up shop inside a powerful computer server, often inside a big company. Access might come from a disgruntled employee with authority to hand out passwords for remote or on-site access to the server. Once announced, the site operator becomes a magnet for specialists, granting access to "suppliers," who provide movies and computer parts, and "rippers," who crack copyright codes. Together, they make up what pirates call a "warez" (as in "softwares") group.

The Silicon Valley sting centered around a server that was leased by agents from an Internet service provider in the Bay Area. Agent Jolie's real coup, though, was in recruiting a thirtysomething Oakland agent (initials A.J.) who used to work in the computer industry. He proved to be a quick study. Shortly after interviewing with Jolie, A.J. discovered that warez groups used Linux server coding, which he learned in one night. "He can teach himself anything," Jolie says.

To slip into the pirate scene, A.J. became "Griffen" and started popping up in chat rooms. Several months later he hooked up with Patel and another bandit, David Fish. Once alerted to the available server, warez members swarmed in. One set up the computer for piracy, but group members judged the job so sloppy that they sought out Fish, whose scripting skills were legendary. Fish, 24, lived 3,000 miles away in Watertown, Conn. His day job was with a computer network company. In late March, 2004, court documents show, he began programming the server so his pals could send movies straight from their e-mail accounts. He set up a competition, pitting members against one another to see who could upload the fastest.

By spring of 2004, Fish and Griffen were busily loading movies -- 68 in all, including Hotel Rwanda, Blade: Trinity, and Monster-in-Law, plus hot new PlayStation 2 and Xbox video games. For example, in July, Fish -- going by the nickname x000x -- told Griffen to put a PlayStation 2 game into the server's DVD player, and explained what was necessary to encode it. A July 2 chat gave Griffen a sense of what was to come:

x000x: interested in ps2 games?
griffen: u bet, funny, just decided to get a ps2, played socom2 and loved it!

x000x: cool, well ur gonna be hooked up lol.

The chatter, sounding like two pre-teens trading instant messages, belied Fish's sophisticated skills. In November, Fish told A.J. to install a disk drive into the server and copy a programming file to it. That updated the flash memory, allowing Fish to read Xbox games remotely and copy them to the main drive.

griffen: ok, it's all ready...let her rip.

x000x: burnin. hopefully this works.
griffen: s--t, u the man, works great!

Meantime, Griffen was building trust with Patel, the Fremont pirate. Patel liked to show off. In late April, 2004, according to court documents, he boasted to Griffen about a TV news report on piracy that included a shot from a film he was stealing.

Of course, all the technological prowess is worthless without a steady supply of movies. Most come from inside the industry, prosecutors say. Sources include studio projectionists and workers at disc-stamping plants, where an estimated 15% of DVDs are discarded as defective. Even movie critics who get early copies sometimes pass them along.

Not every movie can be lifted before its release. That's where people like Curtis Salisbury come in. Salisbury, 20, worked in the box office at the Des Peres Cinema 14 in St. Louis. Last June he agreed to record The Perfect Man and load it onto the server for a warez group, court documents say. One night after the theater had closed, he used camcorder equipment to record copies of Bewitched and The Perfect Man from the projection booth.

With the help of friends, documents say, Salisbury connected his gear to the projector sound board to record. Later, he used his home computer to sync the audio. Salisbury sent a copy of The Perfect Man off to Griffen, who removed copyright watermarks (tiny, randomly placed security dots that identify the print). But first Griffen made a copy with the marks and shot it off to the MPAA. Technicolor, the film-print company, was able to determine that the copies came from the Des Peres. A month later, on July 27, the FBI showed up at Salisbury's door.

Today, Salisbury, Patel, and Fish have all been convicted on counts of criminal copyright infringement after pleading guilty. Salisbury, expected to be sentenced in June, is facing a maximum of eight years in prison but could get off with probation. Patel and Fish await sentencing in August. Patel faces up to eight years, Fish up to 23 years. Each could be ordered to pay from $4,000 to $1 million in fines. (Calls to attorneys for the three were not returned.)

Jolie claims the busts slowed pirate activity. But she recognizes that victory is elusive. "You have to liken it to a gang war," Jolie says. "We try to make an effective dent and glean more intelligence for the next takedown."


Most recent comments

Nickname: Mojo
Review: Great job FBI! Rape a child and get 10 years. Steal a movie and it's 23. If only children were as rich as the MPAA.
Date reviewed: May 9, 2006 1:34 PM

Nickname: barry
Review: This is so lame. Ohhhh movie pirates! Be careful trying to hunt down these bad boys.
Date reviewed: May 9, 2006 1:31 PM

Nickname: DavdJemeyson
Review: No one has caught the real DVD mob yet, www.RealPiracy.com
Date reviewed: May 9, 2006 1:26 PM

Nickname: Annon
Review: So nice to see our tax dollars at work for the Hollywood Movie Cartel.
Date reviewed: May 9, 2006 1:18 PM

Nickname: aerosquid
Review: What nonsense. The MPAA never lost $6.1 billion to piracy. Not everyone who downloads a movie would have gone and seen it or rented/bought it. You can't stop pirates anymore than you can win the war on drugs. All you can do is put little people in jail. Yay America.
Date reviewed: May 9, 2006 1:08 PM

Nickname: MasterRanger
Review: More FBI funds wasted on victimless crimes. Way to go.
Date reviewed: May 9, 2006 1:01 PM

Nickname: steve
Review: "If movie studios hope to dodge the fate of the music industry, whose growth was cut short in part by illegal downloading..." Most studies say the opposite. Downloading has actually helped the music industry. Why the music industry has faltered is that the product released by mainstream acts mostly sucks. It's all forumula based and written more by marketing teams than artists. I think growth in indie labels--because of a quality product, better pricing, no Sony rootkit scams etc.--is where the major industry profits have gone. As for movies, when's the last time there's been a good original movie? They're either remakes or sequels or movies where 95% of the budget is special effects, and the remaining 5% is script, editing, photography etc.
Date reviewed: May 9, 2006 12:47 PM

Nickname: Digitalbrian
Review: Well I said it before and I'll say it again, lower the prices on DVD and movie tickets. The amount charged right now is ludicrous. Personally I can afford it but the teens and students that use pirated goods can't.
Date reviewed: May 9, 2006 12:15 PM

Nickname: Jay
Review: Nice article. I am of the utmost belief that "stealing" movies while they are at cinemas is destroying the industry. However, I do have a few questions. 1) "You have to liken it to a gang war." How can you compare guns, drugs, and underground physical activies such as prostitution to uploading pre-released movies? And doesn't Jolie contradict this by saying that movie pirates are not big bad mafia types? 2) Is this really just action by the US government to please major corporations? 3)15% of DVDs discarded as defective? Surely fixing this problem would eventually greatly increase revenues. With MPAA saying that DVD prices are very much justified, surely reducing this 15% would greatly increase their profits from DVDs.
Date reviewed: May 9, 2006 12:15 PM

Nickname: Boone
Review: Nice to see those tax dollars at work--at work for a few movie industry execs. Stop wasting money and go catch real crooks. Who cares about the movie indutry.
Date reviewed: May 9, 2006 12:03 PM
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...gn_id=bier_tcm





Hollywood Detective Accused of Ordering 'Hit' on Witness
David M. Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner

Anthony Pellicano, the jailed private detective charged with wiretapping and conspiracy in Hollywood's biggest scandal in decades, conspired recently with organized-crime figures to try to assassinate a key witness against him, federal prosecutors say.

He has also made threatening statements about F.B.I. agents and the lead prosecutor in the case, federal evidence shows.

In a court filing circulated late on Monday, prosecutors said Mr. Pellicano had tried to put "a 'hit' " on Alexander Proctor, a convicted drug dealer who first implicated him in the threats against a journalist that led to the federal investigation nearly four years ago.

In 2002 Mr. Proctor was recorded telling an F.B.I. informant that Mr. Pellicano had hired him to threaten a Los Angeles Times reporter, Anita Busch. A search of Mr. Pellicano's offices that November revealed what prosecutors say was a mountain of evidence of illegal wiretapping.

During a jailhouse visit in January with his girlfriend, Sandra Will Carradine, Mr. Pellicano asked her to find a contact at the federal prison in Greenville, Ill., where Mr. Proctor was incarcerated, prosecutors said at a bail hearing in February.

"If something happens to Proctor, he couldn't testify against me," Mr. Pellicano told Ms. Carradine, prosecutors asserted in court.

In their Monday filing, prosecutors said they had now corroborated that Mr. Pellicano "recently conspired with known organized crime connections in Chicago to place a 'hit' on Alex Proctor."

Mr. Pellicano's lawyer, Steven F. Gruel, said he first learned of what he called the government's "phantom claim" that Mr. Pellicano had ordered the killing of Mr. Proctor in a phone call from prosecutors on Friday. "It's one thing to say something, it's another to charge it, and third, it's another to prove it," he said.

Mr. Proctor has since been transferred to a medium-security federal prison in Jesup, Ga.

Summaries written by F.B.I. agents of their interviews with Ms. Carradine describe her accounts of a series of threats against government investigators. According to those summaries, Ms. Carradine heard Mr. Pellicano speak of his ties to organized-crime figures in Chicago. They also say she heard him claim to have murdered people in Chicago before moving to Los Angeles, and make threatening statements about the law-enforcement officials pursuing him.

During a jailhouse conversation in May 2005, Mr. Pellicano railed against the F.B.I. agents who were searching a storage unit in which he had locked away a computer and a cache of disks, Ms. Carradine later told Special Agent Stanley E. Ornellas. In a summary Mr. Ornellas wrote: "Pellicano said if he could, he would douse 'them' with gasoline and set them on fire and after they were burning, he would pour more gasoline on them."

Mr. Pellicano also threatened Daniel A. Saunders, the assistant United States attorney in charge of the case, during at least two of Ms. Carradine's jailhouse visits, she told Mr. Ornellas. She said that on Oct. 3 Mr. Pellicano had described seeing "images of being in a courtroom and lunging across a table towards Saunders."

And Ms. Carradine told Mr. Ornellas that on Oct. 6 Mr. Pellicano had vowed one day to "take Saunders's life like he took mine," according to Mr. Ornellas's notes. Mr. Saunders declined to comment.

In the same F.B.I. interview, Ms. Carradine expressed concern for her safety once Mr. Pellicano learned of her cooperation, according to the summary. Her lawyer, Peter L. Knecht, declined to comment on Tuesday. The Monday court filing describing the alleged threat against Mr. Proctor, which was first reported by The Los Angeles Times, was the government's response to a demand by Mr. Gruel for prosecutors to turn over all evidence, including search warrants and witness statements, involving Mr. Proctor or Steven Seagal, the movie actor Ms. Busch was researching an article about when she was threatened in 2002. (Mr. Seagal has not been accused of any wrongdoing.)

Mr. Gruel argued that the F.B.I. had used the "alleged Proctor-Pellicano-Seagal relationship" to get a warrant to search Mr. Pellicano's office.

But in their response, Mr. Saunders and another prosecutor, Kevin M. Lally, said evidence about Mr. Proctor and Mr. Seagal was irrelevant to the wiretapping case, though Mr. Pellicano faces separate charges of threatening Ms. Busch in state court, not in the federal case.

Instead, the two prosecutors accused Mr. Pellicano of subterfuge: "The government believes that defendant is using this motion to try to find out what, if anything, Proctor has said about him, not because it has any relevance to this case (it does not), but so defendant can determine whether Proctor is cooperating against him in connection with the state case."

Ms. Carradine pleaded guilty to perjury in January and has been cooperating with the government since July, which has given rise to another dispute between prosecutors and Mr. Pellicano's lawyer. Mr. Gruel has argued that Ms. Carradine, who continued to visit Mr. Pellicano frequently and acted at times as a go-between for him with Mr. Gruel, in effect became a government operative, violating Mr. Pellicano's lawyer-client privilege.

In their Monday filing, prosecutors insisted they had not received any information from Ms. Carradine about Mr. Gruel's communications with Mr. Pellicano. But they said Mr. Pellicano's conversations with Ms. Carradine were fair game. "There is simply no 'girlfriend privilege' recognized under the law," they wrote.

Asked to comment on Ms. Carradine's account of Mr. Pellicano's threatening statements about law-enforcement officials, Mr. Gruel declined. "I'm reluctant to talk about something that is under the scrutiny of the government for potential leaks," he said.

The summaries of F.B.I. interviews, including those with Ms. Carradine, some of which have been reviewed by The New York Times and cited in articles about the Pellicano investigation, are themselves the subject of an offshoot federal investigation.

The F.B.I. summaries cited by The Times were included in a trove of evidence turned over to defense lawyers by prosecutors in early April, subject to a protective order, prosecutors have said in court filings. After The Times began publishing articles based on the summaries, federal prosecutors said they would hold off turning over some additional evidence to defense lawyers, and they also began an investigation into how the summaries became public. That inquiry is being led by the United States Attorney's Office in San Diego.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/10/arts/10pell.html





Q. What Could A Boarding Pass Tell An Identity Fraudster About You? A. Way Too Much

A simple airline stub, picked out of a bin near Heathrow, led Steve Boggan to investigate a shocking breach of security
Steve Boggan

This is the story of a piece of paper no bigger than a credit card, thrown away in a dustbin on the Heathrow Express to Paddington station. It was nestling among chewing gum wrappers and baggage tags, cast off by some weary traveller, when I first laid eyes on it just over a month ago.

The traveller's name was Mark Broer. I know this because the paper - actually a flimsy piece of card - was a discarded British Airways boarding-pass stub, the small section of the pass displaying your name and seat number. The stub you probably throw away as soon as you leave your flight.

It said Broer had flown from Brussels to London on March 15 at 7.10am on BA flight 389 in seat 03C. It also told me he was a "Gold" standard passenger and gave me his frequent-flyer number. I picked up the stub, mindful of a conversation I had had with a computer security expert two months earlier, and put it in my pocket.

If the expert was right, this stub would enable me to access Broer's personal information, including his passport number, date of birth and nationality. It would provide the building blocks for stealing his identity, ruining his future travel plans - and even allow me to fake his passport.

It would also serve as the perfect tool for demonstrating the chaotic collection, storage and security of personal information gathered as a result of America's near-fanatical desire to collect data on travellers flying to the US - and raise serious questions about the sort of problems we can expect when ID cards are introduced in 2008.

To understand why the piece of paper I found on the Heathrow Express is important, it is necessary to go back not, as you might expect, to 9/11, but to 1996 and the crash of TWA Flight 800 over Long Island Sound, 12 minutes out of New York, with the loss of 230 lives. Initially, crash investigators suspected a terrorist bomb might have brought down the aircraft. This was later ruled out, but already the Clinton administration had decided it was time to devise a security system that would weed out potential terrorists before they boarded a flight. This was called Capps, the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System.

It was a prosaic, relatively unambitious idea at first. For example, in highly simplistic terms, if someone bought a one-way ticket, paid in cash and checked in no baggage, they would be flagged up as an individual who had no intention of arriving or of going home. A bomber, perhaps.

After 9/11, the ambitions for such screening grew exponentially and the newly founded Department of Homeland Security began inviting computer companies to develop intelligent systems that could "mine" data on individuals, whizzing round state, private and public databases to establish what kind of person was buying the ticket.

In 2003, one of the pioneers of the system, speaking anonymously, told me that the project, by now called Capps II, was being designed to designate travellers as green, amber or red risks. Green would be an individual with no criminal record - a US citizen, perhaps, who had a steady job and a settled home, was a frequent flyer and so on. Amber would be someone who had not provided enough information to confirm all of this and who might be stopped at US Immigration and asked to provide clearer proof of ID. Red would be someone who might be linked to an ever-growing list of suspected terrorists - or someone whose name matched such a suspect.

"If you are an American who has volunteered lots of details proving that you are who you say you are, that you have a stable home, live in a community, aren't a criminal, [Capps II] will flag you up as green and you will be automatically allowed on to your flight," the pioneer told me. "The problem is that if the system doesn't have a lot of information on you, or you have ordered a halal meal, or have a name similar to a known terrorist, or even if you are a foreigner, you'll most likely be flagged amber and held back to be asked for further details. If you are European and the US government is short of information on you - or, as is likely, has incorrect information on you - you can reckon on delay after delay unless you agree to let them delve into your private details.

"That is inconvenient enough but, as we tested the system, it became clear that information was going to be used to build a complete picture of you from lots of private databases - your credit record, your travel history, your criminal record, whether you had the remotest dubious links with anyone at your college who became a terrorist. I began to feel more and more uncomfortable about it."

Eventually, he quit the programme.

All of this was on my mind as I sat down with my computer expert, Adam Laurie, one of the founders of a company called the Bunker Secure Hosting, to examine Broer's boarding-pass stub. Laurie is known in cyber-circles as something of a white knight, a computer wizard who not only advises companies on how to make their systems secure, but also cares about civil rights and privacy. He and his brother Ben are renowned among web designers as the men who developed Apache SSL - the software that makes most of the world's web pages secure - and then gave it away for free.

We logged on to the BA website, bought a ticket in Broer's name and then, using the frequent flyer number on his boarding pass stub, without typing in a password, were given full access to all his personal details - including his passport number, the date it expired, his nationality (he is Dutch, living in the UK) and his date of birth. The system even allowed us to change the information.

Using this information and surfing publicly available databases, we were able - within 15 minutes - to find out where Broer lived, who lived there with him, where he worked, which universities he had attended and even how much his house was worth when he bought it two years ago. (This was particularly easy given his unusual name, but it would have been possible even if his name had been John Smith. We now had his date of birth and passport number, so we would have known exactly which John Smith.)

Laurie was anything but smug.

"This is terrible," he said. "It just shows what happens when governments begin demanding more and more of our personal information and then entrust it to companies simply not geared up for collecting or securing it as it gets shared around more and more people. It doesn't enhance our security; it undermines it."

Just over $100m had been spent on Capps II before it was scrapped in July 2004. Campaigners in the US had objected to it on grounds of privacy, and airlines such as JetBlue and American faced boycotts when it emerged that they were involved in trials - handing over passenger information - with the Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration. Even worse, JetBlue admitted it had given the private records of 5 million passengers to a commercial company for analysis - and some of this was posted on the internet.

But the problems did not end with the demise of Capps II. Earlier that month, after 18 months of acrimonious negotiation, the EU caved in to American demands that European airlines, too, should hand over passenger information to the United States Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, BCBP, before their aircraft would be allowed to land on US soil. The BCBP wanted up to 60 pieces of information routinely gathered by booking agencies and stored as a Passenger Name Record, PNR. This included not only your flight details, name, address and so on, but also your travel itinerary, where you were staying, with whom you travelled, whether you booked a hire car in the US, whether you booked a smoking room in your hotel, even if you ordered a halal or kosher meal. And the US authorities wanted to keep it all for 50 years.

At first, the European Commission argued that surrendering such information would be in breach of European data protection law. Eventually, however, in the face of huge fines for airlines and cancelled landing slots, it agreed that 34 items from PNRs could be handed over and kept by the US for three and a half years.

Capps II was superseded by a new system called Secure Flight in August 2004. Later, in October last year, the BCBP demanded that airlines travelling to, or through, the US should forward "advance passenger information", including passport number and date of birth, before passengers would be allowed to travel. It called this the advance passenger information system, or APIS. This is the information that Laurie and I had accessed through the BA website.

