Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 25th, '07

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"I feel like I'm the world's biggest porn star." – Spencer Elden, "Nevermind" baby


"Allow people to make assumptions and they will come away absolutely convinced that assumption was correct and that it represents fact. It’s not necessarily so." – James Randi


"Obfuscation usually requires a lot more words than if you simply focus on fundamental principles, so I'm not at all surprised by the loquaciousness of liberals." – Tony Fratto


"It's pretty hard to write a book saying, 'No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes' on every page." – Pat Schroeder


"My friend and I went to a shopping mall at 3 p.m. on June 29th, the day it came out. We got our iPhones right at 6 and we came home and I've been working on it ever since." – George Hotz

"Do you think some wiley entrepreneur out there is going to take your method and start himself up a company that's gonna make a whole lot of money?" – Kai Ryssdal

"I mean, I'm sure he will. And actually my dad thinks I should be the one doing that. But I have no desire to do that at all." – George Hotz

"Why not?" – Kai Ryssdal

"That's something I kinda don't want. I mean, it's not what I was going for at all. I wish I could just release a little program that everyone could just run on their iPhone. And then there'd be no need for these companies." – George Hotz


"Die white pork." – Anonymous


"The U.S. government is freaking out." – William D. Watkins































Got You in a Stranglehold Baby

Kudos to Robb Topolski for his thorough job in both outing cable giant Comcast’s peer deflection "traffic management" practices and defending his expose against the usual pro-company flame bait from wannabe Ayn Rands who instantly jumped on him back in May, no doubt with well thumbed copies of The Fountainhead in their white knuckled hands.

The unfortunate truth however is that dubious ISP behavior such as this has been occurring for a much longer period than even Topolski’s mid-spring report would suggest. For instance a story on traffic shaper Sandvine is so old it’s no longer hosted at the parent site. I have it here, and it's sobering to note it’s a Week in Review from 2002.

Sandvine techniques will only get bolder and ISP service weaker unless something concrete is done like actually physically increasing broadband capacity. It’s no exaggeration to say that for the foreseeable future users exploring the more progressive social Internet experiences have much to mourn. In addition, posters say Comcast subscribers haven’t even been seeing the full 8MBs down they paid for, regardless of their file-sharing habits if any, with many getting only about 3 it seems.

Meanwhile Tokyo customers can purchase (and use) 50 MBs down and 12.5 MBs up for the U.S. equivalent of some 40 dollars a month, and others indicate they can buy 100 MBs down for a paltry 14 bucks.

Sandvine is Soma for American ISPs. It allows them to float in an extended dream state, pretending less capacity is more, while all around them countries are getting down to earth, rolling up their sleeves and doing the real work required to improve their systems and the productivity of their citizens.

The contrasts couldn’t be sharper.

If US subscribers could actually buy Japanese service, Comcast and AT&T would be out of business, overnight.

But as Atlas may have shrugged, they can’t.

This is competition?













Enjoy,

Jack













August 25th, 2007








Meet Copowi, the World's First ISP to Guarantee Network Neutrality
Nate Anderson

Copowi! Kablooey! An ISP dons superhero tights

How much would you pay for an Internet connection from an ISP that guarantees a neutral network, bills itself as a "social enterprise" instead of a traditional business, and sends free Ubuntu CDs to every new customer?

In the US, the battle over network neutrality has captured the public imagination in a way that it has yet to do in Europe or Australia. Debates over network neutrality occur in the media and in Washington, but new ISP Copowi wants to give customers a way to vote with their dollars as well. When it opened its doors for business two weeks ago, Copowi billed itself as the country's first ISP to guarantee network neutrality, and it now hopes to prove to other ISPs that the issue matters enough to consumers to provide a competitive advantage, even if prices are higher (and they are).

Copowi already offers service in 12 Western states, but "absolutely" wants to go national—even international. Copowi senior partner George Matafonov tells Ars that he sees no reason why the company couldn't eventually expand into Australia, Canada, and the UK.

But for now, with a few hundred subscribers, selling service in Australia looks a long way off. I spoke to Matafonov (an Australian himself) about Copowi's business model, its challenges, and whether it will really remain neutral if a handful of peer-to-peer users start slurping up most of the available bandwidth.
Your gateway to a neutral 'Net

Copowi's main pitch is a fully neutral network, which it defines as one that provides "equal access to all web sites and online services." The idea is that usage will be unrestricted and traffic will not be shaped, throttled, or prioritized. According to Matafonov, the major telecommunications companies want to "privatize the Internet" because greater control leads to greater profits. The eventual outcome could become something more like cable television than like the open Internet we know now, and Copowi strongly supports SavetheInternet.com's campaign to preserve an open 'Net.

But Copowi doesn't own any "last-mile" lines to people's homes, which means that it needs to lease DSL lines from local telcos out west in order to offer service (interesting side note: although companies like Verizon and AT&T scoffed at the idea of offering part of the 700MHz band as a "wholesale-only" license, both firms run thriving wholesale businesses of their own already). This puts Copowi at the mercy of the telcos that it leases lines from and means it has only limited control over its network neutrality guarantee.

Matafonov says that Copowi has had no problem in its negotiations yet, though. The telcos have so far been happy to provide unregulated access if Copowi is willing to pay for the bandwidth.

Because of this, and because telco wholesalers rarely resell lines at competitive prices (they don't want to create their own competition), Copowi's service runs toward the pricey side of the broadband spectrum. Users in Colorado, for example, will have to cough up a staggering $33.95 a month for a 256Kbps DSL connection—expensive by any standard (except perhaps in Kazakhstan).

Copowi's higher-end plans are actually far more competitive when it comes to price. A 1.5Mbps connection is still not cheap at $49.95 per month, but a 7Mbps link isn't a bad deal at $59.95 a month.

Matafonov admits that high wholesale rates are "one of the key questions" that the company faces, but he hopes that a small niche of customers will be willing to pay the premium for a guaranteed neutral connection. He also hopes that prices will drop as subscriber numbers grow and Copowi can negotiate better contracts. For now, though, Copowi targets those who don't make "cost" their primary concern when choosing an ISP.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/cult...neutrality.ars





Comcast Responds To Traffic Shaping Accusations

But chooses their words carefully....
Karl

We (and other outlets we've spoken to) have been trying to get Comcast to comment on reports that the company has started using Sandvine gear to disrupt the seeding of BitTorrent files. Comcast picked Light Reading to issue their first denial of wrongdoing, chosing their words carefully in response to the allegations of preferential traffic treatment:

"We're not blocking access to any application, and we don't throttle any traffic," says Charlie Douglas, a Comcast spokesman. Douglas didn't explicitly deny the use of deep packet inspection or traffic shaping products. "[Comcast] has a responsibility to manage our network to ensure our customers have the best service, and we use available technologies to do so."

Keep in mind that the allegations that surfaced in our forums and were also highlighted in a Torrent Freak report note that Comcast is using the Sandvine gear to limit the ability to seed Torrent files effectively in some markets, not necessarily throttle available bandwidth or restrict application access.

So are we going to be playing a game of semantics as the practices of our Canadian neighbors trickle down to U.S. cable operators? RCN does something similar, but is very forthcoming. Time Warner Cable denies traffic shaping whatsoever despite evidence otherwise.

While U.S. cable ops offer faster speeds than DSL operators, the practice of download caps and traffic shaping could neutralize that marketing advantage. These ISPs are very aware of your thoughts on this issue. The volume of traffic shaping they implement will depend on how much you're willing to tolerate.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/C...usations-86816





Comcast Wrongfully Denies Interfering with BitTorrent
Ernesto

Last week we reported that Comcast is making it impossible for its customers to seed files on BitTorrent. Not surprisingly, Comcast’s PR department does all it can to deny there allegations, but we - and with us some of the leading BitTorrent developers - know better.

So who’s right here? The hundreds of people that seem to have the same seeding problem, or the Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas, who denies that Comcast is monkeying with BitTorrent bandwidth. Apparently Comcast want people to believe the latter, even though all evidence points in the other direction. Decide for yourself.

Moxie, a Comcast customer who replied to a post on Silicon Alley, points out that when you log your network activity with an application like Wireshark, you’ll notice that Comcast servers start sending reset messages as soon as a download is finished, exactly as we described it.

With Wireshark in the background run your BitTorrent application. Wait until completed and watch Wireshark, notice when it finishes seeding Comcast servers send out a reset command every second to your computer noted by the highlighted red line in Wireshark. It is 8:30 pm Monday pst and Comcast is still resting my BitTorrent connections. Maybe the PR guy didn’t get the email from the VP of Networking.

It might be that not every Comcast customer is equally affected, but a significant percentage is. Not only the 10+ users we talked to before we first reported this issue, but also hundreds of additional commenters here on TorrentFreak, and elsewhere. Some users even captured the throttling in progress on video (download), and anyone has to agree that this does look very suspicious.

More evidence comes from Robb Topolski, a networking and protocol expert with more than 25 years of experience, who first wrote about this issue on DSLReports. He told TorrentFreak: “We have had two Comcast techs confirm Sandvine in use, but neither confirmed or denied its connection with the RST interference. For me, seeding is possible. I can reach my upload speed limit, but there sure is a lot of interference. Since your article came out, I too have received many reports of seeding being impossible. I’m not sure if it’s regional, or what!”

For the networking savvy people among us, here’s an example of real RST interference on an unencrypted BitTorrent connection. In this case, it happens right after the bitfields are exchanged

Nevertheless Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas said in a response to Light Reading: “We’re not blocking access to any application, and we don’t throttle any traffic”. He might be right here semantically speaking, they are not throttling anything, they just kill all outgoing connections when a clients starts to seed a file. But the fact is that Comcast is making it impossible for (at least some) customers to share files with non-Comcast users over BitTorrent.

Luckily there is a fix for this problem, and we know that at least two BitTorrent client developers are including this fix in their next update.
http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-wron...th-bittorrent/





How to Test How Many Connections are Being Reset by RST Pack
Robb Topolski

The technique Comcast is using is definitely not the typical way to employ traffic shaping. Comcast, more accurately, is employing "traffic deflection" by killing an unwanted (by them) connection in hopes that a better connection will take its place.

Here is a quick-and-dirty way to determine whether, and how much, you are being affected by the P2P management that I described at the top of this thread.

1. Start your P2P application, wait about 15 minutes for full connectivity to be established.

2. In a Console window (Start, Run, CMD.EXE), type
netstat -s | find "Reset Connections"
and write down the number that you get in response.

3. Exactly one hour later, repeat Step 2. Subtract the first number from this latest number. The result is how many connections were terminated by a "RST" in the past hour.

If you have a VPN, or an access to a non-Comcast line, repeat the above process (as much as you can, try to match the conditions -- same applications, same uploads and downloads).

Now compare the two numbers. If you are being affected, the "Comcast" number will be an order of magnitude higher than the "non-Comcast" number.

The above result should be enough to show the effect, if it is there, as the difference is huge and undeniable. However, you can be more accurate by using the above process, but using this command and this math at the end of each test, instead:

netstat -s

Look for this output:

TCP Statistics for IPv4

Active Opens = 253461
Passive Opens = 131313
Failed Connection Attempts = 188271
Reset Connections = 12271

These numbers always accumulate (they don't go up and down). Record this output, and at the end of the test, subtract the numbers from the beginning of the test to get the number that applies to the duration of your test.

Now add "Active Opens" and "Passive Opens" and subtract "Failed Connection Attempts." The result will be the number of Successfully Established Connections.

Take the "Reset Connections" and divide that by the number of "Successfully Established Connections," and the result is the ratio of connections that were torn down by Resets.

If you don't have a non-Comcast account to use for comparison, you can use this result to compare with other users of your P2P application (to a degree), since it divides by the number of successful connections instead of by time.


If you know how to use a batch file, here is a batch file that simplifies this testing -- call it CheckRST.BAT:

1) SETLOCAL
2)
3) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Active Opens"`) DO set /A CESTABL1=%%i
4) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Passive Opens"`) DO set /A CESTABL1=%CESTABL1%+%%i
5) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Failed Connection Attempts"`) DO set /A CESTABL1=%CESTABL1%-%%i
6) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Reset Connections"`) DO set /A CRESETS1=%%i
7) SET /A TESTCYCLE=0
8) SET /A TESTMINS=0
9)
10) cls
11) echo results will begin to be reported shortly,
12) echo please wait or use Ctrl-c to quit...
13)
14) :repeatcycle
15) ping -n 9 localhost >nul
16) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Active Opens"`) DO set /A CESTABL2=%%i
17) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Passive Opens"`) DO set /A CESTABL2=%CESTABL2%+%%i
18) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Failed Connection Attempts"`) DO set /A CESTABL2=%CESTABL2%-%%i
19) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Reset Connections"`) DO set /A CRESETS2=%%i
20) SET /A TESTCYCLE=%TESTCYCLE%+1
21) SET /A TESTMINS=%TESTCYCLE% / 6
22) SET /A TESTSECS=%TESTCYCLE%%%6*10
23) IF %TESTSECS% EQU 0 SET TESTSECS=00
24) SET /A CESTABL=%CESTABL2%-%CESTABL1%
25) SET /A CRESETS=%CRESETS2%-%CRESETS1%
26) SET /A PCTRST=(%CRESETS% * 100)/%CESTABL%
27) ECHO %TESTMINS%:%TESTSECS% - %CRESETS% out of %CESTABL% connections reset (%PCTRST%%%) [Ctrl-c quit] goto repeatcycle

The above file was written and tested using Windows XP SP2. Use CMD.EXE (which is installed by default in Windows XP), not COMMAND.COM, to run this batch file. http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r189...et-by-RST-pack

It's Been Over 3 Months Since My Original Post

I decided to see if the numbers or behaviors had changed.

The numbers did not change, much. In May, 39% of my BitTorrent connections were killed by the RST flag, but I was still able to seed a torrent at my preferred speed (16 KB/s). Today that number is 46% killed, and still able to seed a torrent at my preset upload limit speed (16 KB/s).

What did change is the behavior toward BitTorrent's standard DHE encrypted connections: Surprisingly, none were dropped! It was only yesterday or the day before that I noted encrypted connections were still being killed by RST, so this is new behavior for me. This could be due to policy parameters such as time-of-day, level of global or individual use, or localized adjustments -- so your milage may vary.

The test method:

1. Start a BitTorrent client performing an upload (seeding) to an established swarm.
2. Wait 5 minutes to allow connections and speeds to stabilize.
3. Record the starting number of connections and resets reported by "netstat -s" or start the batch file (see »How to test how many connections are being reset by RST pack for details).
4. Wait 5 minutes.
5. Record the ending number of connections and resets, and determine the amount that took place during the test (or obtain the numbers from the batch file).

I used the above method on the same small (25-30 peer, 4 seed) swarm, using uTorrent 1.7.2.

No encryption ... 34 out of 73 reset (46%)
Encryption enabled (with fallback) ... 5 out of 20 reset (25%)
Encryption forced (no fallback) ... 0 out of 17 reset ( 0%)
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18919646-





BitComet Pollutes BitTorrent with Junk Data
Ernesto

Due to a new feature recently introduced into Bitcomet’s torrent maker, people who do not use BitComet (the majority) are sometimes forced to download so called “padding files” which is — for them — a waste of time and bandwidth.

So what are these padding files?

For every file in a multi-file torrent, BitComet includes a padding file by default. This overcomes the problem of ending one file and beginning another on the same BitTorrent “piece.” The feature was added to support finding sources from http/ftp/ed2k services on multi-file torrents.

For example, if BitComet users are downloading a set of .mp3 files, it tries to get some of those files from a non-BitTorrent source if possible. This is good both for the (BitComet) user and the swarm. However, the implementation of these padding files create problems for non-Bitcomet clients and the web sites that carry information from the *.torrent files.

Why is this a problem?

Unfortunately, BitComet’s development team sprung these padding files on to the rest of the community. If they had been more communicative, such as pre-publishing a specification, client makers and administrators of Torrent sites could then program their systems to mask them.

It impacts people who use uTorrent, Azureus or any other client than BitComet. The padding feature is enabled by default, so if a BitComet user created a .torrent, non BitComet users have to download these useless padding files. A padding file is created for every file in the .torrent, so if you download a collection of 100 MP3s you’ll be forced to download 100 (useless) padding files. The average added overhead for an MP3 album will be around 3%, not too bad, but annoying because its junk data to most people. However, it is possible in rare circumstances that the amount of junk data caused by these files might exceed 10%.

The padding file feature might come to bite BitComet users. It has been reported that a malicious user could create a torrent with a fake padding file. This means that Bitcomet 0.85+ users will never be able to complete their downloads without switching to another client.

Some BitTorrent users are starting to get annoyed by these (for most people) useless padding files. “Fuzzier,” who has been leading the charge on several forums (including Wikipedia), sums it up:

“I and lots of my friends don’t use BitComet, and many others stick with older versions of BitComet. We see more and more useless padding files in torrents, and it gets really inconvenient — delete them then we cannot pass hash check and cannot seed; and no matter what, we get a bunch of wastes especially our precious upload bandwidth.”

Unless this practice becomes more widely adopted in the BitTorrent community, BitComet might consider disabling this feature by default, and suppling client makers and administrators of BitTorrent sites with the specs so they can decide how to deal with them.
http://torrentfreak.com/bitcomet-pol...ith-junk-data/





Gunplay Blamed for Internet Slowdown
Robert McMillan

ISPs in the U.S. experienced a service slowdown Monday after fiber-optic cables near Cleveland were apparently sabotaged by gunfire.

TeliaSonera, which lost the northern leg of its U.S. network to the cut, said that the outage began around 7 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday night. When technicians pulled up the affected cable, it appeared to have been shot. "Somebody had been shooting with a gun or a shotgun into the cable," said Anders Olausson, a TeliaSonera spokesman.

The damage affected a large span of cable, more than two-thirds of a mile [1.1 km] long, near Cleveland, TeliaSonera said.

The company declined to name the service provider whose lines had been cut, but a source familiar with the situation said the lines are owned by Level 3 Communications. Level 3 could not be reached immediately for comment.

Cogent Communications warned that some customers may be experiencing disruptions because network lines had been cut somewhere between Montville, Ohio, and Cleveland. "Splice crews are currently doing preparation work on the new fiber cable before splicing begins to resolve the outage," Cogent said in a note to customers.

According to Keynote Systems' Internet Pulse Report, Cogent was experiencing significant latency problems on Monday.

The outage caused headaches for Christopher McCoy, a system administrator for a Web hosting company in Atlanta. "This Telia outage is really causing a pain," he wrote in a blog posting. "Telia is one of my company’s main network providers, and explaining to your average Webmaster the details and specifics of a fiber break isn’t all that easy."From February
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...-internet.html





Japan Working to Replace the Internet

Japanese communications minister Yoshihide Suga said Friday that Japan will start research and development on technology for a new generation of network that would replace the Internet, eyeing bringing the technology into commercial use in 2020. Speaking to reporters in Brazil, where he is visiting, Suga said an organization will be set up as early as this fall with cooperation from businesses, academia and government offices for promoting the technology when the Internet is seen to be faced with increasing constraints in achieving higher throughputs of data as well as ensuring data security.

The envisaged network is expected to ensure faster and more reliable data transmission, and have more resilience against computer virus attacks and breakdowns. The ministry is hoping Japan will take a lead in development of post-Internet technology and setting global standards, a move that ministry officials believe would help make Japanese companies competitive in the global market for hardware and software using such technology.

Suga also said he will set up a task force early next month to oversee the transition from analog to digital broadcasting in July 2011. The task force will request the electronics industry to produce and sell low-price converters to enable analog TVs to receive digital broadcasting programs within two years, the minister said. ''We will consider providing simplified converters to low-income households for free or distributing coupons to assist them to purchase such converters,'' he said.
http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/...e_internet.php





Man Arrested for Stealing Broadband

A man who was spotted in the street using his laptop to access an unsecured wireless connection has been arrested.

The 39-year-old man was seen sitting on a wall outside a home in Chiswick, west London, by two community support officers.
Dishonestly obtaining free internet access is an offence under the Communications Act 2003 and a potential breach of the Computer Misuse Act

When questioned he admitted using the owner's unsecured wireless internet connection without permission and was arrested on suspicion of stealing a wireless broadband connection.

The man was bailed to October pending further inquiries.

Dishonestly obtaining free internet access is an offence under the Communications Act 2003 and a potential breach of the Computer Misuse Act.

The move is the latest example of police cracking down on a crime that did not exist several years ago when wireless internet access was relatively rare.

In April, a man was cautioned by police after neighbours saw him using a laptop in a car parked outside a house in Redditch, Worcestershire.

In 2005, a man was fined £500 for piggybacking on someone else's wireless broadband connection in London.

Detective Constable Mark Roberts, of the Metropolitan Police computer crime unit, said anyone who illegally uses a broadband link faces arrest.

He said: "This arrest should act as a warning to anyone who thinks it is acceptable to illegally use other people's broadband connections.

"To do so potentially breaches the Computer Misuse Act and the Communications Act, so computer users need to be aware that this is unlawful and police will investigate any violation we become aware of."
http://itn.co.uk/news/1112943368020a...568ddbde1.html





Google Ready to Invade Telco Turf, Bid on 700MHz Spectrum
Nate Anderson

For the last few weeks, Google has been pondering its response to the FCC's 700MHz auction rules. Would it bid on the spectrum or wouldn't it? Last night, CEO Eric Schmidt appeared to indicate that the company was leaning toward a bid, a decision that is no doubt giving the incumbent telcos night sweats.

Schmidt delivered a dinner keynote at the Progress & Freedom Foundation's annual Aspen Summit, and he talked about the topic that was on everyone's mind: would Google use its hoard of cash to bid for a juicy block of 700MHz spectrum being vacated by analog television broadcasters in 2009?

Google had promised the FCC a minimum $4.6 billion bid if the agency agreed to impose four "open access" conditions on the available spectrum. After only two of those conditions made their way into the final rules, Google's telecom counsel called the progress "real, if incomplete" and said that Google was waiting on the final FCC rules to make a decision.

Those rules are now out, so anticipation was high among the gathered glitterati of the tech sector. Anticipation was also high among Google competitors like T-Mobile, a company long said to want more spectrum to boost its cellular data offerings. T-Mobile's head of government relations, Thomas Sugrue, stood up after dinner and asked Schmidt directly if Google would make a play for the spectrum.

Here's where things get a bit dicey. Reuters' recounting of his answer goes this way:

Schmidt replied that bidding "probably would be the way to answer that."

GigaOm reports it a bit differently:

Saying the FCC’s rules were "conducive" to the kind of bid Google might make, Schmidt said "probably... is the way to answer."

According to CNet, the crucial line fell trippingly from Schmidt's lips like this:

In response to a question from a T-Mobile representative, he added: "probably is the answer to that."

The fact that each response is worded slightly differently is no big deal, and the gist of Schmidt's words is obvious. But the Reuters report makes it sound as though a bid would be Google's answer to the question; in other words, Schmidt isn't going to say, and other companies will just have to wait until the auction to find out if Google bids or not. The other quotes (and the tone of the rest of the Reuters piece) suggest that Schmidt's answer to the question about whether Google would bid was "Probably." That is, Schmidt said, "Yes, it's likely we will make a play for the spectrum." These are two quite different responses.

What's at stake

In any event, Google hasn't ruled out what could become an expensive bidding war for a prime piece of spectrum and seems to be in favor of throwing its hat into the ring. What Google would do with the spectrum is not entirely clear, though we assume that it would voluntarily stick to the four open access conditions proposed earlier.

In addition to coughing up more than $4.6 billion just for the rights to the spectrum (the reserve price set by the FCC), Google would then need to build out a national network infrastructure in the next few years at a cost that could make the license look like a bargain. Assuming that Google were to do so and were to stick to its four open access principles, the company (or consortium, if it partners with others) would be running a network that only sells wholesale services to others.

This certainly has the potential to create great innovation, since anyone can purchase access to a high-quality wireless network and offer services across it without owning massive infrastructure. What's Google's game here?

Because the 700MHz has such desirable spectrum propagation characteristics, it's also much cheaper and easier to roll out a network with excellent coverage than it is to do so with higher-frequency technology. Making broadband access cheap and affordable means more people come online, and more people are able to make use of Internet services-exactly the sort of thing Google offers.

But just as importantly, it helps Google avoid any problems from non-neutral ISPs. After former SBC chief Ed Whitacre announced that Google shouldn't be able to "use my pipes free," Google saw a potential threat to its existence from the network operators that lay between it and consumers. Running a national wireless network could create enough competition that incumbent telcos simply couldn't implement their previous plans to charge companies like Google and Yahoo for better access to end users.

In effect, this could give Google control of the entire pipe between customers and Google servers, a move that could be very good for business strategy, even if the wireless network is not a major profit center. Companies never like to be at the mercy of other companies, and Google is no exception.

Whitacre's remarks are sometimes credited with igniting the public debate over network neutrality. Ironically for the telcos who can't be thrilled at the possibility of a bidding war with a cash factory like Google, one of their own may be to thank for the current situation.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ctrum-bid.html





With Software and Soldering, a Non-AT&T iPhone
Brad Stone

AT&T is paying millions to be the exclusive United States provider of Apple’s much-hyped and glowingly reviewed gadget, the iPhone.

It took 17-year-old George Hotz two months of work to undermine AT&T’s investment.

Mr. Hotz, a resident of Glen Rock, N.J., published detailed instructions online this week that he says will let iPhone owners abandon AT&T’s service and use their phones on some competing cellular networks.

Mr. Hotz’s method, which requires a soldering gun, a steady hand and a set of obscure software tools, is one of several techniques that have emerged over the last week to break the technological locks confining the iPhone to AT&T’s network.

“This was about opening up the device for everyone,” Mr. Hotz said in an interview over his iPhone, which he was using on the network of T-Mobile, a rival to AT&T.

Carriers like Verizon, AT&T and Sprint seek to keep their customers in two ways. They force them to sign multiyear contracts, which are expensive to break. And the carriers put complex technological locks on phones to ensure that they run only on a given carrier’s wireless network. Without the locks, the phones could be used on rival networks that use the same underlying technology.

People who work on unlocking cellphones say those technical locks unfairly restrict customer choice. They want to give cellphone users the flexibility to take their phones with them overseas without incurring heavy roaming fees, or to transfer the devices to other networks once a user’s service contract has expired.

Mr. Hotz says it took him about 500 hours to unlock two iPhone units. He put one of them up for sale on eBay, and by late yesterday, bids on the phone had reached many thousands of dollars. An unmodified iPhone sells for $499 at an Apple store.

His technique is probably not accessible to most people. But Mr. Hotz described it in detail on his Web site in the hopes that others could simplify the procedure.

Neither Apple nor AT&T would comment on Mr. Hotz’s handiwork or on another unlocking technique revealed yesterday by an anonymous group calling itself iPhoneSimFree.

Members of that group demonstrated their technique to a writer for the Web site Engadget. They said they had developed a way to unlock iPhones with a software update, without any hardware changes to the device.

IPhone owners presumably would be able to run that software and then insert another carrier’s SIM card, the small card inside phones that run on G.S.M. networks. A SIM card stores information about the subscriber.

The writer for Engadget verified that the iPhoneSimFree technique worked. Apparently only one feature, AT&T’s visual voice mail system, which lets users retrieve voice mail in whatever order they choose, stopped working when an iPhone was removed from the AT&T system.

The six-man iPhoneSimFree group says that it has been working on unlocking the iPhone since June and that it plans to start selling its software to parties that want to unlock large numbers of iPhones.

The members have not disclosed what they intend to charge, and they declined to reveal their identities.

“We’re a bit paranoid about privacy because we don’t know how things are going to evolve,” said one group member, who identified himself only as Jim in a brief phone interview.

His caution stems from the murky legal status of unlocking cellphones.

Last fall, the Librarian of Congress issued an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, ruling that people can legally unlock their cellphones. But the ruling does not specifically apply to people like Mr. Hotz and the iPhoneSimFree group who distribute the unlocking tools.

Apple and AT&T could conceivably sue such distributors under the copyright act. The companies could also argue that people sharing modifications to iPhones are interfering with a business relationship, between Apple and AT&T and the customers.

Apple might also seek to block the unlocking tools with its regular software updates to the iPhone. Mr. Hotz says he thinks his unlocking process is immune to such changes, because he is making a change to the device’s read-only memory, which cannot be changed with a software patch.

One other approach to unlocking the iPhone has made some waves recently.

Two weeks ago, a company called Bladox, based in the Czech Republic, began selling an $80 device called a Turbo SIM. The thumbnail-size card, attached to another carrier’s SIM card and inserted into an iPhone, tricks the iPhone into thinking it is running on the AT&T network even when it is not.

The company has reportedly been overwhelmed by orders and is not selling the product on its site. But Jesús Díaz, a technology writer in Madrid, said he bought the Turbo SIM last week and was now using his iPhone on Spain’s Vodafone network.

“Everyone here asks me: ‘What is that? Can I see it, can I touch it?’ ” said Mr. Díaz, whose iPhone draws a lot of attention because Apple has not yet announced a deal to sell the device in Europe.

The iPhone unlocking craze may have reverberations beyond Apple and AT&T.

Cellphone carriers in the United States generally subsidize the initial purchase of a phone and then work to keep customers paying the lucrative monthly fees. That is why operators offer incentives for loyalty and require long contracts.

But people now want the same freedom with their cellphones that they have with other devices, like televisions and computers.

Mike McGuire, an analyst at the research firm Gartner, says that even though few consumers will try these sophisticated alterations, the iPhone modifications point to “the rather rapid erosion of the carrier control of handset distribution.”

“This has been going on for a while,” he said, “and this is the latest salvo.”

John Biggs contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/25/te...iphone.html?hp




'I Partied and I Unlocked the iPhone!'

George Hotz, 17, has posted on his blog the instructions for how to fiddle with an iPhone so it can be used with a wireless carrier other than AT&T. Kai Ryssdal figured that was worth a conversation and called him up.

KAI RYSSDAL: Sometimes cause and effect in the stock market's a pretty easy thing to figure out. Maybe there's an earnings report or something. So when we noticed Apple shares were up more than two percent today we went looking for a reason. And we found it in Glen Rock, New Jersey. That's where George Hotz lives.

Last night on his blog George, who's 17 by the way, posted instructions for how to fiddle with an iPhone so it can be used with a wireless carrier other than AT&T. We figured that was worth a conversation, so we called him up.

GEORGE HOTZ: Hello?

RYSSDAL: Hey, George. Kai Ryssdal. How are you?

HOTZ: Pretty good.

RYSSDAL: How long did it take you to do this?

HOTZ: My friend and I went to a shopping mall at 3 p.m. on June 29th, the day it came out. We got our iPhones right at 6 and we came home and I've been working on it ever since.

RYSSDAL: Now, I read your blog. And I'll be honest with you, I didn't understand the whole thing. Is this a hardware thing where you actually crack open the phone and . . .

HOTZ: Yeah.

RYSSDAL: It is?

HOTZ: You do, actually, have to open the iPhone and solder some stuff to it. And all it is is a piece of wire. So it's tools everyone has. But the issue is you actually can open your iPhone and do it.

RYSSDAL: All right, now here's the big question. Why?

HOTZ: The truth is because our family has T-Mobile. We have a T-Mobile family plan. And if I wanted AT&T, I'd have to pay for it. So, I could either decide to pay for AT&T or just work to unlock the iPhone.

RYSSDAL: So, pure practicality then.

HOTZ: Yeah, basically.

RYSSDAL: As it stands now, you can only buy the iPhone in the United States. You can only use it -- well, until you came out with this thing -- only use it with AT&T. But what this does is it opens up the iPhone to be used overseas. Do you think some wiley entrepreneur out there is going to take your method and start himself up a company that's gonna make a whole lot of money?

HOTZ: I mean, I'm sure he will. And actually my dad thinks I should be the one doing that. But I have no desire to do that at all.

RYSSDAL: Why not?

HOTZ: That's something I kinda don't want. I mean, it's not what I was going for at all. I wish I could just release a little program that everyone could just run on their iPhone. And then there'd be no need for these companies. But, there are going to be companies that do it.

RYSSDAL: And you're all right with that?

HOTZ: It's either that or I don't release the method. And some people -- there's probably been about 50 people so far who have reported success with the method. And I'm happy to hear that.

RYSSDAL: So, what does your mom think of this whole thing?

HOTZ: I mean, she thinks I've been drinking too many Red Bulls.

RYSSDAL: So, a lot of late nights doing this project?

HOTZ: Yeah, like, there were nights I'd go to sleep at 9 in the morning.

RYSSDAL: All right, that's not good.

HOTZ: Well, but, it's all worth it.

RYSSDAL: Yeah, and really what else you gonna do the summer before you go to college, right?

HOTZ: Yeah, exactly. Like it's . . . I partied and I unlocked the iPhone. It was a good summer.

RYSSDAL: Yeah, not bad for a 17-year-old kid from New Jersey, huh?

HOTZ: I'll take it, yeah.

RYSSDAL: Where you going to school?

HOTZ: R.I.T.

RYSSDAL: Excellent. Rochester Institute of Technology, right?

HOTZ: That's the one.

RYSSDAL: All right. Best of luck to you.

HOTZ: Thanks a lot.

RYSSDAL: George Hotz leaves for college tomorrow morning. His "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" essay's going to be titled, "Changing the Market Dynamics of the iPhone."
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/s...200708244.html

Listen to this very confident and cool techie - Jack.





How to…

Unlock the iPhone

What you need
George Hotz

--First, an iPhone. Of the sshed and jailbroken variety. Also, kill commcenter by moving the LaunchDaemon plist out of the directory.
--Some trusty case opener tools(read: guitar picks) Read one of the many tutorials available online for taking apart your phone.
--A soldering iron. This should've cost you more than $10.
--Fine pitch wire. I used magnet wire salvaged from a little motor.
--An unlock switch. The bigger and more badass, the better. Or if you are cheap, wire cutters :-)
--A red bull. This requires concentration, something I don't have without Red Bull.

More





Uniquephones's iPhone Unlock Release 'Slowed' by AT&T Lawyers

Update

It is now 12N EST – the time when we said we would be offering iphone unlocking software to our customers.

We have the software. It works. And we are ready to go.

Seems AT&T is a bit annoyed at the idea. A middle of the night phone call from a Silicon Valley law firm is slowing down the release of the software to you.

Stay tuned.

Hope you weren't waiting in tense anticipation to get your hands on Uniquephone's iPhone unlock software, because things certainly aren't going as planned. Reportedly, the gurus behind the software unlock were contacted by "a Silicon Valley law firm" who is "slowing down the release of the software." Of course, they still claim to have the app "ready to go," but until this legal hubbub gets cleared up, it seems like their method of freeing your iPhone will remain a well kept secret. We'll keep you posted.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/25/u...tandt-lawyers/





AFTRA Musicians, Labels Face Off Over Contract Issues
FMQB

AFTRA's sound-recordings contract expired on June 30, and talks about a new agreement are going slowly between artists and record labels. In fact, an online protest campaign has been posted against the major labels. The petition, posted on the AFTRA Web site, says "The major record labels want to strip or reduce benefits to recording artists and keep singers from being paid for digital distributions." The petition objects to three record label demands, which it lists as: "No more health benefits for recording artists, or at the very least, a reduction in basic benefits; Group recording artists would continue to be paid as if they are one artist for health and pension credits; and Background singers cut out of monies from digital distributions."

"The negotiations are ongoing," AFTRA spokesman John Hinrichs told the Hollywood Reporter. However, it looks like both sides are not on the same page. AFTRA claims that the proposals include givebacks in basic health benefits and that they exclude background singers from digital distribution compensation.

"In this new age of digital distribution, older recordings are finding new popularity through subscriptions services, downloads, ringtones and ringbacks," reads the petition. "Background singers, whose voices are heard on these recordings, should share in these new sources of revenue, just like everyone else who contributes to the music you sell."

But a source told the Hollywood Reporter that the matter of background singers' benefits is not a question of whether they will share in digital distribution money but how much they will receive and for how long. The source also said the suggestion of a demand for benefit givebacks is inaccurate.

Meanwhile, AFTRA musicians claim that their own demands are modest. "The total cost of our union's proposals to the entire recording industry -- which would spread benefits and protection to thousands of artists seeking fair treatment -- is a small fraction of what a single label currently spends on the promotion of one new recording artist or what a single label might pay in a few executive bonuses," reads the petition. "We understand that piracy and the decline in hard product sales are affecting us all, but we also understand as digital businesses grow, it is only fair that we -- as the artist who make your businesses viable -- have a fair share in the future, and fair health and pension security."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=458472





SoundExchange Reaches Agreement On Web Royalty Cap
FMQB

After a Thursday meeting with DiMA, SoundExchange has announced it has reached an agreement with larger webcasters over the minimum fee cap for Web royalties. The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) had required a $500 minimum fee "per station or channel," regardless of the total number of stations. Today's new agreement sets a cap of $50,000 per service on the $500 per station number. The two parties also agreed that beginning in six months, webcasters will provide SoundExchange with a full census of songs performed (24 hours a day, 365 days a year) in order to accurately distribute royalties to independent labels and artists. Furthermore, SoundExchange and DiMA will form a committee to evaluate the issue of "streamripping" (copying a song from a Web stream) and potential technological solutions to it.

Though the deal currently applies to those services involved in today's agreement, SoundExchange says the agreement will be presented to the Copyright Royalty Judges as an industry-wide rule.

John Simson, Executive Director of SoundExchange, said in a statement, "This agreement shows that we can address specific issues of concern to the industry through private negotiations while upholding the integrity of the CRB process and while protecting the interests of SoundExchange members."

He continued, "With the small webcaster agreement we sent out earlier this week, with progress on the non-commercial webcaster front, and with this agreement, SoundExchange has now addressed the key issues of concern with respect to the CRB rate-setting decision while still protecting the value of sound recordings. We now hope to move forward together with our partners, the webcasters, in providing an enhanced listening experience through Internet radio."

DiMA Executive Director Jonathan Potter released a statement saying, "This agreement marks an important first step in the Internet radio royalty negotiation process. We’re encouraged by this development and the knowledge that good-faith negotiations have begun. We look forward to the next step of negotiating the royalty rates that will allow for the growth of the Internet radio industry, a platform for music discovery for consumers."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=462406





Gambling Dispute With a Tiny Country Puts U.S. in a Bind
Gary Rivlin

With long blond hair reaching his shoulders and dozens of cloth bracelets peeking out from under his sleeves, Mark E. Mendel hardly conjures up the image of a typical lawyer.