"The problem here is that a commercial organisation is being given the task of collecting data on behalf of a foreign government, for which it gets no financial reward, and which offers no business benefit in return," says Laurie. "Naturally, in such a case, they will seek to minimise their costs, which they do by handing the problem off to the passengers themselves. This has the neat side-effect of also handing off liability for data errors.

"You can imagine the case where a businessman's trip gets delayed because his passport details were incorrectly entered and he was mistaken for a terrorist. Since BA didn't enter the data - frequent flyers are asked to do it themselves - they can't be held responsible and can't be sued for his lost business."

By the time I found the ticket stub and went to Laurie, he had already reported his suspicions about a potential security lapse to BA (on January 20) by email. He received no response, so followed up with a telephone call asking for the airline's security officer. He was told there wasn't one, so he explained the lapse to an employee. Nothing was done and he still has not been contacted.

Three months ago, after further objections in the US, but before our investigation, Secure Flight was suspended after costing the US taxpayer $144m. At the time, Kip Hawley, transportation security administrator, said: "While the Secure Flight regulation is being developed, this is the time to ensure that the Secure Flight security, operational and privacy foundation is solid."

The TSA said it would continue its passenger pre-screening programme in yet another guise after it had been audited and added that it had plans to introduce more security, privacy and redress for errors - confirming critics' suspicions that no such systems were yet in place. To the consternation of privacy activists in Europe, the TSA also spelled out plans for its desire for various US government departments to share information, including yours and mine.

Dr Gus Hosein, a visiting fellow specialising in privacy and terrorism at the London School of Economics, is concerned about where the whole project will go next.

"They want to extend the advance passenger information system [APIS] to include data on where passengers are going and where they are staying because of concerns over plagues," he says. "For example, if bird flu breaks out, they want to know where all the foreign travellers are. The airlines hate this. It is a security nightmare. Soon the US will demand biometric information [fingerprints, retina scans etc] and they will share that around.

"But what the BA lapse shows is that companies cannot be trusted to gather this information without it getting out to criminals who would abuse it. The potential for identity theft is huge, but the number of agencies among which it will be shared is just growing and growing."

And that is where concern comes in over the UK's proposed ID cards, which may one day be needed to travel to the US. According to the Home Office, the identity cards bill currently going through Parliament allows for up to 40 pieces of personal information to be held on the proposed ID card, with digital biometric details of all of your fingerprints, both your irises and your face, all of which can be transmitted to electronic readers. The cards will contain a microchip the size of a grain of sand linked to a tiny embedded antenna that transmits all the information when contacted by an electronic reader.

This readable system, known as Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, has recently been installed in new British passports. The Home Office says the information can be transmitted across a distance of only a couple of centimetres because the chips have no power of their own - they simply bounce back a response to a weak signal sent from passport readers at immigration points.

However, the suspicion is that the distance over which the signal can be read relates only to the weakness of the signal sent out by the readers. What if the readers sent out much stronger signals? Potentially, then, criminals with powerful readers could suck out your information as you passed by. The Government denies that this scenario is viable, but, in January, Dutch security specialists Riscure successfully read and de-encrypted information from its country's new biometric passports from a distance of about 30ft in just two hours.

"The Home Office says British passport information is encrypted, but it's a pretty basic form of encryption," says Hosein. "Everyone expects the ID cards to be equally insecure. If the government insists they won't be cracked, read or copied, they're kidding themselves and us."

BA has now closed its security loophole after being contacted by the Guardian in March, but that particular lapse is beside the point. Because of the pressure being applied to airlines by the US, breaches will happen again elsewhere as our personal data whizzes around the globe, often without our knowledge or consent.

Meanwhile, accountability remains lamentable. Several calls to the US Transportation Security Administration were not returned.

Perhaps the last word should go to Mark Broer, the man whose boarding pass stub started off this virtual paper chase. He is aged 41 and is a successful executive with a pharmaceutical recruitment company. When I told him what we had done with his boarding pass stub, he was appalled.

"I travel regularly and, because I go to the US, I submitted my personal information and passport number - it is required if you are a frequent flyer and want to check yourself in," he says. "Experienced travellers today know that they have to give up information for ease of travel and to fight terrorism. It is an exchange of information in return for convenience. But as far as I'm concerned, having that information leaked out to people who could steal my identity wasn't part of the deal."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/idcards/st...766266,00.html





OpenDocument Foundation to MA: We Have a Plugin
Pamela Jones

I have just heard from the OpenDocument Foundation's Gary Edwards, with news about a plugin the Foundation is offering the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in response to the Commonwealth's request for information on any plugin that could "allow Microsoft Office to easily open, render, and save to ODF files, and also allow translation of documents between Microsoft's binary (.doc, .xls, .ppt) or XML formats and ODF."

The Foundation says it has such a plugin, it has finished testing it, and it is good to go.

Edwards tells me the following:
The OpenDocument Foundation has notified the Massachusetts ITD that we have completed testing on an ODF Plugin for all versions of MS Office dating back to MS Office 97. The ODF Plugin installs on the file menu as a natural and transparent part of the open, save, and save as sequences. As far as end users and other application add-ons are concerned, ODF plugin renders ODF documents as if it were native to MS Office.

The testing has been extensive and thorough. As far as we can tell there isn't a problem, even with Accessibility add ons, which as you know is a major concern for Massachusetts.

Now that we've had a chance to fully review their RFI document, we expect to submit a formal line by line reply, offering the ODF Plugin for immediate testing, review and implementation.

Some people might wonder why the Foundation would be interested in "extending" the life and vested value of these Win32 bound desktops?

Our reply is that this isn't about "Windows" or MS Office. It's about people, business units, existing workflows and business processes, and vested legacy information systems begging to be connected, coordinated, and re engineered to reach new levels of productivity and service. It's also about the extraordinary value of ODF and it's importance to the next generation of collaborative computing. And it's about ODF rising to meet the needs of key information domains as they are represented by desktop productivity environments; publishing, content and archive management systems; SOA efforts; and the Open Internet.

So, to Microsoft: never mind. You don't need to lift a finger.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?s...60504015438308





Captain America – Fugitive

Marvel's new series has your favourite superheroes fighting George Bush and the Patriot Act
Guy Dixon

Captain America is about to battle his most fearsome foe yet: The government of the United States.

Today, Marvel Comics is releasing the first in its miniseries Civil War, which can only be described as a gutsy comic-book series focusing on the whole debate over homeland security and tighter government controls in the name of public safety.

The seven-issue series once again puts superheroes right back in the thick of real-world news, just as DC Comics has Batman battling al-Qaeda in a soon-to-appear comic and Marvel's X-Men continue to explore themes of public intolerance and discrimination.

It also recalls the plotline during the Watergate years when Captain America's alterego, disillusioned by White House politics, stopped donning the patriotic costume.

But with Civil War, hero is pitted against hero in the choice of whether or not to side with the government, as issues ranging from a Guantanamo-like prison camp for superheroes, embedded reporters and the power of media all play in the mix.

The Fantastic Four's elastic Mr. Fantastic has already joined Iron Man to support Washington in earlier editions of Marvel comics leading into the Civil War series. Doctor Strange isn't taking Washington's side.

But what about Spider-Man, that hero of many counterculture kids? Will he side with the Man? Or will the rest of the Fantastic Four? (There's even a rumour that Marvel's Canadian hero Alpha Flight might get into the mix.)

Civil War starts with a clever premise. A number of incidents involving Marvel's rough-and-ready heroes has turned the good guys into targets of U.S. lawmakers: There is, for instance, one accident where a group of novice superheroes gets in over its head, leading to the death of a schoolyard full of children.

The politicians are concerned about public safety. So Congress passes a bill forcing all superheroes to register with the government as human weapons of mass destruction, and to work, in effect, for Washington. Superheroes who don't comply will themselves be branded fugitives.

Washington insider Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, argues that siding with Washington is a way for the heroes to work with lawmakers, not against them, in this moment of trouble. Others see it as a way to gain recognition from the authorities, at long last, or even a way to get government funding to help fight the bad guys.

But other heroes aren't having any of it. In one comic leading up to the series, Doctor Strange gets hopping mad when he first hears about the bill (albeit in his debonair, "master of the mystic arts" kind of way). And Captain America, who couldn't be more all-American if he tried with that costume of his, finds himself leading the fugitive heroes.

In the first issue of Civil War, he brilliantly folds an entire dissertation on security into one succinct dialogue bubble by saying: "Don't play politics with me, lady. Superheroes need to stay above that stuff or Washington starts telling us who the supervillains are."

But Marvel says it isn't trying to take one side or the other.

"We need to present both sides' arguments, both sides of the coin, as fairly and as accurately as possible, and really let the readers make their own decision," said editor-in-chief Joe Quesada. "Marvel readers come in all shapes and sizes, and we speak to so many different people, different demographics. It's unfair for us to make this our bully pulpit and sit there and say, 'This bad. That good.'."

The series is also far removed from the era when DC Comics' Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were punching out the Nazis or Japanese during the Second World War.

In Civil War, there is no Iraq war, although George W. Bush is the president in the series. The story, though, focuses on the central issue of public security versus personal freedoms with two factions of superheroes battling among themselves on the question (with comic fanboys living vicariously through them).

But what does it say about us if Captain America and Iron Man start to occupy some readers' attention more than the latest real news?

"One of the best ways to broach these conversations and bring up this discussion is through entertainment and through characters that people are familiar with. And again, for us, it's communicating both sides of the argument," Quesada said.

In the end, one of the cleverest touches in Civil War may be a few panels, a momentary breather in the story, in which the giant figure of The Watcher stands silently in the corner of Doctor Strange's sanctum. As the Strange explains: "He only appears to record moments of great change and enormous upheaval. His presence now does not bode well."

Disturbingly, that could be how many of us feel, watching events unfold.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...rtainment/home





Boot Camp: Apple Bobs for Suckers
Jim Louderback

Don't get too excited about the whole Mac/Windows dual-boot thing. Although a wide range of starry-eyed experts—including some in our very own lab—have lauded Boot Camp (aka BC) in tones not heard since the days of OS/2, it's really nothing to get excited about. Here are my top reasons why—at least to real computer users—"Boot Chump" is a snore.

• Design: The more effete among us have embraced BC because now they can run all their favorite Windows apps on a saucy, sexy Mac. The underlying assertion embraced here is that Apple machines are just so much cooler than their PC counterparts. Hogwash. There are dozens of better-looking notebooks out there than those tired, industrial-looking iBooks and PowerBooks that dribble out of Infinite Loop. Want silver? Toshiba's razor-thin Portégé looks better and won't give you a hernia if you carry it around the corner. Acer's Italian-inspired lineup ranges from testosterone-pumping Ferrari red to svelte and sweet. Even Dell now has discovered red.

• Performance: Some idiot wrote recently that "Apple now makes the fastest Windows machines on the planet." What was I thinking? Now that the meds have worn off, let's take a closer look at how fast these BC machines really are. Sure, they run a Photoshop benchmark test as fast as or faster than Windows dedicated machines. But throw in anything needing fast graphics and you're SOL. The dual-core Mac mini uses shared memory for its anemic graphics, which will seriously eat into that default 512MB of RAM. Every time I see Boot Camp benchmark test scores, they come with caveats. Apple apologists give their favorite company more latitude than any other PC company on the planet—I just don't understand it. Substitute "Microsoft" or "Dell" for Apple in any of the recent reviews and a firestorm of bloggers would be criticizing the reviewer up and down the Web. Instead, the laurels just pile on higher and higher. But I digress. This brings me to the next reason you don't want Boot Camp….

• Expandability: Remember the bad old days of OS/2 and Windows NT, and MIPS- and Alpha-based computers? Fanatics tried to push these supposedly better systems on everyone, touting power, capability, and destiny. It was all bunk, and each died from neglect. Neglect from a vast array of add-on hardware vendors that just didn't have the time or inclination to write drivers for all those "other" platforms. Sure, a Mac that runs Windows looks good on paper. But how do you know that that expensive scanner, graphics card, or sound device will actually work on a BC system? To be fair, USB and FireWire devices that work in Windows ought to work under BC. But what about add-in cards? That legacy SCSI adapter that you just can't quit? Until we have an Intel-based Mac tower we have no clue what will work. But I predict that legacy hardware—and even some existing boards—will be difficult to run in both environments. Will the high-end video-digitizing Kona card work under Windows? What about M-Audio's multichannel audio input cards? I'll believe it when I see it. Got more faith? Go ahead, buy a dual-core Mac. And have fun upgrading it.—Continue reading...

• Reliability: I don't know about you, but when I buy a computer I want everything to work right. I have some confidence that peripherals and software will work on my PCs, because I either built them myself or bought them outright from a vendor who knows how to make Windows PCs. So what happens when that critical new part, new application, or new Web site fails to run? Who is going to help? Apple? Hardly. Last I checked, Boot Camp is unsupported. So you're out of luck. And even when it ends up in OS X, it will probably receive marginal support at best. Don't expect your garden-variety tech at the Mac store to help out, for instance.

• Flexibility: Speaking of building computers, if you like building your own computers, you are out of luck again. Apple's not interested in a DIY Mac, nor is it concerned with the case-mod culture of the PC. Oh, I guess that doesn't matter; lemming-like Apple fans aren't interested in actually doing anything different with their cookie-cutter computers that aspire to "Think Different" but, like that old Pete Seeger song about little boxes, "all look just the same." The really creative computer users are the case modders who build extravagant designs to house their systems. And that's just not possible if you aspire to run Windows and simultaneously "Think Different."

• Price: And that leads me to the biggest reason of all to ignore this whole Windows and Macintosh mash-up. Apple's not really known as the low-cost or value leader when it comes to computers. There's a premium to pay for "Think Different" that has nothing to do with performance or capability. After you've already been overcharged for a Mac, you need to spend another hundred dollars or so buying Windows, just for the privilege of tainting the Apple core with Microsoft's OS. You'll probably need more memory, too. Is it really worth all that extra money? From where I sit, no—but a fool and his money have always been quickly parted.

All of this leaves me with just one thing to say: Would you buy a Windows computer from this man [insert picture of Steve Jobs]? This is a guy who has been ripped off by Microsoft for 20 years: Do you think he's about to just up and join the enemy? I doubt it. "Boot Chump" is just a Trojan horse, designed to get Windows users (aka chumps) to sample Macintosh hardware. Once you've laid out a few kilobucks on your BC system and been frustrated a few times with Windows limitations, what are you going to do? Jobs's bet: You'll start spending more and more time in OS X, until you—too—become one of the pod people. It's sad to see so many of my compatriots being turned into lemmings. Perhaps they'll wake up and smell the Apple pie in the sky—and realize they've been taken for a ride. But I doubt it. Because I'm a firm believer that once you start using a Mac, your IQ begins to creep downwards, inversely proportional to an increase in your AAF (Apple Acceptance Factor).

In fact, I'm blaming the AAF for a wide-range of habits espoused by supposedly "creative people." I'll bet it's responsible for tattoos, piercings, and the wide-spread adoption of the phrase "no worries." In fact, I believe that most of today's societal ills can be either indirectly or directly attributed to Apple. Widespread hearing loss? Blame the iPod. Carpal tunnel? Blame the Newton. Upswing in hernias? That Infinite Loop idiot who decided to put a handle on the first iMac—and started the whole luggable trend. No, Boot Camp is just the latest diabolical piece of Steve Jobs's grand plan to dumb us down and mangle our bodies. It's no coincidence that all this is happening just as Jobs has taken over as the head of Disney (which also owns ABC). Pretty soon we'll be good for nothing but sitting on our butts and watching TV. So go ahead and Boot Camp if you must. But don't come running to me when your mind and body prematurely degenerate. I'll be smart, fit, and enjoying my real Windows computers, while you ooze slowly into the Pixar-Disney-ABC swamp of mindlessness. Chump.
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/...=177291,00.asp





Chinese Student Caught Sharing Pirated Songs On-line

Hong Kong Customs Anti-Internet Piracy Team has arrested a 16-year-old student in Sau Mau Ping after cracking a case in which more than 600 pirated songs were provided for free downloading from a personal website.

According to a government press release on Thursday, acting on a complaint from a copyright owner, following intensive investigations, Customs officers seized from a residential unit in Sau Mau Ping a desktop computer with broadband Internet devices, worth about 7,700 HK dollars (987 U.S. dollars).

The student is now on bail pending further investigation.

More than 600 pirated songs had been available on the personal website for free downloading by Internet users. The personal computer had been converted into a server by means of a "Dynamic IP Re-direction Service" provided by a U.S. website.
http://en.chinabroadcast.cn/811/2006/05/11/53@87712.htm





Net Censorship Spreads Worldwide
Mark Ward

Repressive regimes are taking full advantage of the net's ability to censor and stifle reform and debate, reveals a report.

Written by the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) pressure group the report highlights the ways governments threaten the freedom of the press.

The report has a section dedicated to the internet and the growing roster of nations censoring online life.

This censorship is practised on every continent on Earth, said the report.

Power play

Although the internet is changing the way the media works as blogs, chat forums and social networking sites turn passive consumers into active critics, it is not just citizens who are taking advantage of its technological power warned the report.

Julien Pain - who heads the internet freedom desk at the RSF and was one of the report's authors, noted: "Everyone's interested in the internet - especially dictators".

Mr Pain said the world's dictators have not remained powerless in the face of the explosion of online content. By contrast, many have been "efficient and inventive" in using the net to spy on citizens and censor debate.

In many nations, the net used to be the only uncensored outlet and the place people turned to for news they would never hear about through official channels.

However, noted the report, governments have woken up to the fact that the people they regard as dissidents are active online. Many are now moving to censor blogs and the last year has seen many committed bloggers jailed for what they said in their online journal.

For instance, in Iran Mojtaba Saminejad has been in jail since February 2005 for putting online material ruled offensive to Islam.

China was the nation that came in for most criticism for its efforts to monitor and censor the net. The RSF noted that net censorship in the country had undergone a significant shift in the last two years.

Originally, said the report, China was only interested in monitoring political dissidence on the net. Now its scrutiny covers general unrest in its population - ironically something that has grown because the net makes it easier for people to communicate.

Jail term

China's success at censorship means it has effectively produced a "sanitised" version of the internet for its 130 million citizens that regularly go online.

The wide-ranging scrutiny also means that it is the biggest jailer of so-called cyber dissidents. RSF estimates that 62 people in China have been jailed for what they said online.

Net users have also been jailed in Egypt, Iran, Libya, the Maldives, Syria, Tunisia and Vietnam.

Where China has led, other nations are following and taking active steps to filter the net before it gets to their citizens. Zimbabwe is reportedly buying technology directly from China to beef up its censorship efforts.

Many other nations, including Burma, Cuba, Iran, Libya, Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam censor the net. Often this filtering involves stopping access to some types of sites, such as those showing pornography, but it can also involve blocking sites critical of governments or religions.

Some nations, such as Turkmenistan, have banned home net connections and restrict people to using net cafes which, said the RSF, were much easier to control. Burma has banned web e-mail systems such as Hotmail and Yahoo mail and every five minutes screen grabs are taken of what people are looking at in net cafes.

But criticism of the obstacles put before open net access was not limited to nations known for their repressive policies. The European Union was criticised too for its policy of leaving the decision on which sites to censor up to net service firms. This, said the RSF, created a "private system of justice" in which technicians take the place of a judge.

The 153-page report also criticised Western firms for selling technology to repressive regimes to help them monitor what people do online.

The report was produced to mark World Press Freedom Day.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/4973114.stm





Everyone’s Interested In The Internet - Especially Dictators

The Internet has revolutionised the world’s media. Personal websites, blogs and discussion groups have given a voice to men and women who were once only passive consumers of information. It has made many newspaper readers and TV viewers into fairly successful amateur journalists. Dictators would seem powerless faced with this explosion of online material. How could they monitor the e-mails of China’s 130 million users or censor the messages posted by Iran’s 70,000 bloggers? The enemies of the Internet have unfortunately shown their determination and skill in doing just that. China was the first repressive country to realise that the Internet was an extraordinary tool of free expression and quickly assembled the money and personnel to spy on e-mail and censor “subversive” websites. The regime soon showed that the Internet, like traditional media, could be controlled. All that was needed was the right technology and to crack down on the first “cyber-dissidents.” The Chinese model has been a great success and the regime has managed to dissuade Internet users from openly mentioning political topics and when they do to just recycle the official line. But in the past two years, the priority of just monitoring online political dissidence has given way to efforts to cope with unrest among the population. The Internet has become a sounding-board for the rumblings of discontent in most Chinese provinces. Demonstrations and corruption scandals, once confined to a few cities, have spread across the country with the help of the Internet. In 2005, the government sought to counter the surge in cyber-dissidence. It beefed up the law and drafted what might be called “the ten commandments” for Chinese Internet users - a set of very harsh rules targeting online editors. The regime is both efficient and inventive in spying on and censuring the Internet. Other government have unfortunately imitated it.

The Internet’s jailers

Traditional “predators of press freedom” - Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Libya, the Maldives, Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam - all censor the Internet now. In 2003, only China, Vietnam and the Maldives had imprisoned cyber-dissidents. Now more countries do. A score of bloggers and online journalists have been thrown in jail in Iran since September 2004 and one of them, Mojtaba Saminejad, has been there since February 2005 for posting material deemed offensive to Islam. In Libya, former bookseller Abdel Razak al-Mansouri was sentenced to 18 months in prison for making fun of President Muammer Gaddafi online. Two Internet users have been jailed and tortured in Syria, one for posting photos online of a pro-Kurdish demonstration in Damascus and the other for simply passing on an e-mailed newsletter the regime considers illegal. A lawyer has been in jail in Tunisia since March 2005 for criticising official corruption in an online newsletter. While a UN conference was held in Tunis in November 2005 to discuss the future of the Internet, this human rights activist was in a prison cell several hundred kilometres from his family. A grim message to the world’s Internet users. Censorship of the Web is also growing and is now done on every continent. In Cuba, where you need permission from the ruling party to buy a computer, all websites not approved by the regime are filtered. The situation has worsened in the Middle East and North Africa. In November 2005, Morocco began censoring all political websites advocating Western Sahara’s independence. Iran expands its list of banned sites each year and it now includes all publications mentioning women’s rights. China can now automatically censor blog messages, blanking out words such as “democracy” and “human rights.” Some Asian countries seem about to go further than their Chinese “big brother.” Burma has acquired sophisticated technology to filter the Internet and the country’s cybercafés spy on customers by automatically recording what is on the screen every five minutes.

Complicity of Western firms

How did all these countries become so expert at doing this? Did Burma and Tunisia develop their own software? No. They bought the technology from foreign, mostly American firms. Secure Computing, for example, sold Tunisia a programme to censor the Internet, including the Reporters Without Borders website. Another US firm, Cisco Systems, created China’s Internet infrastructure and sold the country special equipment for the police to use. The ethical lapses of Internet companies were exposed when the US firm Yahoo! was accused in September 2005 of supplying the Chinese police with information used to sentence cyber-dissident Shi Tao to 10 years in prison. China is now passing on its cyber-spying skills to other enemies of the Internet, including Zimbabwe, Cuba, and most recently Belarus. These countries will probably no longer need Western help for such spying in a few years time. Democratic governments, not just the private sector, share responsibility for the future of the Internet. But far from showing the way, many countries that usually respect online freedom, now seem to want to unduly control it. They often have laudable reasons, such as fighting terrorism, child sex and cyber-crime, but this control also threatens freedom of expression. Without making any comparison with the harsh restrictions in China, the Internet rules recently adopted by the European Union are very disturbing. One of them, requiring Internet service providers (ISPs) to retain records of customers’ online activity, is presently being considered in Brussels and seriously undermines Internet users’ right to online privacy. The United States is also far from being a model in regulation of the Internet. The authorities are sending an ambiguous message to the international community by making it easier to legally intercept online traffic and by filtering the Internet in public libraries.
http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=578





Blu-Ray Discs Delayed By A Month
Thomas K. Arnold

While high-definition DVD titles trickle into stores, the arrival of the first titles in the rival Blu-ray Disc format has been pushed back by a month until June 20.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment president Benjamin Feingold said his studio's first batch of Blu-ray releases will be ready May 23, as planned.

"But the majority of our retail base and hardware partners have requested that we reconsider this date to better coincide with the first commercially available Blu-ray-compatible hardware," Feingold said.

The decision to hold off shipping Blu-ray titles to retailers comes several weeks after Samsung announced its first Blu-ray player wouldn't arrive in stores until June 25, a month behind schedule.

Feingold said the first eight Blu-ray Disc titles from Sony won't ship until then "in an effort to ensure a more coordinated launch."

The first Blu-ray Disc titles from Warner Home Video are expected to arrive in stores around the same time, although no firm dates or titles have been announced.

The Sony Blu-ray Disc titles that are now slated to arrive in stores June 20 are "Underworld Evolution" (arriving the same day as the DVD), "50 First Dates," "The Fifth Element," "Hitch," "House of Flying Daggers," "A Knight's Tale," "The Last Waltz," "Resident Evil Apocalypse" and "XXX."
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl..._US-BLURAY.xml





Warner Music Posts Narrower - Than - Expected Loss

Warner Music Group Corp. (WMG.N), which earlier this week rejected a $4.2 billion takeover bid by EMI Group Plc. (EMI.L), on Friday posted a narrower-than-expected loss, helped by rising U.S. CD sales and digital revenues.

Analysts said the strong growth by Warner Music will put pressure on EMI to raise its $28.50-per-share bid.

``The numbers are very strong, significantly better than we and investors were expecting,'' said Richard Greenfield analyst at Pali Research. ``It bodes well for renewed vigor from EMI to make a higher offer.''

Warner Music, the fourth largest music company and home to such acts as Madonna and Green Day, posted a net loss of $7 million, or 5 cents a share, in the second quarter, versus a net profit of $4 million a year earlier.

But on a diluted basis, the company posted a year-earlier loss of 28 cents a share, despite the bottom-line profit which was due to unrealized gains of $39 million on warrants issued to former parent Time Warner Inc. (TWX.N) that were recognized in net income, but excluded from the earnings per share.

Analysts polled by Reuters Estimates on average expected a net loss of 15 cents.

Revenue rose 3.8 percent to $796 million from $767 million a year earlier. In the fast-growing digital segment, the company posted revenue of $90 million, nearly triple a year earlier and representing 11 percent of quarterly revenue.

Laura Martin analyst Soleil Media Metrics said the revenue figures were ``excellent'' compared to the industry average. ``It means EMI's got to pay between $30 to $33 a share.''

Warner Music said its major sellers during the quarter included Madonna, James Blunt and Sean Paul helping to push U.S. recorded music revenue up by 22 percent.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/busin...sic-earns.html





AOL to Add Free Phone to Instant Messaging Feature
Saul Hansell and John Markoff

AOL is preparing to offer the 41 million users of its instant messaging system a free phone number that will allow people to call them from regular phones while they are online.

The move is part of a broad effort by AOL — which has been buffeted by defections from its flagship dial-up Internet service — to capitalize on the continued popularity of its decade-old AIM instant message system.

In addition to expanded Internet calling features, AOL also plans to introduce AIM Pages, an effort to compete with MySpace.com, the rapidly growing social networking service. MySpace, which is owned by the News Corporation, gives its 70 million mostly young members a place to post their writings, photographs, favorite music and video clips.

"Our strategy is to protect and extend our instant messaging business," said James P. Bankoff, executive vice president for programming and products at AOL, a unit of Time Warner. "You have to play offense."

The free phone number is a new twist on services that allow calls between regular phones and PC's, an idea made popular by Skype, which is owned by eBay, and copied by others, like Yahoo through its instant message software. As with those services, the new AOL Phoneline service, to be introduced May 16, will allow users to call each other free if both are online, typically using headsets or microphones attached to their computers.

Other services charge about $30 to $40 a year for a telephone number to receive incoming calls, and about 2 cents a minute to place phone calls from a computer to an ordinary telephone line.

AOL will sell outgoing calls only as part of a flat-rate package that costs $14.90 a month for unlimited calling, or at an introductory price of $9.95 a month for people who subscribe when the service starts.

Skype has not taken off in the United States as it has in other countries because telephone rates are much lower here, said John McKinley, the president of AOL's digital services division. Free incoming calls, he said, are more appealing in this country, especially for people who mostly use cellphones but do not want to give their cell number to casual acquaintances.

These people can give the AOL number out freely. They can then receive notifications on their cellphones of new voice mail messages left at their AOL number.

AOL will make phone numbers available in 50 metropolitan areas. The company hopes to profit both from displaying advertisements to users and from the outbound calling charges and additional services, like ring tones and call forwarding.

AOL is joining a growing list of companies that are attacking the traditional telephone market with the aid of the Internet. There are now about five million subscribers to so-called Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, communications services, according to International Data Corporation, a market research firm based in Framingham, Mass. Because cable and Internet companies are aggressively marketing the service, that is expected to increase to about 30 million subscribers by 2009.

"What's really intriguing about this is how cheap and easy some of this stuff is to use," said Will Stofega, research manager for VoIP services at International Data.

The other new piece of AOL's strategy for its AIM network, AIM Pages, hopes to match MySpace in giving users broad flexibility in designing their pages, but it is also meant to be easier to use. AOL has created a series of modules users can place on their pages, including photo albums, buddy lists and other information about themselves and their interests. It offers ways to add content from AOL and its sister Time Warner companies, like AOL music videos and CNN headlines.

But there are also modules for adding material from rival services, including the Flickr photo-sharing site, owned by Yahoo, and videos from the popular video-sharing service YouTube. There will be advertising on users' pages, and marketers will be able to set up their own sites on the service and offer modules for people to include in their pages.

A preview version of the social networking service will be available to AIM users by the end of next week.

Those with some proficiency in Web page design can change any element of the page, as they can on MySpace, and pull in content from other sites. Analysts credit MySpace's design flexibility as one reason it has become more popular than competitors like Friendster.

AIM, which is available as a free download, is still the leading messaging service with 38 percent of the market, followed by Yahoo and Microsoft, according to comScore Networks, a research service. But the market is getting more competitive. Google has introduced Google Talk, and MySpace is developing its own instant message service.

Many MySpace users communicate with friends using AIM, and AOL is hoping they will find AIM Pages easier to use than MySpace. AIM users will see an icon next to the names of people on their buddy lists who have updated their pages.

Analysts who have been briefed on the service said that it had promise for revitalizing AOL in the face of new social-networking rivals.

"There is no question that AIM is a real network," said David Card, vice president and senior analyst at Jupiter Research. "There's life in the old dog yet."

Ken Belson contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/05/te...y/05phone.html





Judges Challenge Internet Wiretap Rules

'Your argument makes no sense,' appeals judge tells FCC lawyer

A U.S. appeals panel sharply challenged the Bush administration Friday over new rules making it easier for police and the FBI to wiretap Internet phone calls. A judge said the government’s courtroom arguments were “gobbledygook.”

The skepticism expressed so openly toward the administration’s case encouraged civil liberties and education groups that argued that the U.S. is improperly applying telephone-era rules to a new generation of Internet services.

“Your argument makes no sense,” U.S. Circuit Judge Harry T. Edwards told the lawyer for the Federal Communications Commission, Jacob Lewis. “When you go back to the office, have a big chuckle. I’m not missing this. This is ridiculous. Counsel!”

At another point in the hearing, Edwards told the FCC’s lawyer that his arguments were “gobbledygook” and “nonsense.”

The court’s decision was expected within several months.

In an unrelated case last year affecting digital television, two of the same three judges determined the FCC had significantly exceeded its authority and threw out new government rules requiring anti-piracy devices in new video devices. Lewis was also the losing lawyer in that case, and Edwards also was impassioned then in his criticisms of the FCC.

In the current case, Edwards appeared especially skeptical over the FCC’s decision to require that providers of Internet phone service and broadband services must ensure their equipment can accommodate police wiretaps under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, known as CALEA.

The new rules go into effect in May 2007.

The 1994 law was originally aimed at ensuring court-ordered wiretaps could be placed on wireless phones.

The Justice Department, which has lobbied aggressively on the subject, warned in court papers that failure to expand the wiretap requirements to the fast-growing Internet phone industry “could effectively provide a surveillance safe haven for criminals and terrorists who make use of new communications services.”

Critics said the new FCC rules are too broad and inconsistent with the intent of Congress when it passed the 1994 surveillance law, which excluded categories of companies described as information services.

The FCC asserted that providers of high-speed Internet services should be covered under the 1994 law because their voice-transmission services can be considered separately from information services. “Congress intended to cover services (in the 1994 law) that were functionally equivalent” to traditional telephones, Lewis said during the hearing in U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia.

“There’s nothing to suggest that in the statute,” Edwards replied. “Stating that doesn’t make it so.”

The panel appeared more inclined to support the FCC’s argument that Internet-phone services — which allow users to dial and receive calls from traditional phone numbers — may be covered under the 1994 law and required to accommodate court-ordered wiretaps. The technology, popularized by Holmdel, N.J.-based Vonage Holdings Corp., is known as “voice over Internet protocol,” or VOIP.

“Voice-over is a very different thing,” U.S. Circuit Judge David B. Sentelle said. He said it offered “precisely the same” functions as traditional telephone lines.

Edwards told the lawyer for the civil liberties groups, Matthew Brill, that on his challenge that VOIP services aren’t covered under the surveillance law, “I didn’t think you have it.”
Education groups had challenged the FCC rules because they said the requirements would impose burdensome new costs on private university networks.

The third judge on the panel, Janice Rogers Brown, did not comment or ask any questions during the arguments.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12645488/





Many Hate Groups Favor U.S. Internet Servers

Watchdog group bemoans lack of oversight of inflammatory Web content

Hate groups around the world, including Islamic militants, often use Internet servers based in the United States to send propaganda and instructions to followers, according to a report released Thursday by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

In its eighth annual report on Internet hate speech, the Wiesenthal Center said it had logged some 6,000 Web sites in the past year used by racists and bigots to incite violence.

The pages, many of which the center archived on compact disc, range from rantings by American white supremacists to execution videos distributed by Islamic terror groups.

Clearinghouse for global hate
In one gruesome Internet post, labeled “Hidden Camera Jihad,” anonymous producers combined home movies of American soldiers being killed with a laugh track and the kind of comical sound effects you hear on “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

That clip proved difficult to trace, the report said, but thousands of others first appeared on U.S. computer servers, often maintained by companies that offer cheap disk space and don’t usually monitor what clients do with their Web sites.

Much of the hateful material originated overseas, but when extremist anti-Americans go looking for a place to post their bile, they often find it easier and cheaper to use a site hosted in America.

The United States, after all, has free speech and little Internet censorship, explained Wiesenthal Center senior researcher Rick Eaton, who was involved in preparing the report.

“If you want to circumvent your own country’s laws, you post it on an American server,” Easton said.

Watchdog on the Net
An international Jewish human rights organization, the Wiesenthal Center routinely complains to Internet companies when it discovers violent, hateful speech on their networks and has succeeded in getting thousands of such pages removed, said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the center’s Museum of Tolerance.

Recently, the center also has been intercepting an increased number of online tutorials and how-to manuals aimed not at the general public, but at sympathizers who might actually be recruited to carry out attacks.

Some of that material includes children’s games urging kids to get involved in violent struggle against Israel and the West, including a puzzle showing a child throwing a rock at a tank.

The center passes most of that material on to law enforcement officials.

“We’ve now reached a point where the Internet is the cornerstone of terrorist groups,” Cooper said.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12635543/





Amnesty: Torture ‘Widespread’ In U.S. Custody

Human rights group says U.S. ‘creating climate’ in which abuse can flourish

Torture and inhumane treatment are “widespread” in U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba and elsewhere despite Washington’s denials, Amnesty International said on Wednesday.

In a report for the United Nations’ Committee against Torture, the London-based human rights group also alleged abuses within the U.S. domestic law enforcement system, including use of excessive force by police and degrading conditions of isolation for inmates in high security prisons.

“Evidence continues to emerge of widespread torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees held in U.S. custody,” Amnesty said in its 47-page report.

It said that while Washington has sought to blame abuses that have recently come to light on “aberrant soldiers and lack of oversight”, much ill-treatment stemmed from officially sanctioned interrogation procedures and techniques.

“The U.S. government is not only failing to take steps to eradicate torture, it is actually creating a climate in which torture and other ill-treatment can flourish,” said Amnesty International USA Senior Deputy Director-General Curt Goering.

U.N. set for review
The U.N. committee, whose experts carry out periodic reviews of countries signatory to the U.N. Convention against Torture, is scheduled to begin consideration of the United States on Friday. The last U.S. review was in 2000.

It said in November it was seeking U.S. answers to questions including whether Washington operated secret detention centers abroad and whether President George W. Bush had the power to absolve anyone from criminal responsibility in torture cases.

The committee also wanted to know whether a December 2004 memorandum from the U.S. Attorney General’s office, reserving torture for “extreme” acts of cruelty, was compatible with the global convention barring all forms of cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment.

In its own submission to the committee, published late last year, Washington justified the holding of thousands of foreign terrorism suspects in prisons abroad, including Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, on the grounds that it was fighting a war that was still not over.

“Like other wars, when they start, we do not know when they will end. Still, we may detain combatants until the end of the war,” it said.

U.S. image takes a beating
The U.S. human rights image has taken a battering abroad over a string of scandals involving the sexual and physical abuse of prisoners held by American forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

In its submission, Washington did not mention alleged secret prisons.

Amnesty listed a series of incidents in recent years involving torture of detainees in U.S. custody, noting the heaviest sentence given to perpetrators was five months in jail.

This was the same punishment you could get for stealing a bicycle in the United States, it added.

“Although the U.S. government continues to assert its condemnation of torture and ill-treatment, these statements contradict what is happening in practice,” said Goering, referring to the testimony of torture victims in the report.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12602098/





Pixar Becomes Unit of Disney
AP

Shareholders of Pixar Animation Studios voted on Friday to approve the company's acquisition by the Walt Disney Company for $7.4 billion in stock.

The vote makes Pixar a subsidiary of Disney and makes the former chief executive of Pixar, Steven P. Jobs, the largest shareholder of Disney, with about a 7 percent stake.

The deal is an effort to help restore Disney's luster as a leader in the animated film business. Disney's own efforts have faltered over the last 10 years, while Pixar's films have been successful.