But then there is nothing run-of-the-mill about the case that Mr. Mendel, a Texan who was born and raised in Southern California, has been waging against his own government before the World Trade Organization, the body in Geneva that sets the ground rules for global trade. It is a clash that at once challenges Washington’s effort to prohibit online gambling while simultaneously testing the ability of the W.T.O. to enforce its own standards.

The dispute stretches back to 2003, when Mr. Mendel first persuaded officials in Antigua and Barbuda, a tiny nation in the Caribbean with a population of around 70,000, to instigate a trade complaint against the United States, claiming its ban against Americans gambling over the Internet violated Antigua and Barbuda’s rights as a member of the W.T.O.

Antigua is best known to Americans for its pristine beaches and tourist attractions like historic English Harbor. But the dozens of online casinos based there are vital to the island’s economy, serving as its second-largest employer.

More than a few people in Washington initially dismissed as absurd the idea that the trade organization could claim jurisdiction over something as basic as a country’s own policies toward gambling. Various states and the federal government, after all, have been deeply engaged for decades in where and when to allow the operation of casinos, Indian gambling halls, racetracks, lotteries and the like.

But a W.T.O. panel ruled against the United States in 2004, and its appellate body upheld that decision one year later. In March, the organization upheld that ruling for a second time and declared Washington out of compliance with its rules.

That has placed the United States in a quandary, said John H. Jackson, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center who specializes in international trade law.

Complying with the W.T.O. ruling, Professor Jackson said, would require Congress and the Bush administration either to reverse course and permit Americans to place bets online legally with offshore casinos or, equally unlikely, impose an across-the-board ban on all forms of Internet gambling — including the online purchase of lottery tickets, participation in Web-based pro sports fantasy leagues and off-track wagering on horse racing.

But not complying with the decision presents big problems of its own for Washington. That’s because Mr. Mendel, who is claiming $3.4 billion in damages on behalf of Antigua, has asked the trade organization to grant a rare form of compensation if the American government refuses to accept the ruling: permission for Antiguans to violate intellectual property laws by allowing them to distribute copies of American music, movie and software products, among others.

For the W.T.O. itself, the decision is equally fraught with peril. It cannot back down because that would undermine its credibility with the rest of the world. But if it actually carries out the penalties, it risks a political backlash in the United States, the most powerful force for free-flowing global trade and the W.T.O.’s biggest backer.

“Think of this from the W.T.O.’s point of view,” said Charles R. Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School. “They’re this fledgling organization dominated by a huge monster in the United States. People there must be scared out of their wits at the prospects of enforcing a ruling that would instantly galvanize public opinion in the United States against the W.T.O.”

In April 2005, the trade body gave the United States one year to comply with its ruling, but that deadline passed with little more than a statement from Washington that it had reviewed its laws and decided it has been in compliance all along. The case is now before an arbitration body charged with assessing damages.

“The stakes here are enormous,” Professor Nesson said.

If anything, the Bush administration raised those stakes in May when it announced it was removing gambling services from existing trade agreements. John K. Veroneau, a deputy trade representative, said that the federal government was only “clarifying our view” that it had never meant to include online gambling in any free trade agreements.

“It is truly untenable to think that we would knowingly bargain away something that has been illegal for decade upon decade in this country,” Mr. Veroneau said, adding that Washington is not defying the W.T.O. but simply pursuing its case through all legal channels.

The W.T.O. allowed that Washington probably had not intended to include online gambling when it agreed to the inclusion of “recreational services” and other similar language in agreements reached during the early 1990s, when the W.T.O. was first established. But the organization says it has no choice but to enforce the plain language of the pacts.

“Geneva is certainly buzzing about this case,” said Lode Van Den Hende, an international trade lawyer with the firm of Herbert Smith in Brussels.

One reason for all the interest is the David-and-Goliath aspect of the case. Another is that the dispute, as the trade organization’s first to deal with the Internet, is likely to serve as a major precedent in establishing rules of commerce in an online age and dealing with such prickly issues as China’s attempts to block online content it finds offensive.

Yet another reason the fraternity of trade lawyers and experts are so closely watching the case, Mr. Van Den Hende said, is “that the U.S. is not behaving as one would expect.”

“One day they’re out there saying how scandalous it is that China doesn’t respect W.T.O. decisions,” he said. “But then the next day there’s a dispute that doesn’t go their way and their attitude is: The decision is completely wrong, these judges don’t know what they’re doing, why should we comply?”

It’s not clear that Mr. Mendel knew just how much of a hornet’s nest he would stir up with this case. But he certainly seems to be enjoying the attention.

In 2002, Mr. Mendel — who does not gamble and knew little about international trade — was little more than a corporate lawyer in El Paso specializing in securities law. His law partner, though, was friends with Jay Cohen, an operator of an offshore sports betting operation in Antigua who had been sentenced to 21 months in prison for taking bets over the Internet from Americans. Mr. Cohen asked his friend to see if there was anything his firm could do.

“I had not done any trade law whatsoever, but for whatever reason this issue really struck my curiosity,” Mr. Mendel said. Beyond the intellectual challenge, the case also offered the prospect of a set of deep-pocketed clients — the online casinos doing business out of Antigua.

So Mr. Mendel, 51, who recently moved his family and his practice to Ireland to be closer to Geneva, jumped in enthusiastically.

Washington responded to Antigua’s complaint by claiming it was within its rights to seek to block online gambling on moral grounds, just as any Muslim country would be within its rights under international trade agreements to ban the import of alcoholic beverages. The W.T.O. rejected this argument as inconsistent with American policy.

The general rule in the world of international trade agreements is that a country must treat foreign goods and services in the same manner as it treats domestic ones. The United States, the trade body found, permits online wagering through sites like Youbet.com, a publicly traded company that allows visitors to place bets at horse racing tracks around the globe.

And, of course, some form of casino gambling is legal in more than 30 states, and even local governments advertise gambling services when states encourage people to buy a lottery ticket.

“This isn’t a case of forcing gambling on a population that has decided they don’t like it,” Mr. Mendel said. “This is the world’s biggest consumer and exporter of gambling services trying to prohibit a small country from developing its economy by offering these same services. And we find that deeply hypocritical.”

Indeed, despite all the obstacles Washington has imposed, including making it a crime for banks and credit card companies to handle Internet gambling payments, millions of Americans still manage to play poker and place sports bets online. Many more would certainly do so if the obstacles were removed.

The United States has exhausted its appeals, so Mr. Mendel and lawyers for the United States are arguing over the extent of damages that Antigua has suffered.

Antigua presents a particularly thorny challenge. To balance the scales, a country that wins a W.T.O. case typically demands trade penalties equal to its losses as compensation. But Antigua is so small that any ordinary trade sanctions would barely register in the United States.

“Compensation is not a check in the mail,” Professor Jackson of Georgetown said. “It’s the right to raise trade barriers against the country in violation.” Whatever trade barriers Antigua imposed, he said, “would feel like a pin prick.”

To get around that limitation, Antigua is seeking the right under international law to violate American intellectual property laws.

Only once has the trade organization done so, with Ecuador, though Ecuador never actually took advantage of that power. It was used instead as a cudgel to force Ecuador’s opponents to back down.

“This is all new territory,” said Simon Lester, who worked in the appeals unit of the W.T.O. before helping to found WorldTradeLaw.net, which provides legal analysis of trade law disputes.

Mr. Lester expects Hollywood, the music industry and software makers like Microsoft to press Washington to work things out with Antigua.

“But the question,” he said, “is whether that would be enough to make Congress do something.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/bu.../23gamble.html





Tom Green Works at Home (You Can Watch)
Joe Rhodes

IT was 8 p.m., time for Tom Green’s live Internet talk show, the one he’s been doing from his living room five nights a week, more or less, for the last year, and as seems to happen more often than not, things were going horribly wrong.

The servers had been wonky all day, most likely the result of a late attempt to install high-definition video players onto his Web site, tomgreen.com. Rex Murphy, Mr. Green’s bright red and usually low-key parrot, was agitated and screeching in a corner. The audio feeds weren’t working, and the Video Toaster system, the heart of Mr. Green’s online operation, was down.

Worst of all, the guest hadn’t turned up. Norm MacDonald, the former “Saturday Night Live” Weekend Update anchor and an old buddy of Mr. Green’s from his hometown, Ottawa, was scheduled to appear, but no one had heard from him all day.

“I’m starting to think he’s not coming,” Mr. Green said at 8:15, clearly flustered. “I can guarantee you that this is probably my fault somehow.”

Most likely, yes. Mr. Green alone is responsible not just for being funny, interviewing guests and sparring with callers, but for nearly every aspect of the production of “Tom Green Live,” up to and including last-minute pet upheavals.

He does have a talent booker, two full-time technical assistants and a sponsorship agreement with an online distributor, but he is the one who does the lion’s share of the tinkering, tweaking and nonstop fretting that goes with running a talk show, even one that’s available only online.

There is a switch under his desk that turns on the lights, microphones, remote-control cameras and live stream on broadband Internet. He has managed to acquire that most sought-after of show business commodities — complete creative control. And the headaches that go with it.

“This is not like a television show where you’ve got 150 people, writers, prescripted interviews and everything put together so that everything’s guaranteed to go great,” he said, one eye on the clock. “It’s turned out to be quite a technically complex thing. I never thought I’d know this much about computers. So it’s an ongoing process. You figure out little things along the way, and slowly they start to work a little better.

“I know, if we go on tonight, I’m not going to do a perfect show,” he continued. “But it’ll be a little better than last night. And it’s not like there are 10 million people watching. But we’re trying to make this better for that day, maybe a year in the future, when there will be. And by that time maybe we’ll have figured things out.”

The viewership of the show, which returns with new episodes Aug. 27, might not be in the millions, but it is still a good size. Although only 5,000 to 10,000 people a night watch the live feeds on his online distributor, ManiaTV.com, 40,000 to 60,000 a day watch reruns. And 250,000 to 300,000 more view clips on sites like YouTube. (Viewership figures from Mr. Green’s Web site weren’t available.)

The site, which he calls “The Channel,” is not exactly a departure for Mr. Green, who started out broadcasting an Ottawa public-access show on Rogers Cable in 1994. He has been dabbling with computers since 1996, before his MTV talk show in 1999 gained him a national following.

MTV’s “Tom Green Show,” which featured his intentionally annoying man-on-the-street interviews and all manner of pre-“Jackass” pranks, led to lucrative commercial gigs, a guest-host appearance on “Saturday Night Live” and, in 2001, the film “Freddy Got Fingered,” which he wrote, directed and starred in. It received some scorchingly bad reviews, largely because of scenes involving unnatural acts with assorted animals living and dead.

In between he had a short-lived and tabloid-covered marriage to Drew Barrymore. He also endured a bout with testicular cancer, which he chronicled in an MTV special that Time magazine lauded as one of the best programs of 2001.

By then Mr. Green was living in Los Angeles and was, he acknowledges, somewhat overwhelmed by all the attention. And he was not sure what to do with himself or his career. “I found myself trying to work within the Los Angeles system,” he said. “I had an agent and a manager, which I still do, and going to meetings with networks about game shows and reality shows and projects that weren’t mine. It was fun, but it wasn’t what I’d set out to do.

“I really missed what I’d done on Rogers Cable, which was shooting and editing all my own stuff. A nightly talk show is what I’d always wanted, and I’d kind of gotten sidetracked.”

So he went back to concentrating on his Web site. He decided two years ago that, if it were technically feasible and economically viable, he’d be happiest doing his own show from his living room.

ManiaTV.com, a Denver-based broadband company, helped him do exactly that. ManiaTV made a deal with Mr. Green to build a television studio inside his home, installing more than $100,000 worth of equipment and providing him a broadband distribution network and sponsors. Archived shows are available for viewing or download on iTunes or elsewhere on the Web.

“Like any television network we bring distribution, an audience, production resources and a marketing machine, all the things that Tom did not have,” said Peter Clemente, ManiaTV’s chief marketing officer.

Although ManiaTV provided the initial financing and technical expertise and found the show’s corporate sponsor, Bud Light, Mr. Green insists he has complete autonomy and will end up owning the equipment and the show. Rather than rely on ManiaTV’s technicians, he has hired his own studio assistants and bought additional equipment, including a teleprompter and extra cameras on his own. That’s part of the reason that there are so many technical glitches.

“If I had, like, 10 people working on the show full time, I’d be able to do what I really want to do,” he said. “I don’t ever want it to look too slick, but I’d like it to look better than it does now.”

As it is, Mr. Green spends much of his on-air time complaining about things that go wrong, mics that don’t work, camera shots that are off-center, Skype video uplinks with callers that sputter out.

It is impossible to forget, even when there are network-worthy celebrity guests like Val Kilmer, Pamela Anderson and Andy Dick (whose only appearance after his much-publicized scuffle with Jon Lovitz was on Mr. Green’s show), that the program is essentially homemade. “I try to think of it as organized confusion,” he said. “I have the freedom to do anything I want. We could sit here in silence for an hour if we wanted. And it’s nice to know that no one can cancel me. Unless I cancel myself.”

At 8:20 Mr. Green’s doorbell rang. It was Mr. MacDonald, unaware that he was late. At 8:47, after the Video Toaster was finally fixed, the show went live. To make up for the late start, Mr. Green stayed on for extra time, drinking Bud Lights on camera until the show ended at 10:20.

“It seems like nobody knows what this is going to be,” Mr. MacDonald said later. “But I want to do something like this way more than I want to do anything that’s been offered to me on television. Television just seems like vaudeville to me. Nobody I know ever watches a sitcom, ever. It’s a dead medium.

“So I don’t know where this is going,” he said, “but I love that Tommy’s just trying to figure it out. It’s cool to watch him try.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/ar....html?ref=arts





Pass the Popcorn. But Where’s the Movie?
Randall Stross

AS consumers by the millions install new flat-screen, high-definition TV sets this year, more than half of which will have 50-inch or larger screens, they can proudly say that they are doing their part to modernize the movie-viewing experience at home.

Cable operators have done their part, too, building a video-on-demand infrastructure that can supply viewers with a nearly limitless choice of movie titles, available at any time of day. No trips to the rental store. No vigils at the mailbox for discs from the subscription service. No purchases of additional computer hardware to transport downloaded movie files to somewhere else in the house. Just a couple of clicks of the cable remote control.

All is ready — except an unstinting supply of movies. The studios have balked.

According to Craig Moffett, vice president and senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, cable’s video-on-demand is well positioned, technically speaking, to be the preferred way that movies reach the home, but the Cable Guys cannot get access to Hollywood’s products: “They built a Ferrari of a delivery engine, but the content owners didn’t show up.”

The movie studios are preternaturally suspicious of the new and unfamiliar. Their fear has nothing to do with crunching the numbers, but rather with large organizations’ tendency to lose sight of their interests — not to mention their customers’. Thanks to the efficiencies of digital delivery, the studios actually earn three times the margin on each video-on-demand viewed that they earn on a store rental, while charging the same $4.

Comcast now has secured rights to offer only about 300 movie titles on-demand on any given day, excluding premium channels like HBO; about 50 of those are high-definition. It has a long way to go to match the comprehensive coverage of Netflix’s 80,000 titles or Blockbuster Online’s 75,000.

But the on-demand menu does not have to attain comparable size immediately, especially since Netflix’s and Blockbuster’s lists mostly consist of the long tail of backlist titles for which demand is low — and high-definition versions are scant. The overwhelming bulk of viewers’ requests could be met simply by having the newest releases on hand in all formats.

To their credit, the major studios have shown a willingness to re-examine the artificial limits they have placed on video-on-demand. Late last year, six studios began an experiment with Comcast in Denver and Pittsburgh, making their newest releases available for viewing on demand the same day the DVD went on sale. Time Warner Cable is in the third month of a similar, six-month trial in Austin, Tex., and Columbus, Ohio.

The studios contend that the trials are necessary so they can be certain that DVD sales are not hurt by immediate availability of video-on-demand. This is supposed to be a $16 billion question, which is the size of the domestic DVD market, the lifeblood of the industry. The sum dwarfs the $10 billion in total box-office revenue or the $8 billion from movie rentals. Because prospective DVD buyers have always had a less-expensive alternative the day when DVDs go on sale — namely, renting the title — it is hard to see why video-on-demand poses a different cannibalistic threat.

Comcast has not yet released details of its findings. Earlier this month, however, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, Time Warner’s president and chief operating officer, offered some encouraging tidbits. He said that when a movie title was made available on-demand the same day the DVD was released, revenue from video-on-demand rentals increased 50 percent — and retail sales actually went up 5 to 10 percent. To explain the somewhat surprising gains in stores, Mr. Bewkes speculated that sales of a new title were depressed in the past by the almost-instant availability of used DVDs for sale at rental stores like Blockbuster.

The movie studio is paid only once — when the DVD is sold the first time — and not when it is resold used. For the studios, digital delivery of a rental eliminates the problem of a physical product being resold, cutting into the sales of new copies without generating additional royalties. And studios are paid every time an on-demand video is viewed.

The digital delivery system of video-on-demand offers many advantages to consumers, too. The immediate gratification provided by instant fulfillment of a viewing request is no trifle. The Netflix model assumes that the lag between the time a subscriber enters a requested title and when that title finally shows up in the mailbox does not matter all that much — that as long as a consumer has at least one unwatched DVD on hand at any time and the queue of requested titles is kept full of good stuff, the customer shouldn’t care when a particular title reaches the top of the queue and wends its way through the postal system to the home.

Netflix customers apparently do care, however. The company has had to build out its shipping centers from one at its founding in 1998 to 44 today, in an effort to minimize transit delays. Even so, the time that elapses between a Netflix user’s request and the delivery of a title is measured in days. With video-on-demand, it’s seconds.

Netflix also struggles to have enough copies of the hottest titles on hand. The swords-sandals-and-pecs hit “300” was released on the last day of July and immediately became the top rental in the nation. Two weeks after its release, however, subscribers were warned on their on-screen queues that they faced a “very long wait.” (Blockbuster Online could not do better.)

So, too, with the No. 2 rental title, “Hot Fuzz.” In fact, in mid-August, Netflix had on hand, ready for shipping, only 4 of the top 10 titles nationally listed as the most popular DVD rentals the week before. With digital transport, a single master can simultaneously supply as many households that wish to view the DVD; inventory management problems — and “very long wait” notices — disappear.

AMERICANS have never failed to show their appreciation for services that provide speedy gratification; the instant variety is preferred most. Once the cooperation of the studios is secured, video-on-demand will become the most popular means of renting movies.

When Netflix made its debut almost 10 years ago, many movie viewers discovered that sitting at a desk at home and using a Web site to select rental titles was considerably easier than going to a store to choose a rental. Video-on-demand offers the next enhancement: ordering by remote control while stretched across the living room couch.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/bu...ey/19digi.html





A Maverick Mogul, Proudly Politically Incorrect
John Strausbaugh

THOR HALVORSSEN is a hard man to pin down. If you ask him whether he’s a human-rights activist, a free-speech advocate, an anti-Communist, an anti-fascist or a movie producer, he could plausibly answer “all of the above.”

“He’s uncategorizable,” Nat Hentoff, the journalist and First Amendment advocate, said. “Thor’s the embodiment of the nonpolitically correct person.”

Mr. Halvorssen, a half-Norwegian Venezuelan, is a conservative operating in fields more often associated with liberals, a scion of wealth and privilege who champions the underdog and the powerless, and a polemicist who loves a lively argument. “I have a lot of fun being a heretic,” Mr. Halvorssen, 31, explained, pacing around a small office in the Empire State Building that was strewn with books, magazines and DVDs.

Since 2005, having already founded two nonprofit organizations focused on free speech and human-rights issues, Mr. Halvorssen has made the movie business part of his portfolio of controversy-stirring efforts. Established with a small amount of his money, his nonprofit Moving Picture Institute has raised about $1.5 million in donations to date to pay for, promote and seek distribution for documentary films.

At a time when the most successful documentaries on political or social issues all seem to be anti-corporate, anti-Bush, pro-environmentalist and left-leaning, the Moving Picture Institute has backed pro-business, anti-Communist and even anti-environmentalist ones. The latest, “Indoctrinate U,” follows the first-time filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney as he turns Michael Moore’s guerrilla interview tactics on their head to address what he sees as political correctness on campus. In one scene, Mr. Maloney strolls into the women’s studies centers on several campuses and, playing innocent, asks directions to the men’s studies center. He is met with genuine bafflement, derisive laughs or icy hostility.

To Mr. Halvorssen his new role as a fledgling movie mogul dovetails perfectly with his other activities. “Pop culture has the power to be transformational culture,” he said. “A film can reach a lot more people than a white paper. You could think of the film as a trailer for the white paper.”

He paused, then said, “Put it this way: What ‘Sideways’ did for pinot noir, I want to do for freedom.”

Boyish and clean-cut, Mr. Halvorssen doesn’t look much like the Viking his name suggests. His grandfather, Oestein Halvorssen, went to Venezuela as the Norwegian king’s consul and built a family dynasty as the Venezuelan representative for corporations including Dunlop and Ericsson.

His father (also Thor) and uncle Olaf “lived in the ultrafast lane” among Venezuela’s most eligible playboys. They flew to Paris for weekends, and while Olaf dated Candice Bergen, Thor lured the girls to his place to meet his pet lion, Petunia.

Mr. Halvorssen’s father eventually settled down, accepting appointments as a cabinet minister and diplomat, and married into one of Venezuela’s first families, descendants of the country’s first two presidents, Cristóbal Mendoza and Simón Bolivar.

“The politics in my house was all over the place,” he said, recalling Nicaraguan refugees from the Sandanista regime holding meetings in his house and a trip with his father when he was 8 to meet Óscar Arias, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president of Costa Rica. “But there were key principles that were very basic.”

His upbringing helped make a self-described “classical liberal” rather than a conservative, big on free markets and individual liberties, and convinced that “government is not your friend most of the time,” he said. “And I abhor fascism, whether it’s socialist or National Socialist.”

He arrived in the United States to attend the University of Pennsylvania, but as a 19-year-old sophomore in 1993 the theories of his youth got a real-world workout when his father was arrested in Venezuela. As the country’s anti-drug minister, Mr. Halvorssen said, his father had led investigations revealing involvement in international drug trafficking at the highest levels of Venezuela’s government and banking. For his efforts he was imprisoned, charged with masterminding a series of bombings in the Caracas financial district. Mr. Halvorssen helped organize an international campaign for his father’s release. After 74 days all charges were dropped.

A decade later it was Mr. Halvorssen’s mother’s turn. In 2004, during a trip to Caracas, she was shot and seriously wounded when gunmen fired into a rally calling for a national referendum to recall President Hugo Chávez. Eleven other protestors were wounded and one killed.

“So you can see why I take this stuff personally,” Mr. Halvorssen said.

“This stuff” includes the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, of which he was a co-founder in 1998 and a director through 2004. (Mr. Hentoff is a board member.) It focuses media attention and legal aid on instances of overzealous political correctness and free-speech restrictions at American colleges. And the Human Rights Foundation, whose advisory board includes Elie Wiesel, focuses on civil-rights abuses in Latin America.

These concerns animate the Motion Picture Institute’s films. “The Sugar Babies,” a documentary by Amy Serrano that Mr. Halvorssen helped produce, takes on the issue human trafficking of Haitian workers on sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic. A screening at Florida International University in June erupted into what local press described as “a near riot” between Dominican and Haitian audience members.

Other documentaries championed by the Motion Picture Institute include “Hammer & Tickle,” a lighthearted look at the subversive jokes Soviet citizens told about their leaders.

And Mr. Halvorssen was a co-producer of “Freedom’s Fury,” narrated by Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz, which describes the role Hungary’s Olympic water polo team played in that nation’s 1956 uprising against its Soviet occupiers.

No doubt the most contentious film on the Motion Picture Institute roster so far is “Mine Your Own Business,” billed as “the world’s first anti-environmentalist documentary.” Phelim McAleer, an Irish journalist who received a fellowship from the Motion Picture Institute, traveled to Romania, Madagascar and Chile, where international environmental groups oppose planned mining operations. His film — financed by Gabriel Resources, a Canadian mining company — portrays environmentalists as condescending elitists while impoverished locals insist they would welcome the jobs and development the mines would bring.

Greenpeace and other environmental groups denounced the film as corporate propaganda and protested outside a screening at the National Geographic Society in Washington in January.

“It’s typical propaganda from anti-regulation types,” said Kert Davies, Greenpeace’s research director, adding that there has been much more community opposition to the proposed mines than the film suggests.

“Indoctrinate U” aims to stir up as big a ruckus. It’s the first film by Mr. Maloney, the conservative son of liberal New York City parents. A fan of Mr. Moore’s techniques, if not his politics, he met Mr. Moore, the director of “Sicko,” in the only proper way. “I found out where he lived, staked out his street for four days” and ambushed Mr. Moore on the sidewalk, camera running.

“He was surprisingly encouraging and surprisingly nice,” Mr. Maloney added. “He told me to go for it and make my movie.”

But as Mr. Halvorssen and Mr. Maloney have found, getting a documentary made is one thing, getting it released in theaters and on DVD is another. “Distributors are starting to shy away” from documentaries, said Morgan Spurlock, the director of “Super Size Me,” “simply because there haven’t been a lot of documentaries in the last few years that made a lot of money.” (“March of the Penguins” and “An Inconvenient Truth” are among the few exceptions.)

But Mr. Spurlock believes that a movie like “Indoctrinate U” “could be a lightning rod,” he said. “Movies that get attention and spark a dialogue, get people talking on news shows, can be profitable at the box office.”

Lately Mr. Halvorssen has been making many trips to Los Angeles to meet with film distributors, producers and assorted Hollywood wheelers and dealers to convince them that the film has the potential to make money in theaters and through DVD sales. “There is no left-wing conspiracy in Hollywood, no manual that says they will not distribute films of this sort,” he insisted.

Nonetheless Mr. Halvorssen and Mr. Maloney are exploring alternative ways to reach audiences. Mr. Halvorssen arranged for the film to open at the American Film Renaissance Festival, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, on Sept. 28. And working directly with theater owners and managers he has to date brokered limited theatrical runs, beginning in October, in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington and seven other cities. (He’s still working on New York.)

Borrowing tactics from their left-leaning brethren like Robert Greenwald, who spurred interest in his films “Wal-Mart” and “Iraq for Sale” by inviting people to hold screenings in their churches or homes, Mr. Halvorssen and Mr. Maloney are also trying to harness the Internet. Visitors to indoctrinate-u.com can request a screening in their hometowns. A Google map displays the results. More than 20,000 requests have been made.

Mr. Halvorssen speaks of a “YouTube revolution” with the Internet, along with on-demand cable and satellite television, freeing independent filmmakers from Hollywood dominance.

Ultimately, he added, he hopes that “exploiting technology, marketing and alternative distribution will transform human rights, making it inspiring and even sexy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/movies/19stra.html





11 Injured At Tom Cruise Film Shoot
AP

Eleven extras were injured during the filming of a new movie starring Tom Cruise, police said Monday.

The 11 men, along with a companion who escaped injury, fell off the back of a truck on Sunday night. Police said in a statement that a bolt on a side panel of the truck apparently came loose as the vehicle turned.

Germany's Bild daily reported that Cruise himself was not involved in the weekend filming.

The extras were taken to a hospital, where all but one of them required only outpatient treatment. Filming work was stopped.

The movie, provisionally titled "Valkyrie," stars Cruise as Germany's most famous anti-Hitler plotter, Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg.

His casting has attracted controversy in Germany because Cruise is one of the best known adherents of Scientology, which the German government considers a commercial enterprise that takes advantage of vulnerable people.

Some critics maintain that one of its members should not be playing what some consider one of the Nazi era's few heroes.

The weekend accident happened during filming of scenes around the Finance Ministry, which was once the Nazis' aviation ministry.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/...n3183900.shtml





Japanese Experts Demand Change to Make Phones and Laptops Safe
Leo Lewis

The fundamental technology behind the present generation of lithium-ion cells – the batteries that power nearly every laptop computer and mobile phone in the world – is inherently dangerous and must be changed to ensure safety, according to experts.

Masataka Wakihara, of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who advises the Japanese Government on battery safety, told The Times that there must be changes to the way in which batteries are made if they are to be robust enough for everyday use.

His warnings were supported by comments from Kuniaki Tatsumi, head of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology’s battery research group, who said that “companies are less cautious about designing batteries with a focus on safety”.

At least two Japanese manufacturers are understood to be considering redesigns of their production lines as a result of Professor Wakihara’s advice, but in general companies are expected to resist calls to overhaul their factories. Although the commercial production of lithium-ion batteries began in 1992, when Sony became the first to enter the market, most battery production lines are young and have required substantial investment already, hence the difficulty in persuading their owners that a small number of battery explosions merits an expensive change.

“Battery companies are still learning because the technology is young, but there is a fundamental flaw with the way lithium-ion batteries are currently designed and if the companies genuinely care about safety, they need to completely change their production methods. A lithium-ion battery is quite a dangerous little box of energy,” Professor Wakihara said.

Last year Japanese companies produced around 60 per cent of the two billion lithium-ion batteries sold worldwide. Machines such as multi-function mobile phones, digital cameras and laptops equipped with processors large enough to cope with Microsoft’s new Vista program place huge demands on the batteries. According to Professor Wakihara, the risks of not adopting an alternative technology are rising constantly because of the demands that modern devices in a “mobile device culture” place on their power source.

“Efforts have been mainly devoted to miniaturisation and boosting power output,” Professor Tatsumi said.

The academics’ concerns emerged after a series of safety problems at the world’s three biggest battery manufacturers – Sony, Sanyo and, most recently, Matsushita (Panasonic), which has recalled 46 million mobile phone batteries made for Nokia after a handful of them burst into flames.

While the temptation has been to blame quality control at the factories where the batteries are made, Professor Wakihara said, the focus is wrong. The Japanese Government’s hasty creation of new battery safety standards fall into the same trap.

The recent recalls at Sony, Sanyo and Matsushita have arisen from problems during the manufacturing process, which led to short-circuits and other overheating issues, but it is possible, Tokyo Institute of Technology researchers say, to produce a lithium-ion battery that poses no fire risk, even if a fault develops. Existing lithium-ion batteries submerge the electrodes in an organic solvent that acts as the electrolyte, and separates them with a film of perforated plastic, which is expensive to produce. An alternative, chemical engineers argue, is to encase the electrodes in a solid polymer electrolyte – a structure that might have to be heated slightly to ensure good function.

Within the past fortnight, Sony has announced a battery plant in Singapore that would use new technology, but it would not say whether this represented the kind of shift that Professor Wakihara is calling for.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle2295743.ece





Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits
Katie Hafner

Last year a Wikipedia visitor edited the entry for the SeaWorld theme parks to change all mentions of “orcas” to “killer whales,” insisting that this was a more accurate name for the species.

There was another, unexplained edit: a paragraph about criticism of SeaWorld’s “lack of respect toward its orcas” disappeared. Both changes, it turns out, originated at a computer at Anheuser-Busch, SeaWorld’s owner.

Dozens of similar examples of insider editing came to light last week through WikiScanner, a new Web site that traces the source of millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor’s network. The address information was already available on Wikipedia, but the new site makes it much easier to connect those numbers with the names of network owners.

Since Wired News first wrote about WikiScanner last week, Internet users have spotted plenty of interesting changes to Wikipedia by people at nonprofit groups and government entities like the Central Intelligence Agency. Many of the most obviously self-interested edits have come from corporate networks.

Last year, someone at PepsiCo deleted several paragraphs of the Pepsi entry that focused on its detrimental health effects. In 2005, someone using a computer at Diebold deleted paragraphs that criticized the company’s electronic voting machines. That same year, someone inside Wal-Mart Stores changed an entry about employee compensation.

Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, says the site discourages such “conflict of interest” editing. “We don’t make it an absolute rule,” he said, “but it’s definitely a guideline.”

Internet experts, for the most part, have welcomed WikiScanner. “I’m very glad that this has been exposed,” said Susan P. Crawford, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School. “Wikipedia is a reliable first stop for getting information about a huge variety of things, and it shouldn’t be manipulated as a public relations arm of major companies.”

Most of the corporate revisions did not stay posted for long. Many Wikipedia entries are in a constant state of flux as they are edited and re-edited, and the site’s many regular volunteers and administrators tend to keep an eye out for bias.

In general, changes to a Wikipedia page cannot be traced to an individual, only to the owner of a particular network. In 2004, someone using a computer at ExxonMobil made substantial changes to a description of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, playing down its impact on the area’s wildlife and casting a positive light on compensation payments the company had made to victims of the spill.

Gantt Walton, a spokesman for the company, said that although the revisions appeared to have come from an ExxonMobil computer, the company has more than 80,000 employees around the world, making it “more than a difficult task” to figure out who made the changes.

Mr. Walton said ExxonMobil employees “are not authorized to update Wikipedia with company computers without company endorsement.” The company’s preferred approach, he said, would be to use Wikipedia’s “talk” pages, a forum for discussing Wikipedia entries.

Mr. Wales also said the “talk” pages are where Wikipedia encourages editors with a conflict of interest to suggest revisions.

“If someone sees a simple factual error about their company, we really don’t mind if they go in and edit,” he said. But if a revision is likely to be controversial, he added, “the best thing to do is log in, go to the ‘talk’ page, identify yourself openly, and say, ‘I’m the communications person from such and such company.’ The community responds very well, especially if the person isn’t combative.”

Mike Sitrick, a longtime public relations consultant in Los Angeles, agreed. “I’m a big believer that if you’re going to correct it, correct it with a name,” he said. “Otherwise it hurts your credibility.”

An Anheuser-Busch employee eventually took responsibility for the changes to the SeaWorld page — but only after being challenged about them twice by another user. A person identifying himself as Fred Jacobs, communications director for the company’s theme park unit, said on the entry’s “talk” page that discussion of the ethics of keeping sea creatures captive “belongs in an article devoted to that subject.”

Mr. Jacobs referred questions about the editing to another company office, which did not respond to requests for comment.

The SCO Group, a software maker in Salt Lake City, made changes to product information in its own entry this year. The company has been involved in legal disputes over the rights to some open-source software.

Craig Bushman, the company’s vice president for marketing, said he had told a public relations manager to make the changes. “The whole history of SCO had been written by someone who doesn’t know the history of SCO,” he said.

An hour after the changes were made, he said, they disappeared. The company e-mailed Wikipedia administrators, who replied that the changes had been rejected because of a lack of objectivity.

In the case of the Wal-Mart revisions, David Tovar, a company spokesman, said that while he was not aware of anyone within Wal-Mart who had asked to contribute to Wikipedia, the changes could have been made by any of its workers, who are called associates. “We consider our associates our best ambassadors,” he said, “and sometimes they speak out to set the record straight.”

At Dell, the computer maker, employees are told that they need to identify their employer if they write about the company online. “Whether it’s Wikipedia, Twitter or MySpace, our policy is you have to let someone know you’re from Dell,” said Bob Pearson, a Dell spokesman.

Before that policy was put in place a year ago, changes to parts of Dell’s Wikipedia entry discussing its offshore outsourcing of customer service were made by someone from the Dell corporate network.

Most people using company networks to edit Wikipedia entries dabble in subjects that appear to have little to do with their work, although sometimes they cannot resist a silly dig at the competition.

Last year, someone using a computer at the Washington Post Company changed the name of the owner of a free local paper, The Washington Examiner, from Philip Anschutz to Charles Manson. A person using a computer at CBS updated the page on Wolf Blitzer of CNN to add that his real name was Irving Federman. (It is actually Wolf Blitzer.)

And The New York Times Company is among those whose employees have made, among hundreds of innocuous changes, a handful of questionable edits. A change to the page on President Bush, for instance, repeated the word “jerk” 12 times. And in the entry for Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, the word “pianist” was changed to “penis.”

“It’s impossible to determine who did any of these things,” said Craig R. Whitney, the standards editor of The Times. “But you can only shake your head when you see what was done to the George Bush and Condoleezza Rice entries.”

WikiScanner is the work of Virgil Griffith, 24, a cognitive scientist who is a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Mr. Griffith, who spent two weeks this summer writing the software for the site, said he got interested in creating such a tool last year after hearing of members of Congress who were editing their own entries.

Mr. Griffith said he “was expecting a few people to get nailed pretty hard” after his service became public. “The yield, in terms of public relations disasters, is about what I expected.”

Mr. Griffith, who also likes to refer to himself as a “disruptive technologist,” said he was certain any more examples of self-interested editing would come out in the next few weeks, “because the data set is just so huge.”

Mr. Wales, who called the scanner “a very clever idea,” said he was considering some changes to Wikipedia to help visitors better understand what information is recorded about them.

“When someone clicks on ‘edit,’ it would be interesting if we could say, ‘Hi, thank you for editing. We see you’re logged in from The New York Times. Keep in mind that we know that, and it’s public information,’ ” he said. “That might make them stop and think.”

Noam Cohen contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/te...wikipedia.html





Ad Growth for AOL Called Vital to a Remake
Miguel Helft

Just over a year ago, AOL unveiled a radical plan to remake itself into a business built on advertising from one driven by Internet access subscriptions.

To a great extent, AOL had little choice in the matter. Customers were rapidly deserting its once-lucrative dial-up access service, and retaining them was costly.

The new plan certainly seemed to make sense. With the advertising business growing rapidly across the Web, AOL appeared to be in an ideal place to capitalize on that trend. It remains, after all, one of the most popular online destinations, with more than 90 million people visiting its sites in a month.

But a precipitous slowdown in advertising growth has raised new questions about AOL’s transformation plans. AOL executives say the slowdown is probably temporary, but Richard D. Parsons, chief executive of Time Warner, which owns 95 percent of AOL, said this month that he no longer expected AOL’s ad growth to match or exceed the overall growth rate of online advertising. The company’s challenges highlight one of the quirks of today’s Internet market. As advertising is moving from offline media to the Internet at a rapid clip, portals, which command some of the biggest audiences online, should be among the top beneficiaries. Instead, the travails of the mass market portals like AOL, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft, indicate a decline in power.

Online advertising in the United States is expected to increase 28.5 percent this year, according to eMarketer, a research firm. AOL’s ad revenue increased 16 percent in the last quarter after gaining 40 percent in the previous quarter. Revenue at Yahoo, the No. 1 Internet portal, rose 8 percent in the latest quarter.