Mr. Jobs was named to Disney's board as a nonindependent member. Under the plan, Pixar shareholders will exchange each of their shares for 2.3 shares of Disney stock.

The acquisition closed quickly after the vote. Regulators had previously cleared the deal.

As part of the deal, important Pixar figures will take executive positions at Disney's animation and theme parks units.

Pixar will keep its brand name and continue to be based in Emeryville, Calif., as part of an effort to preserve the creative culture that has fueled its success.

John A. Lasseter, who was Pixar's executive vice president, will become chief creative officer of the animation studios and principal creative adviser at Walt Disney Imagineering, which designs and builds the company's theme parks.

Mr. Lasseter began his career as a Disney animator and is the creative force behind Pixar's films.

Pixar's president, Edwin E. Catmull, will serve as president of the combined Pixar and Disney animation studios.

The deal comes just a month before a distribution agreement between the companies was set to expire.

Disney agreed to finance Pixar's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," in 1991. The film was released in 1995, the same year Pixar became a public company.

The relationship between the companies has produced a string of box-office hits, including the films "Finding Nemo" and "The Incredibles." The seventh and last film under the old distribution agreement, "Cars," will be released June 9.

Shares of Disney rose 69 cents, to $29.09. Shares of Pixar rose $2.41, to $67.69.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/06/bu...a/06pixar.html





Fighting Off Satellites and the Bells
Ken Belson

THE last year was rough for cable companies. Everyone from Hollywood to New York predicted the industry's demise as satellite providers continued to steal cable customers, as the Bell companies geared up to sell television and as Disney, CBS and other networks started distributing shows over the Internet.

But the outlook for cable companies may be turning. Comcast, Cablevision and others are adding basic subscribers once again, and they are signing up record numbers of broadband and digital phone customers.

More change is on the way. By midyear, Time Warner Cable and Comcast hope to complete their purchase of Adelphia Communications and its 4.9 million subscribers.

As part of the deal, Time Warner Cable will also, for the first time, be publicly traded, increasing the spotlight on Glenn A. Britt, the company's decidedly low-profile chief executive. Mr. Britt has spent more than three decades in the Time Warner universe, working at Time Inc. and HBO before Time Warner Cable.

In an interview this week, Mr. Britt discussed the company's prospects. Following are excerpts:

Q. Time Warner Cable reported strong first-quarter earnings this week. Are satellite customers returning to cable?

A. The triple play — the combination of video, phone and broadband — is really, really popular with consumers and they tend to vote with their feet. The satellite companies have done a wonderful job making themselves look cheaper than cable. Some introductory packages are cheaper. But their average revenue per customer is about the same as cable. So the reality is that what people pay for satellite is about the same.

Q. Most cable stocks are up this year, but analysts remains wary. Why?

A. Wall Street has two concerns about cable. They are both going to be proven wrong. The first is the phone companies are going to crush the cable companies. But the reality is that it will take them many, many years to build out the whole country. When they get to where we are today, we'll be selling all these new things.

The second thing is whether all television is going over the Internet. The answer to that is not anytime soon. The Internet as it exists today is not capable of delivering hundreds of channels to millions of homes. The second reason is we gather an audience and guarantee revenue back to the networks, and they use the money to make more programming. Networks aren't going to put their content on the Internet unless there is a replacement.

Q. But Disney is now putting some of its shows on the Internet free. Isn't that a threat to your business?

A. Media companies are under pressure to experiment with putting a few shows on the Internet. It's a valid experimentation and if something takes off, people will do it. What I don't want to say is that there will not be a lot of video on the Internet. There's a huge amount of consumer-generated video. But that's a lot different than networks putting video on the Internet free.

Q. What will the acquisition of Adelphia Communications do for Time Warner Cable?

A. The really important part of the deal is that we'll be able to consolidate the Los Angeles market. We will go from having 15 percent of the market to having 85 percent.

Q. Time Warner and other cable companies are working with Sprint to develop wireless products. When can consumers expect to see them?

A. We will be in test markets later this year and those products will be fairly rudimentary. The things we really want to do are across platforms, like getting all your e-mail in one box or being able to get your Internet service on your cell. There isn't that big of a rush. It isn't clear what will be popular.

Q. Some consumer and religious groups want cable companies to sell channels on an à la carte basis. How likely is this?

A. The underlying economics of the television business and what it costs to produce the array of television in this country are what drives this phenomenon of big packages. We could offer à la carte technically. But if we offered à la carte, it would introduce all sorts of other costs. Think about being a new subscriber to cable. The average customer service phone call is five minutes. But with à la carte, operators would have to explain all the different channels. It might take half an hour and we would have to pass that cost along. It would not be cheaper but more expensive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/06/bu...interview.html





The Bare Naked Truth On Music File Sharing
Jim Ducharme

A conversation with Steven Page of Barenaked Ladies about why Canadian music fans who share files are not thieves.

The first 45 (remember them?) I ever bought with my own money was Steve Miller's "Take The Money and Run". At that time, it never occurred to me that I would in any way be a criminal if I made a tape of it for a friend. After all, I wasn't trying to rip off the "Space Cowboy". I was only trying to share his music with friends and I was under the impression that they would then likely go out and buy their own copies of his album. I really thought I was doing anything but taking Steve's money and running.

Talking this week to Barenaked Ladies front man Steven Page, I saw that he also had similar memories when he recalled the first time he got a tape from his cousin, who had recorded "Rock Lobster" by the B52s from CHUM FM on his portable recorder. To get that recording, which he listened to for the whole summer, Steven had to place his recorder mic next to his cousin's speaker.

Nowadays, MP3s will do just fine, and that's exactly what Steven and I discussed when we went over a new initiative from some of Canada's biggest music stars, who have joined together to form the Canadian Music Creators Coalition (CMCC) to support their fans and speak out on the issue of music sharing. CMCC wants the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) to know that Canadian music fans are not thieves just because they share music.

Based on the rhetoric coming from the recording industry, perhaps Steve and I will both be busted for confessing we taped music. Not too bad, I suppose - sharing a cell with Steven Page, spending my time singing harmony on BNL classics. Unfortunately, in reality, I'd probably end up in a cell with some tone deaf guy named "Bubba" who would insist on calling me "Jane".

Music sharing is not new. It's been happening for decades. The only thing that has changed is the technology. This is the crux of the issue - home taping (despite industry propaganda to the contrary) did not kill music. Nowadays, P2P file sharing over the web is faster and brings together huge numbers of people (and does not have the quality issues that tape recording had). This, understandably, scares the begeebers out of record execs. Whether they want to admit to it or not, CRIA and the record labels have had an extreme knee jerk reaction to this because they can't seem to understand the technology or, worse yet, music fans and the culture of the web. Now, entrenched in their position, they can't afford to take a step back and look at the issue from a new perspective.

As Steven points out, P2P sharing is the most accessible method people have to music. "There's no reason to punish fans for what they've always been doing. Better technology is just a means for them to enjoy their music better and it should be a way for us to help our business rather than preserving a business model that is out of date," says Steven.

I understand the need to protect copyrights. I often have to engage in this kind of policing myself when some other website lifts one of our stories without first asking for permission. However, because of the way they've dealt with the issue, even folks like me, who used to share CRIA's concerns, have changed our tunes.

Steven makes the case that record labels still need to learn that music is not a commodity, and marketing it in that way alienates fans who view it in an almost spiritual sense. Music is a touchstone in our lives - it's the soundtrack of our past, tied directly to our emotions and memories. The impression of fans is that the recording industry wants to control what most people consider to be something very personal.

Should we have banned the tape recorder or the VCR? That's what the TV industry wanted then. Looking back on it, it doesn't make any sense, does it? In fact, it sounds ridiculous, since VCRs created an entirely new channel to generate even more revenue, while giving video fans exactly what they wanted. P2P file sharing is today's VCR or tape recorder. It's no more likely to destroy the music industry than my Uncle's pet Airedale.

"How do we embrace the P2P (file sharing) world in a way that is unobtrusive for the consumer/music fan, so that it doesn't seem like a sell-out or a co-opt? How do we reconnect with our fan base? It's time to listen to what fans want and give it to them. We need to find ways to truly make it the same experience for people, but easier, with more stuff available and guilt-free, in a way that artists and labels get paid.", says Page.

Now, there is a business model which I can pretty much guarantee will work.
http://www.pcworld.ca/news/column/00...379858/pg2.htm





Canadian Musicians Band Together To Promote Progressive Copyright Reform
Tyler Morency

Broken Social Scene and Avril Lavigne may not have much in common musically, but they share a concern for the way music is shared and listened to in Canada.

To ensure the voice of musicians is heard in the copyright debate, Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies created the Canadian Music Creators Coalition. Members of Blue Rodeo along with Sam Roberts, John K Sampson of The Weakerthans, Broken Social Scene, Avril Lavigne and others have publicly joined the coalition.

Page says the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), which represents the interests of the major record labels, doesn’t speak for the interests of the artists and that it is important for the people actually making the music to participate in the debate on copyright reform.

“Our main message isn’t necessarily for them (the CRIA), it’s to our fans and Ottawa, to say that the CRIA doesn’t speak on our behalf,” says Page. “For along time, we as musicians have allowed them to.”

The three core values of the organization are these: suing fans is wrong and counterproductive; digital locks on music, which prevent music from being copied to other media players, are standing in the way of music getting to the fans; and that Canadian musicians deserve support from the government.

Many independent record companies left the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) two weeks ago, including Nettwerk records which produces records for the Barenaked Ladies.

“Now especially, they’re (CRIA) purely representing the values and goals of the four multinational big record labels,” Page says. “We want to make sure that people understand that Canadian artists deserve a say in Canadian cultural policy.”

CRIA has stated they are against file sharing in all its forms and that they consider music downloads to be piracy.

Despite these claims, the Copyright Board of Canada declared that while uploading music to distribute over the internet is illegal, downloading music is not. A bill aimed at changing Canadian copyright laws died on the order paper last year when the federal election was called.

The US counterpart of CRIA has sued fans in high profile lawsuits for the possession of downloaded music over the last several years. Page doesn’t want to see the same practice in Canada.

“That’s not how we want to earn our living from our fans,” Page says. He adds that a better option is to introduce a levy or tariff, similar to the existing ‘private copying’ tariff on blank CDs, to digital media files.

“They (CRIA) know what the most popular files are and what is being moved around, and they use that data to complain about the process. But they could also use that data to collect and distribute monies from levies,” Page says. “In an ideal situation, that’s where we’re going to start seeing income from our copyrights. In the interim, the last thing we want to do is push our audience away.”

Page says Canadian copyright laws and record companies need to adopt a hands-off attitude towards P2P sharing.

“P2P sharing has become a helpful tool for us,” Page says of his own band, adding that copyright law reform needs to meet the needs of both the artist and the recording industry.

“We’re going to keep moving forward as musicians and we’re going to do it without the labels, and it’s their choice to keep up.”
http://www.vueweekly.com/articles/default.aspx?i=3871





Fair Use Faltering
Roy Mark

Rep. Rick Boucher has Hollywood all flustered. Again. Don't you just hate that?

The Virginia Democrat enjoys wide respect, if not support, from both sides of the aisle for his grasp of technology issues. You may not agree with Boucher, but you almost always come away agreeing he has a point.

The latest case in point: fair use rights.

Boucher supports legislation that would allow consumers to "circumvent a technological measure in order to obtain access [to works] for purposes of making non-infringing use of the work."

H.R. 1201, the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act of 2005, further adds, "Except in cases of direct infringement, it shall not be a violation of the Copyright Act to manufacture or distribute a hardware or software product capable of substantial non-infringing uses."

Boucher's bill would amend two key provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which currently prohibits the circumvention of a technical protection measure guarding access to a copyrighted work, even if the purpose of the circumvention is to exercise traditional consumer fair-use rights.

"We need to have a true balance in the law that respects the rights of copyright owners but also respects the rights of users," Boucher has repeatedly preached.

Hollywood so dislikes this idea that earlier this week a Universal Music Group attorney told a House panel that Boucher's bill "would undermine the legitimate marketplace by granting a 'hacking' right to consumers."

Michael Ostroff went on to claim, "This bill is unnecessary and dangerous."

Congress passed the DMCA in 1998 in response to Hollywood's concerns over piracy. Content owners stressed that with digital technology a copy of a copy of a copy has the same clarity and perfection as the original work.

Copyright owners -- even before the explosion of peer-to-peer (P2P) music services -- said that with a click of the mouse, thousands of those perfect copies could be sent around the world.

Congress's solution was to ban it all.

Under the DMCA there is no requirement that the circumvention be for the purpose of infringing the copyrights. Instead, any act of circumvention without the consent of the copyright owner is a criminal act.

"If you want to copy a portion of a chapter of a book to quote in a book report, you cannot steal the book in order to do so," Ostroff said. "Yet that is exactly what H.R. 1201 would do."

The interesting point about Ostroff's diatribe against Boucher's bill is that the hearing had doing to the legislation.

The hearing was all about digital radio.

Having ripped the very concept of fair use embraced under Boucher's bill, Ostroff launched another attack on satellite radio service XM's development of handheld devices that give XM subscribers the ability to receive live broadcasts and time shift it for later listening.

The handhelds also allow subscribers to play MP3 music collections.

Hollywood: Not fair!

"Congress gave the satellite services a compulsory license to perform our music, so that their subscribers could listen to it," Ostroff said, adding that the music industry help launch satellite radio service by agreeing -- through the compulsory license -- to below market rates.

"Now XM wants to stretch and reinterpret the government imposed license into a service that enables their subscribers to make permanent copies of our music," Ostroff said.

XM: Get a life.

"As an industry, satellite radio is the single largest contributor of sound recording performance royalties to artists and record labels," XM CEO Gary Parsons said.

"In fact, XM and Sirius pay more in such performance royalties than all other digital broadcasters and webcasters combined."

Parsons told the lawmakers the XM handhelds do not allow any of the recorded content to be moved off the device in digital form, including uploading to the Internet.

"Content saved to the device from XM stays on the device and cannot be copied or removed," Parsons said. "The only output on these devices goes to your headphones in analog form. The new products ... promote personal listening enjoyment, not Internet piracy."

Ostroff insisted that allowing XM to distribute music while paying only performance fees is unfair to iTunes, Napster and other distribution services.

"The growth of digital distribution in its many forms -- via cell phones, Internet, cable and now via broadcast signals -- depends on a legitimate marketplace," he said. "A legitimate marketplace, in turn, depends upon the ability to protect content effectively."

From Hollywood's point of view, that ability to protect content, it appears, seems to preclude any consumer fair-use rights.

Too bad more people aren't listening to Rick Boucher.
http://www.internetnews.com/commenta...le.php/3604241





In Case You Were Wondering…

How to Rip DVDs to Small AVI or MPG Formatted Files





Ignore Consumer Tech At Your Peril, CIOs Warned It's Not A Fad And It Won't Go Away, Says Gartner...
Andy McCue

Businesses must embrace the 'consumerisation' of technology and not ban staff from downloading or using new technologies and software at work.

Analyst Gartner has warned that technologies such as wikis and those offered by Google and Skype will increasingly find their way into the enterprise, and CIOs and IT directors will not be able to stop the trend by simply banning or ignoring them.

The majority of new technologies which businesses adopt between 2007 and 2012 will have their roots in the consumer market, according to Gartner.

David Smith, VP and Gartner Fellow, said consumers are now more tech-literate and less willing to be limited by the traditional confines of corporate IT.

He said in a statement: "A primary agent of this phenomenon is the second internet revolution in which the internet serves as a proving ground for new technologies. The internet's ease of use has made people view technology differently, with less hesitancy."

Gartner warned these new technologies will find their way into the enterprise whether CIOs like it or not and that, instead of trying to ban them, CIOs should experiment to find ways the business can get productivity gains and competitive advantage from them.

This includes creating "experimentation zones" where IT staff and other users can become familiar with new consumer technologies and identify possible uses in the enterprise to aid collaboration and efficiency.

Gartner also said the potential security threat of new consumer-based technologies in the enterprise also needs to be addressed. silicon.com's CIO Jury IT user panel recently slammed Google's new desktop search tool because of the security risk it poses.

But Smith said businesses need to recognise the 'consumerisation of IT' trend will continue to gain momentum.

He said: "It isn't a fad that's going to go away next year. Don't try to stop it - you will fail."
http://management.silicon.com/itdire...9158689,00.htm





Local news

Danbury Library Offers Audio Books For Download
Erik Ofgang

Last week Danbury Library implemented a new program that allows patrons to download audio books from the Internet onto their home computers and MP3 players.

Once downloaded, these books can be played on an MP3 player anywhere, any time.

Sue Horton, the audio video coordinator at the library, said she thought it would be "phenomenal" for library patrons.

There are more than 1,248 audio books available, and the number is constantly rising. Titles include "Cell" by Stephen King and "1776" by David McCullough.

To download the audio books, one needs to start a netlibrary account. Members of Danbury Library can start an account online, while members of other libraries need to go to Danbury Library to start an account, Horton said.

Once the account is established, an audio book can be downloaded in about 12 minutes with a high-speed connection. If a book is available, there is no limit to the number of people who can access it.

"Over 100 people could download the same item at one time," said Horton.

The audio book will work for three weeks, and patrons will be able to renew it once. There is no need to worry about late fees, because after the allotted time the book will basically "return itself," Horton says, because it will no longer play.

However, the convenience does come with a hefty price tag for the library. Horton said the program will cost the library $12,000 a year because it pays Recorded Books, an audio book company, for the service.

The bigger a library's readership, the more the fee, because it is likely that more people will use the service.

Horton said the library choose Recorded Books over its competitor Overdrive because of the high quality of the recordings and because a large majority of the books are unabridged,

Also, although Overdrive had a larger selection, Recorded Books had more selections of well-known books. One draw back to Recorded Books is that the audio books cannot be played on an Apple iPod.

Horton said this year will be a test for the program. The library will seek feedback on whether Recorded Books was the right choice.

Mary Monahan, a reference librarian who is involved with letting high school students know about library services, said she anticipates local students will use the service. "Kids are a lot more sophisticated with technology," she aded.

Monahan said the service will be particularly handy for student's summer reading lists, because "500 kids could access (a required book) it at the same time."

Diane Greenwald, assistant director at the library, purchased an MP3 player so she could to try out the new audio books.

"It's great because it goes wherever I go," said Greenwald. "I can listen around the house, in the car, wherever I want to be."

Danbury Library joins the ranks of several Connecticut libraries, including Booth Library in Newtown in offering downloadable audio books.

"It's our goal to be the best library in Connecticut," Horton said, so "we had to do this."

Danbury Library is at 170 Main St. Its Web site is www.danburylibrary.org.
http://news.newstimeslive.com/story....category=Local





420 friendly

The Nitpicking Nation
Stephanie Rosenbloom

THEY are single, gay, straight, biracial, conservative, liberal and tattooed — and they have as many preferences for a potential roommate as an online dater has for a potential lover. They are bankers, fetishists, self-declared nerds and drug users. They have old wounds and new hopes, and are willing to barter their cooking and sexual expertise for free or discounted rent.

They are all seeking and selling housing on Craigslist.org, the electronic listing service with sites in all 50 states and more than 200 worldwide. And because users pay nothing (for now) and are able to go on at length about who they are and what they want, their postings provide a sociological window into housing trends and desires across the country, from the neon cityscape of the Las Vegas Strip to the wheat fields of Wichita, Kan.