Part of the challenge for portals is that people are starting to approach the Internet in a different way. A new generation of Web users has grown increasingly adept at finding what it wants online and is less reliant on portals for guidance. What is more, younger audiences are spending more time on social networking sites and less time on traditional Internet portals.

“Just like Yahoo, AOL is fighting MySpace, Facebook and others for audience and ad dollars, and those are tough competitors,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets.

Social networking sites are not the only culprits. Thousands of smaller Web sites, like blogs, news collectors and niche content sites, are also attracting growing numbers of Internet users and advertisers.

AOL knows all this. It may even have been the first among the major portals to recognize this trend. In 2004, it bought Advertising.com, a network that collects ad space from across the Web and sells it to marketers, giving them a way to reach the Web’s increasingly fragmented audience.

Since then, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google have all invested significantly to remake themselves into companies that not only sell advertising on their own sites, but also help sell or broker ads across the Web. And AOL has sought to further the success of Advertising.com by buying a string of online advertising companies.

Advertising.com is now AOL’s fastest growing unit. “The brand that we build around Advertising.com might become more important than the AOL brand itself,” said Randy Falco, AOL’s chief executive.

Mr. Falco and other AOL executives reject any notion that their turnaround plan is in trouble. They say the slowdown in advertising growth in the most recent quarter was tied to specific events, including redesigns of several of the portal’s channels and a change in the way it displays search results.

“In the first six months of the year, we have accomplished more in terms of a turnaround, in terms of fixing products and the platform, than in the past three years,” Mr. Falco said.

Mr. Falco, a longtime NBC Universal executive who took the top job at AOL in December, said the company was systematically revamping its channels and services. It has redesigned many of its pages and embarked on an expansion into 14 countries.

AOL plans to re-engineer its site so users can choose various channels and services they like and include them in their blogs, personalized home pages or favorite social networking sites.

“We are not trying to build yesterday’s portal,” said Ron Grant, AOL’s president. “We are trying to build a network of sites that users can combine or do whatever they are most comfortable with.”

The efforts are beginning to pay off, AOL executives said, noting that page views have increased 4 percent in the second quarter from the first.

Not all changes have been well received. After an earlier executive team devised an innovative way to display AOL search results, which are powered by Google, Mr. Grant and Mr. Falco decided to roll back the changes and mimic Google’s presentation of 10 links on a page. The decision led to defections.

John McKinley, the former president of AOL Digital Services, thought the imitation would serve to dilute the AOL brand. “Over time, the average consumer is going to develop more of a tendency to just go to google.com directly,” he wrote in his blog. Mr. Grant defended the decision, saying the change to the Google-like results stopped a decline in the use of AOL’s search service.

AOL’s revamping has focused not only on consumers but also on its advertisers. Advertising executives say that for the first time in years, AOL’s customized ad packages are competitive with those of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

None of the improvements have been able to prevent the recent slowdown in growth at AOL. Gordon Hodge, an analyst with Thomas Weisel Partners, said that if the slowdown continues, it could spell trouble for AOL’s turnaround plan. “I think the dial-up subscriber losses and profit losses could overwhelm the gains they could make from advertising,” he said.

Louise Story contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/technology/20aol.html





HP Service Lets Cellphone Users Print Most Anywhere
John Markoff

Hoping to alleviate a frustration of mobile computing, Hewlett-Packard has quietly introduced a free service designed to make it possible to print documents on any printer almost anywhere in the world.

Cloudprint, which was developed over a period of several months by a small group of HP Labs researchers, makes it possible to share, store, and print documents using a mobile phone.

The service emerged as the result of a conversation begun at the laboratory this year over how the computer and printing company might benefit from the introduction of the Apple iPhone, said Patrick Scaglia, HP's director for Internet and computing platforms technologies at the research laboratory.

"The world is going to flip," Scaglia said. "We want to ride the wave of the Web."

The underlying idea is to unhook physical documents from a user's computer and printer and make it simple for travelers to take their documents with them and use them with no more than a cellphone and access to a local printer.

The service requires users to first "print" their documents to HP servers connected to the Internet.

The system then assigns them a document code, and transmits that code to a cellphone, making it possible to retrieve and print the documents from any location.

Later, using the SMS message the service has sent to the user's cellphone, it is possible to retrieve the documents by entering the user's phone number and a document code on the Cloudprint website. The documents can then be retrieved as a PDF, ready to be printed at a nearby printer.

The service will include a directory service that will show the location of publicly available printers on Google Maps. The system currently works with any Windows-connected printer. A Macintosh version is also planned.

The strategy is an extension of a broader, and all-important, HP strategy of indirectly creating a business that will foster the sale of Hewlett-Packard ink and supplies. The strategy has been working well. On Thursday, the company said operating profits from its printing division, most of it from ink and supplies, rose 11 percent in its third quarter from a year earlier.

The service is the first of a series of initiatives the company will take to increasingly unhook printing from desktop computers, Scaglia said.
http://www.boston.com/business/perso...most_anywhere/





Content-Aware Image Resizing
Posted by kdawson

"At the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference in San Diego, two Israeli professors, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, have demonstrated a new method to shrink images. The method is called 'Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing' (PDF paper here) and it figures out which parts of an image are less significant. This makes it possible to change the aspect ratio of an image without making the content look skewed or stretched out. There is a video demonstration up on YouTube."
http://science.slashdot.org/article..../08/25/1835256





Interview

Thinking Outside the Opera Box
Andrew Orlowski

Some of Opera's long-term bets are beginning to pay off. The Norwegian web pioneer has invested in TV and mobile for years, and now Nintendo's hit Wii console has put Opera into more than eight million living rooms. Mini has made the web usable on millions more phones. And the most recent major release of FireFox has been met with pushback on its performance, usability, and security.

This week we caught up with Opera founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner to discuss this, and some of the thornier challenges facing the company.

So we started with a biggie - was the web leaving Opera behind?

Isn't it just getting harder to keep up with the web, especially on mobile?

Software engineers will always find ways to make a device seem slow. I'm a software engineer - I know I did. With Opera Mini there are some things that may not work, but most things work very quickly. We did visual comparisons of Opera Mini in the labs, using the same websites Steve Jobs used at the launch of the iPhone demonstrating how quickly it runs on GPRS agains the iPhone on Wi-Fi. On GPRS, Mini is faster. We did it for fun.

Opera Mini is not the same as the browser you have on iPhone, or desktop Opera - there are things Opera can do that Mini can't do, but for most general uses Mini does the job.

Andrew Brown, a big fan of Opera, wrote that he chose to move to FireFox (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology.../media.comment) because it was more compatible with new websites, partly citing Flickr compatibility. Do you feel you're falling behind?

We've always been moving in a space where people come up with their own ideas all the time. Now Netscape 4 is out of the market, so compatibility with that isn't so important; IE6 is fading, while IE7 has more compatibility - does that mean problem has gone? As people make more and more applications we see more and more standards. IE in particular has its own stuff, but that's part of the reason us, Apple, and Mozilla work on submitting new standards to the W3C, and getting them adopted. So we're quite optimistic.

It's a chicken and egg situation, which means we need to get more users. And we are. We have by far the most used mobile web browser. Net Applications' survey is showing Mini as the fifth most used browser in the world and in some countries it's beating Safari, and others it's beating Mozilla. The Nintendo Wii is also helping and we're working on new version coming out.

We're also spending time with the services, with Google and Yahoo! discussing compatibility.

To be frank, it's not difficult for them to make this work. There's one guy who fixed bugs in Google and he used a JavaScript thing for Opera which fixed Maps and Mail. We are also actively doing what we can - changing how Opera identifies itself is often enough to fix the problem. We'll do whatever it takes.

Opera market share is increasing, and we're putting more and more effort into hiring new people. This is not an issue that only we face. Recently, I read that 10 per cent of UK sites didn't work in FireFox, while a fair amount of people have told me their sites don't work in IE7. Safari has more problems than Opera.

We believe that with the efforts overall the browsers are becoming more compatible. The problem is going to be less and less there. There is a difference between countries where we have a 10 per cent share. In Russia, Ukraine and in Northern and East European countries we have between five per cent and 10 per cent, and some above 10 per cent share; Japan similar.

On mobile networks the latencies are still big, but surely the screens and the devices will always be smaller than the desktops web designers are targeting?

Heh. When you think of a web designer it's a guy with a big computer, a big screen and direct connection to the service. Some of these guys look differently when they use their own services on location.

But stats are showing up on the Wii. There's traffic coming from something other than the desktop, that is going to be significant. People are already taking Wii into consideration - some fairly big companies are optimising it. Google, Yahoo" and YouTube are optimising for Wii so that you do't have to do a lot of work, for example, sending something that doesn't require you to zoom in on the TV, for example. These are important.

With Mini being popular they're thinking about this and more. I'm certain this is a trend that's going to continue. For example, using hovers doesn't work well on a device where you don't have a cursor, such as the iPhone.

Something for web designers and us to think about too.

Mini has its roots in the caching service you rolled out years ago. But the business model for Mini has changed over time. Can you take us through the evolution of that?

Actually, from the first version of Mini it's been free to end users. We're trying to learn from the desktop experience we had. People were saying, "we love Opera, it's the best browser", but we were held back by the business model.

We tried an ad-supported model for a while and the ad revenues continued to increase - although we never made money off the advertising, to be frank. Then there was a negative focus on ad-supported models, because a lot of the apps out there, such as LimeWire, were spying on the end user. Then we saw how FireFox got a big market share in a short space of time. That business model - we make deals off search side revenues - has allowed us to grow, and grow market share.

So we're able to invest more and money on desktop.

Opera Mobile running on the Motorola Z8

Does Mini make money?

We're not making money off Mini at this time. But we have achieved one billion page views, and so we believe we can have business models with Mini that don't upset users. We make money through operator deals and the Yahoo! deal, for example. We're also offering it on the server side. T-Mobile, Vodafone, Telfonica, all get specialised versions with their own front pages - and they pay us for the hosting.

There's been some controversy about the dependence of FireFox on Google. The company has gained at least $50m a year from Google. Do you feel Google "owns" you?

If you look at our numbers we're not receiving those kinds of numbers - but with Google and Yahoo! and companies like that, Amazon, they raise revenue for us - that allows to have free desktop browser.

I believe we have a good business model and it is good to focus on the best product for the end users - we don't have to charge.

Do you feel FireFox is compromised by that relationship?

I don't know what kind of relationship they have, but I think there's nothing wrong with that business model. We were the ones to start it - we were the first to put a search bar in the browser. People think this is a good thing. This helps Google, given they are the default in this, but people can choose to go with others. It's good we can give it away for free giving away a.. same bar.

Do you detect a disenchantment with the performance and user experience of FireFox 2.0?

We just try to focus on our side. We've always focused on a somewhat richer interface. We've had a lot of negative comments ourselves over the years; for example, when we introduced tabbed browsing a lot of people said it doesn't make sense. We've introduced things like zooming, mouse gestures and the like - and we find they find their way into other browsers; tabs found their way into IE7. We are being copied, but we would like to focus on features and giving users a good experience. We favour a fairly minimal UI, but not requiring you to install a lot of plug-ins. We know there is an Opera plug-in for FireFox, which is actually 15 different plug-ins in one. Now adding one or two plug-ins is OK, but if you add 15 to 20 then it impacts performance.

How?

It's easier to be efficient if you're coding every piece of the code yourself. I've seen it myself. Someone on a core part strives to make their part really efficient; then someone on the UI side makes something simple but that makes heavy demands. It's easy to think, "something I do doesn't have to be that efficient", but it does. For example, in one of our builds we noticed the progress bar loading was taking up 25 per cent of the CPU.

I'm still amazed Opera has such a tiny footprint

This has been a focus for us - Opera runs on 10 year old hardware. But we noticed external code takes up time and we write our own libraries. There are libraries out there that satisfy a lot more different kinds of programmers - but when you use it your program becomes bigger and slower.

The Web on TV: Nintendo Wii's Opera browser

What are you doing with the built-in Mail? It got an amazing reception when it appeared, but there are lots of complaints about it not being updated. Or there are tiny features that would sway people to make it their default mail program that never get implemented...

I think we need to look at ourselves in the mirror, and say there's something to your point.

We are addressing it. In the next version there's a significant back end improvement and some front end improvements. This is a product we believe is very important. I use it for everything I do. I have 300,000 to 400,000 mails in my system.

The choice of mail applications is poor on Windows. And Outlook is the most targeted for security. At Opera you're banned from using Outlook. We don't mind people trying things, but one of our sales guys got a virus and started spamming customers. That's stupid. We can't have that.

There are some interesting applications on Wii - particularly the Orb hack (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/01...b_wii_console/) - where people take advantage of the browser to play their own music and view their own the photos. That's using the browser as plumbing rather than platform...

There is a natural direction with more things being connected - Orb is a very interesting example of that. With services like YouTube, you are now using your TV. This is one of the biggest installations of internet TV in the world now, Wii. People use it to browse around - but also to download small videos from YouTube - it becomes nautral to do that. Natural. It's a great showcase, because we have by far the best browser you can get on TV today.

Is Opera Mobile stagnating? It doesn't have the focus of Mini, it seems.

Stagnating? No.

What's happening is there's a new version in the works based on Opera 9. On Opera Mobile 4.0, we're introducing desktop mode and zooming. The desktop mode is based on a new kernel. The Opera 8 browsers are based on what we call Core 1, while Opera 9 is based on Core 2. There are significant changes under the hood.

We see Mini and Mobile as complimentary products. Mini runs on Java, and there's a Brew version in the works that I'm very enthusiastic about, it's going to be great. We went away from doing just smartphones to BREW, P2K Motorola and many other phones.

Aren't widgets are a security nightmare?

When you start to combine web code with the rest of the system you're opening yourself up to issues - you have to watch what you're doing there. It is difficult, but everyone wants to see power in these devices; you have to make some APIs available to access the underlying system. But we definitely don't want to be doing something like ActiveX.

One has to be realistic, but there isn't a single app that hasn't had a security issue at one time or another; again, I do believe it's the safest way to do things. There are so many things you'd like to do, and it's better to do it web-based than natively. There's going to be more and more service components in there; more and more applications are web-based. Whether you call it a service or not isn't neccessary, but it's combing communication to a server and there's a clear trend to web-based solutions and it started with the web being made, and is being intensified with apps Google is making. ®

Jon von Tetzchner co-developed the original Opera browser while working in the labs of Norwegian telco Telenor. He founded the company in 1995, and took it public in 2004.
Bootnote

Out of curiosity, I asked Jon what was his mobile browser of choice. He said nothing could quite match the usefulness of his favourite phone: the Nokia 9210. Not a member of the Cargo Cult (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08...oke/page2.html) then.
http://www.theregister.com/2007/08/1...ceo_interview/





Lyrics Sites Out of Tune with Copyrights
Elinor Mills

How does that song go? We've all used the Internet to search for the lyrics to songs whose tune we know but whose words we just can't muster.

Often the Web sites we end up on have misspellings or incomplete and inaccurate lyrics, not to mention annoying pop-up and flashing ads. But there's another problem with the sites--many of them are violating copyright by republishing the lyrics without permission. And they are making money from the Google text ads that appear on the site.

That's money that could be going into the pockets of people like Alexander Perls Rousmaniere, a Los Angeles-based artist who writes and produces dance club tracks, including some pop hits.

Perhaps not so surprisingly, Google--the company that's been sued for $1 billion by Viacom because of its YouTube video unit and has been the target of increasingly testy attacks from all sorts of publishers--finds itself in the center of yet another copyright storm. This time, it's the people who write music--some of them well-known and some of them obscure--complaining that the search giant is helping others step on their copyrights.

"Google is selling advertising on all the big copyright-infringing lyric Web sites," Rousmaniere said. "It may seem like small potatoes, but lyrics are a huge search term on the Internet--these sites (and Google) are probably pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly, all on the back of copyrighted material."

Rousmaniere has complained to Google, repeatedly, with limited success--Google has removed some ads on sites publishing his lyrics but then the ads go back up, he said. Google told him it is his responsibility as copyright holder to police the infringing sites and file additional complaints when the old lyrics or new lyrics of his appear without his permission, he said.

"It would literally be two to three hours a day for the rest of my life" monitoring the Web for copyright violations, Rousmaniere said. Many of the Internet service providers for the sites are located outside the U.S., making it difficult for him to ask them to shut the sites down, he added.

A Google spokesman said he could not comment on any particular copyright holder's complaint.

"We take copyrights very seriously. In accordance with our policy, we disable ads on websites in our content network when we are made aware that they appear next to copyrighted content," the company said in a statement. "Copyright holders who find their copyrighted material appearing next to Google ads can find more information about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down requests on our AdSense Web site. Hundreds of thousands of Web site publishers responsibly abide by our policies and we're committed to preventing those who don't from using our program."

Focusing on sites that monetize
Rousmaniere isn't the only copyright owner concerned about the lyric sites. Lawyers representing National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) have met with Google to discuss the matter, said Jacqueline Charlesworth, senior vice president and general counsel. The NMPA is the leading trade association representing U.S. music publishers, with more than 700 members.

"It's a significant concern. We do send DMCA notices to sites that are commercially oriented, that are trying to profit and aren't paying the people who wrote the songs," Charlesworth said. "We did reach out to Google before we started the program and they said they would cooperate."

The NMPA began sending warning letters to infringing lyric Web sites a few weeks ago and at least one site has taken down the copyrighted lyrics, she said.

"Our next step will be to send DMCA notices to the ISPs who host the site or the search engine that shows sites up in results," she added. "We're hopeful that it will be effective. The goal and the focus here is really the sites that are trying to monetize the lyrics."

Rogue lyrics Web sites have been on the Internet for years--in part because until recently there wasn't a readily available way for consumers to get lyrics from copyright holders.

"We wanted to make sure there was a legitimate alternative available and now that there is, we think it's appropriate to have the lyrics taken down off the other sites," Charlesworth said. "There is a market for these lyrics. There is consumer demand and the lyrics enhance a digital service. It's a very significant potential market."

In April, Yahoo and Gracenote launched an online lyrics service that has received the rights from music publishers, like Universal Music Publishing Group and Sony/ATV Music Publishing, to republish copyrighted lyrics.

At the time the deal was announced, Gracenote Chief Executive Craig Palmer told Reuters that licensed lyrics services could add as much as $100 million a year to the $4 billion the music publishing industry posts in revenues annually.

But a self-described "small fish" like Rousmaniere may not benefit from a service like that, which focuses on large publishing companies. For him, the courts could be an answer, although convincing a judge that Google is liable for copyright infringements of its AdSense publisher partners would be tough, said Denise Howell, an intellectual property lawyer and blogger.

"If it could be demonstrated that the terms (of service for AdSense) are not being enforced (or are not being enforced with sufficient vigor), a plaintiff could try to build a case portraying the terms as mere window dressing, and Google as an entity with a business model that condones or even encourages its users' infringement," Howell said.

However, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court decision in Google's favor in May is an indication of the "uphill battle" someone suing Google would face, she said.

In that case, Perfect 10, an adult-oriented Web site, accused Google of contributory copyright infringement by profiting off revenue-sharing through Google ads on Web sites that display its images without permission. The court disagreed with that point, although it said thumbnails Google's image search displayed of Perfect 10's photos likely infringe on the copyrights.
How thumbnails translate to music lyrics is still anyone's guess.
http://news.com.com/Lyrics+sites+out...3-6203085.html





Hey Eminem, Blame the System, not Apple
Greg Sandoval

Eminem would be better off tangling with street toughs back on the 8 Mile than mixing it up in court against Apple.

That's the opinion of a half dozen copyright lawyers, including some who represent music artists, when asked about the copyright infringement lawsuit filed last month by Eight Mile Style and Martin Affiliated, the hip-hop star's publishing units.

But Eminem isn't the only star going after Apple. A records check showed that Apple is accused of copyright infringement in two other similar suits: one filed in May by a small label called Dawg Music and another from 2005 by Bridgeport Music, a publishing company with a history of filing such suits. None of the companies involved in the litigation, including Apple, agreed to comment for this story.

Don't expect these lawsuits to go very far. To start, Apple is likely indemnified against such lawsuits, according to copyright attorney Jay Rosenthal. But Rosenthal speculates that the real target of the lawsuits isn't Apple or iTunes. What the musicians and writers really want is to challenge the claim by record labels that they have the right to negotiate Internet sales on their behalf.

"This particular issue is a real sore spot in the industry," said Rosenthal, legal counsel for the Recording Artists' Coalition, a group formed in 1999 by musicians Sheryl Crow and Don Henley. "It's the gorilla in the room, and you're going to start seeing more of these suits as you start to see layoffs and cutbacks."

As compact-disc sales continue to slide, and royalties continue to get squeezed by piracy, more and more performers are growing dissatisfied with the money coming in from digital downloads. Rosenthal predicted that Apple may continue to get drawn into the fray as the music industry tries to prod CEO Steve Jobs to be more flexible with Apple's 99-cent-per-song price.

A growing number of performers, publishers and songwriters want a bigger share of that download revenue and want to see an overhaul of recording and publishing contracts. Among the artists who have expressed anger over their cut of download money are Cheap Trick and The Allman Brothers Band. They jointly filed a lawsuit last year that accused Sony BMG Music Entertainment of shortchanging them on digital-music sales.

"Digital music is going to continue to increase as a percentage of the overall market," said Brian Caplan, the attorney representing the bands against Sony. "As time goes on, I believe recording artists will be able to negotiate higher royalty rates on the downloading process."

But Mark Litvack, an intellectual-property attorney who has worked for Sony, Time Warner and Disney, said artists and publishers have to realize that slowing sales does not give them the right to demand more money. He points out that music labels are getting squeezed by piracy and falling CD sales as well.

"The fact that the artist is unhappy with the economic model isn't legally relevant," Litvack said. "They agreed to a deal to allow labels to distribute music at retail locations. There isn't any difference between the Web and the local record store. I think it's clear the labels have the right to sell over the Web."

"Heartbreak Hotel" for industry
Highly paid musicians won't get much sympathy from most of their fans. But not every performer or writer is living in a palace, argues songwriter Rick Carnes.

Just southwest of downtown Nashville, the much-heralded Music Row is a montage of platinum records, sheet music, cigarette smoke, steel guitars and Jack Daniel's. Music Row, where Carnes came to write music in 1978, is where gospel, country and rock music converge, the home of hundreds of publishing houses and record labels that once churned out some of the world's best loved music. This is where Elvis Presley--who died 30 years ago this week--recorded his first chart-topping single, "Heartbreak Hotel."

Rick Carnes

Music Row is now giving way to "nail shops and hair salons," according to Carnes, 57. He blames piracy, shrinking CD sales, the royalty rates that songwriters and publishers have been locked into for years, and the way revenue from downloads is divvied up.

"It's Armageddon," said Carnes, president of the Songwriters Guild of America, who has written hits for such stars as Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire and Dean Martin.

"We're getting crushed here. The day that hurt the most was driving down Music Row not long ago and seeing all the 'For Sale' signs. We're losing the canon of American music. I can't tell you how sad I feel when I see talented songwriters selling insurance."

By now, anyone following the music industry can practically recite the statistics. According to a report provided by the Recording Industry Association of America, unit sales and revenue from CD sales declined more than 12 percent in 2006. In 2005, they fell 8 percent.

To help the music industry in general, Carnes wants Apple to loosen its grip on download prices. The 99 cents that iTunes charges per song, according to Carnes, isn't enough to go around. And to the specific problems faced by songwriters, performers and publishers, Carnes wants the music labels to raise their royalties.

Royalty vs. license
To understand what artists are upset about, one has to pick through the complex way they are paid. Artists are compensated on a royalty structure for traditional CD sales. When a CD is sold at a retail store, say at a Wal-Mart Stores outlet, the artist receives about 16 cents. The music publisher gets 9.1 cents.

In Cheap Trick's lawsuit, the band alleges that after labels deduct for things like "breakage," the band earns only 4.5 cents on every 99-cent digital download. So what's breakage? The costs incurred by things like damaged CDs, packaging charges and restocking. Of course, there's no such thing as a damaged CD in downloads, making such a charge highly questionable, the band argues.

Some musicians would like download payments to be structured like fees for music that's licensed to movies, television shows, ringtones or commercials. When that happens, the artists and labels split the proceeds from the license after the publisher takes its 9.1 cents. If that structure were to apply to downloads, the artists and labels would split whatever's left after Apple, and the publishers takes their cuts. The assumption is that this would lead to more money going into the pockets of the musicians.

"I represent artists, and you always have disagreements between artists' lawyers over contracts," Rosenthal said. "But I've yet to run into a single artist attorney who thinks any differently about this. We all agree that when it comes to iTunes' sales, revenue should be split between the artist and label 50-50."

In the meantime, there is some reason for hope, according to Carnes. He notes that Apple, in a partnership with EMI, has agreed to sell unprotected MP3 files for 30 cents more than the standard 99-cent price. He's also seeing a little money from ringtones. Still, he says he no longer writes music for recording artists. He has turned to writing jingles for commercials.

"It's really funny how everyone thinks that only rich labels are getting hurt," Carnes said. "The labels are the last to get hurt. The first are the very poorest: artists and songwriters, and they'll be the first ones out of the business."
http://news.com.com/Hey+Eminem%2C+bl...3-6203210.html





Does Skype's Windows Update Story Fly?
Gregg Keizer

Analysts and rivals today said they were dubious of Skype Ltd.'s explanation that the voice-over-IP service's 48-hour outage was triggered by restarts after Microsoft's monthly security updates were delivered.

"Why this particular Tuesday?" asked Doug Williams, an analyst with JupiterResearch. "That doesn't really fly."

Skype's blackout -- which began Wednesday around midnight, Pacific time, and ended late Friday -- was caused by a software glitch provoked, said Skype, by machines rebooting after they had applied updates to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.

"The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update," Skype said in a statement posted this morning.

"I'm leery of that explanation on two counts," said Aron Rosenberg, chief technology officer of SightSpeed Inc., a Berkeley, Calif.-based VoIP competitor to Skype. "First, the timing of the patches."

Although Microsoft rolls out its monthly security updates before noon, Pacific time, on Patch Tuesday, those updates are by default downloaded and installed at 3 a.m. local time, often over a period of a day or two. "At the very least, then, systems would have rebooted time zone by time zone, not all at once," saiRosenberg said.

However, there may be a connection to the 3 a.m. default reboot. According to Skype's statistics, the outage began sometime between Wednesday at 10:30 p.m. and 3:05 a.m. Thursday, PDT. Between those two data points, the number of connected users dropped by 50%.

Second, said Rosenberg, is the fact that Microsoft has been releasing its security fixes on the second Tuesday of each month since October 2003. If the problem was triggered by Windows Update, as Skype claimed, why hadn't it happened before?

While he scoffed at Skype's excuse, Rosenberg also noted that the service's infrastructure may make it vulnerable to problems experienced by a minority of systems on the network. Like the Kazaa music file-sharing network, which was created by the same pair who founded Skype -- Swedish engineer Niklas Zennstrom and Danish entrepreneur Janus Friis -- the VoIP service uses "supernodes" to detect online Skype users, establish connections between users, and help route traffic. The supernodes, which are computers that Skype identifies as having surplus Internet bandwidth and processor cycles, serve as the directory servers and traffic cops of the network. If too many go offline in a short time -- whether from restarts or simply by being switched off -- Skype could suffer.

Skype's explanation hinted as much. "Normally Skype's peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal," said spokesman Villu Arak in this morning's statement. "However, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly."

What Skype describes as self-healing, said Rosenberg, is simply the ability of Skype to switch a user from one supernode to another, necessary, say, when the first supernode goes offline. If too many of those supernodes dropped off the network simultaneously, Skype might have had trouble switching users to other supernodes. In other words, there would have been too many nodes -- normal users -- chasing too few supernodes to allow the former to log on. Skype itself described it as "a chain reaction that had a critical impact."

"Skype is unusual in that one of its key components, the supernodes, are always going up and down," Rosenberg said. "Because it relies on the supernodes working, if Skype's [network] software wasn't load balancing across time zones, they could have had a massive loss of supernodes [when systems rebooted]," he added.

Microsoft also pooh-poohed the idea that there was anything out of the ordinary in last Tuesday's updates that might have triggered the Skype crash. "Windows Update is a routine service Microsoft provides to its users to receive software updates, including last Tuesday's security updates, which were not unique," said a company spokeswoman in an e-mail today. "As indicated in Skype's blog, their specific disruption was caused by a bug in their software."

Tallies of Microsoft's recent monthly updates seem to back up the company's claim that last week's were not unique, at least in the number which demanded restarts. Although five of August's nine updates required a reboot, that number wasn't out of line with July's four of six, or even February's five out of 12.

Skype did not reply to a request for comment, and additional information about the impact of Windows Update-generated restarts on its network.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...ntsrc=hm_topic





Estonia Accuses Ex-Official of Genocide
C. J. Chivers

The authorities in Estonia on Wednesday said that they had charged a cousin of a former president with genocide in connection with his role as a Communist bureaucrat involved in the deportation of civilians to Siberia in 1949.

The man, Arnold Meri, fought the Nazis and became a prominent official in the Communist Party during the decades of Soviet occupation in the Baltics. He was charged last week, his lawyer and the authorities said. If convicted, Mr. Meri, 88, could be sentenced to life in prison.

The authorities accused Mr. Meri of organizing the deportation of 251 Estonian civilians, most of them women and children, from the island of Hiiumaa to the Novosibirsk region of Siberia, where 43 of them died.

They were exiled during a grim period of Stalinist reprisals after World War II, when the K.G.B. forcibly moved more than 20,700 Estonians to Russia, official Estonian accounts say.

Mr. Meri, a cousin of Lennart Meri, the president of Estonia from 1992 to 2001, has long complained that his country has labeled him a traitor, saying that the accusations against him were unfair and were a misreading of history.

His lawyer said that Mr. Meri would defend himself on the grounds that, while he participated in the deportations, he was actually trying to protect fellow citizens being sent into exile.

“His explanation is that he was sent by the Communist Party as a check against K.G.B. action,” said the lawyer, Sven Sillar, by telephone. “Mr. Meri’s defense position is that he cannot be regarded as an accomplice of the K.G.B.”

“He could be regarded as an ombudsman,” Mr. Sillar said. “He protected people’s rights.”

As an example, he said, Mr. Meri contends that he made certain that deportees traveled with the full allotment of personal possessions allowed under Soviet rules and that no violence was used against them as they were rounded up and shipped away by train.
The authorities appeared unmoved. “That is a possible concept — that there is an ombudsman when you are committing crimes against humanity,” said Martin Arpo, superintendent of Security Police Board, the police and intelligence service in Estonia responsible for investigating war crimes.

Among those deported from Hiiumaa were 13 people older than 75 and 61 younger than 12, Mr. Arpo said by telephone. Investigators later found and interviewed 78 survivors from the Hiiumaa group, some of whom may testify in court.

No trial date has been set. But the possibility of the public airing of the emotionally potent charge of genocide could inflame anew the poor relations between Estonia and Russia.

The countries have quarreled since the early 1990s about the interpretation of the Soviet period, which the Kremlin has tried to portray as a liberation from Nazism but many Estonians, and Estonian officials, recall as an ordeal of occupation, subjugation, economic stagnation and state-sponsored terrorism.

The wounds have lingered. Estonia joined NATO and the European Union in 2004 and snubbed a Kremlin invitation to attend a celebration on Red Square in 2006 commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany. Its leaders said that freedom did not arrive in Estonia with Hitler’s defeat.

This spring the Estonian government moved a Soviet war-era memorial in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to a less prominent military graveyard in the city, prompting riots and a diplomatic fury from Russia, which treated the action as a desecration of the Soviet war dead.

Huge cyberattacks, which Estonian officials suggested had been initiated from Russia, soon temporarily disabled many Estonian government and corporate computer networks.

In 1941, Mr. Meri was given the title Hero of the Soviet Union, and in the years after Estonian independence in 1991, he was received in Red Square and at the Kremlin, where he was hailed as a veteran of the war against the Nazis.

Dmitry S. Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, reacted cautiously to the charge, saying that he hoped that Mr. Meri would not stand trial, “taking into account a lot of factors, including the humanitarian one — the guy is 88 years old.”

He added, “Of course we are very sorry that the Estonian government is still fighting with the past, instead of looking into the future.”

Many countries formerly in the Soviet sphere have tried to force an assessment of the crimes and privations of Communist times. The Russian government has generally resisted.

Early this month a document surfaced from archives in Germany that detailed a directive in 1973 to East German border guards to shoot to kill citizens trying to flee to West Germany.

Many Russians have been critical of these efforts at reassessment, however, and have accused countries once under the Kremlin’s sway, including Estonia, of not pursuing a full account of some of their citizens’ collaborations with the Nazis.

Mr. Arpo, the Security Police Board superintendent, disagreed, saying that Nazi cases are more difficult to pursue in lands formerly occupied by the Soviet Union because the K.G.B. had already disposed of many cases.

“Both regimes were criminal and committed criminal acts and brought suffering to the Estonian people,” he said. “But the local K.G.B. couldn’t find any more evidence against the Nazi collaborators.”

“We haven’t found it either,” he added. “And the K.G.B. was a much larger organization than we are and had powers and methods, shall we say, that are not available to a Western democratic country.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/wo...23estonia.html





Your Data's Less Safe Today Than Two Years Ago
Robert L. Scheier

Today's electronic world is a risky place for your personal data -- and it's not getting any safer. More than 158 million data records of U.S. residents have been exposed as a result of security breaches since January 2005, according to The Privacy Rights Clearing House, a nonprofit consumer rights organization.

As fast as banks, merchants and consumers add new layers of security to their storage systems and network, say security analysts, new technologies -- or simply careless users -- create new security holes that aggressive and sophisticated identity thieves eagerly exploit. The result, says Avivah Litan, a vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Inc., is that "things will get worse before they get better."

Clever Crooks

Attacks against both consumers and retailers have "really grown in the last couple of years," says Litan, who cites a Gartner survey showing that approximately 15 million Americans were victims of identity-theft related fraud in the 12 months ending in the middle of 2006. According to Gartner, that's a 50% increase since 2003, and the average loss per incident was $3,257, more than twice the level for the same period a year earlier, according to the survey.

The number of companies whose customers were targeted by phishing attacks -- a fake e-mail asking for sensitive information -- grew by 20% in the second quarter of 2007, says Terry Gudaitis, cyberintelligence director at Cyveillance Inc., an Arlington, Va.-based firm that monitors the Internet for malware and other threats. While such attacks used to target customers of only a few large banks, they now impersonate "credit unions, hotel chains, insurance companies -- it's all over the board," says Todd Bransford, vice president of marketing at Cyveillance.

During the same period, Cyveillance also identified more than 2 million URLs that distribute malicious downloads to site visitors without their knowledge, as well as 2.5 million stolen credit card numbers online.

Criminals are also getting smarter. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of Ponemon Institute, which conducts research on privacy and security issues, calls it "inverted customer relationship management," in which criminals target the wealthiest individuals for their attacks.

Some are even buying marketing lists to piece together profiles of "who's got the Platinum [American Express card] and who's got the account with Merrill Lynch and who doesn't," says Litan.

"Hackers are exploiting Internet auctions, nonregulated money transmittal systems and the ability to impersonate lottery and sweepstakes contests," among other scams, wrote Litan in a February 2007 research report.

Theft and fraud?

Hard figures on identity theft and identity fraud (using stolen data to commit a crime) are difficult to come by. A June 2007 report from the Government Accountability Office said that of 24 large data breaches reported in the media between January 2000 and January 2005, only three "appeared to have resulted in fraud on existing accounts, and one breach appeared to have resulted in the unauthorized creation of new accounts."

However, the study noted it's difficult to determine the exact damage, because while at least 36 states require companies to notify consumers of data breaches, victims often don't know their information has been stolen or how it was stolen. Thieves may wait a year or more before using the data, and may use only some of it so as to not alert the card issuer, which could cancel the entire block of stolen cards.

Mary Monahan, a partner, editor and analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, a research and consulting firm in Pleasanton, Calif., takes a more upbeat view. She says that prevention and awareness by both consumers and businesses helped reduce the number of adult victims of identity fraud in the U.S. from 8.9 million in 2005 to 8.4 million in 2006, and the dollar amount of fraud dropped 12% from $55.7 billion to $49.3 billion.

Those figures, however, include all types of identity fraud, the vast majority of which Javelin says result from traditional causes such as lost or stolen checkbooks or credit cards. Rachel Kim, a research associate at the firm, also points out that less than 1% of victims whose information has been stolen experience fraud. Despite the publicity of data breaches at companies such as The TJX Companies Inc., she says, the percentage of victims who knew how their data was lost who cited a data breach actually fell from 6% to 3% from 2005 to 2006.

Given all the unknowns, it's not surprising that even the experts are sometimes in the dark. A December 2006 survey of more than 200 North American security professionals by Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. showed that more than one-third had experienced a data breach at their company in the past 12 months, and another 10% didn't know if they had lost data.

Weak points

One reason concern about identity theft is increasing is that with the expanding adoption of high-speed Internet service, more consumers are spending more time online, where they might share sensitive data.

And just as hackers target consumers they believe to be wealthy, they also take aim at companies they believe to have loose access controls, says Ponemon. Many companies don't maintain the same strict access control for contractors or part-time employees as they do for full-timers, says Mark McClain, CEO and founder of SailPoint Technologies Inc., an identity risk management vendor. "Folks on long-term contracts live outside the employee control system," he says. "It's very ad hoc: Bob hired Joe to help his group, and only Bob knows what access Joe has, and if Bob leaves, nobody knows what access Joe got."

"The old mind-set was that data breaches were the result of nefarious outside hackers, while the latest industry rhetoric blames insider attacks," Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Jon Oltsik says in his June 2007 report, "The Case for Data Leakage Prevention Solutions." However, the report states, breaches can be caused by either internal or external attacks, as well as logical hacking, physical theft and accidents. To reduce this wide variety of risks, he says, "large organizations need layered and extremely flexible defenses."

Just finding where sensitive data sits within the organization and where it's most vulnerable is a daunting task, says Scott Crawford, a research director at Enterprise Management Associates. Customer credit card information, purchase histories and other information might be stored anywhere, from a user's notebook computer to a Fibre Channel storage array at headquarters. "The data may move wirelessly; it may move through public links on the Internet; it may or may not be encrypted within the business and may be encrypted [only] part of the way," he says.

Retailers also often overlook vulnerabilities in devices such as point-of-sale (POS) systems that store data read from magnetic stripes on credit cards and can be accessed from the Internet, and printers that store data on hard drives as part of the printing process, says Gartner in a December 2006 report. The report predicts that by 2008, more than half of attacks against retailers will be directed at POS systems and that by 2009, less than one-third of POS software will comply with prevailing security standards.

While retailers are always reluctant to spend money on security that could otherwise be spent to drive sales, they might be convinced by the news from TJX that a large data breach disclosed in January will cost the company $118 million, says Litan.

Industry regulations such as the Payment Card Industry data security standard are forcing many companies to strengthen their security processes as well as the security tools they use, says Crawford. Visa U.S.A. Inc. says that about 40% of its 327 Level 1 merchants -- those that process more than 6 million transactions a year -- have demonstrated their compliance with the standard, up from 36% of the 230 Level 1 retailers counted at the end of 2006.

To counter a big spike in the use of counterfeit credit cards, Litan said card issuers, for a cost of about $5 per card, could add strong authentication mechanisms such as a unique password that would be downloaded to the card each time the owner tried to use it. Because the user would need the physical card (and not just the card number, expiration date and security code) to make a purchase, "it wouldn't matter" if companies lost credit card information through data breaches, she says.

Even as companies try to tighten their existing systems, Web 2.0 sites -- such as social networking services where much or all of the content is generated by users -- have become a handy way to distribute malware as well as yet another innocent-sounding business to impersonate in a phishing scheme, says Bransford. "You tend to trust these social networking sites because you belong to them and wind up with malware on your PC."

In the second half of the year, Cyveillance predicts another 10% to 20% growth in the number of traditional phishing attacks, with more than 80% of the attacks aimed at customers of financial services customers.

So what's an IT manager to do to protect sensitive data? "Don't store [information] if you don't need it, encrypt it if you can, and put strong access controls around it -- and then monitor the access," says Litan.

And when you get home, check your own bank statement for any odd-looking transactions.

Tips for avoiding identity theft

For companies:
Just as you did for Sarbanes-Oxley, identify and secure the applications and devices most vulnerable to attack.
Track access rights (and access activity) for contractors as tightly as you do for employees.
Don't store data if you don't need to; encrypt it if you must store it.
Educate and remind all your employees about the need for data security.

Tips for consumers:
Monitor bank statements, credit card bills and credit reports for signs of ID fraud.
Use up-to-date firewalls and antivirus/antispyware software on all computers.
Be wary of performing transactions or spending time on unknown Web sites.
Be alert for changes in the look or wording of emails from banks or other institutions, which might signal a phishing attack.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...tsrc =hm_list





159 Million People Affected by Data Breaches in Under Three Years
Nate Anderson

Data breaches at universities, government agencies, and corporations have become so common that only the most egregious even make the news anymore. Just how common are they? The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, which tracks major breaches, now says that 159,105,898 records have been leaked since 2005.

The number was noted in a recent Computerworld article by Robert Scheier as part of a larger piece on just how bad identity theft has become, but it's mentioned only in passing. That's too bad, because the PRC list makes for fascinating reading.

You might suspect that after the widespread publicity regarding identity theft and data breach issues over the last few years, every organization which collects personally-identifiable information would treat it like gold. Unfortunately, it's too often still treated like a pile of scrap iron. Breaches are still occurring at an alarming rate, and they come in more flavors than Baskin-Robbins ice cream.

Consider five examples from this summer alone:

• May 3, 2007: A Montgomery College employee accidentally puts the personal information of all graduating seniors on a publicly-available hard drive.
• May 19, 2007: Somewhat ironically, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation suffered a data breach after a hacker compromised a server and got access to Social Security numbers, addresses, and more. 300,000 people were affected.
• June 11, 2007: Pharma giant Pfizer found that an employee had inadvertently exposed data on 17,000 workers after installing a file-swapping program on a company laptop.
• June 11, 2007: Michigan's Grand Valley State University had a flash drive stolen. The drive contained data on 3,000 past and present students. It was taken from the English department, a place not known for stringent data security requirements.
• June 14, 2007: The Los Angeles Hamburger Hamlet suffered a breach after a waitress absconded with credit card numbers and began ringing up the bills.

The breaches happen in so many ways that it can be difficult to clamp down on them on all, and even the agency charged with keeping US citizens safe has suffered major breaches of its own. Given the dismal state of many network security measures and the amount of personally-identifying information collected, is it time for a set of federal regulations on data collection and security? Such bills have been proposed several times in the last few years; some proposed more penalties for identity theft, others have tried to regulate the sale and use of Social Security numbers. So far, no major data breach legislation has been passed.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ree-years.html





Monster Attack Steals User Data
BBC

US job website Monster.com has suffered an online attack with the personal data of hundreds of thousands of users stolen, says a security firm.

A computer program was used to access the employers' section of the website using stolen log-in credentials.

Symantec said the log-ins were used to harvest user names, e-mail addresses, home addresses and phone numbers, which were uploaded to a remote web server.

The stolen data could be used to send phishing and spam e-mails.

"This remote server held over 1.6 million entries with personal information belonging to several hundred thousands of candidates, mainly based in the US, who had posted their resumes to the Monster.com website," reported Symantec.

Security breach

The firm has contacted Monster.com to inform them of the security breach.

Symantec said it had seen reports of phishing e-mails sent out to Monster.com users which were "very realistic" and contained "personal information of the victims".

The e-mail encouraged users to download a Monster Job Seeker Tool, which was in fact a program that encrypted files in their computer and left a ransom note demanding money for their decryption.

"To the best of our knowledge, this is not a hack of Monster's security, rather, legitimate customer credentials are being used to log in to the database," said Patrick Manzo, vice president of compliance and fraud prevention at Monster.

He added: "There have been reports of this as an issue of identify theft.

"We are not aware of any cases of identity theft. In fact, the information that is gathered from Monster is no different than that displayed in a phone book."

The program used to access Monster.com user data was a Trojan, which are commonly used to gain access to bank details, usernames and passwords.

More than 8,000 new variants of Trojans are found each month, according to internet security specialists Sophos.

Last year, a British nurse was blackmailed by hackers who had used a Trojan to access her personal e-mails.

They threatened to reveal personal details unless she paid them.

Symantec said users should always limit contact information posted to job websites and to use a disposable e-mail address.

"Never disclose sensitive details such as your social security number, passport or driver's license numbers, bank account information to prospective employers until you have established they are legitimate," said the firm.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/6956349.stm





Data Breaches Endanger NY, CA Retirees

Consultant's bungling, printer's errors put retirees at risk
Martin H. Bosworth

The last thing you want to worry about when enjoying your golden years is the possibility of identity theft or fraud, but two data breaches this week have left thousands of pensioners and retirees in that exact position.

A laptop containing data on 280,000 New York City retirees was stolen from a consultant to the city's Financial Information Services Agency (FISA) on August 23. The unidentified consultant reported that the laptop was stolen when he brought it to a Korean restaurant at roughly 8:20 pm, and could not confirm that the data was encrypted.

The consultant was employed by CGI AMS, a Canadian information and technology services company hired by the city to evaluate the city's pension payments system.

City Comptroller William Thompson, who oversees the city's pension payroll, said he was "outraged" by the theft and that CGI AMS should foot the bill for notifying and protecting any affected city retirees.

"Our pensioners should not be victimized by an absence of judgment by this consultant," Thompson said in a statement. "Providing these credit protection measures, no matter what the cost, will give our pensioners the peace of mind they deserve that we are employing all means possible to protect their assets."

FISA also said it was conducting an internal investigation of the incident, and police are currently looking for the suspected thief.

CalPERS' Calamity

A day earlier, officials at the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) announced that they had mistakenly published the Social Security numbers of 445,000 state retirees on brochures announcing an upcoming election. Some of the brochures contained full numbers, others only partial numbers.

The breach occured when the printer accidentally added the numbers to the brochures' address boxes, even though the printing system had alerts designed to detect and prevent publication of Social Security numbers.

CalPERS' spokepersons said the breach is causing them to perform a thorough top-to-bottom review of their security procedures to prevent another occurrence, but has not said it would provide credit protection to any affected individuals.

CalPERS also downplayed the incident, saying that the numbers could not be easily identified, making them harder to use.

Accidental printings of Social Security numbers have become a frequent cause of data breaches in recent months. In January 2007, Wisconsin's Department of Revenue accidentally printed up tax forms with visible Social Security numbers on the front page for 17,000 citizens.

It was later revealed that the printing agency and the Department of Revenue tried to keep the breach quiet, but went public after angry residents contacted the media about the incident.

And in November 2006, a printing contractor hired by Chicago's school system accidentally sent out personal information on 1,740 employees, mistaking them for health care providers. The information included names, addresses, and Social Security numbers, any combination of which could easily be used by thieves to steal someone's identity or gain access to their finances.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news0..._retirees.html





Source-Code Theft Suspect Caught at Border
Riva Richmond

Federal law-enforcement officials have arrested a Russian national who allegedly stole a U.S. company's programming source code.

The company, closely held Alibre Inc., says a former employee took the source code in an incident the company reported in 2003. The suspect, Roman Voznyuk, was arrested as he tried to re-enter the U.S. this month.

Mr. Voznyuk is scheduled to appear today before Magistrate Judge William F. Sanderson Jr. in U.S. District Court in Dallas. His attorney, Carlton C. McLarty of the Dallas Federal Public Defender Office, said he will seek a release on bond.

Mr. Voznyuk was arrested Aug. 6 in upstate New York as he entered the U.S. from Canada. He was transferred to Dallas, where he was indicted three years ago for allegedly infringing copyrights held by Alibre, based in nearby Richardson, Texas.

The defendant is accused of stealing source code for Alibre Design, three-dimensional solid-modeling software for creating virtual prototypes of products. Alibre Design competes with products by SolidWorks Corp. and Autodesk Inc.. Mr. Voznyuk allegedly offered it under the name RaceCAD Design Professional for download on the Internet. Mr. McLarty said Mr. Voznyuk likely will plead not guilty at an arraignment sometime in the next few weeks.

Paul Grayson, Alibre's founder, said Mr. Voznyuk was a software developer at Alibre until he was laid off in 2003 amid a business downturn. Unable to find another job in the U.S., he returned to Russia where he began trying to market RaceCAD online, Mr. Grayson said.

Mr. Grayson said he began an email dialogue with Mr. Voznyuk to try to persuade him to stop, an exchange the company cited as evidence that Mr. Voznyuk had stolen the source code from Alibre. Mr. Grayson already had contacted the Justice Department, which was involved in the case but wasn't able to pursue Mr. Voznyuk in Russia. The Justice Department confirmed the arrest and court date but declined to comment further.

Mr. Grayson also took his story to the media and to customers to try to block purchases of the clone software. He says he didn't lose customers to Mr. Voznyuk.

Mr. Voznyuk, who more recently had been working in Toronto, apparently was nabbed while entering the U.S. at Niagara Falls for a weekend stay.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118775109729205007.html





Claims that Anonymous Domain Registration Aid Terrorists Are Overblown
Jacqui Cheng

Domain registrars are providing services that aid terrorism, claims Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. A lengthy article published over the weekend, "Terror goes digital. With Canadian help," delves into the many different facets of the Internet that have been used by Islamic terrorist groups to communicate their messages to each other and to the rest of the world. But the "Canadian help" part of the equation comes by way of domain registrars Register.com and Tucows, which both operate out of Canada. The newspaper's assertions that these companies somehow aid terrorists with their services, however, are somewhat misguided.

The linchpin of The Globe and Mail's argument is that registrars are aiding terrorists by helping to keep them anonymous. As many of our readers know, people who register new domains now often have the option to do so without having their personal information displayed to the public through a WHOIS query. This service usually only costs a few extra dollars per year and has been applauded by privacy advocates as a way to keep a citizen's personal info private—no one needs to know who has registered those domains, they argue. But according to The Globe and Mail, the service has made it easier for terrorists to put their message out online without exposing their location or contact information.

But it's not as if the registrars themselves don't store the information. Both Register.com and Tucows require people who are registering domains to enter all of their personal information, regardless of whether they make use of the public anonymizing services or not. Register.com told us that the company provides private registration services so that its customers can avoid getting unwanted spam, mail, and telephone calls, but that there are a number of terms that users must agree to in order to use them. The company says that it takes reports of illegal activity on its servers seriously.

"Our policy clearly states that any site that does not comply with applicable laws, government rules or requirements, court orders or requests from law enforcement, is subject to immediate termination," Register.com's Wendy Kennedy told Ars. "In the event that Register.com is notified that a user of our Private Domain Registration is violating our policy, we follow a very specific process to respond. This process includes investigating the report and if applicable, disabling the domain and notifying the customer of the reason for this action. Register.com has, and will continue, to work with law enforcement to protect our domains for being used for any such activities."

As the "war on terror" moves onto the Internet, however, domain registrars will continue feeling pressure from both sides over the privacy services offered to their customers. And although Register.com appears to be making a reasonable effort to strike a balance thus far, shutting down web sites that are hosted on this side of the pond only represents small victories against those determined to spread word of their activities around the world.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...overblown.html





Video Surveillance Raises Privacy Concerns in California
Jacqui Cheng

Video surveillance cameras are quickly populating the streets of California cities and pose a threat to citizens' privacy, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The organization says that 37 cities in California already have some level of video surveillance, with 18 that have "significant" surveillance and 10 more considering "expansive" programs, but that they have had next to zero impact on fighting crime. Not only that, but certain laws could make it easier for everyday Joes and Janes to get ahold of video surveillance tapes—a privacy nightmare of its own.
Government may not need warrant to search your e-mail

In a report titled "Under the Watchful Eye" (PDF), the ACLU notes that only 11 of the 37 cities have any privacy policy, and that "even where policies exist, they are inadequate and often not legally enforceable." Case in point: Fresno's policy claims to prohibit the use of the cameras for racial profiling although it simultaneously "allows the use of race as a factor in determining whom to monitor."

There has also been virtually no analysis as to the effectiveness of these cameras. The report says that while several jurisdictions in the survey collected general crime stats, not one had conducted a comprehensive analysis on the benefits (or the lack thereof) of the camera programs. If they had done so, says the ACLU, they might find that surveillance cameras don't appear to have any significant effect on crime when compared to areas without cameras, as the Scottish Central Research Unit found in its own 1999 study. The ACLU also cites a study (PDF) by the British Home Office in 2002 that found that the presence of video cameras did not reduce violent crime (only smaller crimes such as those in parking garages), and another by researchers at the University of Leicester that had similar findings.

Cities have been on a surveillance binge in part due to the DHS making $1.4 billion available for anti-terrorism projects. "This trend, along with rising homicide rates and aggressive marketing by security companies, has led many cities to approve and install surveillance camera systems without guidelines to protect civil liberties and with little or no public debate," said ACLU executive director Maya Harris in a statement. We strongly urge local governments to pause and consider whether this is the best way to make our cities safer."

San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom defends the $500,000 his office has spent on 70 cameras throughout the city alongside $200,000 spent on 178 cameras set up by the Housing Authority, saying that they have deterred crime. San Francisco police, however, have also told the San Francisco Chronicle that the cameras have contributed to only a single arrest in the past two years. Spokespeople at Newsom's office said that a report on the cameras' effectiveness is due in October of this year.

Finally, the ACLU warns that due to the California Public Records Act—legislation that the ACLU supports as a means to access government records—video surveillance footage would "almost certainly be accessible to the public." This would clearly introduce a whole new level of privacy concerns: imagine telling your boss that you had a doctor's appointment, only to have him or her later check video surveillance footage to find out that you weren't having your hearing checked but instead interviewing for a new job.

At the top of the list of the ACLU's recommendations is that cities stop deploying surveillance cameras. For cities determined to press ahead, the ACLU encourages them to evaluate other crime reduction measures that might have a greater effect than cameras, and to establish a process for open public debate on any technology deployment. And for those cities that already have cameras in place, the ACLU recommends that they reevaluate the effectiveness of such technology and to hold public hearings. "We all want and deserve safe communities, but video surveillance systems are not the answer," reads the report. "Rather than investing money in invasive systems with marginal effectiveness, local governments must look at programs with proven results that protect Californians'
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...alifornia.html





Courts Block Laws on Video Game Violence
Seth Schiesel

As video games have surged in popularity in recent years, politicians around the country have tried to outlaw the sale of some violent games to children. So far all such efforts have failed.

Citing the Constitution’s protection of free speech, federal judges have rejected attempts to regulate video games in eight cities and states since 2001. The judge in a ninth place, Oklahoma, has temporarily blocked a law pending a final decision. No such laws have been upheld.

The latest state to have its tentative game regulations stymied by a judge’s interpretation of the First Amendment is California. This month a federal judge in San Jose, Ronald M. Whyte, declared unconstitutional a 2005 bill that would have made it a crime to sell or rent certain violent games to minors in that state.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California has said he plans to appeal the ruling, but he is merely the latest in a line of politicians whose attempts to regulate video games have been frustrated by federal courts. “It’s more than a trend,” said Ronald Collins, a scholar at the First Amendment Center in Washington. “It seems the cases are moving uniformly down the same track, and that is that such laws are unconstitutional. Such uniformity in declaring a category of laws unconstitutional is very rare.”

New York will probably be the next state to try its chances in court. Gov. Eliot Spitzer has declared regulating children’s access to video games a priority. The State Assembly passed a game-regulation bill in June, and the Senate could take up the measure when the Legislature reconvenes as soon as next month.

The New York bill has been phrased in an attempt to pass constitutional muster, but it will almost surely be challenged by the same game-industry legal team that has successfully opposed game regulations around the country.

“Video games are a new medium, and while people are used to scary stuff in the movies, they aren’t as used to having scary stuff in interactive media, so there is political value in passing these laws even if they are ultimately rejected by the courts,” said Paul M. Smith, a partner in the Jenner & Block law firm, which represents the game industry. “I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people who passed these laws knew they were unconstitutional, and they did it anyway.”

Put simply, the United States Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution as allowing states broad leeway in regulating minors’ access to sexually explicit material. That is why it is illegal around the country to sell pornography to children. Courts have not, however, said that states have a similar right to regulate media based on violence. Most of the city and state video game laws that have been struck down in recent years have tried to ban the sale or rental of certain violent games to minors. In many of those cases, states and cities have tried to translate the legal rules for pornography into a new system for regulating violent media.

“One of our major arguments was that when it comes to minors, violence should be treated similarly to sexually explicit material,” said Zackery P. Morazzini, the California deputy attorney general who argued the recent case for the state. “We allow states to protect children from sexually explicit material, so to us it is a logical extension to take that lesser obscenity standard and apply that in the context of violent media.”

The United States Supreme Court has not taken up the matter, but judges appear to have taken a dim view of that approach.

The opinion in the first major video game case was written in 2001 by Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. In blocking an Indianapolis ordinance that would have regulated public game arcades, he wrote that exposure to imaginary violence — whether in “The Odyssey,” “War and Peace” or Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 — can play an important role in the development of a child’s moral, social and political outlook.

“Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low,” he wrote. “It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.”

Judge Posner is not known as a First Amendment liberal. He wrote an opinion in 2003 that has been credited (or blamed) with beginning the erosion in the reporter’s privilege that many news organizations have cited in refusing to turn over reporters’ notes to government agencies.

The federal judiciary is hardly monolithic, but as courts around the country have considered video game regulations in places including St. Louis County, Mo.; Washington; Illinois; Michigan; Minnesota; Louisiana; and now California, they have generally followed Judge Posner’s basic arguments.

Many politicians, however, see regulating games not as a First Amendment matter but as a public health and safety issue.

“We prohibit children from smoking,” said Adam Keigwin, a spokesman for State Senator Leland Yee, Democrat of San Francisco, who helped draft the California law. “We regulate driver’s licenses. We prohibit alcohol. We prohibit lots of things from children, and we think it’s logical that kids should not be able to purchase these games on their own.”

Considering the track records of other states that have tried to defend their game restrictions, New York, with Governor Spitzer’s prodding, is taking a novel approach. Under the bill passed in June by the Assembly, it would become a felony in New York to sell or rent to a child any game that includes both pornographic images and egregious violence. Games that are violent but nonsexual would not be regulated.

“If the governor were to be honest, he would have to say that this provision does not change anything in terms of the current state of the law and does nothing to address video game violence,” said State Sen. Andrew J. Lanza, Republican of Staten Island, one of the bill’s sponsors and a proponent of a separate measure to make ratings on video games mandatory. “They want to be able to say they did something about video game violence, and I think it’s a little disinengenuous to say you did something that you didn’t do.”

Christine Anderson, a spokeswoman for Governor Spitzer, said he was confident that New York’s proposed bill could hold up in court.

“Protecting children from violent and indecent video games is one of the governor’s priorities,” she said. “He proposed legislation this session to do just that, which differs from other legislation enacted or proposed in other states. This legislation would give a new tool to district attorneys to use that expressly applies to video games.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/ar...on/21vide.html





The Web Way to Magazine Ad Sales
Maria Aspan

THE September issue of Vogue arrives on newsstands today, clocking in at a record 727 advertising pages. That “extra-extra large!” size, as the cover proudly proclaims, is more than 100 pages fatter than last year and seems to provide evidence of a healthy appetite for print advertising in the fashion industry.

Most of those pages were sold with the added value of an Internet feature that Vogue is introducing today: a broadband channel that aims to serve as both an entertainment destination and a shopping Web site.

The feature, ShopVogue.TV, offers links to purchase the products featured in the magazine’s print ads, while simultaneously showing videos of runway shows, fashion ad campaigns and serial shows created by Vogue. The channel will also have a user-generated component, with visitors encouraged to upload photos of their own fashion looks in an area designated Fashion U Share.

For Vogue, which is owned by the Condé Nast Publications unit of Advance Publications, the channel is a major push into the world of fashion-related video entertainment; the channel will start with more than 240 minutes of original online video content. Vogue has particularly high hopes for the multi-episode series it will feature on the channel, like “60 Seconds to Chic” (a quick-makeover show), “Behind the Lens” (a documentary-style series) and “Trend Watch,” which started on syndicated television in 2003.

“America seems to be very interested in entertainment about fashion,” said Thomas A. Florio, publishing director of Vogue, in a recent interview at Condé Nast’s Manhattan headquarters. He cited the success of television shows like “Ugly Betty” and the film “The Devil Wears Prada” (both of which take place in magazines that bear more than a passing resemblance to Vogue) as well as of reality shows like “Project Runway" and “America’s Next Top Model.” According to Mr. Florio, the programs on ShopVogue.TV will give “more of a nonfiction perspective” on the fashion industry.

And while Bravo’s popular “Project Runway” may seem like the champion of the behind-the-scenes fashion genre, Vogue is hoping that its high-definition Internet videos will offer some competition. Episodes of “Behind the Lens,” for example, will document recent fashion shoots for advertising campaigns; one segment focuses on a shoot with Gisele Bündchen for Vogue Eyewear, and another shows an exclusive interview with Trey Laird of Laird + Partners, who recently shot a campaign for Gwen Stefani’s new fragrance, L by L.A.M.B.

These episodes try to convey an insider feel “without any of the negativity of the reality shows, and the B-level people in the industry,” Mr. Florio said. “The real world is the glamour, the product. It’s not forced, it’s not a Kmart sticker over the runway.”

Mr. Florio says he hopes that the shows on the channel become as popular as television clips on YouTube. “We shot it to be viral, we expect it to go beyond our site,” he said of series like “60 Seconds to Chic.”

Beyond entertainment, the broadband channel is meant to move product for the magazine’s advertisers. According to Mr. Florio, more than 85 percent of Vogue readers said the ads in Vogue’s September issues define the overall tone of the magazine. “It’s our Super Bowl,” he said.

ShopVogue.TV once existed in static Web form at ShopVogue.com, allowing visitors to see online versions of the print ads that were in the current issue, three times a year. At the new site, visitors will be able to shop by brand, trend, department or even price (an option that Vogue expects to become especially popular after November, when the channel will be refreshed for the holiday shopping season.) And videos from recent runway shows will also appear online, allowing visitors to see — and purchase — fashions from the current season.

Each advertiser that purchased a national ad page in the September issue qualified for inclusion on the Web site. Advertisers that bought multipage spreads were permitted to post additional content, like behind-the-scenes video from their campaign’s photo shoots. Visitors can get an inside look at the making of a glamorous fashion ad, and, if the spirit moves them, buy the product being advertised as well.

Fashion magazines may be latecomers to the online-retail sphere. This month, Hearst Magazines said it would acquire the established shopping-bookmark site Kaboodle; Hearst and Vogue’s entries both arrive years after the success of designer shopping sites like net-a-porter.com.

But Vogue is emphasizing the channel’s entertainment value over its pure advertising impact. “We really wanted to make it feel like a program, not an advertorial,” Mr. Florio said of the new shows. “We don’t want to be in a business that’s about selling goods online. We’re in a branding business.”

ShopVogue.TV is not technically a retail site; the “shop” function allows visitors to click through to the Web sites of the advertisers or their online merchant partners. Vogue does not take a cut of any of the sales made through its site. (Condé Nast, which is privately held, does not disclose its finances and declined to say how much was spent on this campaign.)

Vogue expects to draw about half a million visitors to the channel in the first few months, or first “season.” The channel will be advertised on fashion Web sites, on the sides of 270 Manhattan buses, and, of course, in the print pages of September Vogue.
The interactive agency Schematic helped design the channel, although all of the original programming was created and produced by Vogue. Vogue Studio, the magazine’s internal creative agency, worked with many advertisers on both print ads and online video content.

According to Dennis Keogh, the senior vice president for United States marketing at Coty Prestige, which handled the L fragrance for Gwen Stefani, Vogue’s assistance was vital. In addition to a fold-out insert in the magazine, the “Behind the Lens” interview with Mr. Laird was produced specifically for ShopVogue.TV. Visitors can watch either that episode or b-roll from the campaign’s photo session with Ms. Stefani, and simultaneously click through to Nordstrom’s Web site to buy the fragrance.

“We’re working very aggressively on digital media these days as well, and this is such a wonderful communication platform,” Mr. Keogh said.

He said he had no concerns about the entertainment portion of the ShopVogue.TV channel overshadowing its purpose as an advertising destination. “Even if they don’t get that far, it’s building awareness and interest in the brand,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/bu...ia/21adco.html





Scientists Induce Out-of-Body Sensation
Sandra Blakeslee

Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.

When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.

The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.

Usually these sensory streams, which include including vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to other-worldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. After severe and sudden injuries, people often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said, and then, just as suddenly, find themselves back inside their body.

The new research is a first step in figuring out exactly how the brain creates this sensation, he said.

The out-of-body experiments were conducted by two research groups using slightly different methods intended to expand the so-called rubber hand illusion.

In that illusion, people hide one hand in their lap and look at a rubber hand set on a table in front of them. As a researcher strokes the real hand and the rubber hand simultaneously with a stick, people have the vivid sense that the rubber hand is their own.

When the rubber hand is whacked with a hammer, people wince and sometimes cry out.

The illusion shows that body parts can be separated from the whole body by manipulating a mismatch between touch and vision. That is, when a person’s brain sees the fake hand being stroked and feels the same sensation, the sense of being touched is misattributed to the fake.

The new experiments were designed to create a whole body illusion with similar manipulations.

In Switzerland, Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, asked people to don virtual reality goggles while standing in an empty room. A camera projected an image of each person taken from the back and displayed 6 feet away. The subjects thus saw an illusory image of themselves standing in the distance.

Then Dr. Blanke stroked each person’s back for one minute with a stick while simultaneously projecting the image of the stick onto the illusory image of the person’s body.

When the strokes were synchronous, people reported the sensation of being momentarily within the illusory body. When the strokes were not synchronous, the illusion did not occur.

In another variation, Dr. Blanke projected a “rubber body” — a cheap mannequin bought on eBay and dressed in the same clothes as the subject — into the virtual reality goggles. With synchronous strokes of the stick, people’s sense of self drifted into the mannequin.

A separate set of experiments were carried out by Dr. Henrik Ehrsson, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Karolinska Insitutute in Helsinki.

Last year, when Dr. Ehrsson was, as he says, “a bored medical student at University College London,” he wondered, he said, “what would happen if you ‘took’ your eyes and moved them to a different part of a room? Would you see yourself where you eyes were placed? Or from where your body was placed?”

To find out, Dr. Ehrsson asked people to sit on a chair and wear goggles connected to two video cameras placed 6 feet behind them. The left camera projected to the left eye. The right camera projected to the right eye. As a result, people saw their own backs from the perspective of a virtual person sitting behind them.

Using two sticks, Dr. Ehrsson stroked each person’s chest for two minutes with one stick while moving a second stick just under the camera lenses — as if it were touching the virtual body.

Again, when the stroking was synchronous people reported the sense of being outside their own bodies — in this case looking at themselves from a distance where their “eyes” were located.

Then Dr. Ehrsson grabbed a hammer. While people were experiencing the illusion, he pretended to smash the virtual body by waving the hammer just below the cameras. Immediately, the subjects registered a threat response as measured by sensors on their skin. They sweated and their pulses raced.

They also reacted emotionally, as if they were watching themselves get hurt, Dr. Ehrsson said.

People who participated in the experiments said that they felt a sense of drifting out of their bodies but not a strong sense of floating or rotating, as is common in full-blown out of body experiences, the researchers said.

The next set of experiments will involve decoupling not just touch and vision but other aspects of sensory embodiment, including the felt sense of the body position in space and balance, they said.

Such mismatches are likely to occur naturally when multi-sensory regions of the brain are deprived of oxygen after injury or shock. Or they may be induced during sleep paralysis, the exertion of extreme sports or intense meditation practices that alter blood flow to specific brain regions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/sc...d-body.html?hp





Sleights of Mind
George Johnson

The reason he had picked me from the audience, Apollo Robbins insisted, was that I’d seemed so engaged, nodding my head and making eye contact as he and the other magicians explained the tricks of the trade. I believed him when he told me afterward, over dinner at the Venetian, that he hadn’t noticed the name tag identifying me as a science writer. But then everyone believes Apollo — as he expertly removes your wallet and car keys and unbuckles your watch.

It was Sunday night on the Las Vegas Strip, where earlier this summer the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness was holding its annual meeting at the Imperial Palace Hotel. The organization’s last gathering had been in the staid environs of Oxford, but Las Vegas — the city of illusions, where the Statue of Liberty stares past Camelot at the Sphinx — turned out to be the perfect locale. After two days of presentations by scientists and philosophers speculating on how the mind construes, and misconstrues, reality, we were hearing from the pros: James (The Amazing) Randi, Johnny Thompson (The Great Tomsoni), Mac King and Teller — magicians who had intuitively mastered some of the lessons being learned in the laboratory about the limits of cognition and attention.

“This wasn’t just a group of world-class performers,” said Susana Martinez-Conde, a scientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix who studies optical illusions and what they say about the brain. “They were hand-picked because of their specific interest in the cognitive principles underlying the magic.”

She and Stephen Macknik, another Barrow researcher, organized the symposium, appropriately called the Magic of Consciousness.

Apollo, with the pull of his eyes and the arc of his hand, swung around my attention like a gooseneck lamp, so that it always pointed in the wrong direction. When he appeared to be reaching for my left pocket he was swiping something from the right. At the end of the act the audience applauded as he handed me my pen, some crumpled receipts and dollar bills, and my digital audio recorder, which had been running all the while. I hadn’t noticed that my watch was gone until he unstrapped it from his own wrist.
“He’s uncanny,” Teller said to me afterward as he rushed off for his nightly show with Penn at the Rio.

A recurring theme in experimental psychology is the narrowness of perception: how very little of the sensory clamor makes its way into awareness. Earlier in the day, before the magic show, a neuroscientist had demonstrated a phenomenon called inattentional blindness with a video made at the Visual Cognition Laboratory at the University of Illinois.

In the video, six men and women — half with white shirts and half with black — are tossing around a couple of basketballs. Viewers are asked to count how many times members of, say, the white team, manage to complete a pass, keeping the ball from the opposition. I dutifully followed the instructions and was surprised when some 15 seconds into the game, laughter began to ripple through the audience. Only when I watched a second time did I see the person in the gorilla suit walking on from stage left. (The video is online at viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html.)

Secretive as they are about specifics, the magicians were as eager as the scientists when it came to discussing the cognitive illusions that masquerade as magic: disguising one action as another, implying data that isn’t there, taking advantage of how the brain fills in gaps — making assumptions, as The Amazing Randi put it, and mistaking them for facts.

Sounding more like a professor than a comedian and magician, Teller described how a good conjuror exploits the human compulsion to find patterns, and to impose them when they aren’t really there.

“In real life if you see something done again and again, you study it and you gradually pick up a pattern,” he said as he walked onstage holding a brass bucket in his left hand. “If you do that with a magician, it’s sometimes a big mistake.”

Pulling one coin after another from the air, he dropped them, thunk, thunk, thunk, into the bucket. Just as the audience was beginning to catch on — somehow he was concealing the coins between his fingers — he flashed his empty palm and, thunk, dropped another coin, and then grabbed another from a gentlemen’s white hair. For the climax of the act, Teller deftly removed a spectator’s glasses, tipped them over the bucket and, thunk, thunk, two more coins fell.

As he ran through the trick a second time, annotating each step, we saw how we had been led to mismatch cause and effect, to form one false hypothesis after another. Sometimes the coins were coming from his right hand, and sometimes from his left, hidden beneath the fingers holding the bucket.

He left us with his definition of magic: “The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.”

• • •

In his opening address, Michael Gazzaniga, the president of the consciousness association, had described another form of prestidigitation — a virtual reality experiment in which he had put on a pair of electronic goggles that projected the illusion of a deep hole opening in what he knew to be a solid concrete floor. Jolted by the adrenaline rush, his heart beat faster and his muscles tensed, a reminder that even without goggles the brain cobbles together a world from whatever it can.

“In a sense our reality is virtual,” Dr. Gazzaniga said. “Think about flying in an airplane. You’re up there in an aluminum tube, 30,000 feet up, going 600 miles an hour, and you think everything is all right.”

Dr. Gazzaniga is famous for his work with split-brain patients, whose left and right hemispheres have been disconnected as a last-ditch treatment for severe epilepsy. These are the experiments that have led to the notion, oversimplified in popular culture, that the left brain is predominantly analytical while the right brain is intuitive and laid-back.

The left brain, as Dr. Gazzaniga put it, is the confabulator, constantly concocting stories. But mine was momentarily dumbstruck when, after his talk, I passed through a doorway inside the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino and entered an air-conditioned simulation of the Grand Canal. My eyes were drawn upward to the stunning illusion of a trompe l’oeil sky and what I decided must be ravens flying high overhead. Looking closer, my brain discarded that theory, and I saw that the black curved wings were the edges of discs — giant thumbtacks holding up the sky. Later I was told they were automatic sprinklers, in case the clouds catch fire.

“It’s ‘The Truman Show,’ ” said Robert Van Gulick, a philosopher at Syracuse University, as I joined him at a table overlooking a version of the Piazza San Marco. A sea breeze was wafting through the window, the clouds were glowing in the late afternoon sun (and they were still glowing, around 10:30 p.m., when I headed back toward my hotel). How could we be sure that the world outside the Venetian — outside Las Vegas itself — wasn’t also a simulation? Or that I wasn’t just a brain in a vat in some mad scientist’s laboratory.

Dr. Van Gulick had come to the conference to talk about qualia, the raw, subjective sense we have of colors, sounds, tastes, touches and smells. The crunch of the crostini, the slitheriness of the penne alla vodka — a question preoccupying philosophers is where these personal experiences fit within a purely physical theory of the mind.

Like physicists, philosophers play with such conundrums by engaging in thought experiments. In a recent paper, Michael P. Lynch, a philosopher at the University of Connecticut, entertained the idea of a “phenomenal pickpocket,” an imaginary creature, like Apollo the thief, who distracts your attention while he removes your qualia, turning you into what’s known in the trade as a philosophical zombie. You could catch a ball, hum a tune, stop at a red light — act exactly like a person but without any sense of what it is like to be alive. If zombies are logically possible, some philosophers insist, then conscious beings must be endowed with an ineffable essence that cannot be reduced to biological circuitry.

Dr. Lynch’s fantasy was a ploy to undermine the zombie argument. But if zombies do exist, it is probably in Las Vegas. One evening as I walked across the floor of the Imperial Palace casino — a cacophony of clanging bells and electronic arpeggios — it was easy to imagine that the hominids parked in front of the one-armed bandits were simply extensions of the machines.

“Intermittent conditioning,” suggested Irene Pepperberg, an adjunct associate professor at Brandeis University who studies animal intelligence. If you want to train a laboratory rat to pull a crank to get a food pellet, the reflex will be scratched in deeper if the creature is rewarded with some regularity but not all the time.

Dr. Pepperberg has thrown a wild card into studies of consciousness with her controversial experiments with African gray parrots. With a brain “the size of a walnut,” as she puts it, the birds display what appears to be the cognitive potential of a young child. Her best-known parrot, Alex, can stare at a tray of objects and pick the one that has four corners and is blue. He has also coined his own word for almond — “cork nut.”

With appearances on PBS and a cameo role in a Margaret Atwood novel, “Oryx and Crake,” Alex has entered the popular imagination, while Dr. Pepperberg struggles to find a secure academic position. Critics can’t resist comparing Alex to “Clever Hans,” the famous horse whose arithmetical abilities were exposed as learned responses to his trainer’s subtle cues. Dr. Pepperberg says she controls for that possibility in her experiments and believes her parrots are thinking and expressing themselves with words.

• • •

One evening out on the Strip, I spotted Daniel Dennett, the Tufts University philosopher, hurrying along the sidewalk across from the Mirage, which has its own tropical rain forest and volcano. The marquees were flashing and the air-conditioners roaring — Las Vegas stomping its carbon footprint with jackboots in the Nevada sand. I asked him if he was enjoying the qualia. “You really know how to hurt a guy,” he replied.

For years Dr. Dennett has argued that qualia, in the airy way they have been defined in philosophy, are illusory. In his book “Consciousness Explained,” he posed a thought experiment involving a wine-tasting machine. Pour a sample into the funnel and an array of electronic sensors would analyze the chemical content, refer to a database and finally type out its conclusion: “a flamboyant and velvety Pinot, though lacking in stamina.”

If the hardware and software could be made sophisticated enough, there would be no functional difference, Dr. Dennett suggested, between a human oenophile and the machine. So where inside the circuitry are the ineffable qualia?