Myriad other sites provide roommate-matching services, but in the last decade Craigslist has emerged as the gold standard. It is easy to navigate, has an extensive number of listings and does not require people to complete an online sign-up sheet to view postings in their entirety. And the intimate and sometimes politically incorrect nature of Craigslist postings can make them fun to read — amusing, frank and even kinky.

Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising thing about the housing listings is the abundance of users — even young, savvy residents of anything-goes metropolises like Los Angeles and Miami — who want mellow, nonpartying roommates. Las Vegas sounds more like Snore City if you judge it by its housing listings. And New Yorkers can come off sounding square. "No parties" and "no drama" are common refrains.

There are exceptions, but even club-hopping Paris Hilton hopefuls seem to have their limits. As four women (ages 19 to 22) seeking a fifth roommate in Boston wrote, "We want a partier, not a puker."

People in their 20's often list their alma maters and request a roommate in their own age group. Cleanliness is a must, or at least "clean-ish," "decently clean" or "clean in public spaces." And spending life with a "professional" appears to be just as important to users of Craigslist's housing listings as it is to users of Match.com.

Some listings have stirred up trouble, however, and the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit group, has filed a lawsuit in federal court against Craigslist for "publishing housing advertisements which exclude prospective tenants on the basis of race, gender, family status, marital status, national origin and religion."

A news release issued by the organization said that the Craigslist postings contained such language as "no minorities," "African-Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won't work out," "ladies, please rent from me," "requirements: clean godly Christian male," "will allow only single occupancy," and "no children."

The suit is addressed on Craigslist: "Although in all likelihood this suit will be dismissed on the grounds that Internet sites cannot legally be held liable for content posted by users, Craigslist has no need to hide behind this well-established immunity."

The statement also says that Craigslist respects constitutionally protected free speech rights and that "discriminatory postings are exceedingly uncommon, and those few that do reach the site are typically removed quickly by our users through the flagging system that accompanies each ad."

Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, said that its "culture of trust" inspires users to be straightforward. In fact, some users do not even feel compelled to embellish the descriptions of their spaces, as housing advertisements commonly do. Rather, they take a certain pride in the gritty crudeness of their offerings. A small room for rent in the East Village is described as "definitely a young person's apartment" with "two small junky TV's that we have cheap antennas on, but we get the normal channels, and that is enough for us."

"There is no window," the listing says, "but you have a full-sized door."

And where else do you find housing listings that include candid photographs of the owner or leaseholder instead of the property they are advertising? (A man in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., compromised and included images of his bare room and his bare chest.)

Indeed, Craigslist is where sex and real estate can truly merge. Near Dallas, a married couple are looking for a female roommate "with benefits." A listing for Astoria, Queens, reads: "I am offering a free room for up to three months for any females who are ticklish." A single man in Los Angeles is offering foot massages and free rent to women with comely feet.

Those are some of the tamer overtures, though the majority of roommate listings are not suggestive.

But just who are the most desirable roommates?

Many people prefer women to men. There are women who feel more comfortable sharing a home with someone of the same sex, men who say they get along better with female housemates, and a few cyberspace Casanovas who want to take a shot at turning a roommate into a bedmate. Interns are also desirable, apparently because they are thought to be hard-working, responsible and willing to pay good money for cramped rooms.

But couples are sometimes lumped into a list of the unacceptable, like cigarette smoking. Over all, Democrats are more vocal than Republicans in expressing a desire not to live with the opposing party, though two "hip professional guys" found elusive harmony on Capitol Hill: "One guy is straight, and one is gay. One is a Republican, and the other is a Democrat," they wrote in a listing for a third roommate. "We appreciate and welcome diversity."

Users in the San Francisco Bay Area appear to be among the least interested in rooming with a pet. This area had the highest percentage of "no pets" listings during a key-word search last Thursday (slightly more than 16 percent of 32,295 housing listings). In Boston, about 14 percent of 45,880 listings said "no pets."

Dallas, Wyoming and Birmingham, Ala., seemed quite pet-friendly by comparison: only about 1 percent of the housing listings in each location said "no pets." But Wichita, Kan., emerged as one of the most accepting places, with less than 1 percent of the listings snubbing pets.

In some parts of the country Craigslist housing postings are an essential part of the real estate biosphere. New York is by far the leader in this regard (it had some 180,245 housing listings last Thursday).

Mr. Newmark said there were two reasons for that. "New York real estate is kind of a blood sport," he said, "and also, because our site is free, brokers tend to post a lot of redundant ads."

He said he hoped to address that problem in a matter of weeks by beginning to charge a fee.

Although Mr. Newmark has not studied how the number of housing listings fluctuates day to day, he believes they remain fairly steady on weekdays and drop off on weekends.

Boston had 45,880 housing listings last Thursday, and the San Francisco Bay Area had 32,295. In other places like Montana and Louisville, Ky., there were just a few hundred postings, and North Dakota had fewer than 100.

The New York listings include some of the most expensive, precarious sleeping arrangements in the country. A sofa bed in the living room/kitchen of a one-bedroom apartment on 55th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues is $683 a month. You could get a 780-square-foot one-bedroom cottage in Savannah, Ga., for $665 a month. A couch on the West Coast, in a Los Angeles apartment belonging to three actors, is merely $400 a month and includes utilities, cable, Netflix membership, Starbucks wireless membership and wireless Internet, as well as household staples like toothpaste and shampoo.

New Yorkers are also adept at constructing what the military calls a zone of separation. A woman with an apartment at Union Square posted a photograph, not of the bedroom she wanted to rent out for $1,150 a month, but of a large divider she planned to use to create the bedroom from part of her living room.

Near Columbus Circle, a "very small, but cozy space enclosed by tall bookshelves and bamboo screens" is listed for $1,700 a month. Potential occupants are advised that they must be older than 30 and cannot wear shoes inside the apartment, smoke, consume alcohol, invite guests over or have "sleepovers."

A plethora of "no smokers" statements in the New York housing listings make it appear that the public smoking ban has infiltrated private spaces, too.

But while cigarettes are a deal breaker for some, a number of Craigslist users across the country (Denver and Boulder, Colo.; San Francisco; Boston; and Portland, Ore., to name but a few) say that they are "420 friendly," slang for marijuana use. References to 420 were nonexistent in other cities, including Little Rock, Ark.; Santa Fe, N.M.; and Boise, Idaho.

There are also myriad references to amenities, everything from the use of old record collections and video games to a trapeze suspended in a Brooklyn loft. A posting for a room for rent in Detroit lacks images of the property, though there is a photograph of the L.C.D. television.

And if nothing else, Craigslist housing postings in the United States confirm the zaniness of the hunt and provide a taste of the free-spirited, random connections that have always been part of the experience.

A posting in Asheville, N.C., says that two 21-year-old women are planning to drive almost 20 hours to Austin, Tex., this summer, where they will rent a two-bedroom apartment for $550 a month. "We are looking for one or two (yeah, you can bring a buddy) cool people to ride out there and split an apartment with us," the listing reads. "Are you up for being spontaneous?"

Would-be Jack Kerouacs, take note: they hit the road at the end of the month.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/re...07listing.html





More Questions Surface in the Wake of a Congressman's Bribery Case
Paul von Zielbauer and David Johnston

A federal investigation into one congressman's bribe-taking last year has produced a second round of inquiries into the actions of officials at the C.I.A. and the Homeland Security Department and of members of the House Intelligence Committee, government officials say.

These new inquiries reach beyond Randy Cunningham, the former Republican House member from California who was sentenced in March to more than eight years in prison for taking $2.4 million in bribes from military contractors. The investigations suggest a growing suspicion among some lawmakers that corrupt practices may have influenced decision-making in Congress and at executive-branch agencies.

Last month, The San Diego Union-Tribune and The Wall Street Journal reported that federal investigators were looking into whether the military contractors involved in Mr. Cunningham's bribery had also arranged limousines, poker parties and prostitutes for him at the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels here.

Law enforcement officials have confirmed these reports, and a manager at the Watergate has said the hotel was subpoenaed by federal officials seeking documents related to the poker parties. Calls to Mr. Cunningham's lawyer, K. Lee Blalack II, seeking comment were not returned.

The investigation has led to further official inquiries into who arranged and attended the poker parties and their connections to the military contractors who played roles in Mr. Cunningham's bribery.

The inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency, the agency says, is conducting an inquiry into Kyle Foggo, its executive director, who said this week that he attended some of the parties over the years.

Mr. Foggo, the C.I.A.'s third-ranking official, is a longtime friend of Brent R. Wilkes, one of the military contractors whose role is described in the indictment against Mr. Cunningham. Mr. Wilkes has not been charged, and his lawyer did not return calls on Friday.

Mr. Wilkes is a business associate of Mitchell Wade, a military contractor who pleaded guilty in February to providing more than $1 million in bribes to Mr. Cunningham. Mr. Wade's lawyer declined Friday to discuss his client's role in the investigation.

A C.I.A. spokesman said Saturday that Mr. Foggo has said he did not violate agency rules in the awarding of contracts and that the poker games were nothing more than a gathering of friends. Mr. Foggo was promoted to his job at the C.I.A. by Porter J. Goss, who abruptly resigned Friday as director of the agency. There has been no suggestion by officials involved in these investigations that Mr. Goss did anything wrong or was under investigation.

The inquiry into the poker games has also put a spotlight on the limousine company that ferried Mr. Cunningham and others to the Watergate and Westin Grand. The company, Shirlington Limousine and Transportation, is operated by Christopher D. Baker, a man with a history of criminal convictions and financial troubles. Shirlington won a contract worth as much as $25.2 million to drive homeland security employees and officials around Washington.

Lawyers for Mr. Baker did not return calls seeking comment, and a message left with Shirlington Limousine's answering service on Saturday did not bring a response. The company is listed at several addresses in the region, including a post office box in Arlington, Va., and an apartment in a residential building in downtown Washington.

Shirlington provided 12 minibuses five days a week to drive homeland security employees among downtown offices, and 10 drivers to ferry department executives around the region in department-owned sedans.

F.B.I. agents have talked to Shirlington employees about driving Mr. Cunningham and prostitutes to hotel poker parties, and have interviewed women who work for escort services, said a lawyer involved in the investigation.

On Friday, Republicans and Democrats on the House Committee on Homeland Security announced that they planned to investigate Shirlington Limousine's contract.

"The information we've obtained raises a number of serious questions, from the contracting process to possible security concerns," said Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, the Republican chairman of the House subcommittee in charge of management and oversight at the Department of Homeland Security. "The appearance of a lack of background checks on contractors is another troubling personnel issue at D.H.S. that we are examining."

In a draft letter to the inspector general of homeland security, to be sent Monday, Representative Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, the ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, asks why the department hired the limousine company and whether Shirlington's bid received preferential treatment. It seeks a list of official passengers.

Democrats on the committee said Friday that they plan to ask homeland security officials about the Shirlington contract in a May 18 hearing.

Larry Orluskie, a homeland security spokesman, said background checks were conducted on all Shirlington drivers before they were given access to department cars and officials. He stressed that the department does not use Shirlington's limousines and that it has been "absolutely satisfied" with the company since awarding it a contract in April 2004.

"The drivers are professional," he said. "The buses are always on time. The contract is just perfect."

In January, the top Republican and top Democrat on the House intelligence committee announced their own inquiry into whether Mr. Cunningham's bribery schemes had influenced the committee's business. The intelligence committee oversees the 16 intelligence agencies and their $44 billion annual budget.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/wa...07inquire.html





Someone Has to Pay for TV. But Who? And How?
Randall Stross

THEY will take my remote control away only when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

This thought followed my first reading of a patent application for a new kind of television set and digital video recorder recently filed by a unit of Royal Philips Electronics at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The design appears to threaten the inalienable right to channel-surf during commercials or fast-forward through ads in programs you've taped.

A second, calmer reading of the patent application revealed that the proposed design would uphold the right to avoid commercials, but only for those who paid a fee. Those disinclined to pay would be prevented from changing channels during commercials. If the viewer tried to circumvent the system by recording the program and skipping the ads during playback, the new, improved recorder would detect when a commercial segment was being displayed and disable the fast-forward button for the duration.

As a business proposition, the concept appears dead on arrival: what consumer would voluntarily buy a television designed to charge fees for using it? When I spoke last week with Ruud Peters, the executive in charge of intellectual property at Philips, to learn how it would be pitched to consumers, he explained that the patent application had no connection to any Philips products in the pipeline. And, he explained, the notion of temporarily crippling the remote control to protect advertising is already out there and did not originate with his company.

But limiting remote controls is a possibility that could be realized in a new technical standard — M.H.P., for multimedia home standard — that the television industry is contemplating for the future. Neither broadcasters nor television manufacturers, whose joint cooperation would be necessary, have yet to adopt the standard. If the television industry embraced M.H.P., broadcasters could insert special signals to immobilize the remote control during commercials. If this came to pass, Mr. Peters said the Philips technology would "give consumers the freedom of choice" — "freedom" defined as exercising the option to pay a fee in order to regain the use of the remote control.

Philips's pay-to-surf proposal may be the first of its kind, but we should expect to see other ideas that would not have appeared in days past, when advertising-based television thrived. Today, the digital video recorder is slowly, but surely, tunneling through the television industry's foundation. Ten million homes had DVR's in 2005, according to Forrester Research; the number is expected to jump to 15 million this year, 30 million next year and 42 million in 2010. Scientific-Atlanta, which supplies set-top boxes to all the major cable companies, reports that fully half its boxes going out today are equipped with DVR's.

What this means for traditional advertising can be divined in data collected by TiVo, which has 4.4 million subscribers. Davina Kent, a TiVo vice president, said that when its customers watch recorded programs, they skip 70 percent of the commercials.

This has not escaped the notice of advertisers. Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst at Forrester, predicted that "next year, you'll see significant decline in TV ad spending as a result of digital video recorders."

The television industry has not figured out how best to respond. Four years ago, Jamie Kellner, then head of the Turner Broadcasting System, remarked in an interview in CableWorld magazine that viewers who used DVR's to fast-forward past commercials were committing "theft," then a moment later described it as "stealing the programming." He did allow trips to the bathroom as a noncriminal exemption.

The remarks brought instant criticism outside the industry. But he anticipated the adoption curve for DVR's when he said in the same interview that broadcasters needed to come up with a "new model" for collecting revenue from consumers who used recorders to skip commercials.

CBS OnDemand, which rents commercial-free episodes for a modest fee as low as 99 cents, but which must be viewed within 24 hours of downloading to a PC, is one experiment. (Those CBS downloads reveal just how much time commercials occupy in the traditional broadcast: with commercials stripped out, a 60-minute program may run as short as 41 minutes.) The abundant network program offerings at iTunes, which cost $1.99 but do not go poof after a set time, is a work in progress, too. An industrywide hardware standard that could immobilize remote controls, and the related Philips pay-to-surf proposal, are also in the mix of possible responses to the industry's quandary.

I have not paid close attention to the online offerings of single television episodes because my DVR works well and the fast-forward function on my remote works very, very well. (The button I've programmed to perform a 30-second skip is holding up beautifully, even though it is pressed as emphatically as a hospital button connected to a morphine pump.) Why would I ever buy what the DVR effortlessly records at no cost? Even if I were to feel a twinge of concern that by skipping ads, I am violating an implicit contract that Mr. Kellner asserted exists between broadcaster and viewer of ad-supported television, I take comfort in the knowledge that no such contract exists.

James Boyle, a law professor at Duke University, said that broadcasters offer a program knowing that only a fraction of the audience watches the commercials. Advertisers, he added, buy nothing more than "an option on a probability," and the viewer is no more obligated to watch every commercial than a driver is obligated to read every billboard.

The trickiest legal issue posed by DVR's is not ad-skipping, but something even more basic: the right to freely make a copy of a program for personal use in the first place. My assertion of an inalienable right to fast-forward through commercials would be rendered moot if the creators of the program that I am racing to rejoin were permitted to fully exercise the protections of copyright and impose control over the copying of their creative work.

Since the dawn of the videocassette recorder designed for home use in the mid-1970's, we have copied copyrighted television programs with impunity, enjoying the "fair use" exemption granted for this, a private, noncommercial purpose. The legality of home copying based on "fair use" was enshrined in a Supreme Court decision, Sony Corporation v. Universal City Studios Inc., handed down in 1984.

That decision addressed copying with a Betamax videocassette recorder, and it remains the key decision that protects copying with DVR's today. But the more one looks at how the court arrived at its decision in the Sony case — a 5-to-4 squeaker — and at how recording technology has changed and new business opportunities have opened since then, the more difficult it is to see how a majority of the court could possibly uphold the same position today.

The courts uphold "fair use" only when it doesn't harm the commercial value of the copyrighted work. At the time the suit was brought, skipping ads during playback on a clunky tape machine was hardly worth the considerable trouble. At the trial, survey data showed that only about 25 percent of recorded ads were skipped. In the face of testimony by Fred Rogers of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" on PBS, who welcomed home copying of his program, the movie studios that brought the lawsuit failed to convince the judge that VCR copying of televised movies was hurting their business.

WOULD indisputable evidence that DVR's facilitated ad-skipping make a difference if the Sony case were decided today? Paul Goldstein, a professor at Stanford Law School, thinks that it might. "If you were working with a clean slate, and everything was the same except for the ad-skipping rate — that's a compelling fact that could have made a difference," he said.

Randal C. Picker, a law professor of the University of Chicago, pointed to the commercial availability of network programs at places like iTunes as another enormously important change to be considered by the court if a case like Sony were litigated today.


How to pay for free television is the overarching but unanswered question, Professor Picker said. Speaking as a viewer, he said: "I want the other guy to watch advertising. But we can't all not watch."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/bu...ey/07digi.html





Legalise Personal Music Copying, Says BPI
Andrew Murray-Watson

The British music industry is to recommend to the Government that consumers be allowed to legally copy music without fear of prosecution.

The BPI, the body that represents British record companies, believes copyright on CDs and records should be changed to allow consumers to copy music if it is for personal use. Currently, it is technically illegal for anyone to copy a CD onto their computer for the purposes of downloading music onto their own portable music player.

In its submission to the Gowers Review - the independent review body set up by the Treasury to examine the UK's intellectual property framework - the BPI has asked for the issue of this area of music copyright to be addressed.

It is believed the organisation, which represents the likes of EMI and Sanctuary, prefers the option of altering copyright protections on music without the requirement for a change in legislation.

The BPI has vigorously prosecuted consumers who share music illegally over the internet using peer-to-peer (P2P) websites. It wants the current legislative protections to remain in place for these music "pirates", but believes allowances should be made for individuals who simply want to copy music for their own use.

"This is about the UK music industry responding effectively to the changing way music is consumed," said a senior industry figure yesterday.

If Gowers endorses the BPI's preferred solution to the issue of copying music, it will lead to one of the most significant changes in UK copyright law in decades.

Some of the UK's existing music copyright laws date back nearly 100 years, to the days when the gramophone was cutting-edge technology.