Retreating to a bar at the Imperial Palace, we talked about a different mystery he had been pondering: the role words play inside the brain. Learn a bit of wine speak — “ripe black plums with an accent of earthy leather” — and you are suddenly equipped with anchors to pin down your fleeting gustatory impressions. Words, he suggested, are “like sheepdogs herding ideas.”

As he sipped his drink he tried out another metaphor, involving a gold panning technique he had learned about in New Zealand. Lead and gold are similar in density. If you salt the slurry with buck shot and swirl the pan around, the dark pellets will track the elusive flecks of gold.

With a grab bag of devices accumulated over the eons, the brain pulls off the ultimate conjuring act: the subjective sense of I.

“Stage magicians know that a collection of cheap tricks will often suffice to produce ‘magic,’ ” Dr. Dennett has written, “and so does Mother Nature, the ultimate gadgeteer.”

At the end of the magic show where I was fleeced by Apollo, The Amazing Randi called on Dr. Dennett and another volunteer to help with the final act. As Mr. Randi sat on a chair, the two men tightly bound his arms to his thighs with a rope.

“Daniel, would you take off your jacket for me for just a moment?” the conjuror asked. “Now drape it around the front of my hands.”

“A little higher,” Mr. Randi said.

Without missing a beat, he grabbed the collar and pulled it up toward his chin. The audience cheered. Either he had slipped the ropes in a matter of seconds or his hands had been free all along.

“Allow people to make assumptions and they will come away absolutely convinced that assumption was correct and that it represents fact,” Mr. Randi said. “It’s not necessarily so.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/science/21magic.html





Foundation on Which RIAA Builds Cases in Danger of Being Undermined
Eric Bangeman

At the base of every one of the over 25,000 lawsuits filed by the RIAA against suspected file-sharing is a single argument: making a song available over a P2P network like KaZaA infringes on the copyrights of the record labels. That assertion will be tested by Warner v. Cassin next month, as her attorney, Ray Beckerman, will argue the matter in a federal court in White Plains, NY.

Although the RIAA's claim that making a song available over a P2P network infringes on a record label's copyrights may seem sound at first glance, the issue is as not cut and dried as the music industry would lead us to believe. First, the RIAA has not established that any infringement has actually taken place. The RIAA's claims of copyright infringement come after its investigator, MediaSentry, discovers music in a P2P user's shared folder. MediaSentry then takes screenshots, notes the IP address, and the litigation process is set into motion. That's the sole basis for the RIAA's complaints.

A number of defendants have pointed out the weakness of the RIAA's argument. First, the RIAA's complaints do not allege any actual acts of infringement, which the Copyright Act says must take place in order for a case for infringement to be made. The only downloading that the RIAA can actually prove occurred was done by its authorized agent, MediaSentry. Since the RIAA cannot demonstrate that someone other than MediaSentry downloaded the file—or that the defendant ever illegally downloaded any of the tracks in the shared folder—it therefore cannot show that infringement actually took place. Looking at it from another angle, there are no allegations that the defendants actually engaged in a specific act of distribution at any point in time—which is why the RIAA's boilerplate complaints refer to "ongoing" and "continuous" infringement.

Or, as Beckerman notes in his motion, "the complaint fails to set forth... any instance or example of 'downloading' a recording; any instance or example of 'distributing' a recording; any instance or example of 'making [a recording] available';... or what law would support a claim for 'making [a recording] available.'"

Beckerman also argues that if making available is found to be the same as distributing, it could have broader implications than just sharing files over a P2P network. "Under such an elastic interpretation and ill-defined standards, almost all participants in the Internet would become vulnerable to accusations that they 'make available' a variety of content, including copyrighted materials, to users," he argues in the reply. Think about hyperlinks, which make available other content on the Internet. Providing a hyperlink could be construed as distribution under the RIAA's definition, argues Beckerman.

There have been seven cases in which the making available argument has been tested. In six of those cases, the judges did not actually rule on the issue of whether making a file available is the same as distribution. Instead, the judges said that the cases could go ahead based on the allegations of continuing infringement. The judge in Elektra v. Perez also considered the argument after the RIAA decided to dismiss the case and the defendant argued that the case should be dismissed with prejudice. The judge presiding over the seventh case, Elektra v. Barker, has yet to issue a decision but has promised to rule on the making available argument.

The rulings in Warner v. Cassin and Elektra v. Barker could change the legal landscape for both the RIAA and defendants if the judges hold that making a file available on KaZaA or any other P2P network does not constitute copyright infringement. In fact, it would all but certainly kill the RIAA's current litigation model. The labels would have to show actual evidence that someone downloaded a file from a targeted P2P user instead of just offering a few screenshots and a report from MediaSentry along with a boilerplate complaint.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ndermined.html





A billion trillion zillion…and that’s the truth!

Latest Music Piracy Study Overstates Effect of P2P
Eric Bangeman

A new study (large PDF) from the Institute for Policy Innovation takes a different approach to quantifying the cost of music piracy. Instead of just focusing on what the lost sales cost the record labels, the new study measures the impact of piracy on the US economy. The total price tag? A cool $12.5 billion in lost output, if you trust the study's numbers.

Along with the multibillion-dollar loss, piracy also is hindering job growth, according to the IPI. The US economy will lose 71,060 jobs due to piracy, with almost 38 percent of those (26,860) in the recording industry. That amounts to $2.7 billion in lost earnings. Piracy also hits Uncle Sam—as well as state and local governments—right in the pocketbook, with at least $422 million in lost tax revenues.

Problematic assumptions

The study makes for some alarming reading, but it suffers from a few significant flaws. First and foremost, it appears to fall into the "illicit downloads == lost sales" fallacy, the view that each song obtained over a P2P network is a lost purchase. "Unfortunately, there is no precise measure of the degree to which consumers of pirated CDs would continue to purchase those CDs at legitimate prices," according to the study. "While the degree to which these legitimate purchases would occur differs by market, it appears nevertheless that such purchases would comprise a very significant fraction of the total number of pirated CDs now purchased... In this study, the weighted average substitution rate used for the physical piracy of recorded music is 65.7 percent. It is then assumed that only 20% (1 in 5) of these downloaded songs would have been purchased legitimately if piracy did not exist."

That's a bit better than the one-to-one argument, but not by much. It essentially assumes that one of every five downloaded songs would have been purchased, were it not for file-sharing. Although a 20 percent figure may not look like much, it is still a percentage not justified by our own knowledge of file-sharing trends. The study needs to make a firm argument for why this percentage is so high. It's a flaw similar to that in a 2006 study commissioned by the MPAA.

Note that the assumption cuts both ways. Not only does it assume many would-be sales, but it also ignores sales that do stem from file sharing. P2P users buy a lot of music, after all. Three out of four P2P users said that they bought music after downloading it online, with 21 percent of the respondents to the survey commissioned by the Canadian Record Industry Association saying that they have bought previously downloaded music on more than 10 occasions. So here again, we have data not being taken into account, data which would necessarily lower the study's estimates.

Another study even goes so far as to argue that the effect of file-sharing on legal music sales is "not statistically distinguishable from zero." Published this past February in the Journal of Political Economy, the study tracked the effects of 1.75 million song downloads on 680 albums. The researchers concluded that the availability—and even increased downloads—of music on P2P networks did not correlate to a negative effect on music sales. "Even our most negative point estimate implies that a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album's weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero," the study's authors reported.

If there was no such thing as piracy...

The IPI study also assesses the increased demand for music if piracy didn't exist and assumes the market would remain as "intensely competitive" as it is today. The problem is that music fans are largely disenchanted with the market. By and large, music fans think that music is too expensive, and that much of what is available isn't very good. 58 percent of those responding to a study commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine and the Associated Press said that music is declining in quality. And although the DRM situation is looking up these days, it can still be a confusing morass with unanticipated side effects for consumers, as the recently announced closure of the Google Video Store demonstrates.

Consumer apathy aside, there are other factors at work in the music industry. One of the biggest is the transition from sales of physical media to digital media. CD sales have dropped sharply since the beginning of the decade, and projections indicate that there's no end in sight to the decline. Sure, downloads have picked up since 2004, but not at a rate that will come close to overcoming the slide in CD sales. The individual song download angle is largely ignored by the IPI's study as well, which is fixated on sales of physical media.

The IPI has a history of pushing what it calls a pro-market agenda with its research, including one study asking if open source has reached its limits and another similar to that under discussion here that attempts to quantify the economic impact of movie piracy. Given its track record (which includes this gem from the aforementioned open-source study: "Open source will go the way of other IT industry fads that were once trumpeted as the way of the future, like Macintosh computers, business AI, 4GL programming languages and Y2K") and ideological bent, the results of this study are rather unsurprising.

When the discussion over dollar figures and economic impact comes to an end, most people will agree that file-sharing is a real issue for the recording industry and that there is a financial cost that goes along with it. It's also true that piracy has something of a ripple effect, reaching beyond the artists and record labels. But studies that overstate the economic effect of piracy do little to further the discussion over issues of copyright, file-sharing, and DRM and obscure the fact that the music industry still has some serious work to do on its business model.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ct-of-p2p.html





RIAA Faces Possible Class Action Over Suing the Innocent
Nate Anderson

The scene at RIAA headquarters this week must have been fascinating. The group yesterday announced that it has finished sending out a new batch of 503 "pre-litigation letters" to 58 different universities around the US, generously offering to let students settle copyright infringement claims "at a discounted rate" before those claims go to trial. The letters blanketed the country, going everywhere from the University of Hawaii to Swarthmore, from Boston College to Tulane, from Emory to Chico State. And then the RIAA learned that its aggressive litigation tactics have placed it on the receiving end of a class action lawsuit.

Single mom Tanya Andersen, a defendant in a previous lawsuit brought by the RIAA, was one of the first to have her case dismissed with prejudice (it cannot be refiled at a later date). Throughout the court battle, she maintained her total innocence, a claim given even more plausibility by the fact that she was charged with downloading numerous gangsta rap tracks.

After the case was dismissed, Andersen then sued the RIAA for malicious prosecution, and her attorney filed court documents in an Oregon federal court on Wednesday that seek to elevate the case to class action status.

The development, first reported by p2pnet, hopes to make a class out of those "who were sued or were threatened with sued by Defendants for file-sharing, downloading or other similar activities, who have not actually engaged in actual copyright infringement." In other words, a class of the innocent. In the complaint, Andersen alleges that the RIAA "has engaged in a coordinated enterprise to pursue a scheme of threatening and intimidating litigation in an attempt to maintain its music distribution monopoly."

Andersen is also going after the RIAA's investigative arm, SafeNet, formerly known as MediaSentry. This group allegedly "conducts illegal, flawed and negligent investigations for the RIAA and its controlled member companies" and has also featured in past complaints.

Some of Andersen's claims against the RIAA have been tried by other defendants who chose to fight back, but this is the first time that a judge has been asked to consolidate such lawsuits into a class action.

Proving many of these charges will be difficult. Andersen alleges that the RIAA has violated the RICO racketeering act, but we have previously discussed why this will be hard to prove. The charge of malicious prosecution could be a bit easier, though Andersen (and other defendants, if the class is certified) will have to show a pattern of willful behavior by the RIAA, something that could be very difficult without having an insider from the organization "flip."

Should the case eventually be certified as a class action, it would bring a whole new kind of negative attention to the RIAA's legal campaign. The fact that the class specifically includes only those who have not committed copyright infringement will certainly go a long way toward making this look like David v. Goliath redux. Whether deserved or not, these sort of cases are giving the RIAA a reputation for suing innocent people, a perception that a class action suit would only heighten.

Expect a vigorous defense from the association.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...tion-suit.html





Anime Distributor Has No Legal Right to Threaten BitTorrent Users
enigmax

A company that tracked thousands of users sharing anime via BitTorrent has lost its legal battle to force an ISP to reveal its customer’s details. The company would’ve used the information to demand $3,500 in compensation from each person they tracked - a plan which now lies in ruins.

Last week we reported on the Singapore-based anime distributor Odex Pt. Ltd and their campaign to track, find and threaten thousands of BitTorrent users which they claim infringe their copyrights. The demand - ‘Pay us $3,500 - or else’.

After previously forcing the ISP ‘Singnet’ to give up personal details (names, addresses) of its customers, they moved on to the ISP ‘StarHub’ who put up a fight but was also forced to hand over details. The next move was to force another ISP - Pacific Internet (PacNet) - to give up the details of a thousand of its customers so it could demand money from them also.

PacNet said that although it respects the rights of intellectual property owners, equally it believes in “protecting the privacy of all our subscribers” and refused to hand the information over. Odex went to the courts to force PacNet to comply.

Unfortunately for Odex, the court decided that Odex had ‘no right of civil action’ against those it accuses of infringing its copyrights. Apparently, Odex is merely a sub-licensee of its anime titles and is not even the copyright holder so it cannot take any action at all. It had also threatened criminal action against BitTorrent users - the judge quashed this threat too.

Furthermore, according to the report from ChannelNewsAsia, the judge wasn’t happy with the way Odex went after the BitTorrent users. He criticized the investigative methods used to collect their IP addresses and the manner in which it gathered other so-called ‘evidence’.

Odex is to appeal but in the meantime, they now know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a ‘pay-up or else’ demand. The judge has ordered them to pay more than $7,000 in legal costs.
http://torrentfreak.com/anime-distri...torrent-users/





BitTorrent Admin Monitored by US Government, Forced to Dump Linux
enigmax

Sk0t, an ex-administrator of the EliteTorrents BitTorrent tracker is to have his internet connection forcibly monitored by the US Government. If that wasn’t bad enough, the monitoring software is Windows based - which means he is being forced to ditch Linux - or face being barred from the internet.

Scott McCausland (sk0t), the ex-administrator of the EliteTorrents BitTorrent tracker isn’t having much luck lately. Back in September 2006, he pleaded guilty to two charges - ‘conspiracy to commit copyright infringement’ and ‘criminal copyright infringement’. Both charges relate to him uploading ‘Star Wars: Episode III’ onto the internet hours before the theatrical release, earning him 5 months in jail and 5 months home confinement.

Sk0t has now been released from jail but this doesn’t mean that everything is back to normal.

Back on 17 July, sk0t had to see his Probation Officer for the first time and two days later he had to have a special ankle bracelet attached. This monitoring device is there to enforce the terms of his release: Monday to Friday 08:30 to 21:00 he is free to do as he pleases. Weekends are more restrictive - freedom is allocated between 08:30 to 17:00. The one good thing about this device is that it will be removed before Christmas (Dec 19th).

According to a post on his blog, following another meeting with his Probation Officer, it seems sk0t is having more trouble:

So, I am getting shafted by the Justice Department again…”

sk0t was informed by his Probation Officer that he has to have special software installed on his PC so that the government can monitor his online activities. However, what is a more bitter pill to swallow for him is that the monitoring software is Windows only and as sk0t is an Ubuntu user, the Justice Department is forcing him to switch operating systems.

I had a meeting with my probation officer today, and he told me that he has to install monitoring software onto my PC. No big deal to me, that is part of my sentence. However, their software doesnt support GNU/Linux (Which is what I use). So, he told me that if I want to use a computer, I would have to use an OS that the software can be installed on.

Sk0t is left with a tough choice. Give in to the evils of the monitoring software, format his hard drive and install Windows - or be barred from using a PC completely.

Sk0t told TorrentFreak: “I think that this whole situation is just one more way that they can impose their will onto me. I have contacted my attorney, and we are going to fight this. It isn’t the fact that I have to be monitored that bothers me, it is the fact that I have restructure my life (different OS, different software on that OS) and that they would require (force) me to purchase software while I a currently unemployed and relatively unemployable with the 2 felonies that they gave me. It is just a ridiculous situation. Why should I conform to them when I am consenting to the software… they should have software that conforms to me.”

Unfortunately, thanks to the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, some BitTorrent users are considered criminals these days, which means these unusual measures can be forced upon them. In a society where ‘the punishment should fit the crime’, you can’t help but think that somewhere along the line there’s been a big miscalculation when regular citizens are turned into criminals for sharing files.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-a...to-dump-linux/





Booze Banned After 2 Die, 83 Arrested At N.J. Concert
Drinking In Parking Lot Banned

Authorities are taking a tougher approach after a crackdown failed to stop underage drinking at PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel.

Effective Friday, alcohol is banned in the parking lot of the central New Jersey entertainment venue. The ban comes a day after two people died and more than 80 people were arrested Thursday night at an Ozzfest concert.

Police are investigating the deaths of two men, identified as Raymond Guarino, 26, of Forked River and Patrick Norris, 24, of Coram, N.Y.

After possibly taking drugs and alcohol, both passed out in separate incidents at the concert, went into cardiac arrest and later died. State Police said the men were believed to have ingested cocaine, marijuana and alcohol prior to their deaths, and troopers who searched Guarino's vehicle found small amounts of both drugs.

Eighty-three people were arrested during the concert; 59 were charged with underage drinking. Other charges included distribution of drugs, lewd behavior and providing alcohol to a minor.

Authorities said the Ozzfest incidents were the latest in a long string of problems this season that led them to ban alcohol in the center's parking lot.

"This is a dramatic step to have to take, but one that is necessary given the potential consequences of such risky behavior," Gov. Jon S. Corzine said Friday.

The first show to be affected will be a concert featuring Velvet Revolver, Alice in Chains and Kill Hannah, scheduled for Friday night. Signs on the Garden State Parkway will notify concertgoers of the alcohol ban.

Joe Orlando, a spokesman for the Turnpike Authority, which owns the arts center, said the ban is effective no matter a person's age, so even those who can drink legally cannot bring alcohol onto the site; in the past, people over the legal drinking age have been allowed to bring alcohol to the center's parking lot and tailgate before and during concerts.

Depending on their age, violators face fines, expulsion from the premises and arrest.

Alcohol will still be sold inside the center, which is located near the shore.

Kevin Coyne, of Sewell, N.J., who attended Ozzfest, said Friday that the all-day concert didn't seem particularly out of control to him, although he left around 5:30 p.m. and didn't spend much time in the parking lot.

"To me it was just a normal concert. I didn't see anything that was out of the ordinary," said Coyne, who said the alcohol ban wouldn't keep him from going to shows in the future.

Coyne said many concertgoers seem to spend more time in the parking lot drinking than inside the venue watching the acts.

"People get there bright and early and get their party started," Coyne.

Another concertgoer said the alcohol ban might keep him from going to shows in the future.

"My only chance to get drunk is in the parking lot, and they took that away from us," said Avi Miller, of Elizabeth, N.J. who said the beer prices inside the concert venue are too high.

"They do go around the parking lot asking people for IDs. I don't understand why that's not enough," said Miller, who was at the Ozzfest show.

Miller had been planning to attend Friday night's Velvet Revolver show, but instead plans to go to Camden's Tweeter Center on the Waterfront on Monday, where the band was playing and alcohol is still allowed in the parking lot.

Orlando said state police have arrested more than 200 people at shows at the center in the past 10 days.

"We've tried to deal with it by enforcing the law, and people have thumbed their nose at it," he said. "So we're taking the only action we can."

Some of the arrests Thursday also involved unruly behavior in the mosh pit. Concertgoers were charged with assault if they were flailing arms or legs in a way that would hurt others.

Ozzfest is a tour of heavy-metal bands started by rocker Ozzy Osbourne. Over the years it has showcased a number of up-and-coming bands, including Linkin Park and Incubus.

Authorities launched a crackdown on drinking after the season's first show in May because 13 young patrons had to be taken to hospitals with alcohol-related illnesses. The youngest was 11 years old.

More than 90 patrons were arrested at the O.A.R concert on Saturday and 54 people were arrested at the Incubus show last Friday.
http://www.wnbc.com/news/13914641/de...ss=ny&psp=news





Rolling Stones to Quit Touring After 45 Years

THE Rolling Stones will reportedly quit touring for good after playing London's O2 Arena this Sunday after 45 years in the music business.

The veteran rockers are believed to have declared that their current A Bigger Bang Tour will be their last because frontman Sir Mick Jagger, 64, and guitarist Keith Richards, 63, will be too old to do another.

A source said: "We've been told this will be the last tour. Embarking on a Stones world tour takes years to plan. Mick and Keith would be in their late 60s by the time they would be ready to rock once more."

Mick, Keith, drummer Charlie Watts, 66, and guitarist Ronnie Wood, 60, end their massive two-year tour this week with three dates at the new O2 Arena, with their final performance on Sunday.

The band was formed in 1962 and has been touring regularly ever since.

The group have sold more than 200 million albums worldwide over the last five decades and played thousands of sold-out shows.

The Stones have been receiving rave reviews for the latest leg of their tour - and wowed 60,000 at Ireland's Slane Castle on Saturday.

The band started in London in 1962 with original leader Brian Jones, but he was usurped by the songwriting partnership of singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards.

Jones died in 1969, shortly after being fired from the band and was replaced by 20-year-old Mick Taylor.

The band has released 55 albums and have had 37 top-10 singles. They have sold over 300 million albums worldwide. Their latest album, A Bigger Bang, was released in 2005 and their world tour is still continuing.
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegrap...006003,00.html





The Future of Music
Suhas Sreedhar

You're listening to your favorite Pink Floyd CD on your home stereo when you accidentally hit the “change CD” button on the control panel. All goes quiet for a bit as your CD player urgently shifts to play whatever is in the next tray. With dread, you desperately reach for the volume knob, but it's too late—your speakers blast the latest Green Day album. Reacting like you were just pricked by a pin, your hand jolts to the volume knob and turns it down. You breathe a sigh of relief. But that's not the end of it. Ten minutes later you feel that something isn't right. Even though you love this album, you can't listen to it anymore. You shut it off, tired, puzzled, and confused. This always seems to happen when you switch from a classic album to a modern one. What you've just experienced is something called overcompression of the dynamic range. Welcome to the loudness war.

The loudness war, what many audiophiles refer to as an assault on music (and ears), has been an open secret of the recording industry for nearly the past two decades and has garnered more attention in recent years as CDs have pushed the limits of loudness thanks to advances in digital technology. The “war” refers to the competition among record companies to make louder and louder albums. But the loudness war could be doing more than simply pumping up the volume and angering aficionados—it could be responsible for halting technological advances in sound quality for years to come.

Overcompression

Music, like speech, is dynamic. There are quiet and loud moments that serve to accentuate each other and convey meaning by their relative levels of loudness. For instance, if someone is talking and suddenly shouts, the loudness of the shout, in addition to the content, conveys a message—be it a sense of urgency, surprise, or anger.

When the dynamic range of a song is heavily reduced for the sake of achieving loudness, the sound becomes analogous to someone constantly shouting everything he or she says. Not only is all impact lost, but the constant level of the sound is fatiguing to the ear. So why is achieving greater and greater loudness so important that the natural ebb and flow of music has been so readily sacrificed?

The answer goes back to the beginnings of recorded music.

The Vinyl Era

Loudness has always been a desirable quality for mainstream popular music. The louder a song is overall, the more it stands out from ambient noise and the more it grabs your attention. Studies in the field of psychoacoustics, which investigates how humans perceive sound, show that people judge how loud a sound is based on its average loudness, not its peak loudness. So even though there might be two songs whose loudest parts reach the same loudness level in decibels (dB), the one with the higher average level is generally perceived as louder.

As far back as the early 1960s, record companies began engaging in a loudness battle when they observed that louder songs in jukeboxes tended to garner more attention than quieter ones. To maintain their competitive edge, record companies wanted to keep raising the loudness of their songs. But the physical properties of vinyl records limited engineers' ability to perpetually increase loudness.

A vinyl record consists of a lacquer into which small V-shaped grooves—vibrational transcriptions of analog sound—are cut. Creating a record in the studio involves a process called mastering, where songs are sonically adjusted and placed into an appropriate order to fit the given medium's requirements. Mastering for vinyl was always a balance between loudness and playing time. The louder you wanted a song to be, the wider the groove needed to be in order to accommodate the larger amplitude of the transcription. Since there's only a limited amount of usable surface area per vinyl disc, gaining loudness meant sacrificing playing time, especially on a long playing (LP) record where upwards of six songs were often fit on each side of the disc.

In order to save the cost of manufacturing an excessive number of vinyl discs per album, playing time usually won out over loudness. Live music typically has a dynamic range of 120 dB, peaking at about the same loudness of a jet engine (though some concerts have gone even louder). Vinyl records tend to have about 70 dB of dynamic range. This meant that in order to fit a song onto a record, it either needed to have its overall amplitude reduced or it needed to be compressed—have its peaks brought down to a lower level—to fit within the given range. How much of each was done varied from record to record and defined the art of mastering. However, the tools of analog signal processing limited the amount of compression that was possible.

Analog compressors of this era were basically voltage control amplifiers that varied the level of an output signal based on a control voltage, similar to the devices that regulate signals in AM radio. Such compressors were typically used on individual instrument tracks (vocals, guitar, etc.) to add clarity to a sound or to change the sound of an instrument for effect. However, in some cases, such as with the hit singles put out by Motown Records (for example, “Want Ads” by Honey Cone), compressors were used to boost the loudness of songs to higher-than-average levels. Mastering engineers accomplished this by reducing the dynamic range of a song so that the entire song could be amplified to a greater extent before it pushed the physical limits of the medium. This became known as “hot” mastering and was typically done on singles where each side of the record only contained one song. Generally, however, the average level of songs and albums stayed relatively the same throughout the period.

“CD” Behavior

“The invention of digital audio and the compact disc became a new fuel for a previously existing loudness race,” says Bob Katz, a renowned mastering engineer and one of the first outspoken critics of dynamic-range overcompression. “The reason is that the analog media did not permit what we would call ‘normalization' to the peak level.”

When the compact disc (CD) was introduced in the early 1980s, there was much for audiophiles to be happy about. Digital audio removed many of the physical restrictions vinyl had imposed, such as concerns about surface noise (caused by dust, scratches, the lacquer itself, and so on) and limited dynamic range. The CD was capable of supporting a dynamic range of about 96 dB. For most of the 1980s, when CDs were still high-end products and mastering engineers largely did not have access to digital signal-processing technologies, albums released on CD tended to make use of this better dynamic range.

Unlike vinyl, which had varying loudness limits due to its physical characteristics, the CD had a definitive peak loudness limit due to its specified digitizing standard, a form of pulse code modulation (PCM). PCM had previously been used in telephony as a method of digitizing an analog signal. When an analog signal is sampled for digitization, each level of the signal is quantized (stored as a number in binary). How frequently samples of the signal are taken is specified by the sampling rate, and the total number of unique quantization levels capable of being stored is determined by the number of bits. When Sony and Philips specified the standard for CD audio, they determined that the sampling rate would be 44.1 kHz with 16 bits per sample. Using the rule of thumb, the approximation of 6.02 dB of dynamic range per bit gave CD audio roughly 96 dB of dynamic range. The highest loudness level (16 bits of all 1's) was designated as 0 decibels full scale (dBFS). Lower levels were assigned negative numbers.

In the 1980s, CDs were mastered so that songs generally peaked at about -6 dBFS with their root mean square (RMS)—or average levels—hovering around -20 dBFS to -18 dBFS. As multidisc CD changers began to gain prominence in households toward the end of the decade, the same jukebox-type loudness competition started all over again as record companies wanted their CDs to stick out more than their competitors'. By the end of the 1980s, songs on CDs were amplified to the point where their peaks started pushing the loudness limit of 0 dBFS. At this point, the only way to raise the average levels of songs without having their loudest parts clipped—the digital equivalent of distortion, where information is lost because it exceeds the bit capacity—was to compress the peaks.

While analog compressors had been limited in the extent to which they could reduce peak levels, digital compressors were much more powerful. As mastering engineers began to get hold of digital signal-processing tools, they were able to “hot” master songs even more. The process was similar to what had been done on some vinyl singles—peak levels were brought down by a certain amount, and then the entire waveform was amplified until the (now reduced) peaks once again reached 0 dBFS. The result? The average level of the entire song increased.

The 1990s saw average amplitude levels go from around -15 dBFS to as much as -6 dBFS in extreme cases. Most songs in this decade, however, remained at around -12 dBFS. The 2000s saw the loudness war reach its height, with most current songs having an average level of -9 dBFS or higher. From the mid 1980s to now, the average loudness of CDs increased by a factor of 10, and the peaks of songs are now one-tenth of what they used to be. The loudness war is also not just confined to the big four record companies (Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony BMG, and Universal Music Group). Overcompression is now widespread and performed by independent labels and international record companies.

The CD Is Dead

The biggest change from 15 years ago to today is how people consume music. With more than 100 million iPods sold worldwide as of early this year, more and more people are listening to music on the go rather than at their home stereos. Physical media like CDs are on their way out. And yet overcompression continues to plague the music world.

Even though the CD might be in its death throes, most digital music available online was mastered for CDs. Popular formats like MP3, AAC, and Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) merely use data-compression techniques (not to be confused with dynamic-range compression) to reduce the amount of data a song encoded in PCM takes up. As long as the specter of CDs continues to haunt the online world, downloaded songs will still be subject to overcompression.

But the problem doesn't just lie on the production end. If people are listening to songs in a noisy environment—such as in their cars, on trains, in airport waiting rooms, at work, or in a dormitory—the music needs to be louder to compensate. Dynamic-range compression does just that and more. Not only does it raise the average loudness of the song, but by doing so it eliminates all the quiet moments of a song as well. So listeners are now able to hear the entire song above the noise without getting frustrated by any inaudible low parts.

This might be one of the biggest reasons why most people are completely unaware of the loss of dynamics in modern music. They are listening to songs in less-than-ideal environments on a constant basis. But many listeners have subconsciously felt the effects of overcompressed songs in the form of auditory fatigue, where it actually becomes tiring to continue listening to the music.

“You want music that breathes. If the music has stopped breathing, and it's a continuous wall of sound, that will be fatiguing,” says Katz. “If you listen to it loudly as well, it will potentially damage your ears before the older music did because the older music had room to breathe.”

Some audiophiles find relief by going back to the past. A few musicians still continue to release their albums on vinyl records (in addition to CDs and online formats). Because vinyl cannot support the loudness that CDs can, these modern vinyl releases are much quieter than their CD counterparts. But they are often less compressed as well, and, in some instances, remastered in a way that is as dynamic as albums released in the 1960s and 1970s.

One of the most prominent examples of this is the recent Red Hot Chili Peppers album Stadium Arcadium, which was remastered for vinyl by mastering engineer Steve Hoffman with the intent of providing full dynamic sound. Hoffman is one of the few mastering engineers who have actually refused to take certain jobs because he's been asked to overcompress music. “[It happens] all the time,” says Hoffman. “At least once a week.”

But turning to vinyl for uncompressed music might not always provide salvation. In order to save the cost of remastering, record companies might simply take the compressed master of a song, reduce the overall loudness, and place it on vinyl. Katz warns, “You could take the Red Hot Chili Peppers recording and put it onto vinyl just as it came from CD, and it would sound just as fatiguing. [The only difference is] you'd just have to turn the volume control up because you couldn't get the peak level the same.”

Tearing Down the Wall

Audiophiles looking to the future for relief from overcompression see a cloudy picture. DVD-Audio and Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD) are two high-fidelity formats that were thought to be solutions to the loudness war. Both formats offer not only a greater dynamic range than CD but also higher sampling rates. This allows for frequencies higher than what most humans are capable of hearing to be encoded onto the medium, addressing a common complaint by people who prefer analog over digital because they claim they can hear these frequencies.

DVD-Audio uses PCM encoding that can support 24-bit, 192 kHz stereo sound (contrasted with the CD's 16 bit, 44.1 kHz) yielding 144 dB of dynamic range, 14 dB over the human threshold of pain. SACD, like the CD, was developed by Sony and Philips and uses a form of pulse-density modulation (PDM) encoding branded as Direct Stream Digital. Basically, instead of having 16-bit samples at a frequency of 44.1 kHz, it takes 1-bit samples at 64 times that rate (2.82 MHz). It has a dynamic range of about 120 dB. Additionally, both SACD and DVD-Audio are capable of high-fidelity five-channel surround sound.

Since their introduction in 2000, however, neither format has taken hold. An overwhelming majority of releases have been of the classical music genre, which has generally not been subject to overcompression to begin with. So even if audiophiles wanted to spend upward of $300 for a DVD-Audio or SACD player, chances are they won't be able to buy their favorite popular albums in either medium.

Since music has gone online, the possibility of having high-fidelity digital files remains, and formats such as FLAC are capable of supporting 24-bit audio. Slim Devices, a company acquired last year by Logitech, has created two products—the Squeezebox and the Transporter—that wirelessly stream digital files from a computer or the Internet to high-end stereo receivers. Both are capable of handling 24-bit audio, but the problem, says Sean Adams, former CEO of Slim Devices, is lack of content.

“If we're going to go to higher levels of sound quality, the real problem is actually getting the content out. Right now, unfortunately, the industry has kind of gone backward from CD quality. When MP3 came out, [it was called] CD quality when it really wasn't,” says Adams. “We've made some improvements since then with better [compression techniques], but it's really a function of people demanding better sound quality. That has to happen first before the [recording] industry's going to start producing it.”
Overcompression, however, seems to be one of the biggest obstacles to overcome. With music being compressed to have smaller and smaller dynamic ranges, the need for the next high-fidelity audio format vanishes. If record companies aren't making use of the full dynamic capability of CDs, then why bother moving to another format with even more potentially unused capability? And with the average consumer being either completely unaware of, or only subconsciously irritated by, the current state of overcompressed music, there is little incentive for sound quality to progress. Consequently, all the potential benefits of higher-quality audio—lifelike dynamic range, greater frequency response, and multichannel surround sound—remain unseen, even though the technology exists today. Audiophiles are forced to return to vinyl and analog recordings that should have been obsolete 20 years ago.

But there might still be hope for getting out of the loudness war. RMS (average) normalization algorithms, such as Replay Gain, have been implemented in many digital audio players and work to bring all songs in a digital library to the same average level. With Replay Gain enabled, songs originating from many CDs are processed and played back at a consistent average level of loudness. This helps listeners because they no longer have to adjust their volume each time they go from one album to another. And while such normalization cannot undo the compression of music (it amplifies or reduces the song in its entirety), it counteracts any efforts that were put in to make one song louder than another, essentially nullifying the loudness war altogether.

Many hope that widespread implementation of technologies like Replay Gain will make record companies see that further and further compression in the name of competitive loudness is a feckless task, and slowly but surely popular music will begin to return to a dynamic, less-compressed state. In fact, many digital audio players have caught on; Winamp uses Replay Gain, and iTunes has its own normalization option called Sound Check, which also works on iPods.

Whether the loudness war can end and give rise to the next generation of high-fidelity audio depends heavily on the attitudes of consumers. Unlike the CD and DVD video, there is no overwhelming industrial push toward the next level of sound quality. How songs and albums will sound will depend entirely on whether or not the listener actually cares about the intricacies of the music.

For a multimedia version of this article click here.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aug07/5429





Nevermind Baby: 'I Feel Like I'm the World's Biggest Porn Star'
NeutralMilk

Spencer Elden, who was photograhed in 1991 for the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind (and is now 17), told MTV: "Yeah, it's kind of creepy that that many people have seen me naked. I feel like I'm the world's biggest porn star." Yeah, for pederasts.

Elden goes to Eagle Rock High School in Eagle Rock, California and is, by all accounts, a pretty normal dude. "It's kind of cool, knowing that I've been on an album cover, but I feel pretty normal about it because growing up, I've always known I was the Nirvana baby. It never really struck me as like, 'Oh, shit — that's me on the cover.' It's always just been whatever for me. At the time, my parents didn't know who Nirvana was. No one really knew who they were. And then all of a sudden, it took off, and I just happened to be on the album cover." Did I say "normal"? I meant "self-righteous." Did you seriously just refer to yourself as "the Nirvana baby"?

I'll let him out-douche himself: "I have to use stupid pickup lines like, 'You want to see my penis ... again.'"

Emo.
http://www.shoutmouth.com/index.php/news/25018

[JackSpratts]

Hip-Hop's Down Beat
Ta-Nehisi Coates

When the political activist Al Sharpton pivoted from his war against bigmouth radio man Don Imus to a war on bad-mouth gangsta rap, the instinct among older music fans was to roll their eyes and yawn. Ten years ago, another activist, C. Delores Tucker, launched a very similar campaign to clean up rap music. She focused on Time Warner (parent of TIME), whose subsidiary Interscope was home to hard-core rappers Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur. In 1995 Tucker succeeded in forcing Time Warner to dump Interscope.

Her victory was Pyrrhic. Interscope flourished, launching artists like 50 Cent and Eminem and distributing the posthumous recordings of Shakur. And the genre exploded across the planet, with rappers emerging everywhere from Capetown to the banlieues of Paris. In the U.S. alone, sales reached $1.8 billion.

The lesson was Capitalism 101: rap music's market strength gave its artists permission to say what they pleased. And the rappers themselves exhibited an entrepreneurial bent unlike that of musicians before them. They understood the need to market and the benefits of line extensions. Theirs was capitalism with a beat.

Today that same market is telling rappers to please shut up. While music-industry sales have plummeted, no genre has fallen harder than rap. According to the music trade publication Billboard, rap sales have dropped 44% since 2000 and declined from 13% of all music sales to 10%. Artists who were once the tent poles at rap labels are posting disappointing numbers. Jay-Z's return album, Kingdom Come, for instance, sold a gaudy 680,000 units in its first week, according to Billboard. But by the second week, its sales had declined some 80%. This year rap sales are down 33% so far.

Longtime rap fans are doing the math and coming to the same conclusions as the music's voluminous critics. In February, the filmmaker Byron Hurt released Beyond Beats and Rhymes, a documentary notable not just for its hard critique but for the fact that most of the people doing the criticizing were not dowdy church ladies but members of the hip-hop generation who deplore rap's recent fixation on the sensational.

Both rappers and music execs are clamoring for solutions. Russell Simmons recently made a tepid call for rappers to self-censor the words nigger and bitch from their albums. But most insiders believe that a debate about profanity and misogyny obscures a much deeper problem: an artistic vacuum at major labels. "The music community has to get more creative," says Steve Rifkin, CEO of SRC Records. "We have to start betting on the new and the up-and-coming for us to grow as an industry. Right now, I don't think anyone is taking chances. It's a big-business culture."

It's the ultimate irony. Since the 1980s, when Run-DMC attracted sponsorship from Adidas, the rap community has aspired to be big business. By the '90s, those aspirations had become a reality. In a 1999 cover story, TIME reported that with 81 million CDs sold, rap was officially America's top-selling music genre. The boom produced enterprises like Roc-A-Fella, which straddled fashion, music and film and in 2001 was worth $300 million. It produced moguls like No Limit's Master P and Bad Boy's Puff Daddy, each of whom in 2001 made an appearance on FORTUNE's list of the richest 40 under 40. Along the way, the music influenced everything from advertising to fashion to sports.

The growth spurt was fueled by sensationalism. Tupac Shakur shot at police, was convicted of sexual abuse and ultimately was murdered in Las Vegas. But Shakur both alive and dead has also sold more than 20 million records. Death Row Records, which released much of Shakur's material, was run by ex-con Suge Knight and dogged by rumors of money laundering. But between 1992 and 1998, the label churned out 11 multiplatinum albums. Gangsta rappers reveled in their outlaw mystique, crafting ultra-violent tales of drive-bys and stick-ups designed to shock and enthrall their primary audience--white suburban teenagers. "Hip-hop seemed dangerous; it seemed angry," says Richard Nickels, who manages the hip-hop band the Roots. "Kurt Cobain killed himself, and rock seemed weak. But then you had these black guys who came out and had guns. It was exciting to white kids."

Hip-hop now faces a generation that takes gangsta rap as just another mundane marker in the cultural scenery. "It's collapsing because they can no longer fool the white kids," says Nickels. "There's only so much redundancy anyone can take."

Artists who never jumped on the gangsta bandwagon point the finger at the boardroom. They accuse major labels of strip-mining the music, playing up its sensationalist aspects for easy sales. "In rock you have metal, alternative, emo, soft rock, pop-rock, you have all these different strains," says Q-Tip, front man for the defunct A Tribe Called Quest. "And there are different strains of hip-hop, but record companies aren't set up to sell these different strains. They aren't set up to do anything more of a mature sort of hip-hop."

Of course, gangsta rap isn't a record-company invention. Indeed, hip-hop's two most celebrated icons, Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., embraced the sort of lyrical content that today has opened hip-hop to criticism. And the music companies, under assault from file-sharing and other alternative distribution channels, are hardly in a position to do R&D. "When I first signed to Tommy Boy, [the A&R person] would take us to different shows and to art museums," says Q-Tip. "There was real mentorship. Today that's largely absent, and we see the results in the music and in the aesthetic." That result is a stale product, defined by cable channels like BET, now owned by Viacom, which seems to consist primarily of gun worship and underdressed women.

During the past decade, record labels have outsourced the business of kingmaking to other artists. Established stars Dr. Dre and Eminem brought 50 Cent to Interscope. Jay-Z founded his own label, cut a distribution deal and began developing his own roster. But most established artists do little development. That leaves the possibility that hip-hop is following the same path that soul and R&B traveled when they descended into disco, which died quickly.

No longer able to peddle sensation, rap's moguls are switching tactics. Simmons, while still something of a hip-hop ambassador, is hawking a new self-help book. Master P, whose estimated worth was once $661 million, watched his label, No Limit, sink into bankruptcy. He recently announced the formation of Take a Stand Records, a label catering to "clean" hip-hop music. "Personally, I have profited millions of dollars through explicit rap lyrics," Master P stated on his website. "I can honestly say that I was once part of the problem, and now it's time to be part of the solution."

Chris Lighty, CEO of Violator Entertainment, whose clients include 50 Cent and Busta Rhymes, is looking at ways that record companies can work with artists in one area where rappers have been innovative: endorsement and branding. Whether it's 50 Cent owning a stake in Vitamin Water or Jay-Z doing a commercial for HP, most of these deals have been brokered by the artists' own camp. But Lighty sees in hip-hop a chance for record labels to generate more sponsorship and endorsements. "Record companies are going to have to make even better records and participate in brand extension. It's the only way they can survive," says Lighty. "We need to change the format, and this is the only way. 50 Cent is a brand. Jay-Z is a brand."

But the current hubbub over indecency poses a direct challenge to that brand strength, as the artist Akon recently discovered. While performing in Trinidad, Akon was videotaped dancing suggestively with a fan who was later revealed to be only 14. The video attracted the ire of conservatives like Bill O'Reilly. In the wake of the controversy, Akon's tour sponsor, Verizon, removed all ringtones featuring his work and retracted its sponsorship. The message was clear: Hip-hop needs a new and improved product. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...653639,00.html





50 Gets Frustrated With Early Leaks
FMQB

Album leaks seem to be inevitable these days, but early video leaks are not something you hear of every day. But it happened to 50 Cent when his video for the Robin Thicke collaboration "Follow My Lead" leaked onto the Internet last week, two or three months ahead of schedule. 50 was not happy about it, and the MC admitted to MTV News that his frustration sent him on a rampage in the G-Unit offices, tearing a plasma TV from the wall and tossing a cell phone through a window.

"I [got a] phone call and someone is telling me they seen the Robin Thicke video! It was a friend of mine, but he's from a different state," said 50. "Soon as [bootleggers] see something like that, they take the audio off the video, because they know it's not supposed to be out, [and leak the audio track online]. Then I start to get the phone calls, 'cause across the country the mix-show DJs start getting it. This record isn't even supposed to be out!" He added, "When is a video leaked? I never even heard of that before!"

50 said he feels like he's lost a hit record due to the leak of "Follow My Lead," and he's upset that he wasted time filming a video that's not going to be set up properly. "What bothers me is nothing is going according to the actual plan," he told MTV.

Meanwhile, he backed off his claim that he'll stop making solo records if Kanye West's new album sells more copies than his when they are both released on September 11. While he says West is a talented producer, 50 also said West is a "worker bee" while he's a "boss." 50 feels that West selling more would mean that "he did a better job than me on his album."

"Don't get lost in the hype," 50 concluded. "I got the right records, so we're gonna sit here and I'll see you next time. Maybe next time they can send me off to the pastures. But right now, I'm
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=457857





Rascal Flatts "Feels Good" About New CD

The clock on Rascal Flatts' Web site counts down the days, hours, minutes and even seconds until the September 25 release of the superstar band's fifth studio album, "Still Feels Good." There's no doubt the date is circled on many music industry calendars.

In a business in which album sales are off by double-digit percentages this year, more than a few people will be interested to see how Rascal Flatts will fare with its new Lyric Street release. After all, "Me and My Gang" scored the biggest first-week sales debut of 2006 when it moved 722,000 copies that April. Only four country acts have had bigger first weeks: Tim McGraw, Garth Brooks (twice), Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks.

The album was the second-best seller of 2006 behind "High School Musical," with 3.5 million copies sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Rascal Flatts is also one of the biggest success stories of the new century.

In addition to radio hits -- the band has seven No. 1s and 17 top 10s on Hot Country Songs, including its current "Take Me There," which is No. 7 this week -- it has performed exceptionally at retail. Its 2000 self-titled debut sold more than 2 million copies, and its last two albums have broken the 4 million plane. As a touring act, the band has played to increasingly larger crowds.

Getting Real

But the retail landscape has changed since the band's last release, and no act has had a sales week as big since. That fact is not lost on the band's Jay DeMarcus. "I'm a realist," he says. "I know that at some point there's got to be a ceiling somewhere. I remember thinking while we were all toasting each other for the last record, 'You know, this might be the last time anybody sells this many units out of the box, because of the digital world and the new world that we live in and how the Internet has affected record sales."'

Don't mistake DeMarcus' realism for defeatism. "I don't know if we'll do 722,000 units again in the first week ... but we're going to do everything we can to try and sell as many records as possible."

Lyric Street VP of sales, marketing and media Greg McCarn agrees. "There's a lot of questions as to what the top end is, given the deterioration of the marketplace, but whatever that can be, we'd like to repeat and have the biggest-debuting album of the year." If "Still Feels Good" doesn't perform as well as past records, it won't be for a lack of focus and effort. The band and producer Dann Huff dedicated a substantial amount of time to the new project.

"We got off the road for three months and just sat and banged it out in the studio," lead singer Gary LeVox says. "With the four previous albums, we'd come in off the road and knock some of it out for two or three days, and then go back on the road. This time we had more time to totally focus."

New Sounds

There's a well-known adage in Nashville that it all begins with a song. "The quality of songs are the best we've ever had -- lyrically and melodically," LeVox says.

Upon hearing the opening notes of I-want-to-get-to-know-you first single "Take Me There," there's no doubt it's a Rascal Flatts album. But the band offers new sounds as well. "We didn't want to reinvent the wheel, because if something's not broken we didn't feel the need to fix it," DeMarcus says. "But particularly when it comes to songs that the three of us write, we write whatever's in our heart at that moment. We've got a bluegrass tune that we've written for a bonus cut that is definitely different than anything we've done."

"Winner at a Losing Game" conjures '70s country-rock. The trio wrote it late one night on the bus after a show. "We kept it around and kept it around, and we kept playing it for Dann and Dann fell in love with it," DeMarcus says. "We wanted to try this different sort of thing with the production of it, and it ended up being one of our favorite things on the record."

Another departure is actor/singer Jamie Foxx's duet with LeVox on the soulful "She Goes All the Way." "We've never done a duet on one of our albums," LeVox says. "Jamie and I have been friends (for a long time), and so I called him up. He's always been one of my favorite singers -- he got two scoops of talent when they were dishing it out."

The band also recorded five bonus cuts, including the Beatles hit "Revolution," which appeared on the "Evan Almighty" soundtrack. "When Universal Pictures brought it to us, we thought, 'Oh, geez, the Beatles?"' LeVox recalls. "'You mean like the actual Beatles?' But you know, I think we did a good job of marrying us and the original. I actually sang through the same thing that John Lennon sang through -- it's called a Cooper tuner. It's like a hose-in-a-box kind of deal."

Overseeing the process was producer Huff (Faith Hill, Keith Urban), who worked with the trio on "Me and My Gang."

"Dann has been able to take us to another place and to better all three of us individually, not just as musicians, but as singers," the band's Joe Don Rooney says. "He's two things -- completely passionate and overly patient. With those two ingredients in a producer, that's all you need."
http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/..._id=1003627248





Spitzer Signs Law Protecting Artists From Impersonators
FMQB

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has signed legislation protecting musicians from impersonators advertising themselves falsely. The Truth in Music Advertising Law was inspired by acts such as The Platters and The Coasters, who have had other groups falsely advertise themselves using their names, songs and routines.

The new law authorizes the Attorney General to protect the original artists' rights and prohibit "those who copy their style and performances through false representations such as invoking similar names, billings and promotion of the original artists by another performer."

"Music artists work for years to build names for themselves in the entertainment industry," said Governor Spitzer. "We should not allow others to impersonate their work and profit from that deception."

The law is nicknamed "the Bowzer Bill," because it was inspired by Jon "Bowzer" Bauman of Sha Na Na, who became involved in advocating the legislation around the country.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=462240





World's Largest Music Retailer Ditches DRM, not Censorship
Nate Anderson

Like a frog slowly turning into a princess, Wal-Mart's music download store has grown far more attractive now that it offers 256kbps unrestricted MP3 tracks from both EMI and Universal. It won't win over fans who like the other features of iTunes, but it can finally compete with Apple's media store for at least the value segment of the music download market.

Universal threatens contract shake-up with Apple, others may follow

DRM isn't yet dead in the music business, but it has a nasty, hacking cough. Wal-Mart is the latest company to ditch the DRM in an attempt to crack the coveted iPod market, which for years has been out of reach. The company announced this morning that it has embraced high-bitrate MP3s from Universal and EMI (iTunes only has DRM-free files from EMI, not from Universal), and it promises to continually expand its offerings.

Wal-Mart has actually run a download store for years, selling DRM-encumbered WMA files at $0.88 a pop. They couldn't play on either the iPod or the Zune, but at least they were cheap!

Now that the DRM shackles are loosening, Wal-Mart can offer a store with at least a chance of attracting customers. As a sign of how badly Wal-Mart want to attract iPod users, the music store doesn't list tracks as being DRM-free, but as being ready to "play on the iPod."

Because neither Warner nor Sony BMG are yet licensing their catalogs without DRM, many of the tracks at the store are still DRM-encumbered WMA files—it's a confusing situation and a huge drawback if the company wants iPod users to shop there. Most users don't think in terms of what record label their favorite artists appear on, so finding music for download can be a hit-and-miss affair. Still, there's not much that Wal-Mart can do except try to compete on price with its current selection of tracks and stress the fact that it has MP3s from Universal as well.

And pricing is competitive. The 256kbps MP3 tracks are available for $.94 apiece, which compares well with iTunes' $1.29 for 256kbps AAC files (though AAC is a more modern compression scheme). Wal-Mart's store can be accessed either through the browser or through Windows Media Player (version 9 and later); oddly, the browser-based store cannot be accessed when using Linux or Mac.

In a statement sent to Ars, Maura Corbett of the Digital Freedom Campaign praised the move. "Wal-Mart has become the world's largest retailer by putting their customers first and offering the products they want; today they took that philosophy digital," she said.

Common is commonly edited

It's a bit hard to believe that all the customers who shop at the world's largest retailer want censored versions of music, though, but that's what they get. Only edited versions of albums with parental advisories are available, just as they are in Wal-Mart's offline stores. This isn't a new policy; Wal-Mart's online music store has carried only edited versions for years, but it's worth pointing out to potential new users tempted by the lower prices and lack of DRM.

The policy is in contrast to iTunes, which offers both versions for sale and allows users to choose which version they wish to purchase. Wal-Mart has already made the decision for you, though, as part of its corporate policy, and it hits hard in the rap section of the site: six of the top ten rap and hip-hop albums have been edited.

Despite its best efforts, though, Wal-Mart warns users that "the use of the Edited notice does not necessarily mean that all content that all listeners might find objectionable has been removed from the recording." We'll have to wait and see whether the company's practice of selling only edited music will hamper its online efforts.

Universal thinks outside the gBox

DRM-free is the new black, apparently, and everyone is wearing it. Universal, which is snubbing Apple with its own restricted tracks, has instead agreed to an interesting marketing plan with new music site gBox. TechCrunch has a nice writeup of the deal, which will see Universal purchasing Google AdWords for its artists. Those AdWords ads will then point to gBox.

Rather than encouraging people to buy music for themselves, gBox hopes to popularize the idea of buying tracks and whole albums as gifts for friends. People create wish lists at the site, friends purchase tracks from those wish lists, and the list creator can then log in and download the tracks. Sounds like a neat idea, as most current stores make it difficult to buy digital content for others. Again, although it's browser-based, gBox only works on Windows due to a download plugin it uses.

We haven't yet entered the DRM-free paradise, but at least it's visible atop a distant hill. Hopefully, it's caused by something in the Perrier that all these executives are drinking and will soon spread to the movie business, which would do well to stop crippling movie download services with DRM and preventing burns to DVD. Removing AACS and its invasive demands on hardware and PC makers would also be great, but we'll keep that one in the "Winged Pigs" file for now.

After years of widespread piracy and thousands of deeply unpopular lawsuits, the music business is at least considering the idea that since they aren't going to thwart determined pirates, they might as well make it easy and cheap for consumers to make legal purchases. Hassling those who want to give you their money was never a solid business strategy, and the faster it fades away, the better.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ensorship.html





From February

YouTube Stars Don't Always Welcome Record Deals
Antony Bruno

The Dutch village of Oosterbeck is not a very big place -- population 31,944. So it must have been quite a shock when a local hotel received a phone call from Atlantic Records looking for assistance in tracking down an 18-year-old resident named Esmee Denters.

The label representative had the astonished hotel clerk provide phone numbers for every Denters listing in the local phone book and then called each one until he reached Esmee's very surprised mom.

That call was just one of many Denters has received from artist and repertoire (A&R) reps during the last five months to discuss a potential recording contract.

Never heard of her? Well, hundreds of thousands of YouTube members have. The doe-eyed girl-next-door with a soulful voice and shy smile has become a bona fide Internet sensation. She's posted videos of herself singing Beyonce, Monica and Natalie Imbruglia covers -- using nothing but a karaoke machine and her sister's low-tech webcam -- that have been streamed almost 8 million times. Nearly 20,000 fans have subscribed to her YouTube channel to receive automatic updates, with about 200 added a day, putting her at No. 22 on the all-time most-popular list.

Denters has since traveled to the United States and met a veritable who's who of the music industry's leading executives, from Jason Flom to Antonio "L.A." Reid to Tommy Motolla. She has recorded demo tracks with Kelly Rowland and is fielding TV deals with Sony Pictures Entertainment.

GOING IT ALONE

The obvious logical next step, then, is a record label deal, right? Not so fast.

"We may decide not to get together with a label," Denters said via phone, waiting for a flight from Los Angeles to New York for another round of meetings and recording sessions. "We may try new stuff. I've already accomplished so much on my own, we'd like to see what we can do with that."

Artists like Denters, emerging from the realm of user-generated media, have learned to tap the viral power of the Internet to do what acts a generation ago could only dream of -- build a grassroots following numbering in the thousands at very little cost or effort.

But being talented and building a fan base is only part of the equation. Artists who decide to go it alone must bear the full financial weight of the various aspects of a music career -- recording and production fees, distribution costs, marketing and promotion expenses and more.

These costs are falling in the digital age. Recording and production fees can be extraordinarily cheap, depending on the level of sophistication desired. Tech-savvy artists can further cut costs with a good laptop and ProTools.

Distribution can be done digitally through such firms as the Orchard or INgrooves, which take a flat percentage of each sale for their efforts. Physical sales can be handled by CD Baby at $4 a pop. There are a gaggle of online services designed to host commerce and promotional sites for unsigned acts as part of a "music social network," most notably PureVolume and Sellaband.com. Companies like Musictoday can serve as a one-stop shop for artists for Web site hosting and design, digital downloads, concert ticket sales, CD replication, fan club management, and merchandise sales and fulfillment.

For licensing, digital services like Rumblefish, PumpAudio and even some digital distribution firms like the Orchard promote their clients' work to advertising firms and film producers and charge only a percentage of the licensing fee in return. And since they've taken no recoupable advance, these artists get to keep all the proceeds.

PROMOTIONAL POWER

Yet the reality is that no act has carved out a lucrative career doing all this on its own. Many point to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah as a DIY success story. And while it's true that the band declined to sign to a label for either its 2005 self-titled debut or its sophomore album, "Some Loud Thunder," released January 30, the band did secure major-label-affiliated distribution through the Alternative Distribution Alliance. After capitalizing on blog buzz the first time around and selling more than 125,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the band has sold only 29,000 copies of its follow-up so far.

The hard part for DIY bands is mass retail and radio promotion, an area where record labels still hold tremendous sway.

"There are relationships and leverage that labels have with retail and radio placement," says Ryan Leslie, a producer, manager, artist and head of new-media marketing firm NextSelection. The company was behind the MySpace marketing of newcomer Cassie and is now working with another YouTube star, Mia Rose. Leslie also brought Denters to the United States for her initial round of industry meetings. "The majority of CDs is bought in the major chains, (and) radio is still one of the greatest outlets to discover music," he says.

Denter's producer/manager, Billy Mann, says that label meetings so far have been thought-provoking. "It's been really interesting hearing their point of view on how they would harness all this YouTube activity that she'd created on her own," says Mann, who has written hit songs for Pink and Jessica Simpson. "How does the music business then link arms with that and help move it forward?"

While Mann ponders such questions, labels are busy trying to decide just how much value to place on the kind of fan base that Denters has accrued. A&R reps are unsure exactly how metrics like 20,000 YouTube subscribers or MySpace friends relate to potential customers.

"Strong online popularity doesn't necessarily translate to real sales," says Steve Yegelwel, senior VP of A&R at Columbia Records.

Yegelwel cites OK Go to support his point. The act's famous "treadmill" video for the single "Here It Goes Again" was an Internet viral smash, viewed more than 1 million times on Yahoo Music and more than 11 million times on YouTube. But the album "Oh No" has sold slightly more than 200,000 copies, and the single was downloaded a little more than 450,000 times. Many of those sales came after the song was added to more traditional promotional outlets such as MTV.

KEYSTROKE OF SUPPORT

In the past, an artist's potential could be measured by how many people attended their shows or bought their CDs. But with the convenience factor of the Internet, it's easy to sign up to support the artist without the two points of sacrifice used to judge true attachment -- time and money.

"They don't have to wait in the cold for a ticket," says Jordy Trachtenberg, vice president of content acquisition and A&R for the Orchard and former owner of indie label Gammon Records. "They're just sitting in their bedroom. The biggest effort is their finger pressing down."

Yegelwel adds: "Everybody wishes there was some formula you could just plug in and determine whether there's more of a likelihood that that band will do well."

MySpace hopes to address that concern by giving artists the ability to sell music directly from their MySpace profiles or through the profiles of their fans, called the MyStore. This will give A&R reps a more tangible metric by which to judge an artist -- downloads sold, rather than streams or friends.

But since MySpace began offering the service as a "soft launch" in December, few artists have adopted it. Among the top 20 unsigned acts on MySpace, none have a MyStore module on their profile page. SnoCap, the company that operates the service, in late January lowered its per-track commission from 45 cents to 39 cents to spur more adoption.

Denters, for one, has her fans -- both virtual and real. Two YouTube fans, who have posted multiple videos of themselves singing along to her songs, took the time and effort to meet her at the airport in New York when she arrived in the United States in early February. Despite having no idea what flight she was on, they showed up at John F. Kennedy International Airport with "Welcome Esmee" signs, waiting as passengers from virtually every flight from Europe arrived until Denters appeared.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...18918320070226

In June Esmee Denters walked down the isle -- with Justin Timberlake’s Tennman label, a unit of Vivendi/Universal – Jack.





Emerging Bands Expand Global Digital Reach With NFT Technology
Press Release

Emerging unsigned bands with homepages on MySpace are always looking for creative ways to reach more fans and at the same time gain the attention of record labels. Locally based band Without Tomorrow accomplished both with a live Internet broadcast performance from The Boardwalk in Orangevale, CA. "We just recently reached over a million song plays on our MySpace page and thought that it would be great to celebrate that milestone with a free live concert broadcast over the internet", said Jeremy Unruh, the bands co-founder and drummer, "But until we found NFT, the bandwidth cost to reach all our fans was way too much." Made possible by Network Foundation Technologies (NFT) patented software, the group was able to leverage off their huge MySpace fan base, and interact live with their massive fan base all over the world. The concert was enjoyed by viewers from across the country.

Network Foundation Technologies has broadcast similar events for Stone Sour (Roadrunner Records), and for former Limp Bizkit guitarist Wes Borland’s new project Black Light Burns (AMG), in partnership with FMQB.

Fred Deane CEO, FMQB, remarked, "We believe NFT technology opens up a whole new era of opportunities for the entire spectrum of the music business, particularly for emerging artists." Marcus Morton, President of Network Foundation Technologies added, "This is the first time that an up and coming band has been able to reach beyond the pages of MySpace and give a live worldwide concert to all their fans free of charge, and we are delighted to have been able to make this broadcast possible. We believe this opens up incredible opportunities for other MySpace bands to expand their fan base."

In March 2007, FMQB and Network Foundation Technologies (NFT) formed a partnership to expand the online presence of music and radio industry clients via live broadcasts of industry and artist events, as well as customized content. Network Foundation Technologies is a name that is quickly becoming synonymous with the online broadcasting of large, live events to world-wide audiences. The company’s patented technology used in its NiFTy Online Broadcasting product, is the most efficient and successful method for enabling distributed video broadcasting over the Internet. For more information please visit www.NiFTy-tv.com.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=457224





Ken Sharp Touts The Return of The Raspberries

SWEETER THAN EVER… THE RASPBERRIES RETURN…

More than three decades since they released their last record, 1974’s acclaimed Starting Over (voted by Rolling Stone as one of the best albums of the year), Cleveland’s seminal power pop titans The Raspberries return with a terrific new CD, Raspberries Live On Sunset Strip (Rykodisc). Recorded live at L.A.’s House Of Blues in October of 2005, the CD is available in two configurations: a 13-track greatest hits collection and 21-song set with bonus DVD containing five cuts filmed at the L.A. show - “I Wanna Be With You,” “Tonight,” “Ecstasy,” "Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)” and "Go All The Way.” Raspberries Live On Sunset Strip delivers on all fronts. It’s a marvelous primer of timeless power pop, picture-perfect songs boasting sweeping melodies, lush harmonies, and fiery musicianship.

Produced by Eric Carmen and Mark Linett, renowned for his work on Brian Wilson’s Grammy nominated Smile album, Live On Sunset Strip is crammed with all the essential Raspberries gems - “Go All The Way,” "I Wanna Be With You,” “Tonight,” “Ecstasy,” “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record),” “If You Change Your Mind,” “Let’s Pretend,” “Nobody Knows,” “Last Dance,” “Hard To Get Over a Heartbreak,” “Party’s Over,” “Should I Wait,” “I Can Remember” and countless others. What’s most impressive about the CD is how good these songs sound 30 years on. Whether tackling the Small Faces fueled incendiary pop/rock aggression of “Tonight”, country-rock stylings of “Should I Wait” and “Last Dance” or more complex, orchestrated fare like “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)” or “I Can Remember,” the band nails it. Perhaps even more surprisingly, many of these live reworkings, benefiting from current technology and the band’s seasoned musicianship, sound more full-bodied and explosive than the original Capitol recordings. And that’s no mean feat.

Showcasing liner notes penned by long-time fan Bruce Springsteen who enthuses, “Dismissed at the time of their chart dominance for having 'hits' (Fools!), they are THE great underrated power pop masters." the music legend firepower doesn’t stop there. Inside the booklet is a 1974 photo of fellow fan John Lennon proudly wearing a Raspberries sweatshirt. In the summer of 1974, while recording their final album at New York’s Record Plant, the group shared the studio with Lennon who was working in an adjacent studio producing Harry Nilsson’s Pussycats. Lennon popped into a few sessions and loved what he heard.

Embarking on a 10-date reunion trek in 2004-2005, the original lineup of the Raspberries - lead singer/ guitarist/ keyboardist Eric Carmen, lead guitarist Wally Bryson, bassist Dave Smalley and drummer Jim Bonfanti - wowed audiences by sounding better than ever.

For this listener, perhaps the highlight of the live set is the group’s spectacular rendition of “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record),” a song selected by Rolling Stone as one of the top 100 singles of all time. Lauded in concert by Springsteen as “one of the best pop symphonies you’ll ever hear,” the live version of this classic is breathtaking; from the intricate classical motifs that grace the song’s beginning to the uncanny AM radio speaker sound effect that seamlessly merges into the song’s climactic and cinematic “Wall Of Sound” kitchen-sink ending, it’s an aural knockout. Also noteworthy is the band's foray into the harder rock echelon of their catalog. "Tonight" and "Ecstacy" both sizzle with incandescent energy and DNA altering kinetic power. Carmen introduces another live powerhouse, "I Don't Know What I Want" as "my love letter to the Who" and he ain't kiddin'. With an affectionate tip of the hat to Who signature classics "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "I'm A Boy," "I Don't Know What I Want" proves the Raspberries could rock with the best of them. Opening with the sound of a boxing bell, Carmen's spectacular vocal and Bryson's slammin' guitar fireworks dropkick this track into aural heaven.

Rounding up such heavyweight fans as Elton John, Tom Petty, Paul Stanley of KISS, The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, Cheap Trick, Nirvana, Jon Bon Jovi, Motley Crue and others, the Raspberries are also cited as a pivotal influence on contemporary acts like Fountains of Wayne and Rooney. Lead guitarist Bryson touches on the band’s appeal to a younger generation, saying, “It’s a great feeling to know that young people are into our music. While doing their research and their homework they’ve somehow hit upon us. They find us melodic and musically valid and that’s really great to know."

Hardcore fans may also want to investigate a special edition package made available exclusively through the group’s Web site, www.raspberriesonline.com. The limited edition includes a DVD of the full 21-song show filmed by Jim Bullotta and Kent Hagen, the pre-concert video, a documentary tracing the reunion packed with backstage, soundcheck and rehearsal footage, fan testimonials, plus a live clip of “I Wanna Be With You,” the first song performed at the group’s kickoff reunion show at Cleveland’s House Of Blues taped in November 2004. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Audio of a 1973 Armed Forces Network live radio broadcast in Frankfurt, Germany including a spirited run through of Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven" and unreleased instrumental track, "Raspberry Jam," vintage unreleased demos (“Please Let Me Home Back Home” and “Oh Tonight),” '70s era home movies of the group in the States and Europe, including footage of the band in the studio recording their 1973 album, Side 3, unseen interviews taped for the band’s VH1 “Hanging with Raspberries” TV special and much more make this an essential purchase for any self-respecting music fan.

As for any new Raspberries music, Bonfanti reveals, “I’d like us to go back into the studio. It would be so much fun to do that. I’m always being asked, ‘What about the future?’ Who knows? This thing seems to have a mind of its own. In a funny sense it seems to be taking us where it wants to take us and we almost have no say in it now.”
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=115421





Outrageous Farce From R. Kelly: He’s In on the Joke, Right?
Kelefa Sanneh

What is there to say, really, about a multipart R&B soap opera cum sex farce starring an expanding cast of actors and actresses, all lip-syncing to the increasingly kaleidoscopic story-songs of a pop star once known for slow jams and “I Believe I Can Fly”?

Plenty, it seems. Because people have been talking about R. Kelly’s unprecedented audiovisual opus, “Trapped in the Closet,” ever since its premiere, two summers ago. A 5-part single mushroomed into a 12-part DVD, and in retrospect, his timing looks perfect. The DVD arrived in late 2005, just as YouTube was taking off, and “Trapped” became a viral hit. It was the kind of pop spectacle you had to see to believe; thanks to the online video explosion you could.

Back then, Mr. Kelly promised that “Trapped” would return, and now it has: the IFC channel’s Web site has been showing a new episode every day, leading up to tomorrow’s DVD release of “Trapped in the Closet: Chapters 13-22” (Jive). Mr. Kelly’s outlandish achievement seems to inspire overstatement, especially online. The Web site for New York magazine (nymag.com) proclaimed this “the cultural event of the year,” while one fairly typical commenter at ifc.com called it “a perfect storm of the worst artistry ever.”

No doubt Mr. Kelly is enjoying all the attention. He seems drawn to the idea of being an old-fashioned all-around entertainer, and he has recently taken to performing beneath a lit-up sign that reads, “R. Kelly as Mr. Show Biz.” He already stands as one of the last true giants in the twinned worlds of R&B and hip-hop, and now he’s relishing the idea of branching out into IFC territory. (He told Variety he “thought of ‘Trapped’ as an independent film.”) Mr. Kelly seems giddier than ever.

And yet there is something slightly unnerving about the kind of attention “Trapped in the Closet” has received. Many of its biggest fans seem to think they’re laughing at Mr. Kelly, not with him, as if the whole thing were some sort of glorious, terrible mistake; as if the far-fetched plot turns (most infamously, the policeman cuckolded by the “midget” hiding beneath the sink) and cliffhanger endings (“Oh my God, a rubber!”) were the work of someone who set out to make a traditional musical and failed. It’s hard to think of a work that has inspired more parodies, from Weird Al to Jimmy Kimmel, from sketch comedy to cabaret. Why do so many people think the funniest pop star on the planet is the butt of the joke when he is so obviously in on it?

Maybe it comes with the territory. R&B lovermen have long been parodied as comically earnest lotharios, blissfully unaware of how ridiculous they sound. But Mr. Kelly long ago realized that a subtle joke, or an unsubtle one, can make a slow jam feel more intimate and therefore more effective. No doubt more than a few couples have used “Feelin on Yo Booty” as mood music, chuckling contentedly when the chorus suddenly morphs into a yodeling demonstration.

Listen closely, and you can hear Mr. Kelly chuckling too. Ever since the appearance in 2002 of a video that the police say shows him with an under-age girl, his jokes have grown bigger and sillier. Maybe that’s an expression of his relief at the way his career has rebounded from scandal. Or maybe it’s an expression of his continuing anxiety about his forthcoming trial on charges of child pornography. (It is scheduled to start Sept. 17 in Chicago.) Or maybe it’s just a phase.

If it is a phase, it’s an extraordinarily entertaining one. Mr. Kelly’s obsession with comedy is also an obsession with plot and narrative. And his most recent album, “Double Up,” contains elegant theatrical songs like “Same Girl,” the hit Usher duet about a two-timing woman; “Best Friend,” a prison drama; and “Real Talk,” a defensive boyfriend’s bilious rant. In this last song, Mr. Kelly takes an absurd three-word phrase — “Is you tweakin’?” — and makes it funny, scary, believable and diabolically catchy. “Trapped in the Closet” may be an anomaly, but it’s no fluke.

Some “Trapped” fans may think they’re flattering Mr. Kelly by praising his alleged insanity or naïveté, but that’s the kind of praise that can easily sound like condescension, especially when directed (as it often is) at African-American performers. And some IFC viewers might not know that Mr. Kelly is deploying some of the same dramatic devices you can find in the world of urban theater, sometimes affectionately or derisively called the chitlin circuit.” Many of his stock characters (the pastor with a secret, the nosy neighbors, the semireformed ex-con, the stuttering pimp) and melodramatic revelations would be at home in a play by Tyler Perry, Shelly Garrett, Angela Barrow-Dunlap or David E. Talbert.

As “Trapped” spirals out from its soap opera beginnings, the action and the songwriting get looser, in ways good and bad. There are some great and cheerfully extraneous scenes in a church, when the familiar backing track gives way to comic gospel. Mr. Kelly adopts more roles, and in Chapter 15 he gets an unlikely co-star: the indie-rock hero Will Oldham, on screen for only a few seconds. And although “Trapped” isn’t tuneless, exactly, Mr. Kelly generally recycles the same few tunes, and sometimes chooses exposition over meter.

In the new chapters, as in the old ones, there are some marvelous set pieces: scenes full of carefully choreographed cross-talk, an echo of the famous closet scene from Chapter 1, an oddly pretty evocation of poor cellphone reception (“Static-in’,” he explains, sotto voce), an occasional dash of falsetto sweetness. There are missteps too, especially an overlong Mafia scene. You can also feel Mr. Kelly drift further from the tension and claustrophobia that characterized the early episodes.

In the beginning “Trapped” was rooted in the first-person narration of Mr. Kelly as Sylvester: “7 o’clock in the morning, and rays from the sun wakes me.” By Chapter 8 Mr. Kelly had acquired a second role as the cigar-smoking narrator, broadening the story’s scope (we could see things Sylvester didn’t) but slightly undermining its intensity. And by Chapter 10 Sylvester’s speech had gone third person: “Sylvester said,” instead of “I said.” That was when the plot got more farcical; instead of inhabiting Sylvester, Mr. Kelly was toying with him or making him a bystander. One odd thing about the new chapters is that nothing much happens to Sylvester.

At least until near the end. No one likes a spoiler, but suffice it to say that Mr. Kelly finds a clever way to bring the story back to its sex-and-deception roots, culminating in a mesmerizing song composed of phone-call fragments. It’s eerie and funny, a reminder that Mr. Kelly can make great music more or less whenever he feels like it. And, just when you thought this was all an elaborate joke, the ending is surprisingly sad. Surely Chapter 23, whenever it comes, will bring — well, it would be foolish to guess. But here’s hoping Mr. Kelly’s dramatic phase isn’t over yet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/ar...ic/20trap.html





Dylan Movie to Open Like a Rolling Premiere
John Anderson

Imagine you’re a film distributor, handling an experimental movie by one of the country’s most iconoclastic directors. The subject is an enigmatic occasional recluse who is being portrayed by four actors, an actress and a 13-year-old boy. Where do you open that film?

If you’re very lucky, you get to book it at Film Forum, perhaps the most exclusive art-house cinema in Manhattan.

Now what do you do with a movie that stars Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Christian Bale and Heath Ledger; whose subject is Bob Dylan; and whose director is the Oscar-nominated Todd Haynes?

Same answer. Same film. Which is what’s making the planned Nov. 21 release of “I’m Not There,” Mr. Haynes’s rumination on Mr. Dylan’s lives and times, something of a curiosity.

In addition to Film Forum, the film’s distributor, the Weinstein Company, will be opening the movie in just three other theaters, one more in New York and two in Los Angeles, giving it the kind of debut that might be afforded a Mexican documentary. Even “Velvet Goldmine” — the previous Weinstein-Haynes collaboration, about the British glam-rock scene of the 1970s, which starred an unknown Jonathan Rhys Meyers — began in 85 theaters in 1998.

But Harvey Weinstein, the company’s co-chairman, said the slow rollout was the best way to nurture an unconventional, nonlinear movie like “I’m Not There,” in which the above-mentioned stars play Mr. Dylan at particular stages of his life. Shot in styles that correspond to each Dylan epoch, “I’m Not There” sometimes looks like “A Hard Day’s Night,” elsewhere like “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” with Mr. Dylan’s life being imbued with mythic American qualities.

“With a movie like this you have to build it,” said Mr. Weinstein, who founded the company with his brother, Bob, two years ago after an acrimonious split from the Walt Disney Company saw them relinquish control of Miramax. “I don’t think you can go out on 500 screens. The reason for Film Forum is you go where the best word of mouth is on the movie. I like the movie; I think it’s adventurous. The audience is going to have to work — work in a good way.”

Mr. Weinstein said that a similar approach had worked for two of Miramax’s biggest successes. “Good Will Hunting” opened in New York and Los Angeles and eventually brought in nearly $140 million at the domestic box office, while “Chicago” began the same way and grossed $170 million. Those films had larger openings, however: “Good Will Hunting” (with the rising stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) in 7 theaters, “Chicago” in 77.

“I’m not saying this movie’s going to come anywhere near those,” Mr. Weinstein said, “but I have a tendency to start small and go big. If we threw this movie out wide, I don’t know what it would do. I think we have to start somewhere.”

The “somewhere” means Film Forum, “a real cathedral of cinema” according to Mr. Haynes’s longtime producer, Christine Vachon, which has presented the premieres of work by Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Hal Hartley, Claude Chabrol, Spike Lee and Lars von Trier, among many others. But rarely does it get star-laden films like “I’m Not There.” And for it to agree to have another theater share a New York premiere is a rare move.

“We did it with ‘Saraband,’ ” said Karen Cooper, Film Forum’s director, referring to Mr. Bergman’s last American release. “Lincoln Plaza opened it the same day, and I don’t think either of us were happy. I thought the same crowd that lined up to see ‘Scenes From a Marriage’ would want to see ‘Scenes From a Divorce.’ I was wrong.”