The Gowers Review, led by Andrew Gowers, the former editor of the Financial Times, will look to update a raft of antiquated laws and address the contentious issue of artists losing copyright protection on recorded music after 50 years.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/mai...ixcitytop.html





Thermal Greasy: Apple Sics Lawyers on Something Awful

After a Something Awful denizen took apart his MacBook Pro and discovered that Apple had slathered on far too much thermal grease, he found that using a more modest amount dropped his MacBook Pro’s temperatures by several degrees. Now the forum has recieved a threatening letter from Apple’s legal staff, requesting a link to this image [pictured above] be removed because “The Service Source manual for the MacBook Pro is Apple’s intellectual property and is protected by U.S. copyright law.”

Of course the real problem isn’t the single excerpted page being linked from Something Awful, but instead the fact that the image shows the extremely sloppy manufacturing process that is causing the MacBook Pro to run at temperatures as high as a 95 degrees Celcius under full load. (A temperature so high that the processor is at risk of malfunctioning.) Rather than addressing the problem of the shoddy workmanship, documented not only by those who purchased Apple’s $2,500 laptop but by Apple’s own service manual, Apple is trying to silence those from the Macintosh community who are trying to help other Mac users fix Apple’s mistake.

My MacBook Pro has the problem with the whining screen, too. Perhaps I’ll wait until they acknowledge the sloppy application of the thermal grease before I go in to request repair. In the meantime I will keep telling people how much I love using my Mac while silently questioning my devotion to a company who would rather use the law than service to assuage their customers’ complaints.
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/lapto...ful-171394.php





D’oh!

New Disclaimer
David Canton

Rob Hyndman had a post yesterday that said: I’m so impressed with the artistry of this disclaimer that I may just have to find a way to work it into the technology contracts I draft.

Rob linked to an amusing but clear rock climbing disclaimer.

I took that as a challenge, and offer below an amended version for technology contracts. I'm sure it can be improved upon (this calls for a wiki).

Read Rob's post and the rock climbing disclaimer


WARNING
Business is unpredictable and unsafe. The Internet is dangerous. Many blogs have been written about these dangers, and there's no way we can list them all here. Read the blogs.

The Internet is covered in slippery slopes with loose, slippery and unpredictable footing. The RIAA can make matters worse. Patent trolls are everywhere. You may fall, be spammed or suffer a DOS attack. There are hidden viruses and worms. You could break your computer. There is wild code, which may be vicious, poisonous or carriers of dread malware. These include viruses and worms. E-mail can be poisonous as well. We don't do anything to protect you from any of this. We do not inspect, supervise or maintain the Internet, blogsphere, ISP’s or other features, natural or otherwise.

Real dangers are present even on the Web. E-commerce is not the mall. It can be, and is, steep, slippery and dangerous. Web features made or enhanced by humans, such as firewalls and spam filters (if any) can break, collapse, or otherwise fail catastrophically at any time. We don't promise to inspect, supervise or maintain them in any way. They may be negligently constructed or repaired. The web is unsafe, period. Live with it or stay away.

Stay on trusted sites whenever possible. The terrain, in addition to being dangerous, is surprisingly complex. You may get lost. Carry food, water and an APU at all times.

Ads for things you don’t want and other objectionable content can arrive from nowhere. This can happen naturally, or be caused by people around you that are being used as bots. Spam and disgusting images of all sizes, including huge images, can arrive, or pop-up with no warning. Use of spam filters is advised for anyone approaching the Internet. They can be purchased or rented from us. They won't save you if you get hit by something big or on a port you left open. A whole DOS attack might collapse on you and squash you like a bug. Don't think it can't happen.

Public opinion can be dangerous, regardless of the forecast. Be prepared with extra damage control, including press releases. Ticking off the blogsphere can kill you. The Streisand effect can turn a simple nastygram into a deathtrap.

If you make hasty comments about those in high places (making unsupported comments that reduce the image of a person, often posted quickly and without thinking) without proper thought and, or allow your employees to do so, you are making a terrible mistake. Even if you know what you're doing, lots of things can go wrong and you may be sued for libel. It happens all the time.

We do not provide rangers or security personnel. The other people on the web, including other visitors, our employees, agents, and guests, and anyone else who might sneak in, may be stupid, reckless, or otherwise dangerous. They may be mentally ill, criminally insane, drunk, using illegal drugs and/or armed with deadly malware and ready to use them. We aren't necessarily going to do anything about it. We refuse to take responsibility.

If you surf at work, you may become pre-occupied with it. This is true whether you are experienced or not, trained or not, equipped or not, though training and equipment may help. It's a fact, surfing at work is extremely dangerous. If you don't like it, surf at home. You really shouldn't be doing it anyway. We do not provide supervision or instruction. We are not responsible for, and do not track how much time you surf at work (although we could if we wanted to.) As far as we know, your employer may find out and send you plunging to unemployment. There are countless tons of loose management staff ready to be dislodged and fall on you or someone else. There are any number of extremely and unusually dangerous conditions existing on and around the Web, and elsewhere on the Internet. We may or may not know about any specific hazard, but even if we do, don't expect us to try to warn you. You're on your own.

Rescue services are not provided by us, and may not be available quickly or at all. Local computer geeks may not be equipped for or trained in hard drive recovery. If you are lucky enough to have somebody try to get rid of a virus or find that deleted file, they may be incompetent or worse. This includes your local computer store. We assume no responsibility. Also, if you decide to participate in a rescue of some other unfortunate, that's your choice. Don't do it unless you are willing to assume all risks.

By entering our site, you are agreeing that we owe you no duty of care or any other duty. We promise you nothing. We do not and will not even try to keep the premises safe for any purpose. The premises are not safe for any purpose. This is no joke. We won't even try to warn you about any dangerous or hazardous condition, whether we know about it or not. If we do decide to warn you about something, that doesn't mean we will try to warn you about anything else. If we do make an effort to fix an unsafe condition, we may not try to correct any others, and we may make matters worse! We and our employees or agents may do things that are unwise and dangerous. Sorry, we're not responsible. We may give you bad advice. Don't listen to us. In short, ENTER AND USE THIS SITE AT YOUR OWN RISK. And have fun!
http://www.canton.elegal.ca/archives...isclaimer.html





Welcome to the New Dollhouse
Seth Schiesel

AROUND lunchtime one recent Sunday, Francesca Rookwood, 9, and her brother Richard, 6, were hard at play in Pelham, N.Y., renovating the four-bedroom house they share and picking up after the wayward family they look after.

"Who left food on the floor?" Francesca sighed, turning toward Richard and almost rolling her eyes.

"It wasn't me," he said quickly. "It was probably Francine."

Francesca picked the microwave dinner up off the kitchen floor and put it back on the table. "Yeah, you're probably right," she said. "Francine can be a little messy."

Francine is Francesca and Richard's mother, but that's not who they meant. Instead, the children were referring to the other Francine — the matriarch not of their flesh-and-blood family but of their family in The Sims, the wildly successful computer game that has found its most fervent audience among millions of children across the country.

Francesca and Richard have been playing the game since last fall and within its electronic confines have built a fantasy world that looks surprisingly similar to their own. Comfortable suburban home. Parents named Mark and Francine. Children named Francesca and Richard. Antique French sofa in the entry hall. Lots of leopard-skin patterns scattered about the house.

At the moment, the suspected food-dropper — call her Sim Francine — was coming out of the shower and trying to decide whether to take a nap. Sim Mark was working out in his new home gym. Naturally, Sim Francesca and Sim Richard were at school.

As the small animated characters move through their daily lives, they evoke living dolls.

As far as we know, children have always played with dolls of one sort or another to act out variations on their own lives, or lives they observe or imagine. Today, a vast and growing number of kids are doing the same thing — but with a very new tool. Instead of dolls, they are using video games. And perhaps most of all, they're using The Sims.

Some video games let players battle aliens or quarterback a pro football team; The Sims drops the player into an even more fantastic environment: suburban family life. Each Sim, as the characters are known, is different — one might be an old man, one might be a young girl; one is motivated primarily by money, for instance, while another may want popularity — and it's up to the player to tend to those needs. As in real life, there are no points in The Sims and you can't "win." You just try to find happiness as best you can.

And though video game players are often stereotyped as grunged-out, desensitized slackers, it is the nation's middle-class schoolchildren, particularly girls, who have helped make The Sims one of the world's premier game franchises, selling more than 60 million copies globally since its introduction in 2000.

"I like Sims more than other games, and Sims is way more fun than TV because TV gets so boring — you just stare at a screen and watch and watch and watch," Francesca said in her (real) airy playroom as she tinkered with the layout of the new (imaginary) home office she was designing on the monitor connected to her Dell computer. "But in The Sims you make your own characters and give them a personality and give them stuff and build their houses and make them live."

Standing at Francesca's side so he could see the screen more easily, Richard said firmly: "Making characters is a lot more fun than watching TV. And with commercials you have to wait. I don't like to wait."

In the impeccably maintained real-life Rookwood household, there was no food on the floor, or on the stove for that matter, so Francine Rookwood, 44, ordered pepperoni and mushroom pizza. "Initially I was a little concerned because it is rated T for Teen and Francesca said she had tried it at a friend's house and I was concerned that she had done that without checking with me first," she said after the pizza showed up. "But then I looked into it and now I don't mind them playing this game at all. Actually, it seems to have some value for them. And I'll tell you, she used to really be into dolls, like Barbies and the Bratz dolls; once The Sims came along the dolls were done. And I mean done."

Mark Rookwood, 46, a currency trader in Manhattan, didn't seem to have had any initial reservations. "The entire concept seems very creative," he said. "It seems as if it teaches them a lot about the different motivations and desires people have in life and it shows some of the frustrations of running a household. In other games you see a lot of violence and we're not into that as a family. But it's interesting to see how they react to things with The Sims that normally a parent would have to deal with, like if one of their Sims doesn't want to go to school or is messy or if there are conflicting desires in the family."

As Francesca explained: "They need to take care of fun, comfort, hygiene, food, room, energy, bladder and social life."

"And is it hard to keep them happy?" her mother asked.

"Yeah, it's hard because they have a lot of different desires and they don't always listen," Francesca replied.

"Ah, so it's frustrating sometimes when they don't listen?" said Mom, with only the faintest hint of amusement. Francesca nodded. "O.K. then," and finally a chuckle. "Keep that in mind."

Not every parent is so comfortable with the game. Miranda Saylor, a 14-year-old who lives in Montclair, N.J., has played The Sims since shortly after its introduction. But her father, Durston Saylor, an architecture photographer, said he was still a bit baffled by it.

"I think it's a little more stimulating than television and I don't think it's harmful, but I still don't like it very much," he said. "I've never quite understood what the pleasure is of constantly monitoring the characters' various emotional and financial thermometers to make sure they're getting enough food and happiness to keep your characters buzzing around."

"That is kind of what life is," Mr. Saylor said. "But the difference is that in real life it's happening to you and when you're in a relationship you feel real pleasure, and it's not this vicarious thing like it is with The Sims."

AMONG psychologists and education experts, it is widely accepted that playing with dolls is a safe and perhaps even essential part of self-discovery and growing up for many children, especially girls. Now, some of those experts are catching on to how quickly video games are moving into the territory formerly dominated by a slim blonde named Barbie.

"It's not that surprising when you look at the game," said James Paul Gee, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin who directs a program that studies the intersection of learning and gaming among both adults and children. "It's a great resource for them to design and think about relationships and social spaces."

"We leave most of the social work in our society to women and The Sims lets young girls, in particular, work out their desires and conflicts about those relationships," said Professor Gee, whose team has formally interviewed about 100 children and included more than 50 others in continuing projects during the four years they have studied video games. "Rather than calling it a dollhouse, it's like they are writing their own interactive stories in The Sims to do what novelists do, which is explore personal themes about social relationships. And they have fun doing it."

When adults or older adolescents play The Sims, it is often with the slightly perverse goal of seeing just how dysfunctional or outlandish a household they can create — "Three's Company" meets "Peyton Place," perhaps, with maybe a little "Brokeback Mountain" sprinkled in. But when children play, they usually try to make healthy "normal" families, often modeled on their own lives.

As to how the stories that children create when playing The Sims differ from those in traditional doll play, there appear to have been no serious studies.

Caitlin Kelleher, a doctoral candidate in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, helps to run a program that uses interactive storytelling software to encourage girls to pursue computer programming. Over the past two and a half years, about 300 girls have passed through the workshop.

"One of the things that children and adolescents really deal with is trying to figure out who they are as people and what their values are," she said. "One of the ways they do that is by role-playing through different social situations. Figuring out their reaction to those situations helps them understand their values and priorities. Things like The Sims help them make that thought process concrete. By creating actual characters that they can see and manipulate, the game becomes a tool through which they can explore these life issues and issues of identity."

Naturally, the young players don't describe their favorite game in quite those terms, but they say basically the same thing.

Fresh off the miniature golf links at Walt Disney World in Florida last month, Meghan McGoldrick, 12, also from Pelham, explained by cellphone why she switched from dolls to The Sims two years ago.

"You can't really develop the dolls," she said. "But in the Sims you're building the houses and putting the characters into different situations. You can actually decide what you want to happen and it's more descriptive when you're playing it because you can see what the characters are really doing. And also you can see how they get older and how they grow over time."

Asked what he had learned from the game, Meghan's brother, Conor, 10, was blunt: "I learned don't leave your baby crying or people will come take your baby away."

Boys certainly play The Sims, but more than half of the game's players are female, according to Electronic Arts, the game's publisher. That is a huge anomaly in an industry in which fewer than 25 percent of video game players are women; for many of the more violent and intense games that figure falls to less than 5 percent.

The popularity of The Sims among girls dovetails neatly with some researchers' ideas about the fantasy lives of kids. "Children generally want to create characters, but with girls we see them wanting to create a friend," said Marjorie Taylor, head of the psychology department at the University of Oregon and author of "Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them" (Oxford, 1999). "It might be expressed through a doll or something like The Sims or be completely imaginary, but with a girl that character is often going to be someone just like them, another girl that they can relate to."

"But with boys," she said, "they are often more interested in actually taking on a pretend identity. Rather than it being a character outside themselves, boys want to create a character and actually inhabit it."

Why might The Sims take girls where no other video game has gone before? Will Wright, its creator (and long one of the luminaries of game design) has a few theories. "To start, I think women are much more discriminating in general than men in their choice of entertainment experience," he said. "Men will do the same stupid thing over and over again and be happy. Women tend to want a more complex, creative experience. And The Sims appeals to that."

"Also," he said, "if you look at movies and books and television, many of the most successful properties are set in normal contemporary situations. And I don't really understand why we don't have more games like that. So if you look at boys and men, there are a lot of games that appeal to them, but it seems like women have fewer choices."

(In Mr. Wright's next big game, called Spore, players will create an entire species from scratch and guide it through billions of years of evolution. As with The Sims, Spore, due out in the next year or so, will enable players to define their own goals and style of playing, rather than navigate a set of predefined obstacles.)

BUT the very characteristics that appear to make The Sims popular among girls — free-form game play and everyday setting — may also help explain why many girls stop playing The Sims once they actually start living young adult lives. The game as training ground gives way to the real thing.

Anna Harbaugh, 18, a freshman at the University of Oregon (and Professor Taylor's step-daughter), said she started playing The Sims regularly when she was around 15 but stopped fairly abruptly halfway through her senior year of high school, around the time guys entered the picture.

"The Sims was really an important part of my life for a few years," she said. "But I stopped because real life started to get more interesting, so at that point games like that started to seem a little bit less relevant. Around that age is when my social network started expanding and that kind of interaction was no longer something you had to practice in The Sims."

To some researchers, stories like Ms. Harbaugh's are as demoralizing as they are revealing. "Modern girls are very interested in video games, but then when they get toward high school they start to gravitate away because they begin to think that boys don't like girls who play games," said Professor Gee. "They give up their interest in video games around the same time they give up their interest in science and math and that's a real problem because boys use video games to foster an interest in technology, and if girls give that up we're going to continue to see a real gender imbalance in these areas."

Ms. Kelleher of Carnegie Mellon said her research with school-age girls made much the same point. "If you walk into a room full of girls and ask them, 'Who wants to learn to program computers?' you don't get very many hands," she said. "But if you ask them, 'Who wants to learn how to make a movie like Pixar or perhaps something like The Sims?', you get a very different response. And fundamentally, those two activities can be the same thing."

Back in Pelham, Francesca Rookwood wasn't thinking about such broad issues as she and her brother picked out a new leopard-pattern rug for her parents' bedroom.

"It's just I never saw a game like this before," she said. "You get to make the game however you want it to be, and I like that. I like making the characters and the houses and taking care of them. I'm really happy they made this game. I just wish there were more games like The Sims."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/ar...=1&oref=slogin





Sen. Obama Gets Neil Young's Endorsement
AP

Rocker Neil Young may want Sen. Barack Obama to run for president, but the freshman Democratic senator from Illinois isn't having any of it - at least not yet.

In his latest album, "Living With War," Young mentions Obama in the song "Lookin' for a Leader." In it, Young sings of the nation's need for a new leader, singing, "Yeah maybe it's Obama, but he thinks that he's too young."

The 44-year-old Obama said at a news conference before a fundraiser Saturday that he had read the lyrics. But despite being name-checked by a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Obama said he has no intention of running for president in two years.

That doesn't mean Obama is dissing Young completely: "I'm a big Neil Young fan," Obama said.

He and Young met in Chicago at last year's Farm Aid concert. Obama said he sat in a trailer while Young rehearsed the song "Southern Man."

"The acoustics in a trailer are terrific. It was unbelievable. ... It was one of the best times that we've had since I was a senator," Obama said.

For his part, Young doesn't pin all his hopes on the Illinois senator. In the same song, Young says the needed leader may also be a woman, possibly a reference to Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.
http://news.newstimeslive.com/story....egory=Politics





Isabella Rossellini's Tribute to Her Father, Cinema's Great Neorealist Talking Belly
Caryn James

The groundbreaking Italian director Roberto Rossellini was born 100 years ago today, which makes him sound like a dusty relic. Yet he learned firsthand the perils of the age of celebrity in 1949, when Ingrid Bergman (married to someone else) became pregnant with his child, the couple's fame turned to infamy and they were effectively exiled from Hollywood.

All these years later, at least one of their children has failed to calculate how media attention can boomerang. Ingrid Rossellini has complained publicly about "My Dad Is 100 Years Old," a short film written by and starring her twin sister, the actress Isabella Rossellini, and directed by the innovative Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. Ingrid has said that the impressionistic film, in which her father is depicted only as a giant, pillowy tummy, is an inappropriate tribute for his centennial: remarks that were reported around the world, calling attention to a tiny film that might otherwise have been ignored.

Inadvertently, she did film lovers a big favor. "My Dad Is 100" is an affectionate, playful and above all artful work, which displays Isabella Rossellini's emotional attachment to her father, and presents a savvy little description of his films and his reputation. Isabella is the twin who understands fame and how to use it.

"My Dad" will be shown tonight at 7 on the Sundance Channel, followed by Roberto Rossellini's 1945 classic of neorealism, "Open City." A DVD of the short film will also be included with a slight but charming companion book by Isabella, "In the Name of the Father, the Daughter and the Holy Spirits: Remembering Roberto Rossellini" (Schirmer/Mosel, $35, to be published on May 24).