Ms. Cooper said that she was offered shared openings all the time and regularly turned them down. But she said that she and Mike Maggiore, Film Forum’s programmer and publicist, decided the Haynes film was so remarkable that they would not mind sharing it with Lincoln Plaza. In Los Angeles, “I’m Not There” will open at the Westside Pavilion and ArcLight Cinemas.

Conventional movie-business wisdom says that if a film fails to catch fire at its opening theater, it will not move much farther. But Mr. Weinstein said there was “not a chance” he would not take this film into more theaters and cities, regardless of its fate on the coasts. “I’m going to play every major city in the United States with this movie,” he said. “I’ll play 100 cities, at least.”

He said he also planned to position Ms. Blanchett, who plays Mr. Dylan during his “Blonde on Blonde” phase, for an Oscar. (Mr. Bale corresponds to “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” Mr. Ledger to “John Wesley Harding.”)

“I may be jumping the gun,” Mr. Weinstein said, “but if Cate Blanchett doesn’t get nominated, I’ll shoot myself.”

Films considered Oscar-worthy are released in various ways. Last year, Pedro Almodóvar’s “Volver” and its star, Penélope Cruz, were seen as possible contenders, but Sony Pictures Classics opened the film in only six theaters. (It ultimately grossed close to $13 million.) Another nominee-to-be, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” opened on 17 screens. It has made approximately $37 million. Both those films, however, were in Spanish, and foreign-language films are a hard sell to the American moviegoer.

“I’m Not There,” which will play at film festivals in Venice, Toronto and New York, is Mr. Haynes’s first movie since “Far From Heaven,” his critically acclaimed 2002 homage to the melodramas of Douglas Sirk. The film, which has Mr. Dylan’s blessing, is also, according to Ms. Vachon, his most expensive film, although she declined to divulge the amount. (“Far From Heaven” cost $13.5 million, according to boxofficemojo.com.)

Though Mr. Haynes, who was unavailable for this article, has never had a major commercial success except for “Far From Heaven,” he has never suffered a lack of critical acclaim. His “Poison,” for example, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991, and “Far From Heaven” received four Academy Award nominations, including one for its star, Julianne Moore. But Mr. Weinstein said the decision to pick up “I’m Not There” was not purely about making money but about an obligation to have important movies distributed.

“That’s the story of my life,” he said. “That’s exactly what I believe in. ‘I’m Not There’ and some of the tougher stuff — it’s not going to be ‘The Nanny Diaries,’ you know. But I’ve been very fortunate that what I’ve believed in has worked, and even when it doesn’t work, we make money in other areas to cover that. It is my responsibility and, more importantly, it’s my passion.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/movies/21dyla.html





A Return to That Drop-Dead Year 1960
Ruth La Ferla



I’M from Bay Ridge. We have manners,” Peggy, the pony-tailed secretary, scolds the colleague who has just propositioned her in “Mad Men,” the new drama on the cable channel AMC. Do Peggy’s colleagues at Sterling Cooper, the turbo-powered advertising agency where she works, fall a little short in that department?

No matter. They have style.

The “girls” in the steno pool, the nakedly striving junior executives, the smooth-talking bosses and their stay-at-home wives have done their best to acquire the veneer of graceful gestures that stand in for real courtesy. Their mannerisms, and their sleek appurtenances, come with the turf: the steel-and-glass landscape of Madison Avenue in 1960, where burled wood and frosted-glass-panel interiors form a sumptuous backdrop against which the players stride about in sheaths and glen plaid suits.

Taking it all in, viewers may find themselves hooked, not just on the show’s artfully shaded characterizations and plot twists, but on its insistent attention to detail. To a style aficionado, “Mad Men” is that rare TV show in which an ashtray, a lipstick or an aerosol tin gets star treatment, and is a protagonist in its own right.

Why not? “The story is told in the details, and those details have their own life,” said Matthew Weiner, who conceived and wrote the series. Spiffed up by amber lighting, the camera lingering almost lewdly on a whiskey tumbler, a gilded compact or the polished surface of a conference table, those details reflect the growing materialism of the Eisenhower years.

Jaeger-LeCoultre watches, Delman pumps and Buick sedans are as essential to the action as a glistening smile or arched brow — projections of the characters’ idealized selves. His hair slicked with Brylcreem and flashing cuff links, Don Draper, Sterling Cooper’s brooding creative director, can imagine himself an impenetrably suave Lothario. In her scarlet-lined kimono, Midge, his mistress, can convince herself that she is a faintly louche, spirited adventuress. Floating into a party, Betty, his wife, can play the suburban princess in crinolines and pearls.

That fixation on objects, surfaces and status signifiers also holds up a mirror to the fetishistic obsessions of the present day. It would hardly seem alien to an aspiring red-carpet queen swinging an outsize Balenciaga tote, or to an ambitious young Manhattan trader girded for battle in a Hugo Boss suit.

Or, for that matter, to a fashion addict, who would surely note that the show’s aura of pulled-together formality is in step with the look of the runways, which returned this fall to mannerly 1950s-inflected tailoring.

From a modern vantage, it is easy to forget that 1960 was a watershed. An election loomed, the Pill became widely available, and there dawned a conviction, one later promoted by Andy Warhol and his ilk, that image trumps content, that style and substance may in fact be all but interchangeable.

The seeds of that notion were planted during the newly prosperous postwar years. Happiness then was not some hard-won spiritual attainment. In Don’s glib assessment, it was rather “the smell of a new car ... freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams: ‘Whatever you’re doing, is O.K. You are O.K.’ ”

In such a climate, a presidential candidate could turn unembarrassed to an agency like Sterling Cooper to rev up his image. Who knew better than Madison Avenue’s tastemakers that putting him across was largely a matter of packaging? As Don is told by Roger, his mentor: “Consider the product: He’s young, handsome, a Navy hero.

“Honestly, it shouldn’t be too difficult to convince America that Nixon is a winner.”

Like Nixon’s infamous five o’clock shadow, a dusting of grit mars the otherwise sleek surfaces of “Mad Men.” That is by design, said Mr. Weiner, a former writer and producer of “The Sopranos.” Not a single prop is an afterthought, he said. “The metal fixture that clasps like a clothespin onto the guest towel — my grandmother had it, my mother had it,” Mr. Weiner said. “It’s actually written into the script.”

Roughly $2.5 million went into the filming of each episode. “All of that money has been funneled onto the screen,” he added, down to the conference tables coated in cigarette ash, and the homely touches bestowed on the characters — wrinkled shirts, sweat stains, ill-applied makeup — that lend the show an air of authenticity.

“The period is usually very glamorized,” Mr. Weiner said. Production teams, he pointed out, generally look to films like “The Best of Everything,” or Vogue or Architectural Digest, to ferret out examples of the crystal tumblers, towering beehives and pristine swing coats thought to typify the period.

“I told them that’s not the way it works,” Mr. Weiner said. “We are not doing a show from the perspective of the movies. We are doing a show about the people who watch those movies. Often they are imitating what they see.”

Imperfect creatures, they mix and match at home, placing a streamlined silver-tone coffee brewer in front of rustically patterned cafe curtains. Their drawers are full. So are their garbage pails.

Even their hair and accessories are not always tidy or up to date. “We looked at Vogue, but we also looked at the Sears catalog,” Mr. Weiner said. In the idealized world of a ’50s movie, Don might drive a Cadillac. In “Mad Men,” he drives a Buick LeSabre. In “The Best of Everything,” Hope Lange is coiffed to perfection, not a hair out of place. On “Mad Men,” chignons tumble, pageboys wilt.

“The secretary has to have a hairstyle that will basically degrade over five days of the week,” Mr. Weiner explained. “And each character has a closet — she will wear the same six dresses during a single season.”

At times throwaway gestures betray an infatuation with Hollywood and distinguish the characters from their modern counterparts. Women deftly roll down their stockings and shut their compacts with a definitive click; men flick at their lighters and habitually tug at their ties. As Mr. Weiner pointed out, they loosen the knots in private, but snap them back into place the moment a female enters the room.

An uptight move, it did not betoken good manners exactly. But it was good style.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/fashion/23MAD.html





A Fourth Way to Deliver TV to the Home
Brad Stone

One of the most covert startups in Silicon Valley, the temporarily named Building B, is lifting its head up today to announce a round of funding. Though executives at the Belmont, Calif. company still aren’t saying much about their plans, they appear have sizeable ambitions: Building B is aiming to bring both television and other media content, restyled for the Internet age, into your living room in competition with your cable, satellite or telco’s IPTV service.

Today, Building B announces a $17 million round of funding by venture capital firms Morgenthaler Ventures, Index Ventures, Omni Capital and private investors. Andy Lack, the chairman of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, is joining its board of directors. The 14 month-old company was started by longtime investor and entrepreneur Buno Pati and Phil Wiser, the former chief technology officer of Sony Corporation of America. Last week, they offered a few details about their plans.

The company appears to be developing an entirely new experience for the home television. By the end of the year they will start selling a set-top box, either through partners or in retail. The box plugs into your television, in the same dusty space where your cable or satellite box used to chug away.

The service, as I understood it, will get both the popular channels as well as the more niche fair (like overseas cricket matches or user-generated videos) that is now delivered over the Internet. Behind the scenes, the service is a hybrid. It will receive the major channels in high-definition through wireless broadcasts (think rabbit ears). The company won’t say how they’ll broadcast this content, but since the small firm does not own any spectrum itself, one possibility is that Building B plans to lease digital spectrum from local television stations.

Meanwhile, the Building B device will receive less popular content over a broadband Internet connection. Movies, old TV shows, perhaps even music will also be available on demand and delivered in this way as well.

“We see ourselves as delivering next generation of television without forcing consumers to walk over to the PC to get access to it,” Mr. Wiser said.

“The biggest advantage we have is an advantage that every startup has – no legacy,” Mr. Pati added. “We were able to ask ourselves, if we were to put together a video entertainment solution today, what would it look like?”

The company may not go directly to retailers with the service. The founders hinted the service would be a perfect “video companion” for ISPs or telcos who have not yet made big IPTV investments but are looking to offer comprehensive “triple play” packages to customers. Expect to hear more from Building B this fall.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/0.../index.html?hp





More details on Sony's new PlayTV
Joshua Topolsky

The info is flying fast today as Sony's launches a multi-tiered attack on the entertainment community. Luckily, we've got some additional info on the just announced PlayTV TV tuner / DVR for the PS3, and we'd like to share it. The unit will apparently be coming to Europe "early in 2008" with other territories to follow (PAL only for now). The new box will feature two 1080p tuners, which utilize the European Digital Video Broadcasting system (DVB-T) -- which should dash any US hopes for the time being.

The system will allow you to store recorded broadcasts on your PS3 drive, and also transcode and transfer the saved files to your PSP. Additionally, you'll be able to use the PSP's "Remote Play" feature to program and watch your PlayTV away from home. Sony reps also make the bold pronouncement that the PlayTV architecture will "never be out of date" due to automatic network updates from the company. We're gutted that the US gets no love from Sony on this one, but it's a good time to be a European PlayStation 3 fan, that's for sure.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/22/m...ys-new-playtv/

Sony’s PlayTV press release is here - Jack.





Important Warning Regarding New HD TiVo and Cable System Incompatibilities
Lauren Weinstein

Greetings. You may have seen much (deserved) hoopla regarding the new relatively low-priced HD TiVo, that uses CableCARD technology to allow a direct interface between digital cable systems and the TiVo unit.

While it is generally understood that the current generation of these devices (this may well change within a year or two) cannot access two-way cable services such as Pay Per View (PPV) or Video On Demand (VOD), many potential buyers of this TiVo product may not be aware of concerns regarding the use of Switched Digital Video (SDV) on an increasing number of cable systems.

Briefly, SDV technology -- which is being aggressively deployed by Time Warner Cable and also by many other large and small systems -- requires two-way communications with the cable company servers to allow the customer to access all of the available channels. Without this capability, those channels on a cable system being managed via SDV would typically be inaccessible to the associated devices.

Since existing third-party CableCARD host devices of types including the new HD TiVo don't currently support the necessary two-way operations, users of these devices (including the new TiVo) could find themselves unable to watch or record channels of interest (the exact set of which will vary from system to system over time).

While there are continuing statements that the cable companies and TiVo are working on some sort of solution to this problem (keep in mind that CableCARD compatibility is an FCC mandate), no specifics on any possible "fix" or time frame for such a fix have been forthcoming.

There indeed are ways that the problem could be worked around. For example, signaling over the Internet could be used (newer TiVos are Internet compatible). Or, some sort of external device associated with one of the TiVo's various interfaces could be employed to communicate back to the cable system servers.

However, until there are more details available, such workarounds appear to be rather speculative right now. On the other hand, deployment of SDV and the problems it could cause for CableCARD TiVo users are very real and in some cases immediate.

I'm definitely not saying that you absolutely shouldn't buy the new HD TiVo -- it's a very nice box. But be warned that these potentially serious issues do exist at this time.
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000273.html





FCC's Martin Supports 'A La Carte' Cable Plans
PC Magazine Staff

FCC chairman Kevin Martin expressed his support for a la carte cable programming in a letter sent to several minority groups on Wednesday.

Martin said his support of a la carte programming, a position that argues that consumers should be allowed to buy channels individually rather than as a bulk package, would actually assist poorer minority groups. He noted that a Nielsen Media Research study pointed out that an average cable subscriber was paying for 85 channels when in reality that consumer only watched 16.

"Channel choice is increasingly significant to consumers as the number of channels included in expanded basic, and the corresponding price to consumers, has continued to skyrocket," Martin wrote. "Indeed, cable rates have more than doubled in the last ten years. Cable companies often point to the increased number of channels being offered as an explanation for the increase in prices. This explanation, however, ignores the fact that most of these channels are not actually being watched.

"While I believe all consumers would benefit from channels being sold in a more a la carte manner, minority consumers, especially those living in Spanish speaking homes, might benefit most of all," Martin said. Those consumers typically have to buy large, expensive blocks of channels to access Spanish-language channels, he said.

Martin said that allowing a la carte purchasing could diversify programming, He cited a case where the Black Family Channel was forced to become an online-only network, after cable providers refused to offer the channel -- even after the channel reached 16 million homes across the nation.

"'Cable companies act as gatekeepers into the programming allowed by the expanded basic cable package, preventing independent content producers from reaching viewers,'" Martin wrote, citing a letter written by Consumers' Union to the U.S. Congress. "'By allowing consumers to vote with their wallets rather than forcing them to buy channels they never watch, the marketplace will responding [sic] by providing more diverse and higher-quality programming than consumers demand.'"

Martin's letter was sent to the Black Leadership Council, the Hispanic Federation, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, and the League of Latin American Citizens, among others.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2174261,00.asp





Adobe Launches "Moviestar" Version of Flash Player - HD Television Quality for Web Video
Richard MacManus

Adobe today announced the latest version of its near ubiquitous Web video software, Adobe Flash Player 9. It's codenamed Moviestar, because it includes H.264 standard video support – the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players. In other words, the quality of video has been substantially improved from the previous version of Flash Player 9. Also added to the mix is High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio support and "hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced full screen video playback".

Adobe claims that these advancements will extend their leadership position in web video "by enabling the delivery of HD television quality and premium audio content".

The new Flash Player will be available later today as a beta at Adobe Labs - and the final release is slated to be available in the fall (September - November). The last big update to Flash Player was the launch of Flash 9 in June 2006.
Adobe: This is Tipping Point for H.264

I spoke to Mark Randall, Chief Strategist for Dynamic Media at Adobe, about the news. He told me there were three main points to the Moviestar release:

1) The H.264 support means superior video quality; it is also an open standard.

2) High Efficiency Advanced Audio is, says Mark Randall, a "successor to MP3". He said it is a higher quality audio, but at a lower bit rate.

3) It means "hardware acceleration" for Web video.

Randall also said that this represents a tipping point for the H.264 standard, because now Flash Player is supporting it as well Blu-Ray - two big industry players.
Richer Platform for Online Video Producers

As well as the consumer benefits, this also gives online video companies a platform to deliver richer Flash experiences on the desktop, Web and H.264 ready consumer devices. As well as the new Flash Player, H.264 playback will be supported by the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR - a platform to create rich Internet applications to the desktop) and applications developed with Adobe AIR software, including Adobe Media Player in late April.

Currently Adobe Flash Player is said to have 98.7% penetration in the Web, making it the most used media player:

Conclusion

Higher quality online video is great news for consumers and producers alike - especially in a near ubiquitous media player like Flash Player, which is used on YouTube, MySpace and other major platforms. What do you think of this news?
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...estar_h264.php


Adobe’s Tinic Uro blogs about the specs in some detail but doesn’t mention locked video cards or the company’s sweeping DRM plan previously reported in May - Jack.





Google Aims to Make YouTube Profitable With Ads
Miguel Helft

Ever since Google bought YouTube last November, it has avoided cluttering the site and the video clips themselves with ads, for fear of alienating its audience.

The strategy helped cement YouTube’s position as the largest video Web site but didn’t do much to justify YouTube’s $1.65 billion price tag.

Now Google believes it finally has found the formula to cash in on YouTube’s potential as a magnet for online video advertising and keep its audience loyal at the same time.

The company said late Tuesday that after months of testing various video advertising models, it was ready to introduce a new type of video ad, which it said was unobtrusive and kept users in control of what they saw.

The ads, which appear 15 seconds after a user begins watching a video clip, take the form of an overlay on the bottom fifth of the screen, not unlike the tickers that display headlines during television news programs.

A user can ignore the overlay, which will disappear after about 10 seconds, or close it. But if the user clicks on it, the video they were watching will stop and a video ad will begin playing. Once the ad is over, or if a user clicks on a box to close it, the original video will resume playing from the point where it was stopped.

“What we have come up with is a user-controlled ad format that is engaging,” said Eileen Naughton, Google’s director for media platforms. “We want our users to be able to accept and choose what type of advertising they engage in.”

For now, Google will place the ads only on video clips of its content partners — the more than 1,000 small and large media companies that have licensed their videos to YouTube. By doing so, YouTube will avoid the potential liability of having ads appear on copyrighted clips it is not authorized to display. And it will also prevent ads from playing on clips generated by users whose message may not be to the liking of advertisers.

The revenue from the ads will be split between the media partner and YouTube. Ms. Naughton said Google would charge advertisers $20 for every 1,000 times the ads were displayed. Google said the ads would begin appearing today throughout the site. Ms. Naughton also said advertisers would be able to take aim at specific channels and genres, as well as demographic profiles, geography and hour of the day.

If successful, the video ads could persuade more media companies to license their content to YouTube as a way to make money from it, analysts said.

“Today, YouTube is a sunk cost for Google,” said Darren Aftahi, a securities analyst with ThinkEquity Partners. “If they can couple the proper advertising with the proper content, there is a tremendous opportunity for the company.”

With 51 million users in June, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, YouTube now attracts an audience that is larger than the combined audiences of its three nearest competitors, MySpace, AOL and Yahoo. Its adoption of overlay ads for online video could turn the format into an industry standard, advertising executives said. The video ad market, which is expected to nearly double from last year to $775 million, has been projected to grow to $4.3 billion by 2011, according to eMarketer, a research firm.

But while Google may help popularize the format, it did not invent it. Smaller online video companies, like VideoEgg, a video advertising start-up in San Francisco, have been using similar overlay ads for nearly a year.

Troy Young, VideoEgg’s chief marketing officer, said the goal was to get away from forcing users to watch an ad before showing the clip they wanted to see. Those ads are known as “preroll” and are the most common form of online video advertising so far.

“On the Internet, you have a lot of short-form content, and preroll wasn’t going to work for short content,” Mr. Young said. Mr. Young said that preroll, and “midroll” ads that appear in the middle of a clip, may be appropriate for television shows, movies or other long videos. But overlays have proven effective at making money with short clips, he said. Viewers click on them at a rate roughly five times higher than banner ads, he added.

In tests, YouTube users had clicked on overlays five to 10 times more frequently than on banner ads that already appear on some YouTube pages, Ms. Naughton said. Yahoo has also been testing overlay video ads, creating further momentum for the format.

“We need to be in a place where we have standard overlays and standard measures of engagement across all portals, before the entire preroll industry can shift in any big way,” said Rebecca Paoletti, director of video strategy at Yahoo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/te.../22google.html





TubeStop Also Stops YouTube Ads
Chris Finke

The TubeStop Firefox extension that I wrote in order to stop YouTube videos from auto-playing also has the serendipitous side-effect of removing ads from YouTube videos. Since YouTube is only serving ads through the player on their main site, and not on the embeddable/syndicated player, and TubeStop works by replacing YouTube’s native player with the embeddable version, you won’t see any ads when you’re using TubeStop.

Try it out by first viewing this video without TubeStop: Rock Yo Hips. (I recommend muting your speakers; the content of the video is terrible, but it was the first video I could find with ads.) You’ll see around the 15-second mark an ad pops up over the bottom 15% of the video.

Now install TubeStop, restart Firefox, and view the video again. You’ll notice that while the video still sucks, there are no ads layered on it. I don’t know how long this will be the case, but it works for now.

Update: It looks like Google has removed all video ads for now. I’ll update this post if I come across a video that still has them. Maybe I should rename this post to “TubeStop also stops YouTube ads… FOREVER”.
http://www.chrisfinke.com/2007/08/22...s-youtube-ads/





Paramount Dumps Sony's Blu-Ray Format

Viacom-owned studio opts for Toshiba's "affordable" HD-DVD technology, dumping Sony's Blu-ray discs
Rhy Blakely

Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation have dropped support for Sony’s Blu-ray next generation DVD format in a shock move that will see the two studios exclusively use Toshiba’s rival HD-DVD system.

Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, the media giant, previously released movies in both Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Significantly, it cited HD-DVD's cheaper costs as a decisive factor behind its decision to back it.

The latest development is a blow for Sony, which has invested heavily in Blu-ray. The battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD is widely being seen as a re-run of that in the 1970s and 1980s between Sony’s Betamax video format and VHS - a cheaper rival - a fight that Sony lost.

The move is also likely to prolong the confusion among consumers, who cannot be sure of buying a next-generation DVD system that does not become defunct after being beaten by an incompatible rival.

Analysts have consistently suggested that confusion over the formats is likely to seriously stymie demand for both Blu-ray and HD-DVD until a clear winner emerges.

Blu-ray still leads HD-DVD in terms of Hollywood support, having won the exclusive backing of five studios: Sony, Walt Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, Lions Gate Entertainment and MGM.

By contrast, before today only Universal had opted to back HD DVD exclusively. Paramount and Warner Bros had been making films available on both formats.

However, Sony last month took another hit when it emerged that Europe’s competition watchdog had launched a fresh probe into allegations of possible market rigging in the formats war, thought to centre on exclusivity deals linked to the Blu-ray format.

The European Commission sent requests for information to “several major Hollywood studios” in the second half of June. It is searching for any hints that talks between the studios and the groups behind the formats have given rise to arrangements that could be obstacles to free competition and illegal under European law.

Today’s announcement affects the upcoming DVD release of the blockbuster Shrek the Third and all movies distributed by Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, Paramount Vantage, Nickelodeon Movies and MTV Films, as well as movies from DreamWorks Animation, which are distributed exclusively by Paramount Home Entertainment.

Brad Grey, chairman and chief executive of Paramount Pictures, said: “Part of our vision is to aggressively extend our movies beyond the theatre and deliver the quality and features that appeal to our audience.”

He added: “I believe HD DVD is not only the affordable high-quality choice for consumers, but also the smart choice for Paramount.”
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle2295565.ece





Sony PR Firm Pushes Paramount HD DVD Payoff

Top public relations agency for Sony's Blu-ray interests tips reporters to blog item after Paramount backs rival HD DVD.
Swanni

Paramount announced today that it's dropping Blu-ray to back HD DVD exclusively in the high-def disc format war.

Soon after the announcement, GCI Group, a Los Angeles-based public relations firm, began calling reporters (including this one) to tell them that a Hollywood news blog was reporting that HD DVD supporters gave Paramount $100 million in "promotional considerations" to dump Blu-ray.

GCI Group represents Sony, the leading supporter of the Blu-ray format, and jointly issues press releases on its behalf on Blu-ray issues.

The blog, "Deadline Hollywood Daily," is written by Nikki Finke of the LA Weekly. Finke also wrote that DreamWorks Animation, which today said it would also support HD DVD exclusively, got $50 million in "promotional considerations."

Finke did not name her sources, say how many they were or even characterize them as coming from a specific company or industry.

Her blog item, which was posted shortly after today's Paramount announcement, also did not elaborate on the "promotional considerations."

It did quote the "sources" as saying the alleged payoff was "really out of desperation" by HD DVD supporters and "a cash grab" by the studios (Paramount and DreamWorks.) Toshiba and Microsoft are the leading supporters of the HD DVD format.

In response to the blog item, the web site Gizmodo asked Paramount for a response and here it is:

"The reason we made this decision is simple. After a year of fully experiencing and exploring both formats, we decided to exclusively support HD DVD because of the quality, value and potential the format offers. Beyond that, whenever we conduct co-marketing, production deals or other agreements, we never discuss business terms."
http://www.tvpredictions.com/bluraypay082007.htm





Malaysia Honors DVD-Sniffing Dogs as They End 6-Month Assignment
AP

Malaysia gave a hero's send-off Monday to Lucky and Flo, honoring the two DVD-sniffing dogs with medals as they ended a six-month assignment that netted 1.6 million illegal movie discs.

The two black Labradors looked puzzled when a multitude of press photographers' flash bulbs went off as Malaysia's deputy trade minister S. Veerasingham placed medals around their necks.

"What they have helped us achieve in such a short time is remarkable," said Veerasingham. "Malaysia is committed to wiping out piracy and pirates. We will go after them very fast."

The world's first dogs trained to identify optical discs by the scent of their chemicals, Lucky and Flo were loaned to the Malaysian government in March by the Motion Picture Association, a U.S.-based watchdog.

During that stint - dubbed Operation Double Trouble - they helped unearth 1.6 million DVDs and other optical discs, three DVD replicating machines and 97 compact disc burners, worth $6 million. Twenty-six people were arrested during the raids.

The operations were so successful that Malaysian movie pirates were reported to have placed a bounty of $29,000 on the dogs, prompting them to be kept under close guard.

The two dogs will leave on Aug. 23 for New York, where they will take part in shows and also help in raids on movie pirates.

The dogs cannot distinguish between pirated and legal discs, but that can be easily done by enforcement officers once the
Advertisement

dogs had unearthed the caches. In at least one instance, the dogs uncovered a secret room behind a false wall.

The domestic trade ministry will set up a canine unit later this year to unearth pirated DVDs. Two new dogs will be trained in Ireland by the same trainer who taught Lucky and Flo, said Veerasingham.

According to the MPA, its member studios in the U.S. lost $6.1 billion to worldwide piracy in 2005, of which the Asia-Pacific region accounted for $1.2 billion and the United States for $1.3 billion.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_6670285





Peel Police Smash Illegal DVD Ring, Net 75,000 Pirated Films
CBC News

Ontario police seized 75,000 illegal copies of some of this summer's biggest blockbusters and rounded up at least a dozen suspects Sunday, capping off an eight-month sting operation that investigators say ended in one of the largest anti-piracy busts in Canadian history.

On Monday, officers from the Peel region said they may now charge up to 21 people for allegedly running the illegal DVD market, which hawked still-in-theatre titles such as the Michael Moore documentary Sicko and The Simpsons Movie for as little as $4 a disc.

The pirated films were sold by merchants operating out of a Mississauga flea market at Mavis Rd., as well as at least one other Mississauga market, police said.

"As far as the sheer numbers involved, with the number of entries and the amount of arrests, the volume of DVDs seized, the money, the lab equipment — it's pretty significant," Peel police Det. John Mans said of the bust.

CBC News learned about the piracy investigation and checked in on the black market operation a few weeks ago using hidden cameras. The undercover report found that the operation was so efficient that $4 copies of The Simpsons Movie had already appeared on store shelves just 14 hours after the film began premiering in Canadian movie theatres.

Reproducing $21 million in movies a year

Investigators said business was brisk at the illegal markets. Even as officers were slapping cuffs on suspects, loyal customers were asking when the stores would reopen, the lead investigator told CBC News.

"You've got all walks of life coming in there — old, young, men in wheelchairs coming up asking for a television series they want and giving their names and phone numbers," Det. Mans said. "It's amazing. People are just completely oblivious to the fact that it's entirely illegal."

In all, Peel investigators believe the piracy ring was reproducing $21 million in Hollywood movies a year.

Canada, in particular, is a hotbed for movie piracy, with the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association saying that up to 25 per cent of all pirated films originate from illegal recordings done in Canadian theatres.

In an act of protest against what it feels are Canada's lax anti-piracy laws, Warner Bros. recently threatened to delay its movie premieres and stop handing out promotional copies in Canada.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/sto.../dvd-bust.html





Legal Fights Uncovered in Docu on Skin's Flynt
Gregg Kilday

Larry Flynt is no stranger to the big screen. Milos Forman's 1996 "The People vs. Larry Flynt," with Woody Harrelson playing the quarrelsome pornographer, chronicled Flynt's colorful run-ins with the law as he challenged establishment moralists. Flynt is no stranger to the small screen, either: Most recently, he has popped up decrying Washington hypocrisy as Sen. David Vitter, R-La., admitted to dealings with a D.C. escort service after receiving a phone call from an editor with Flynt's Hustler magazine.

Now, Flynt also is the subject of a new documentary, "Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone," which will screen as part of the International Documentary Assn.'s DocuWeek, which gets under way today and runs through Thursday at the ArcLight Hollywood and the Landmark Theatre in Los Angeles.

The film marks the feature directorial debut of Joan Brooker-Marks, a former TV writer who moved on to teach film at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Even though Flynt has gotten plenty of media attention, she was convinced that most of the previous accounts of his life "were more biographical. I wanted to touch on the seminal events in his life but also wanted to really, really concentrate on his court battles on behalf of the First Amendment. Personally, I think the First Amendment is unequivocal, and Larry's efforts have been significant -- particularly for writers and satirists, even though they have been minimized because he is a pornographer."

Her husband Walter Marks, who happened to be an old acquaintance of Flynt's, introduced her to her subject, who gave her carte blanche, opening up his own extensive archives. With Marks serving as producer, Brooker-Marks launched the project under her own Midtownfilms banner.

While the film, which was privately financed at the cost of several hundred thousand dollars, began shooting in October 2005, Brooker-Marks has been adding bits of footage right up until locking it for its DocuWeek premiere -- for example, adding Flynt's reaction to the recent death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, whose libel suit against Flynt led to a Supreme Court victory for the publisher in the 1980s.

As a piece of advocacy filmmaking, "Left Alone" could almost have jumped from the pages of Hustler itself. It includes interspersed footage of a Hustler photo shoot -- albeit a relatively discreet one -- as well as political-minded cartoons from the magazine. It jumps from topic to topic: Flynt's first court case in Cincinnati, where he was convicted of pandering in 1977; his refusal to surrender sources for the tapes revealing the FBI sting operation against carmaker John DeLorean in the '80s; and his exposes of prominent Republicans during the Clinton impeachment trail in the '90s.

The docu does tend to lionize Flynt at points. It reports, for example, how Flynt filed suit against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld so that his reporters could accompany troops into battle in Afghanistan. Although a U.S. district judge denied Flynt's request for a preliminary injunction and the Supreme Court subsequently refused to hear the case on appeal, the docu argues that the Defense Department allowed embedded journalists to accompany the military into Iraq as a result of Flynt's legal efforts.
The film takes its title from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis' contention that the Fourth Amendment's right to privacy includes "the right to be left alone" -- a sentiment that Flynt echoes. In the buttoned-down world of constitutional law, Flynt emerges as a most unlikely champion of free speech because, as Brooker-Marks says, "In the beginning, he just wanted to be around pretty girls and publish a magazine."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...4eee7a3993d167





My China girl

Mattel Sues Porn Website Over Use of Barbie Name

Mattel Inc. sued a small company on Tuesday for using the toymaker's famed "Barbie" trademark as part of the name for a pornographic Web site it owned.

The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan federal court, said the Web site www.chinabarbie.com had used the Barbie trademark to capture the positive image Mattel had created through its "Barbie" products.

The suit, which seeks unspecified damages, said the company, Global China Networks LLC, was based in Florida with a postal address in New York and had sold memberships to the site to customers around the world.

Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler in 1959 created the Barbie doll after noticing her daughter preferred playing with paper cut-outs of adult female fashion dolls, the lawsuit said.

American girls aged between 3 and 11 own an average of eight Barbie dolls each, the lawsuit said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...39574720070822





Got wood?

Australian Teenager Cracks $84-Million Internet Porn Filter in 30 Minutes

Tom Wood, a Year 10 student, probably 15 - 16 years old has cracked the federal government's $84-million internet porn filter in just 30 minutes. He can deactivate the filter in several clicks in such a way that the software's icon is not deleted which will make his parents believe the filter is still working. Tom says it is a matter of time before some computer-savvy kid puts the bypass on the Internet for others to use. "It's a horrible waste of money," he said. "They could get a much better filter for a few million dollars made here rather than paying overseas companies for an ineffective one."

Australian communications Minister Helen Coonan said the government had anticipated kids would find their ways around the NetFilter. Yes Minister but 30 minutes for a teenager to crack a 84 million dollar filter is simply ridiculous.
http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/...30_minutes.php





Patent Ruling May Help Firms' Defense in Suits
Peter Lattman

In a significant win for companies accused of patent infringement, a federal appeals court has essentially raised the bar for proving willful infringement, a finding that allows a judge to triple a damage award.

By changing the standard to prove willful patent infringement, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a specialized patent-appeals court, has blunted a weapon that patent holders use against companies they accuse of patent infringement. In such cases, companies faced with the uncertainty of a jury finding of willful infringement often choose to settle rather than take a case to trial.

"The threat of willful infringement is always in the background when a patentee and defendant are thinking about negotiating a license or settlement," said Jeffrey D. Sullivan, a lawyer at Baker Botts LLP in New York, who isn't involved in the case. "A potential finding of willful infringement raises the stakes in any patent litigation."

The Federal Circuit court ruling overturned a 24-year-old legal precedent. Proof of willful patent infringement will now require "at least a showing of objective recklessness" on the part of an alleged infringer, wrote Judge Haldane Robert Mayer for the unanimous court. The case was closely watched: The Federal Circuit received nearly two dozen "friend-of-the-court" briefs from parties weighing in on the issue.

The seven-year-old case, which hasn't gone to trial, pits an individual inventor and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology against Seagate Technology. Seagate brought the matter before the Federal Circuit to sort out a discovery dispute that took place at the trial court. A lawyer for the plaintiffs declined to comment on whether her clients will appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.

Companies defending themselves against lawsuits have long complained that the legal standard for finding willful patent infringement led to unpredictable rulings. The old criteria placed an "affirmative duty of due care" on anyone who learned that they might be infringing a patent.

Findings of willful infringement have been common in patent cases. In perhaps the most notable example, in 2003 a federal judge enhanced the damages award against Research In Motion Ltd. after a finding that RIM had willfully infringed patents held by NTP Inc.

The ruling is the latest in a string of decisions that have favored companies defending themselves from patent-infringement lawsuits. In May 2006, the Supreme Court gave trial-court judges more discretion in deciding whether to issue an injunction against a patent infringer, rather than automatically issuing one upon a finding of infringement. In April, the Supreme Court handed down a patent decision making it easier for trial-court judges to call an invention "obvious" and therefore ineligible for a patent.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118774466005504815.html





Stretching Crystals Promises Flexible Colour Displays
Belle Dumé

The first full-colour display made from a single material could turn the market for flat and flexible displays on its head. Commercial screens based on the technology could be available on the high street in as little as two years, says the Canadian team who built the device.

The pixels in the device are made from photonic crystals similar in structure to the natural gemstone opal. Each crystal is made from silica microspheres in a repeating 3D pattern which blocks certain wavelengths of light, or colours, while reflecting others. Altering the colour of the pixel is simply a matter of changing the spacing between the microspheres, which is achieved by stretching the material.

The beauty of the device is that it can produce the whole spectrum of colours, even ultraviolet and infrared light, using only incident light. As a result, the expensive colour filters used in every other colour display on the market today, are no longer needed. And because the displays use only reflected ambient light, no power is wasted on backlighting, as in today's mobile phones, for example.
'Unprecedented tuning'

"They can be viewed just as well in bright sunlight as in indoor light," team member André Arsenault of the University of Toronto told New Scientist.

The researchers stretch the crystals by bonding them to an electroactive polymer that expands when a voltage is applied to it, causing a change in the crystal structure. "By gradually increasing the voltage, we can span the whole visible spectrum, and even the UV and IR ranges. Such full-colour tuning is unprecedented," says Arsenault, who has co-founded a start-up company called Opalux to commercialise the technology.

The crystals could be used to make full-colour flexible electronic paper, small displays, and large roadside billboards, say the researchers. But this will involve scaling up the process, a task that has proven challenging for other display technologies.

"This is certainly important work," says photonic physicist Yadong Ying of the University of California, Riverside, US. "Although the principle of tuning the photonic property by changing the lattice spacing is widely known, this system represents the first practical photonic-crystal-based display that has fully electrically tuneable colours."
http://technology.newscientist.com/a...ine-news_rss20





Gender Colours Your Choice of Hues: Study
CBC News

A study released today reveals that the long-held stereotypes about men's and women's favourite colours have some scientific basis.

A study in the Aug. 21 issue of Current Biology reports some of the first conclusive evidence of a gender divide over favourite colours. Indeed, the researchers found that more women than men really do prefer pink — or at least a redder shade of blue.

"Although we expected to find sex differences, we were surprised at how robust they were, given the simplicity of our test," said Anya Hurlbert of Newcastle University.

The test asked young men and women to choose, as quickly as possible, their preferred colour from each of a series of paired, coloured rectangles. Results showed blue is a universal favourite, but that tastes still differ between the sexes.

"Females have a preference for the red end of the red-green axis, and this shifts their colour preference slightly away from blue towards red, which tends to make pinks and lilacs the most preferred colours in comparison with others," Hurlbert said.

The researchers found the divide predictable enough that they can now usually tell the sex of a participant based on their favourite-colour choices.

To clarify whether the results were more cultural than biological, the researchers tested a small group of Chinese people against the other 171 British Caucasian participants. The results were similar, strengthening the idea that the sex differences might be biological.