In the 17-minute black-and-white film, Isabella Rossellini appears as herself, speaks her father's words, and also portrays characters including Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini and her own mother. (The twins were born two years after their parents married; the scandalous pregnancy produced their older brother Roberto.) Offering not a biographical document but her interpretation of her father, she describes a childhood in which he seemed the maternal figure; she liked to cuddle against his belly and he pretended to be a mother sow.

The other filmmakers she portrays debate the talking belly about their opposing philosophies of what movies should do. Rossellini, who died in 1977, was more influential than popular, capturing reality in the most straightforward manner possible in films of social conscience like "Open City," with Anna Magnani as a woman resisting the Nazis.

On a set that looks like an old movie theater, the Isabella-as-Hitchcock figure argues that films are about storytelling; her David O. Selznick character says they are entertainment; most important, Fellini (one of the screenwriters of "Open City") talks about the dreamlike quality of his films, only to be called a cinematic traitor by Rossellini, the neorealist tummy.

Mr. Maddin himself is a most Felliniesque director, and one of Isabella Rossellini's smartest moves was to get him to collaborate on "My Dad." Why try to mimic her father's realism, an approach that could only seem derivative? Steeped in and evoking old movies, Maddin films (like "Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary") operate on a kind of dream logic. Isabella Rossellini appeared in his 2003 black comedy, "The Saddest Music in the World," in which she plays a wealthy woman who has glass legs filled with beer and somehow makes them seem glamorous.

Like Rossellini's films, though, Mr. Maddin's are stylistically pure and polarizing. Viewers have been known to walk out of a Maddin film in confused irritation, and to leave a Rossellini film bored to death. "My Dad" acknowledges as much. In her own voice Isabella Rossellini looks at the camera and says she thinks her father was a genius, but not everyone agrees. "Indeed, they are very slow," she says of his films. "Yet their simplicity and starkness move me profoundly."

At the end, as we peer down at the grown Isabella reclining against her dad's belly, she looks up and scolds the camera for its arty, unnatural angle, saying her father would have called it immoral. She instructs the camera to come back to eye level and his "perfectly simple Rossellini framing."

Mischievous and witty, "My Dad" coexists perfectly well with films like "Open City," and even includes a glimpse of that film's climactic scene. (The short will also be included in the Museum of Modern Art's major Rossellini retrospective later this year.)

"My Dad" is not just a tribute to Rossellini, but to the rich variety of moviemaking itself. The film's most poignant, honest moments mingle fantasy and realism, family and Hollywood history. When Isabella plays her mother, whom she strikingly resembles, Ingrid Bergman is dressed in gleaming white, gazing down at her daughter from a tattered movie screen.

Isabella, dressed in black, looks up and tells her mother, "Some say that father destroyed your career."

Ingrid Bergman — at once Mama and icon — serenely replies: "No, he didn't destroy my career. I destroyed his."

This is, of course, a conversation that Isabella Rossellini is having with herself, and its unanswerable question could lead everyone in circles forever. It also represents the film's fanciful, eloquent acknowledgment that as a way to emotional truth, realism has nothing over dreams — even if Roberto Rossellini might have disagreed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/08/movies/08ross.html





For Heaven's Sake, Don't Touch the Mona Lisa
Alan Riding

THE Louvre is silent. Lights are dimmed and security cameras activated. In the Grande Galerie, masterpieces from the Italian Renaissance are mere shapes in the gloom. In the adjacent Salle des États, Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" smiles to herself. Then, shortly after 11 p.m., footsteps are heard and a senior museum official appears.

No, Henri Loyrette, the president-director of the Louvre, is not gunned down by an albino Opus Dei monk. But everything else resembles the opening scene of "The Da Vinci Code." In fact, only last July, a naked corpse did lie nearby on the parquet floor, as Ron Howard began filming the screen adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling novel inside Europe's greatest museum.

The much-awaited movie, which opens the Cannes Film Festival on May 17, will be released around the world on May 19. And, not for the first time, the Louvre will be in the spotlight. The novel's popularity helped to bring a record 7.5 million visitors to the museum last year. Now, Mr. Loyrette is bracing for still more.

As it happens, not everyone in France thought it proper for the venerable Louvre to hire out its space to a $125 million Hollywood blockbuster, particularly since the novel was rife with mistakes about the workings of the museum and even the geography of Paris. But Mr. Loyrette, who lives with his family in an apartment in the Louvre, was unfazed.

"This is not the first time a film has been shot here," he said, striding down the 930-foot-long Grande Galerie one Thursday night in late April, two security guards in his wake. " 'Belphégor, Phantom of the Louvre' with Sophie Marceau was made here. Others too. But we've never had a film as large as this. It was complicated. It involved enormous preparation. But things worked out very well."

Naturally, the Louvre charged a fee, which the museum and the production have so far refused to divulge. It also laid down strict conditions and mobilized a score of curators and guards to ensure that they were respected. No equipment was allowed into the museum during open hours, which meant filming took place overnight, with external lights sending "moonlight" through the windows. More critically, no artwork could be touched or lighted directly, equipment had to be kept at a safe distance from paintings, no "blood" or mystical drawings could mark the wooden floors, even food and drink for the production crew were banned.

Oh, yes, and no filming of "Mona Lisa," in the Salle des États, where Leonardo's small oil looks out toward Veronese's immense "Marriage at Cana."

But Mr. Howard had no complaints. "The restrictions were daunting cinematically, but totally understandable," he said in a telephone interview from New York. "And we were able to work our way around them. At first, the curators were kind of nervous and then later realized we were true to our word. We didn't have a single disagreement. They were always very positive about it."

In the end, he said, even the prohibition on lighting the paintings brought unexpected results. "The very low light levels led us to create this very mysterious kind of ambiance, very eerie and absolutely appropriate," he explained. "When we moved the camera toward the art, it would kind of emerge and reveal itself. It turned out to be a creative blessing."

In adapting a novel that blurs fantasy and reality, it was a coup to be able to film the book's first 100 or so pages in their original setting, starting when the story's curator, Jacques Saunière, played by Jean-Pierre Marielle, races through the Louvre's Denon Wing before being shot by the albino monk Silas, played by Paul Bettany.

True, Mr. Marielle was not allowed to tear down Caravaggio's "Death of the Virgin" in order to trigger the descent of an iron gate. In reality, there is no iron gate.

No matter. The real point was to have three of the movie's stars there in the Grande Galerie — Tom Hanks as the "symbology" professor Robert Langdon; Audrey Tautou as Saunière's cryptographer granddaughter, Sophie Neveu; and Jean Reno as the police inspector Bezu Fache — all in the company of Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Caravaggio and other greats.

Additional Louvre sites were also used: exterior shots of its imposing courtyard, the Cour Napoléon; I. M. Pei's famous glass pyramid, which serves as the museum's main entrance; and, for the story's denouement, the inverted glass pyramid inside the Carrousel du Louvre shopping mall.

Such was the scramble of squeezing in six hours of filming a night, Mr. Howard said, that he often ran from one part of the Louvre to another. Even so, there were moments when the art imposed itself.

"Tom Hanks and I found ourselves standing in front of 'Mona Lisa,' " he recalled. "There was a guard but it was really just the two of us. We looked at each other and said, 'Well, we did all that underwater work for 'Splash' and weightlessness for 'Apollo 13.' Those were great adventures. But at this point in our lives, we appreciate this as much as those experiences.' It was fantastic."

Without a film crew standing by, the museum's mood on this April night is still more tranquil. Mr. Loyrette recalls frequent visits to the Louvre as a child, and often joins the night watchmen on their tours. Now, after also pausing before "Mona Lisa," he leads the way through sculpture galleries. At the top of a wide staircase, the Louvre's other tourist favorite, "The Winged Victory of Samothrace," hovers in the dark like a giant headless eagle.

For the movie production, two weeks of shooting at the Louvre still left a fair amount to be recreated at Pinewood Studios outside London. Only there, for instance, could Mr. Howard show Saunière grabbing the Caravaggio (a smaller copy of the original) before bleeding to death. There too, Sophie was able to find hidden writing on the glass protecting "Mona Lisa" as well as an embossed key behind Leonardo's "Madonna of the Rocks" — both paintings also copied for the occasion.

Imagination was again required to depict the other crucial Paris location, the Church of St.-Sulpice. In the novel's account of the search for the Holy Grail, it is here that Silas the Monk digs for clues. Two years ago, though, with the novel already a hit in France, this church signaled distaste for its sudden notoriety with a notice in French and English. And it is still there.

"Contrary to fanciful allegations in a recent best-selling novel, this is not a vestige of a pagan temple," it begins. "No such temple ever existed in this place."

So the movie production did not even ask to film inside the church, opting instead for some exterior shots. More cooperative was Olivia Hsu Decker, a California real estate agent who owns the 17th-century Château de Villette, which in the novel is the home of the eccentric English art historian Sir Leigh Teabing, played in the movie by Ian McKellen.

In Britain, where the plot then moves, there was no less a need to be visually convincing. And there the production was able to film inside the 12th-century Temple Church in London and at the 15th-century Rosslyn Chapel in the Scottish village of Roslin, both packed with symbols deemed relevant to the story.

"But Westminster Abbey declined to have us shoot inside," Mr. Howard noted, referring to an important scene involving the ornate tomb of Sir Isaac Newton. "So we recreated Newton's tomb and shot it in Lincoln Cathedral. These cathedrals were built around the same time, so we were quite pleased with the match."

For some prelates, the novel's premise — that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and fathered a child with her — is too much to digest. Indeed, anticipating the movie's release, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, in his Easter address last month, referred to the novel as "cynical," while a senior Vatican official, Archbishop Angelo Amato, has called for a boycott of the film, describing the book as "stridently anti-Christian."

The Louvre, though, had no such problems.

"It's a thriller," Mr. Loyrette said.

He shrugged off the description of Saunière still working at 75; all French curators must retire at 65. He felt confident that anyone entering the Louvre illicitly — like Silas — would be immediately spotted. And, standing before Caravaggio's "Death of the Virgin," an 8 feet by 12 feet oil in a heavy frame, he seemed amused to learn that the novel has it thrown to the ground by an old man.

Did that mean he had not read the book?

"The truth is," he said with just a hint of embarrassment, "with all the excitement around the film, I am constantly asked if I have read it. I say no and it stops there. But if you say you have read it, they want to know what you thought of this and that moment. It's simpler this way."

He paused and looked down the magnificent length of the Grand Galerie.

"But I will go and see the film," he added with a smile.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/movies/07ridi.html





SuprNova.org: The Story of a Legend
Michael Ingram

Despite the domain being on sale for over a week, there has been no news or discussion on the apparent end to the once all-powerful BitTorrent site, Suprnova.org. Nobody even noticed, and if they did, they decided the news was not worthy or reporting to the world.

It was not always this way, once upon a time SuprNova was as much part of BitTorrent as the client itself, serving up torrents to 420,000 unique visitors a day. Without question, the site revolutionised the dynamics of internet traffic.

The Birth of a Legend

The story beginnings in Ljubljana, the beautiful capital of Slovenia, with a local teenager called Andrej Preston. Preston was one of the first to start using BitTorrent when it debuted in 2002.

At the time there were only about half-a-dozen all-purpose BitTorrent sites, but Preston was quickly hooked on the technology. Inspired by the now defunct BitTorrent websites Donkax.com and Turok.info, he decided to begin a BitTorrent site of his own in late 2002.

Being a huge Star Trek and sci-fi fan, Preston wanted to name the website Supernova, but the domain name was already taken, hence SuprNova, the universal BitTorrent source, was born.

As the administrator of this new site, Preston used his internet pseudonym Sloncek, which is a derivative of his childhood nickname “Slonček”, meaning “Little Elephant” in Slovenian.

The site was originally hosted on a Linux box connected to a basic domestic broadband line at Sloncek’s home address. With the aid of Microsoft FrontPage, Sloncek painstakingly uploaded every torrent to the website manually.

The foundations were rocky, but curiosity in the site and BitTorrent in general was stirring. Having spammed his favorite internet forums and all over IRC, interest in SuprNova was rising. While other site administrators got tired of the upkeep their sites demanded, Sloncek continued to put in the hard hours. To help, the MPAA began sending threatening letters to the owners of BitTorrent sites, giving SuprNova almost monopoly control of the market.

It was not long before SuprNova outgrew the Linux box, which had a measly upload of 16kb/s. For comparison, the modern day Mininova peaks at nearly 10,000kb/s.

Laying The Foundations

It was June 2003. Random Nut’s Kazaa Lite K++ was the file sharing client of choice and the Ares network population was struggling to break past the 10,000 mark. The RIAA had just publicized their intention to collect evidence for their first round of lawsuits and more and more file sharers were discovering the joys of BitTorrent.

To handle the expediential growth, SuprNova was fully upgraded. A new script automatically uploaded new torrent submissions to the site and another script regularly checked trackers in order to produce seed and leech statistics.

The website was otherwise minimal. Originally SuprNova gave detailed information about each torrent, such as the tracker used and details of each file within the download, but this was later dropped. Only the torrent name, the total file size, the number of seeds and leeches and a URL to more information was offered. It was simple, but loved for it.

SuprNova had one more trick to play. To overcome the problem of hosts shutting down the site after each letter from the MPAA, SuprNova also began using a unique system of mirrors. Hosts, which were paid for by SuprNova or donated by users, acted as either a server for the SuprNova webpage, or a server for the torrent files. Both were controlled and updated by a central server.

It succeeded in what is was meant to do. Hosts would come and go, but SuprNova stayed online in the long term.

The system was far from perfect and suffered frequent short-term downtime. Furthermore, the database of torrents could not even be searched within SuprNova.org until nearly a year later, in April 2004.

Despite the troubles, the timing of the upgrade was perfect. The site now had everything it needed to boom.

Boom and Bust

The site gained a reputation of completeness and integrity. Thousands of people submitted tens of thousands of torrent files. The fakes were all weeded out by a group of only 20 moderators. Their job was made easier with unmoderated submitters, who had gained the trust of the moderators, so could publish torrents directly to the front page.

As part of a study into BitTorrent and SuprNova by J.A. Pouwelse, et al. at Department of Computer Science, Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, researchers attempted pollute SuprNova with fake files, but failed to get any past the moderators.

8 months after the upgrade, SuprNova was receiving 675,000 visits per day. 4 months later, daily visitors reached 830,000, and another 4 months after that, the figure was over 1.2 million.

By this time it was November 2004. On the surface, everything was sound. The associated forums were among the largest forums in the world, and the site even had its own radio station. It was the same month that the mainstream press started to report CacheLogic's research that found BitTorrent accounted for 35% of the total traffic on the internet. It was difficult to imagine a world without SuprNova.

However, behind the scenes the pressure was swelling.

Technologically, SuprNova was slipping behind. At least two websites, Bi-Torrent and LiteNova, offered SuprNova torrent files in an easy to browse and search format, and was much faster than SuprNova. The SuprNova team originally attempted to block these sites, but was forced to give up when his measures caused problems for SuprNova users.

Meanwhile, other websites were collecting and hosting torrent files of their own. Youceff hosted nearly as many files as SuprNova, but was faster, provided more detailed information on each torrent, allowed users to comment on torrents and provided a database of passwords for passworded torrents.

At the same time, sites like isoHunt and TorrentSpy had started to scan the internet for torrent files, creating a huge database of files and giving detailed information on each. They also had SuprNova’s staying power and are still online today.

SuprNova had competition.

Meanwhile, the French anti-piracy company RetSpan was after blood. Sloncek casually dismissed the threat, telling Slyck.com:

“Since I am sure I am not doing anything wrong, I think that there shouldn’t be a reason to worry about it.”

Later in the month he learnt that the Slovenian authorities were not so sure. According to Sloncek’s version of events, the local police raided the main SuprNova servers. At the time, the police took no further action. Sloncek claims he would not have even known it had happened if his ISP had not called to tell him.

Shortly after, the local press picked up on a Reuters story about SuprNova. The combination of the police raid and his name in the headlines were enough to spook Sloncek, so he made the decision to take down the site. On December 19th 2004, SuprNova.org as a torrent site and a force on the internet died, but not before it revolutionized the free distribution of media on the internet.

Final 18 Months

Before the shutdown, Sloncek was already working as a spokesman for another project called eXeem. eXeem was a failed attempt at creating a distributed version of BitTorrent and SuprNova, which could both report the latest files and act as a tracker.

Within a fortnight of SuprNova closing, Sloncek used SuprNova’s radio station, NovaStream, to officially announce eXeem.

SuprNova was then turned into an advert for eXeem. At the time, Sloncek had not explained the closure of SuprNova, which caused rumors to quickly spread around the internet that Sloncek was attempting to sell the SuprNova traffic to eXeem, which contained Cydoor adware. Love quickly turned to hate and Sloncek was sidelined from the community as a sellout.

In January 2005, eXeem was officially launched to the public for beta testing. The once all-powerful SuprNova remained as a worthless advert. SuprNova.org would remain this way for the next 9 months.

About the same time, the police knocked on Sloncek’s door at 6.30am. Sloncek, who believed himself to be clear of any trouble now SuprNova was offline, was shocked and shaken by the move. After showing a court order, the police confiscated two computers, CDs and some documents to help their investigation into Sloncek’s involvement with SuprNova.

Only the SuprNova Forums remained as an indication to previous importance of the domain, but even they closed and merged with the Snarf-It forums in March 2005.

Unsurprisingly, the traffic to SuprNova plummeted, but this was perhaps the least of Sloncek’s worries. Sloncek was called to a police hearing in reference to SuprNova. After the hearing, the police turned over their evidence to the prosecutor.

Sloncek was still waiting to hear from the prosecutor in September 2005, when he resurrected SuprNova as a P2P News resource - 9 months after the site was closed as a torrent site.

“The main theme of SuprNova.org will stay the news, but with time I hope it becomes one of the biggest resources for P2P (or possibly something else, if users think it would better serve the community),” he announced on the front page, having removed the eXeem advert.

A month after SuprNova was reinvented as a news site, Sloncek received some good news. The prosecutor had dropped the case against him and returned his computers and other confiscated equipment.

After a strong start, the news on SuprNova began to dry up. There was a steady downward spiral in new content and within six months the site became a cobweb.

Sloncek’s vision SuprNova becoming a P2P Mecca never came to fruition. The site spawned SuprFile.org, an image hosting service, but was otherwise a failure. Without putting in the hard hours that originally made SuprNova a success, Sloncek was unable to recapture the magic of the original SuprNova. It did not help that no free media was on offer.

The site had once again descended into obscurity.

Sometime over the last few weeks, SuprNova.org went up for sale on Sedo.com. Once a file sharing hero, the MPAA’s worst nightmare and an internet giant, yet nobody cared enough to report that the site is now up for sale.

But this seems to be of little concern to Sloncek, who unlike his creation is still very much active.

"SuprNova.org is being redone and during that time I put some different advertisments on," Sloncek told Slyck.com.

Perhaps validating hope to die-hard SuprNova.org fans, Sloncek expressed some optimism. "[SuprNova.org]...is not really for sale, I am just interested if I get any nice offers. If offer was very, very nice I would sell it. But I don't think I ever will, cause this domain is part of me and I dont think I could go without it."

If Sloncek does not get any "very, very nice" offers, he plans to relaunch the SuprNova P2P news site, this time with more news, a fresh new layout and independent movie and music content.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1177





French Fight Copyright Proposals

Demonstrators in Paris have protested against proposed laws which will make online file-sharing illegal in France.

The law, being debated by the French Senate, will ban the unauthorised downloading of copyrighted files.

Around 300 people laid a wreath "in memory of private copying and free software in France" near the city's culture and communications ministry.

It follows a decision by the government in March to scrap a bill to legalise downloading in return for a flat fee.

The draft copyright law introduces fines of between 38 and 150 euros (£26-£104) for people pirating music or movies at home.

Digital rights

Demonstrators also attacked plans to bolster digital rights management technology, which prevents commercial files from being freely shared over the internet.

Apple, which runs the iTunes music store, has criticised the draft law for the opposite reason.

The law calls upon Apple and rivals Sony and Microsoft to share their proprietary copy-protection - to ensure that digital music can be played on any player, regardless of its format or source.

Currently most online stores lock consumers into their own downloading systems and players.

Apple argues that one digital rights management system would leave legal download services vulnerable to illegal file-sharing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...nt/4751459.stm





Floppy polycarbonate

Hitachi Maxell Develops Optical Storage Technology
Mark Peters



Hitachi Maxell develops optical storage technology : Hitachi Maxell, Ltd. has developed an optical storage technology "stacked volumetric optical discs (SVOD)" that can boost per-volume capacity by using a film-type disc medium with a thickness of 92 μm. The prototyped disc is a recordable disc with a diameter of 12 cm which is equivalent to that of DVDs. It includes two 92 μm thick disc media that are bonded with each other, and the capacity on both sides totals 9.4 GB. Based on the new technology, the company has succeeded in the development of a high-capacity optical storage system having 940 GB by accommodating 100 newly developed discs in a dedicated cartridge (thickness: 6.5 cm; width: 13.3 cm; depth: 16.1 cm).

Next generation disc - Blue-violet laser
The company plans to commercialize SVOD as early as the beginning of 2007. The target price is set at ¥40,000 or lower for a cartridge holding 100 discs. Although the system is mainly targeted for commercial use, Norio Ota, Fellow and Chief Engineer of Hitachi Maxell commented; "It is possible that the product will be provided for consumer use, too."The technology can also be applied to the next-generation optical disc that utilizes a blue-violet laser. In that case, the capacity that can be achieved by using a cartridge with 100 discs reaches 3 to 5 TB.

Thin disc record/playback technique
Two features were stressed as key points in the development of SVOD: disc manufacturing technique with the adoption of 92 μm thin film, and thin disc record/playback technique. CD and DVD disc media are usually manufactured by injection molding, which method cannot be employed to make a disc as thin as the one used in the new optical storage system. Hitachi Maxell has adopted a polycarbonate sheet which is used in a protective layer of the Blu-ray discs.

Nanoimprint technique
According to the process developed by Hitachi Maxell, the sheet is subjected to heat pressing in order to obtain land and groove pattern on its surface. This process is referred to as nanoimprint technique. Although it required 6 minutes for heat pressing at the initial stage of the development, it has been reduced to 8 seconds by now. The company claims that a yield comparable to that of DVDs is expected.

Hitachi Maxell recordable system - Optical head
The recordable system demonstrated at a press conference was fabricated by using an optical head and driver LSI included in typical DVD systems. It enables 8x recording on recordable discs. Hitachi Maxell boasts that the size of the prototyped system supporting two-sided recording has been reduced to less than 1/10 that of a typical DVD library system.
http://www.letsgodigital.org/en/news...tory_7786.html





New Century in Mobile Malware
JP

In less than half a year our tally of mobile malware has doubled to 200. Many of those in that count are variants of already detected viruses, but the speed at which the number grows has real implications for all those with unprotected smartphones. At the least, this is a testing ground. What comes next?
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archi....html#00000864





Fox To Release Unaltered Star Wars Flicks

Move Comes Despite Earlier Lucas Statements
Scott Nance

Fans of the original Star Wars trilogy have reason to celebrate.

Fox said it intends to release the original unaltered theatrical versions of the first three Star Wars movies on DVD on Sept. 12, according to SciFi Wire.

The release comes despite statements by creator George Lucas in which he said that 2004's digitally restored Star Wars trilogy DVDs were definitive versions of his movies.

Fans, however, clamored for unaltered DVDs of the original films. Fox said it will release new two-disc DVDs, priced at $30 each, of "Star Wars," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" that will look as they did when they first appeared in theaters, along with the new, restored versions (now available in the four-disc $70 Star Wars trilogy).

The individual DVDs will be taken off the market on Dec. 31, a strategy that Disney uses on many of its classic releases.

This new set of DVDs does not constitute "George changing his mind," Lucasfilm's Jim Ward told USA Today. "What we've always said is George viewed the revised versions of the films as the definitive versions."

The original films' video quality will not match up to that of the restored versions.

"It is state of the art, as of 1993, and that's not as good as state of the art 2006," Ward said.
http://www.syfyportal.com/news.php?id=2554





Q&A: Sun's Radia Perlman Speaks Out On Being Stuck With IP, New Life For Spanning Tree And Her Answer To Data Security: The Ephemerizer

Distinguished engineer weighs in on the state of network research and her latest projects.
Bob Brown

Some people refer to Sun Labs distinguished engineer Radia Perlman as the Mother of the Internet and the creator of the spanning tree algorithm used by bridges and switches. Others know her as the author of network textbooks such as Interconnections. Network World even singled her out in March as one of 20 people who changed the industry over the past 20 years. But when I met with her recently at a security event in Boston I wanted to know this: What have you done for us lately?

One week I get to see Tim Berners-Lee, the Father of the Web, and the next week I get to meet with the Mother of the Internet. What more could a networking editor ask for?

Mother of the Internet. That’s kind of a strange marketing sound bite. I cringe when people emphasize my gender, because it's really a very small part of my life, especially my professional life. Recently a recruiter for a company sent me e-mail saying "We are particularly interested in you as a female thought leader." I didn't reply, because I wasn't interested in a job, but I fantasized replying: "Thank you for your interest. Although my credentials as a thought leader are impeccable, I must warn you that I am not that qualified as a female. I can't walk in heels, I have no clothing sense, and I'm not particularly decorative. What aspects of being female are important for this position?"

What exactly does a distinguished engineer do?

The job is not that well defined so I get to kind of do whatever I want. I enjoy talking to various groups in and out of Sun to find out what they're doing and often it intrigues me with some problem that needs to be solved. Or I meet two groups that ought to know each other and I introduce them. At Sun Labs it's nice if we do things that make the company money but it's also nice if we change the world. Though if all I did was change the world, then I assume that would be a bad thing.

What's your take on the state of networking and security research these days?

The taste of whoever is in the funding agencies tends to cause everyone to look at the same stuff at the same time. Often technologies get hot then go away. There was active networking for a while, which always mystified me and has now died. In security the money is behind digital rights management, which I think ultimately is a bad thing -- not that we need to preserve the right to pirate music, but because the solutions are things that don’t solve the real problems in terms of security. The few dishonest people will always manage to steal things. But most people are basically honest, and are willing to pay if you make it convenient. If there's a trust relationship there most people will wind up buying things. I hate to see so much emphasis on digital rights management.

Where should the funding go?

The things that seem absolutely unsolvable but that we have to solve is the user interface stuff. Everything is so complicated. People tell you to turn off cookies because they are dangerous, but you can't talk to anything on the Web without using them. People build this horribly complicated software, put up all these mysterious pop-up boxes and then blame the users when things don't go right. I keep hearing people say, like with distributed denial of service, that there are all these grandmothers out there who don’t know how to maintain their systems. Don't blame the grandmothers; blame the vendors. Liability is one of those things I don't understand. Somebody makes a toy and some kid manages to stick a piece up his nose and dies from it, that company has to pay millions of dollars because everyone is so sympathetic. But in the software industry, when you install something there is this 9,000-page legalese that basically says: "We have no idea what this thing does, we're not claiming it does anything, if it remotely does anything useful you should be grateful to us, but you shouldn’t blame us if it doesn't do what you expect." And they get away with it!

We could use more standards, such as with document formats. Customers would be better off, but it's not really in the interest of the vendors to do that. And customers actually don't want standards; they want the cheapest thing that works. Even though it's good for them, how do you convince people to eat broccoli instead of chocolate bars?

Yeah, broccoli can be tough. Even tougher might be getting them to use something called an "ephemerizer." What's this security project of yours all about?

You want to be able to create files that have expiration dates and make lots of copies of all of your storage so even if your data center burns down you can buy a brand new machine, reinstall the file system from scratch, get your backup tapes and be able to recover all the data that hasn’t expired and not be able to recover any data that has expired. You want to be able to do this in a way that can be very scalable and in which you won't lose performance and to do it with key managers that manage time-release keys in a way you don’t really have to trust them.

We've been working on it for a few years and it's been evolving. Originally the design was every time you opened a file that had an expiration date you had to go to a key manager, like an external site, and ask him to unlock the file for you. When I tried to sell it to the file system groups they were unhappy about the overhead every time you opened a file and the amount of information you'd have to keep in the header of the file was a whole bunch. After that I changed it so that only after a file system recovers from a crash does it have to ask for one decryption from an outside agent and otherwise it works autonomously so it has no performance problems. In the header of a file all I need is about 4 bytes for a key ID.

What form might this all take in products?

The intention is that it will get built into file systems, but I'm just in research and who knows when and if things will happen. I'm optimistic that it will and fairly soon.

I've read your "Algorhyme" poem about spanning tree [plays off of Joyce Kilmer's "Trees"]. I'm thinking that coming up with words that rhyme with "ephemerizer" might be tough.

True. The spanning tree one just sort of came out. My son actually set that poem to music and my daughter and I had a chance to perform it at a concert at her office [Click here to hear Radia (on piano) and her daughter Dawn Perlner (voice) performing at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.]

What else is on your plate?

I'll tell you, but there's a story behind it. A couple of years back there was this Boston Globe article about a hospital network melting down and in the middle of it was mentioned the spanning tree algorithm. I'm thinking: those are words that don’t belong in a Boston Globe article even if spanning tree was involved. Eventually we tracked down the company providing the switches and indeed it was a giant bridged network.

Now, bridging was never intended to do that: it was kind of a hack because people at the time were all confused about what Layer 3 was and they thought Ethernet was a competitor to DECnet. With bridges we did such a good job and it was so plug-and-play that you didn’t have to think about them, so people are still taking large networks and doing bridges. As it turns out people kind of believed IP must have been the best protocol ever because it just took over the world (just like English must be the best language ever because it's going to take over the world, but no, it has nothing to do with how good a language it is).

DECnet would have been a much better protocol for the world to have adopted. It had a lot of advantages, like a larger address space (We're still talking about will IPv6 ever happen and if it does, there's nothing better about it than what we could have had 15 years ago). One of the advantages DECnet had was the ability to have a whole campus that was zero-configuration, that all had the same prefix , and you didn’t have to divvy up your address space for every link like IP does. But given that companies didn't go in that direction they're using bridging, which is inherently more fragile, especially when you take that notion and try to make it more responsive by doing all these things that involve lots of configuration. If you get the configuration wrong things can melt down. You shouldn’t be stressing it really hard.

One of the things I'm trying to do now, given that we're stuck with IP, is come up with something that gives you the advantages of bridging so it can be all zero-configuration within a campus and all look like one big prefix and not be confined to just transmitting data along the spanning tree. You'd be able to use shortest paths and will be safer if you have temporary loops, so it shouldn’t melt down. About a year ago we finally got through the politics and got an IETF working group started called TRILL, which stands for "transparent interconnection of lots of links." I'd written a paper about this five years ago and have been trying to sell it to the various standards bodies. I'm pretty sure it will get implemented. There are a lot of companies asking the sort of questions that only would be asked if they were planning to.

So TRILL is kind of like a new spanning tree?

You can think of it as a replacement to spanning tree that has the same properties of being zero-configuration, just plug it together and it works and it looks like one big thing but performs better because you have optimal paths. With spanning tree it's like taking the highway system and saying you don’t need both Rtes. 128 and 495 [to use local roads here in Massachusetts] just because they both sort of go in the same direction.

Jeez, I wasn't even going to ask you about spanning tree. I figured it was old news.

Something else you would think is old news is my thesis from 1988 on how to design a network that had the property that even if some of the routers were really malicious and were trying to do bad things (lying about who they were connected to, flooding the network with garbage, etc.) how could you cope with that. My thesis sounded really hard and important when I proposed it but the solution turned out to be embarrassingly simple. I found out years later that University of Washington networking people were required to read it. The thing was, though, that my proof of concept required a small enough network that all of the routers in it could keep track of all the source destination pairs talking at the same time. Recently I was discussing my thesis with someone else and we realized it does not extend to larger networks where you need hierarchy. We had to rethink it and do it in a totally different way which also has implications for congestion control. That's another paper that I've been working on recently.

Speaking of schools, I understand you aren't thrilled about how networking is being taught these days.

I get frustrated. Universities tend to teach it like it's a trade school. As if the only thing that every existed is TCP/IP The attitude seems to be that everything about it is perfect, so you just need to get your students to learn how to use it and write applications to it. But there are a lot of problems with this field where people just repeat things and nobody questions them anymore. Including in text books that are used at reputable universities. There's a lot in there that's just wrong. Like that ISO failed because it had too many layers. Or, if everything were encoded in XML it would all be interoperable or that security problems will go away once you have IPv6. What I'd like to see more of, and what I tried to do in [my book] Interconnections is to get people to think about things conceptually. One problem is that the books out there today only tend to deal with one or two layers and if they do all of networking they tend to only be strong in the areas of the writer's expertise. I've thought of collaborating with others on a book that would look at all of networking.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...interview.html





Local news

Band Manager Is Sentenced In R.I. Club Fire
Kathleen Burge

PROVIDENCE -- Minutes after he wept through an apology yesterday to the families of the 100 who died, Daniel M. Biechele was sentenced to four years in prison for lighting the fireworks that sparked the 2003 Station nightclub fire.

''Mr. Biechele, the greatest sentence that can be imposed upon you has been imposed upon you by yourself, that is, having to live a lifetime knowing that your actions were a proximate cause of the deaths of 100 people," said Superior Court Judge Francis J. Darigan Jr., as he announced the sentence, less than half the 10 years in prison that prosecutors requested.

Some relatives of the dead moaned and cried out as Darigan announced his sentence and afterward said they were incensed that Biechele, the first person to be convicted in the deaths, would not spend more time in prison.

Biechele's lawyers had requested that he be sentenced to community service, with no prison time. Biechele could be eligible for parole in about 16 months.

The Feb. 20, 2003 fire was the fourth deadliest nightclub fire in US history.

As Biechele, the tour manager for the heavy metal band Great White, was led away in handcuffs for the drive to the state prison in Cranston, Patricia Belanger, whose daughter, Dina DeMaio, died in the fire, yelled in the courtroom to Biechele's parents, ''What do you think of your son now?"

''He's got his family," Belanger said later, outside the courthouse. ''What do we [have]?" Now, she said, Biechele's mother will ''suffer just like we've been suffering because of her son."

''He's going to serve less time than we have already served," said Annmarie Swidwa, mother of victim Bridget Sanetti.

Biechele, who pleaded guilty in February to 100 counts of involuntary manslaughter, addressed the victims' families and Darigan, sobbing, just before the sentence was handed down. He apologized for his actions, saying he never meant to harm anyone.

''I don't know that I'll ever forgive myself for what happened that night, so I can't expect anyone else to," he said.

As Darigan announced his sentence -- 15 years with 11 years suspended -- he cautioned that reading the sentence as a measure of the value of the lives of those who died would only dishonor their memories.

''You and the victims' families will forever be mindful of that fateful night, and it is not within the power of this or any other court to fashion a sentence reflective of the enormity of the tragedy," he said.

Prosecutors had sought 10 years, the maximum sentence allowed under the plea agreement. In his statement in court, Assistant Attorney General Randall White reminded Darigan of the dozens of relatives of the dead who had given moving statements over two previous days.

''The suffering is endless, and the extent and the depth of the pain is bottomless," White said.

But some of the relatives said that punishing Biechele, 29, who had been living in Florida with his wife, whom he married last month, would not bring their loved ones back.

Sarah Mancini, whose son, Keith, died in the fire said she felt Biechele's sentence was appropriate. No matter how many years he spends in jail, she said, her son will still be dead.

''I lost my son," she said. ''I will miss him till I die. But I can feel this young man's pain as well as my son's loss."

Biechele's lawyer, Thomas G. Briody, said his client showed courage by deciding to plead guilty, against the advice of his attorneys.

''Daniel Biechele is the only man in this tragedy to stand up and say, 'I did something wrong,' " Briody said. ''He's the only one to apologize."

Biechele wrote letters to the families of each of the victims, apologizing for his role in the fire. Darigan said the handwritten letters will be made available to the families by the court in the future.

Briody argued that the fire was caused by a deadly series of building-code violations in the nightclub, circumstances beyond Biechele's control.

Biechele could not have known that the soundproofing foam along the walls was highly flammable or that the club's exits would not allow everyone to leave the building quickly enough to escape the fire, he said.

''Daniel Biechele's conduct alone is not the cause of the horror, the carnage, the destruction at the Station nightclub," Briody said.

Attorney General Patrick Lynch said he was disappointed that Darigan had not imposed a longer sentence, but defended the plea agreement with Biechele.

Nearly 10 months after the fire, a grand jury indicted Biechele and club owners Michael and Jeffrey Derderian, who are brothers, on 200 criminal counts using two different theories of involuntary manslaughter: 100 counts of misdemeanor manslaughter and 100 counts of criminal negligence. Many victims and their families said state fire and regulatory officials, as well as band members, were also at fault.

When Biechele's plea deal was announced in January, the criminal negligence charges were dropped.

The misdemeanor manslaughter charge, which is a felony, referred to his lighting the pyrotechnics without a license. In the case of the Derderians, the misdemeanor charges stem from the use of soundproofing insulation that was not flame-retardant.

Michael Derderian's trial is scheduled to begin July 31; no trial date has been set in his brother's case.

Lynch would not discuss whether Biechele would testify against the Derderians or any details of the case against them.

Andrew Horwitz, a professor at the Ralph R. Papitto School of Law at Roger Williams University in Bristol and director of the school's criminal defense clinic, said Biechele will probably testify if the Derderians go to trial.

Horwitz said he was surprised that the plea deal did not include an agreement that Biechele would cooperate with prosecutors. ''It continues to surprise me," he said.

Such cooperation agreements are common in plea deals and the fact that this agreement was reached without Biechele agreeing to cooperate means that if Biechele does take the witness stand against the Derderians, his testimony will be more credible, Horwitz said.

Horwitz said the case against the Derderians -- that installing the soundproofing foam was the direct cause of death for each of the 100 victims -- will be difficult for prosecutors to prove.

J. Richard Ratcliffe, a Providence lawyer and former chairman of the Rhode Island Bar Association's Criminal Law Bench/Bar Committee, said Darigan's ruling is significant for the Derderians in that it sets a benchmark for punishment in the criminal cases.

Biechele's sentence will be one piece of information used by the Derderians and their lawyers to decide whether to go to trial or seek a plea bargain, Ratcliffe said, and he noted that the Derderians should not expect to receive similar leniency.

Lawyers for the Derderians could not be reached for comment.

Matthew Brelis and Ralph Ranalli of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/rho...fetime_burden/