Hurlbert theorized the female preference for red could date from humans' hunter-gatherer days when women — the primary gatherers — would have benefited from an ability to key in on ripe, red fruits.

"Evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colours — reddish fruits, healthy, reddish faces," Hurlbert said. "Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preference."

Hurlbert also offered ideas as to the universal preference for blue, but said it's mostly speculation.

"I would favour evolutionary arguments again here," she said. "Going back to our savannah days, we would have a natural preference for a clear blue sky, because it signalled good weather. Clear blue also signals a good water source."

The researchers plan to test infants as well to gain further insight into colour preferences.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...ors070821.html





Words Unspoken Are Rendered on War’s Faces
Holland Cotter

One of the more shocking photographs to emerge from the current Iraq war was taken last year in a rural farm town in the American Midwest. It’s a studio portrait by the New York photographer Nina Berman of a young Illinois couple on their wedding day.

The bride, Renee Kline, 21, is dressed in a traditional white gown and holds a bouquet of scarlet flowers. The groom, Ty Ziegel, 24, a former Marine sergeant, wears his dress uniform, decorated with combat medals, including a Purple Heart. Her expression is unsmiling, maybe grave. His, as he looks toward her, is hard to read: his dead-white face is all but featureless, with no nose and no chin, as blank as a pullover mask.

Two years earlier, while in Iraq as a Marine Corps reservist, Mr. Ziegel had been trapped in a burning truck after a suicide bomber’s attack. The heat melted the flesh from his face. At Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas he underwent 19 rounds of surgery. His shattered skull was replaced by a plastic dome, and a face was constructed more or less from scratch with salvaged tissue, holes left where his ears and nose had been.

Ms. Berman took this picture, which is in the solo show at Jen Bekman Gallery, on assignment for People magazine. It was meant to accompany an article that documented Mr. Ziegel’s recovery, culminating in his marriage to his childhood sweetheart. But the published portrait was a convivial shot of the whole wedding party. Maybe the image of the couple alone was judged to be too stark, the emotional interchange too ambiguous. Maybe they looked, separately and together, too alone.

“Marine Wedding,” the portrait’s title, was not Ms. Berman’s first encounter with wounded Iraq war veterans. She photographed several others beginning in 2003, and 20 of her portraits were published as a book, “Purple Hearts: Back From Iraq” (Trolley Books, 2004), with an introduction by Verlyn Klinkenborg, a member of the editorial board of The New York Times. These pictures, accompanied by printed interviews with the sitters, have been traveling the country, and 10 are now at Bekman.

None are as startling as “Marine Wedding,” even when the disability recorded is more extensive. Former Spc. Luis Calderon, 22, of Puerto Rico, had his spinal cord severed when a concrete wall he was ordered to pull down — it was painted with a mural of Saddam Hussein — fell on him. He is now a quadriplegic, though this is not immediately evident from his portrait. Nor can we see from the photograph of Spc. Sam Ross, 20, of Pennsylvania, that he lost a leg in a bomb blast, which also caused permanent brain damage.

Almost all the veterans in Ms. Berman’s pictures look isolated, even if someone else is present. And a sense of loneliness comes through in their brief interviews. Mr. Ross, separated from his family, lives by himself in a trailer. Mr. Calderon, who waited months for veterans’ benefits, says he feels abandoned by the military; because he was not wounded in combat, he has not been awarded a Purple Heart.

Spc. Robert Acosta, 20, a Californian who lost a hand in a grenade attack, says he is psychologically unable to resume his former social life: “I don’t like dealing with the questions. Like, ‘Was it hot?’ ‘Did you shoot anybody?’ They want me to glorify the war and say it was so cool.”

Mr. Acosta’s interview has the only overt anti-war sentiment in the Bekman show, and there are few words of bitterness or recrimination. Mr. Ross calls combat in Iraq the best time of his life. Randall Clunen of Ohio remembers the excitement of search missions in Iraqi homes as a peak experience. Sgt. Joseph Mosner, at 35 the oldest in this group, was 19 when he enlisted. “There was no good jobs,” he said, “so I figured this would have been a good thing.” He still thinks so, despite his severe facial scarring from a bomb explosion.

Sgt. Jeremy Feldbusch, left brain-damaged and blind by an artillery attack, once had plans for medical school. but says: “I don’t have any regrets. I had some fun over there. I don’t want to talk about the military anymore.” He claims, as do others, that he has no political opinions.

Ms. Berman adds no direct editorial comment to the presentation. She has said in interviews that she started photographing disabled veterans soon after the war began mainly because she didn’t see anyone else doing so. In what may be the most intensively photographed war in history, the visual documentation has been selective. The fate of the injured veterans was not a public issue until news reports about substandard treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

This background provides the context for Ms. Berman’s photographs, which are themselves tip-of-the-iceberg images. No matter what the viewer’s political position, the images add up to a complex and desolating anti-war statement. Mr. Acosta makes that statement outright: “Yeah, I got a Purple Heart. I don’t care. I don’t need anything to prove I was there. I know I was there. I got a constant reminder. I mean like all the reasons we went to war, it just seems like they’re not legit enough for people to lose their lives for and for me to lose my hand and use of my legs and for my buddies to lose their limbs.”

And “Marine Wedding” speaks, as powerfully as a picture can, for itself.

“Nina Berman: Purple Hearts” continues through Aug. 30 at Jen Bekman Gallery, 6 Spring Street, between the Bowery and Elizabeth Street; (212) 219-0166, jenbekman.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/ar...gn/22berm.html





Lines Can be Crossed as Blog Power Surges
Nellie Andreeva

Call it "the 'Jericho' effect." After gathering strength and flexing their muscles for the past several years, TV bloggers came into their own as a force to be reckoned with this summer when their campaign to save CBS' canceled postapocalyptic drama "Jericho" became a triumphant success.

Blogs, with their feedback features that foster dialogue among users, have become the perfect forum for fans to share their passion about their favorite TV shows.

And with the bloggers' power growing, the networks and studios increasingly are catering to them, giving them access to their stars and producers. Web writers have become a growing presence at industry events like the Television Critics Assn.'s press tours. To promote its lineup, the Sci Fi Channel last month hosted an exclusive press event for bloggers and webmasters who went behind the scenes of the channel's series.

Some bloggers have become as powerful as the leading TV critics in shaping the online community's opinions of new and exciting series. But that growing influence also has brought out a dark side.

Because of the virtually infinite number of TV blogs out there, the pressure to stand out and get traffic is mounting, prompting some bloggers to rush to post unconfirmed and unsourced items just to be the first out there, beating mainstream reporters who have to meet rigorous confirmation standards before going with a story. A blogger, for instance, ran a big "exclusive" pronouncing Geena Davis the front-runner to succeed departed Mandy Patinkin on CBS' "Criminal Minds" after the actress had already passed on the role.

Two weekends ago, along with other reporters, I was waiting to see if Joe Mantegna's deal to become the new lead on "Minds" would go through. That Sunday, the network's PR department sent an e-mail out that the show's executive producer/showrunner Ed Bernero had posted an announcement of Mantegna's casting on the "Minds" fan blog. I wrote a story referring to the posting. The following day, I got an exasperated cell phone call at 6 a.m. from Jill Davidson, the woman behind the Criminal Minds Fanatic blog that hosted the posting. It was garnered by a slew of angry midnight voice messages on my and other Hollywood Reporter editors' office phones and more harassing phone calls to our offices Monday morning. All because Davidson felt she didn't get enough credit.

With online fan armies growing stronger and more powerful as the "Jericho" victory proved, some of them seem to be getting more aggressive, too. To play off Davidson's site's name -- when is it a fan, and when does it become a fanatic?

A day after the Mantegna piece ran, I had written a story about HBO's cancellation of "John From Cincinnati." Another angry response from an online fan of the show, this time an e-mail scolding me for using "negative context" in the story.

OK, it's a story about the cancellation of a show that has to address the potential reasons for the demise -- it has got to have some "negative context."

As trade journalists covering television, do we have to fear criticizing shows because their fans can get offended and, being Web-savvy, can track us down and come after us?

Investigative reporters often have been targeted for exposing fraud, uncovering cover-ups and shedding light on organized crime as evidenced by the recent assassination of veteran Oakland reporter Chauncey Bailey. But entertainment trade reporters worrying for their safety?! Even with hard-hitting stories, the damages we inflict are mostly in the form of bruised Hollywood egos.

Yes, the love of its fans is a show's biggest asset, and the Internet has made it easier for that fan base to stay close together and grow. But it also has made the small step from love to obsession a hell of a lot easier.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...b275f6e6abf86e





Chinese Blog Providers ‘Encouraged' to Register Users with their Real Names
Anita Chang

Blog service providers in China are “encouraged” to register users with their real names and contact information, according to a new government document that tones down an earlier proposal banning anonymous online blogging.

At least 10 major Chinese blog service providers have agreed to sign the “self-discipline pledge” issued by the Internet Society of China, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday.

Online bulletin boards and blogs are the only forum for most Chinese to express opinions before a large audience in a society where all media are state-controlled.

China has the world's second-biggest population of Internet users after the United States, with 137 million people online. It also has 30 million registered bloggers, and more than 100 million Chinese Internet users visit blogs regularly, according to the ISC. The group is under the Ministry of Information Industry.

The guidelines, issued Tuesday and effective immediately, “encouraged” real-name registration of users, according to a copy posted on the Internet group's Web site.

The information — to be filed with the companies, not posted online — should include the user's name, address, contact numbers and e-mail address, it said.

Measures listed in the document were guidelines only and blog service providers were not required to comply, said an official at the Internet group, surnamed Zhu.

It was not clear whether the guideline calling for real-name registration covered bloggers only or whether it extended to people who post comments. Zhu refused to provide details.

The Chinese government had wanted to require real-name registration, but the proposal was met by “fierce opposition,” Xinhua said.

“Conditions are not yet mature for implementing real-name registration as we lack reliable technology for privacy protection and identity verification,” Huang Chengqing, secretary general of the ISC, was quoted as saying.

But he said service providers were still responsible for the content of the blogs. Chinese leaders often try to block online material deemed pornographic or a threat to communist rule.

“Blog service providers who allow the use of pseudonyms may be more attractive to bloggers, but they will be punished by the government if they fail to screen illegal information,” Huang was quoted as saying.

The Xinhua report did not provide additional details of banned information, but other measures called for in the pledge include not spreading pornography and not speaking ill of other nationalities, races, religions and cultural customs. Bloggers also should not spread rumors or libelous information, it said.

“Blog providers should monitor and manage comments ... and delete illegal and bad information in a timely manner,” the document said.

Blog service providers such as People's Daily online, Sohu.com, Sina.com.cn and cn.msn.com have said they would abide by the pledge, Xinhua reported.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...echnology/home





BuynLarge - Hilarious Web Attack on Excesses of Capitalism by.. Disney?

The BuynLarge Corporation's website illustrates a future where one company effectively controls everything on the planet - from industry and media to the world clock, government, and, even North on the compass. If it want's to stop paying tax, it can. It's opponants such as anarchists and anti-consumer groups, are in fact 'customers we haven't reached yet'. To top it all the site is littered with cringable stock photography and a web-standards unfriendly Flash interface.

And the source of this smart (and wet myself funny) illustration of the nightmare Stalinist totalitarian future for unchecked global capitalism? Adbusters, perhaps? Greenpeace or Armando Iannucci or Chris Morris?

It's actually Disney subsidiary PIxar and the new promotion site for 2008's Wall-E. While most of us in the UK are waiting to get to see Rataouille (which I saw at Edinburgh this week and is reportedly topping the audience award already - review and Edinburgh write up soon!) publicity for the final film of the original Stanton-Lasseter- slate is heating up. The film, conceived over a legnedary lunch shortly before the release of Toy Story, where A Bugs Life, Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo were also formed, looks like Pixar's first attempt at a love story, through the heart of an R2D2 like robot. Says Disney's head of animation, John Lasster:

WALL-E is the story of the last little robot on Earth. He is a robot that his programming was to help clean up. You see, it's set way in the future. Through consumerism, rampant, unchecked consumerism, the Earth was covered with trash. And to clean up, everyone had to leave Earth and set in place millions of these little robots that went around to clean up the trash and make Earth habitable again.

Well, the cleanup program failed with the exception of this one little robot and he's left on Earth doing his duty all alone. But it's not a story about science fiction. It's a love story, because, you see, WALL-E falls in love with [Eve], a robot from a probe that comes down to check on Earth, and she's left there to check on and see how things are going and he absolutely falls in love with her

It sounds promising - according to the Wikipedia entry, director Andrew Stanton developed WALL-E before Toy Story was made:[3]. After directing Finding Nemo, Stanton felt, "[W]e had really achieved the physics of believing you were really under water, so I said 'Hey, let’s do that with air.' I said, 'Let’s do that with air. Let’s fix our lenses, let’s get the depth of field looking exactly how anthropomorphic lenses work and do all these tricks that make us have the same kind of dimensionality that we got on Nemo with an object out in the air and on the ground.'"[3] The design of WALL-E and Eve came about by Stanton telling his designers, "See it as an appliance first, and then read character into it."[3] There is no traditional dialogue in the film; Stanton joked, "I’m basically making R2-D2: The Movie", in reference to voice artist/sound designer Ben Burtt's work on Star Wars. To create dialogue, Burtt took various mechanical sounds, and combined them to resemble dialogue.[4] Producer Jim Morris added that the film was animated so that it would feel "as if there really was a cameraman."
http://www.netribution.co.uk/2/content/view/1256/182/





No CDN Lawsuits Aginst Individuals for File Sharing?
Howard Knopf

There’s a Slyck interview from August 17, 2007 with David Basskin, spokesperson these days for the CPCC - the collector of private copying levies in Canada.

Leaving aside lots of other issues that merit comment, one answer was quite strange.

Slyck.com: Many people have argued for some time that sending lawsuits to people on P2P networks is a bad idea. Some are arguing that, instead of sending lawsuits, it's better to put a levy on ISPs to counteract what the industry considers losses over the internet. Is this something that the CPCC has considered? What are your thoughts on this idea?

David: No lawsuits have been brought in Canada against individuals with respect to unauthorized file "sharing".
...
Excuse me, but what about BMG v. Doe, in which the big record companies sued 29 John and Jane Doe Canadian defendants for file sharing? The result, as we all know, is that BMG et al failed to get disclosure of the names of the actual 29 individuals who were alleged to be illegally sharing files.

If the law suits didn’t actually proceed any further, it wasn’t for lack of effort. The record companies - backed by CRIA - lost in both the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal. CRIA went through three prominent law firms to get this result. There was no lack of effort to sue individuals here.

See my comment on these cases here.

These major record companies - who tried to sue 29 individuals in Canada - happen to be major stakeholders in the private copying levy scheme, through one of the collectives that comprise the CPCC. CRIA was probably the prime mover for the levy scheme in the first place.

I should remind readers that I acted against the record companies in the BMG case and I have long acted against CPCC concerning the private copying levies. http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/...duals-for.html





Coupon Hacker Faces DMCA Lawsuit
David Kravets

John Stottlemire is the DVD Jon of coupon-clipping, and it's getting him in trouble.

The California man is on the working end of a federal copyright lawsuit after posting code and instructions that allow shoppers to circumvent copy protection on downloadable, printable coupons -- the type used by General Foods, Colgate, Disney and others to sell everything from soap to breakfast cereal.

The coupons are distributed by Mountain View, California-based Coupons Inc. through ad banners, e-mail and its website, coupons.com. To use them, consumers must install Coupons Inc.'s proprietary software. The software assigns each user's computer a unique identifier, which the company uses to track and control the consumer's coupon-printing practices, usually limiting each user to two coupons per product. Each printed coupon has its own unique serial code.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, last month, Coupons Inc. accuses Stottlemire of creating and giving away a program that erases the unique identifier, allowing consumers to repeatedly download and print as many copies of a particular coupon as they want.

The lawsuit also charges Stottlemire with posting tutorials on bargain-swapping sites DealIdeal.com and thecouponqueen.net on how to manually defeat the print limit, which the complaint alleges "would allow users of that software to print an unlimited number of coupons from the coupons.com website."

Stottlemire, 42, of Fremont, California, insists there was no encryption or hacking involved, and therefore he did not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. "I honestly think there are big problems when you are not allowed to delete files off of your computer," says Stottlemire.

To be sure, Stottlemire's work differs from the generic online copyright battles involving movies, music or even literature: He's accused of liberating something that is already free. But Coupons Inc. argues the coupon hack is no different from cracks like "DVD Jon" Johansen's program DeCSS.

Scores of companies contract with Coupons Inc. to release a limited number of coupons for each product. If somebody cracks the code and downloads hundreds or thousands of them, it's consumers who lose, according to CEO Jeff Weitzman.

"We're protecting copyrighted information that is free to consumers already," says Weitzman. "We're trying to make sure everybody can get their fair share."

Ironically, Stottlemire says his motive was to get a job at Coupons Inc. "My goal was to show Jeff my capabilities and to ask him for employment," he says. But motives aside, Stottlemire says the case now raises bigger issues: How can a computer owner be prohibited from deleting files from his own computer?

"All I did was erase files or registry keys," he says. "Nothing was hacked. Nothing was decoded that was any way, shape or form in the way the DMCA was written."

Legal experts aren't so sure.

"I think it's a pretty broad statute," says Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. "It may cover this. I think it does give companies a lot of leverage and a lot of power."

Jim Gibson, a University of Virginia School of Law visiting scholar who teaches copyright law, suggests Stottlemire might be swimming in legally murky waters at best.

"He might be in trouble for providing technology that is designed for essentially hacking around copyright protection," Gibson says. "Whether as a matter of public policy there should be a claim against him is a completely different story."

Stottlemire says he's being sued because Coupons Inc. "does not have the technology in place that would limit the number of times that a person could print a coupon."

The 500 brands Coupons Inc. represents also suffer from fraud the old-fashioned way. They fall victim to photocopying of their coupons. Weitzman says the company shuts off coupon-printing access to violators if photocopied coupons with the same serial numbers show up at markets.

That hurts the companies' bottom line, Weitzman says.

"We monitor those things very carefully," he says. "If we do see duplicates coming through, we have ways from keeping people from printing coupons in the future."

The company wants Stottlemire to turn over the names of people he knows downloaded his software, and is seeking damages from the coder that could amount to hundreds of thousands -- or even millions -- of dollars. And it's not offering him 10 percent off.
http://www.wired.com/politics/online...007/08/coupons





Genius Phone Hacker Dead at 58
UPI

A blind genius, who insisted on being 5 years old forever, has died in Minneapolis. He was 58.

Joe Engressia, who legally changed his name to Joybubbles in 1991, played a pivotal role in the 1970s subculture of "phone phreaks" after discovering at a young age that he could make free phone calls by whistling tones, The New York Times reported Monday.

The precursors of today's computer hackers, the reign of phone phreaks ended when digitalization replaced the tone-based system.

Born blind, Joybubbles had an I.Q. of 172.

At one point during his childhood his obsession prompted his parents to go without telephone service for five years.

Joybubbles attended the University of South Florida but left after being caught making phone calls for friends at $1 a call.

He did menial work for most of his life before moving to Minnesota in 1982 and living on Social Security disability.

The cause of his death on Aug. 8 has not been determined.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_New...ad_at_58/4813/





Seagate to Offer Solid-State Drives in 2008

SSDs offer advantages over disk-based drives: they're lighter, consume less power
Sumner Lemon

Seagate Technology LLC plans to add solid-state drives based on flash memory chips to its lineup of storage products sometime in 2008, the company said Thursday.

Seagate will introduce the drives across a range of products including desktop and notebook PCs, offering various storage capacities, said Woody Monroy, a Seagate spokesman. Monroy confirmed comments made by the company in published reports earlier in the day.

"We have solid-state drives on every road map that we have," Bill Watkins, the company's CEO, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview.

SSDs, as solid-state drives are also known, use flash memory instead of magnetic disks to store information. Flash is a type of non-volatile memory, which means the chips retain stored information when power is off. Other memory types, such as DRAM, lose data when the power goes off.

SSDs offer a couple advantages over disk-based drives: they're lighter, consume less power, and more rugged, making them ideal for laptops and mobile devices. They are also more expensive, but the price gap is narrowing as flash memory becomes increasingly cheaper.

Seagate already makes hybrid drives, which combine flash memory with magnetic disks. Its Momentus 5400 PSD hybrid drive stores the most commonly accessed data on flash memory instead of on disks, which improves read time and speeds up the process of booting a computer, the company said.

The drives are intended to be used in laptops and are available in capacities up to 160GB, according to Seagate's Web site.

Seagate will use the new flash drives to augment its product lineup for certain applications, but predicts far greater demand for its hybrid, or "flash-embedded," drives. "We have a pretty compelling product in hybrid drives; that's where we see a large part of the storage market going in the future, much bigger than SSD," Monroy said.

In January, Seagate joined an industry alliance of storage vendors promoting hybrid drive technology, also including Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Toshiba Corp. That capability also complements a feature of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista OS, designed to remove the delay often encountered while a computer searches for and retrieves files from its hard drive. Intel Corp. also uses a similar approach to speed the performance of its Centrino Duo notebook platform.

As the high cost of flash and hybrid drives drops closer to traditional hard drives, consumers will soon fuel increased demand for the superior performance of solid state, analysts said. In June, iSuppli Corp. forecasted that by the end of 2009, 12% of notebooks would include SSDs, and 35% of notebooks would use hybrid hard drives.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...&intsrc=kc_top





Chinese Seek to Buy a U.S. Maker of Disk Drives
John Markoff

A Chinese technology company has expressed interest in buying a maker of computer disk drives in the United States, raising concerns among American government officials about the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China.

The overture, which was disclosed by the chief executive of one of the two remaining drive makers in the United States, William D. Watkins of Seagate Technology, has resurrected the issues of economic competitiveness and national security raised three years ago when Lenovo, a Chinese computer maker, bought I.B.M.’s personal computer business.

Tensions have been increasing lately between the countries over China’s ambitions in developing its military abilities and advanced technologies for industrial and consumer uses.

Although disk drives do not fall under a list of export-controlled technologies, the attempted purchase of an American disk drive company would require a security review by the federal government, according to several government officials.

In recent years, modern disk drives, used to store vast quantities of digital information securely, have become complex computing systems, complete with hundreds of thousands of lines of software that are used to ensure the integrity of data and to offer data encryption.

That could raise the prospect of secret tampering with hardware or software to make it possible to pilfer information via computer networks, intelligence officials have warned.

Seagate has recently begun selling drives with hardware encryption abilities.

Mr. Watkins did not identify the Chinese company. But he said that the possibility of an acquisition had sent alarm bells ringing at some government agencies.

“The U.S. government is freaking out,” Mr. Watkins said during an interview on Thursday.

Reached Friday night, Treasury officials declined to comment on possible Chinese overtures for an American maker.

While Mr. Watkins said that Seagate, which is the largest drive maker in the United States, was not for sale, he also said that if a high enough premium was offered to shareholders it would be difficult to stop.

Seagate’s shares rose 1.05 percent Friday to close at $24.96 and were up about 4 percent for the week after news that it might enter the flash memory market. There does not appear to have been any significant increase in trading of Seagate options.

With a booming economy and $1.33 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves, Chinese companies are in a position to acquire American companies, as Japanese and West European companies were several decades ago. While those earlier acquisitions were often opposed out of fears that they would damage American economic competitiveness, the acquisition of American companies by Chinese companies is regarded with more suspicion, particularly in the high-tech sector.

Since the Lenovo sale, the government has become increasingly concerned about technology security, according to members of federal advisory committees.

“Seagate would be extremely sensitive,” said an industry executive who participates in classified government advisory groups. “I do not think anyone in the U.S. wants the Chinese to have access to the controller chips for a disk drive. One never knows what the Chinese could do to instrument the drive.”

The transfer of advanced disk drive manufacturing technology would give the Chinese a major leg up in competing in information technologies. China, however, still lags in basic manufacturing skills like semiconductor design and manufacturing.

“This is clearly a critical component of a computer system and the purchase by the Chinese or other nations merits a full review to determine what our risks are,” said Michael R. Wessell, a commissioner of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a group that monitors the national security implications of trade with China for Congress.

I.B.M., which invented the disk drive in the 1950s and which dominated the industry through the 1990s, sold its disk drive business to the Japanese computer maker Hitachi in 2002, leaving just two American companies: Seagate, based in Scotts Valley, Calif., and Western Digital, based in Lake Forest, Calif.

Two other Japanese makers, Fujitsu and Toshiba, and a division of Samsung, a South Korean electronics conglomerate, are also major manufacturers of the storage devices.

Western Digital executives declined to comment.

Kenneth Lieberthal, the senior director for Asia at the National Security Council during the later years of the Clinton administration, expressed strong doubt that the Chinese government would allow a technology company to pursue an acquisition if the transaction were likely to draw criticism from the United States government, even if that criticism did not reach the level of an actual prohibition on a deal.

“The Chinese have been very concerned about how to invest in the United States without producing the kind of political firestorm they ran into when they tried to buy Unocal,” said Mr. Lieberthal, a professor of politics and business administration at the University of Michigan. “The government really does not want to confront the kind of situation it ran into with Unocal.”

The China National Offshore Oil Corporation, a state-owned company, abandoned its plan to buy Unocal in 2005 when it touched off opposition in Congress. Mr. Lieberthal said that the Chinese government had only been lukewarm about supporting Cnooc, and was likely to be even more cautious now. “If’ they’ve really decided to go after a high-end computer equipment manufacturer, they’ve really decided to test the waters,” he said.

If a Chinese company has made an advance to an American company in a technologically sensitive industry without obtaining prior support from the Chinese government, the Chinese company would be in serious trouble with Beijing officials, Mr. Lieberthal said. So it is unlikely that any serious approach would be made by a Chinese company without careful prior consultations in Beijing.

Yet the Chinese government also faces a quandary: how to improve yields on its foreign exchange reserves, more than two-thirds of it in dollars. Roughly $100 billion is believed to be in American mortgage-backed securities, an investment that has suffered during the recent financial turmoil.

A Chinese government investment fund spent $3 billion to buy nearly 10 percent of the Blackstone Group this summer, but made a point of taking nonvoting shares to reduce the risk of a political backlash. Stakes in financial services companies also tend to be less controversial than stakes in high-tech enterprises.

Beijing authorities are also starting to encourage companies and even individuals to invest more overseas, as a way to offset some of the foreign investment pouring into China. The inflow of money from investment and trade surpluses has been putting upward pressure on the value of China’s currency, threatening to erode some of the competitiveness of Chinese exports.

If a Chinese company does make an actual bid for an American high-tech company, a former government official said, and that bid is blocked for political reasons, then Chinese companies may become even warier of investing in American companies and the government in Beijing may begin to suspect that Washington so distrusts China that it is trying to throw roadblocks in the path of its economic development.

“If they are blocked, I would suspect this would at a minimum contribute to their being gun-shy of the U.S. government,” said Mr. Lieberthal, a Chinese speaker who stays in close touch with a range of Chinese government officials and American corporate leaders.

Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/25/bu...5drive.html?hp





Interesting Thing About Slow Vista Network Speed
Dloneranger

background - M2N32-SLI DELUXE, 5600+ cpu, 2Gb ram, dual boot system xp and vista

on xp the network speed was between 30-50%
on vista it was stuck at just over 5%

so I followed all the advice about disabling autotuning etc, tried setting all the differerent lan driver settings, played with the tcp window size, latest drivers etc ....
none of it made a bit of difference, I was still stuck on 5% usage <grrrr>

until.... I stopped playing music...
doesn't matter what I play back music with, if it's playing or paused the lan speed seems to be locked at the 5%
stopping playback or quitting the player lets the file copy go to the 30-50% instantly

oddly, if I play a video, the lan transfers go up to 10%

playing an mp3 and video at the same time gives the same 10% and the usage stays the same even if the video is closed

after that the lan is limited to 10% when any audio/video programs are playing (as soon as they're closed it jumps back up to 30-50%, start them and it's down to the 10% again)

I can see it's not cpu usage, as it happens even while the video/audio is paused

In summary - not a clue why it happens , but I've seen this behaviour on a few different machines now
http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?t=83112





European Legal Circles Await Ruling by Top Appeals Court on Microsoft
Kevin J. O’Brien

Perhaps the most closely watched figure in European legal circles this summer has been Bo Vesterdorf, the Danish judge who heads Europe’s top appeals court, with antitrust lawyers hanging on his every public utterance.

They are interested in how the Court of First Instance, the body that he leads, will rule when it announces its decision Sept. 17 on Microsoft’s appeal of Europe’s biggest antitrust case ever. But Judge Vesterdorf, 61, who has said he plans to retire on the day the decision is made public, has avoided any discussion of the case.

Christopher Fretwell, a court spokesman, said Judge Vesterdorf, who has presided over the court since March 1998, would not give interviews on the case before the Microsoft verdict.

“He’s been very, very careful not to give anything away,” said Jonathan Zuck, the president of the Association for Competitive Technology, a group based in Washington that has intervened in the case to support Microsoft. “But whatever comes out, there are huge issues that will be decided here.”

Less than a month before the ruling’s publication, expectations for a watershed decision are running high. And despite the information vacuum, lawyers on both sides of the case say they expect the court to render a split decision of sorts — giving both Microsoft and the European Commission victories on key legal points.

Microsoft, the reasoning goes, will prevail on the issue of bundling, with the court recognizing the company’s right to wrap new extras like voice recognition, antivirus and media player software into its dominant Windows operating system.

But the same court is seen as upholding the commission’s demand that Microsoft share at reasonable cost the computer code that competitors need to make their software compatible with computers using the Microsoft operating system. In its original 2004 decision, the commission ruled that Microsoft had used the predominance of its Windows operating system to essentially corner the market for work-group servers.

The Court of First Instance in Luxembourg is Europe’s main appeals court for challenges to the European Commission. Judge Vesterdorf heads the 13-judge panel.

Regardless of the outcome, antitrust lawyers expect one or both sides to appeal the decision to the European Court of Justice. But that review, which could take up to three more years, will deal only with legal procedures used by the appeals court, not the facts in the case.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/te...=1&oref=slogin





Microsoft Looks for the Big Guns in OOXML In-Fighting

Bill Gates has reportedly been making phone calls to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Commerce

Bill Gates has reportedly been making phone calls to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Commerce to push the American National Standards Institute to ignore the votes of its advisory committees and vote "yes" on ISO standardizing Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) format, the one in competition with the OpenDocument Format (ODF) pushed by IBM and Sun.

Gates reportedly picked up the phone when the last INCITS ballot failed by one vote to support Microsoft.

The only trouble with getting the US government involved in voting "aye" is that because of the way OOXML handles XML Scheme the government will have to break its own rules to use it.
http://xml.sys-con.com/read/419573.htm





India Throws MS Open Format Out of the Window

NEW DELHI: India on Thursday gave Microsoft a thumbs-down in the war of standards for office documents.

In a tense meeting at Delhi’s Manak Bhawan, the 21-member technical committee decided that India will vote a ‘no’ against Microsoft’s Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) standard at the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in Geneva on September 2.

“We unanimously agree on the disapproval of OOXML with comments. The same will be submitted to ISO,” National Informatics Centre head and BIS technical committee chairperson Nita Verma said after a marathon meeting that lasted over six hours. There was no need for a voting as only Infosys Technologies and CSI supported Microsoft.

The Open Document Format (ODF) alliance, enjoying widespread support from academia and corporates like Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Google, were in a jubilant mood having succeeded in stalling OOXML from being accepted as a standard in India.

Microsoft said it respect’s the government’s decision. “There were only three options `Yes’, `No’ and `Abstain’ to be taken and we respect the government’s decision,” Microsoft’s legal affairs head Rakesh Bakshi said.

He, however, added that India’s ‘No’ vote will become a ‘Yes’ if Microsoft is able to resolve all technical issues with OOXML before the ballot resolution committee of ISO.

Prof DB Phatak of IIT Mumbai, who was instrumental in conducting the meetings, looked relieved after being flooded with calls from both camps over the week.

The Microsoft camp complained that when ODF was being standardised by ISO, they did not oppose it and now the ODF camp refused to return the favour. ODF supporters said they would have no problems with OOXML if all the 200 technical issues were taken care of.

Amongst hectic lobbying from both camps, the US government on Thursday said that it will abstain from voting. China has already voted a ‘No’ against Microsoft, while Malaysia, Denmark and Switzerland are supporting the software major.

A global alliance of Sun-IBM, Oracle, Google, Red Hat have ganged up against Microsoft which is being supported by Apple, Quark, Accenture and Novell. On Indian soil, Infosys, HCL, Skelta, Sonata Software and Sify have come out in support of Microsoft.

September 2 is the last date to submit the vote with comments to ISO. About 123 counties are participating in the vote. Votes from most are still to come. Canada, Czech Republic, Iran, Japan, Libya, Cuba, New Zealand, UK are likely to back the IBM-Sun’s ODF Alliance.

On the other hand, Belgium, Finland, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Singapore, Korea, France and Australia are likely to abstain from voting.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/...ow/2305780.cms





Shareholders OK $8.2B Tribune Co. Buyout
UPI

Tribune Co. stockholders have overwhelmingly approved an $8.2 billion deal to take the Chicago media company private, the company said Tuesday.

A preliminary vote tally showed 97 percent of investor votes in hand supported the $34-a-share buyout led by real estate mogul Sam Zell, Tribune said.

Zell wasn't at the meeting in Chicago for the vote on the deal, Tribune said.

The company, which owns 11 daily newspapers, 23 TV stations and the Chicago Cubs baseball team, borrowed $7 billion to finance the first step of the transaction and must take on $4.2 billion more debt to finish the buyout.

It also needs U.S. Federal Communications Commission permission to own TV stations and newspapers in the same market.

Tribune -- whose newspapers include the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Hartford Courant and Baltimore Sun -- has said it believes the deal will close in the fourth quarter.

It has also said and financing for the deal -- from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Merrill Lynch & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. -- is fully committed.

The company has said it would sell the Cubs and related assets but plans to keep its newspapers.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Busines...o_buyout/8448/





RIAA approved client

US Man Admits P2P Child Porn Charges

David Leroy Knellinger jailed for seven years
Clement James

A US man has been sentenced to 87 months in prison for receipt of child pornography via a peer-to-peer network.

David Leroy Knellinger Sr, 60, pleaded guilty before the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to one count of receiving child pornography.

US District Judge Robert Payne also ordered Knellinger to pay a $15,000 fine and serve five years of supervised release following his prison term.

Knellinger admitted to using iMesh peer-to-peer software to obtain three videos depicting child pornography.

In a related incident, the child victim in one video has been identified by law enforcement officers and her alleged abuser, Kenneth Freeman, was a fugitive on the 15 Most Wanted list of the US Marshal's Service.

Freeman was arrested in Hong Kong in May and is currently contesting extradition proceedings.

The investigation of Knellinger was conducted by the FBI and arose from an investigation conducted by the US Postal Inspection Service.

The case is being prosecuted by Assistant US Attorney Brian Hood for the Eastern District of Virginia and Trial Attorney Alexandra Gelber for the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the Criminal Division.
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/21...p2p-child-porn





Emmis CFO: No "Measurable Effect" From Satellite Radio
FMQB

Emmis Communications CFO Patrick Walsh discussed what his company considered a "threat" to terrestrial radio, while speaking at the Noble Financial Conference in Charleston, SC yesterday. Walsh said he did not consider satellite radio to have a "measurable effect" and described it as a niche business.

Walsh said that Emmis views "the threat as being much more fragmentation from the iPod and Internet streaming and the fragmentation from media, whether it be YouTube or other media being delivered on the Internet just fragmenting peoples’ time," according to Radio Ink.

He continued, “Satellite radio doesn’t show up in our diaries very often. The people that utilize satellite radio often toggle between AM and FM and satellite radio, and it really hasn’t caused a measurable effect in our business yet. We reach hundreds of millions of people every day. Ninety-three percent of Americans listen to AM/FM radio every week. Satellite radio is a niche business focused on people willing to spend 13 dollars per month for the radio. Which for long-haul truckers or people who are advocates of a music format which may not reach a mass market – if you’re a passionate Blue Grass listener in New York City – it probably makes sense for you."

Walsh called the satcaster business model "challenging" and described the proposed XM-Sirius merger as an attempt to "with the government to solve a business model problem." He concluded that satellite radio "is competition but I don’t think it’s the principal competition for radio going forward."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=460839





Lebanon Bans Tale of Fighters in Militias
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Over the next three months, the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué will stage his new performance piece in Paris, Rome and the capitals of Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. But he will not present it here, for the audience with whom it might resonate most.

This week, an Interior Ministry censorship board banned performances of the piece, “How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke,” which was to have received its premiere this weekend.

For Mr. Mroué, the outright ban is a first. And he says it bodes ill for an art scene that gestated during a period of precarious peace but is now squeezed by the government’s fear of renewed civil war.

“The margin of freedom is getting smaller and smaller,” he said during a break from his day job as an illustrator for a Lebanese television station. “The vision is becoming so narrow, and there is no more room for different voices.”

Written by Mr. Mroué with Fadi Toufic, “Nancy” presents an episodic history of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war through the experiences of four fighters who served in different militias. For the duration of the performance, Mr. Mroué; his wife, Lina Saneh; and two other actors sit on a couch meant for three. Above each actor’s head, like speech balloons in a comic strip, are a microphone and a screen projecting posters of the “martyrs” and militias that are common to this day on the streets of Beirut.

The four characters tell stories of contradiction that ricochet off one another. They will adhere to an ideological position and then change it. They pledge loyalty to a political leader and then betray him. They make allies and then forsake them. They switch sides and get lost.

In each story they tell they are killed in battle, only to come back to life again in the next round, like irrepressible players of video games.

The various and competing narratives weave a dense web that gives a sense of how conflicts play out over the years in any city — Beirut, Baghdad, Sarajevo, Belfast — riven by sectarian strife.

Mr. Mroué, 40, belongs to a tight-knit generation of artists, writers and filmmakers that has put Beirut back on the cultural map since the end of the civil war in 1990. They have learned to maneuver on the margins of mainstream society, striving to create works of formal precision and political insight with as little interference as possible from Lebanon’s fragile, divided government.

But that space is indeed shrinking. Since the late 1990s, Mr. Mroué had eluded the censors by ignoring them. He didn’t bother to clear his scripts. The price, he said, was that he could perform each piece for a few nights only, he could not accept a fee, and he relied on art spaces that are slightly off the radar.

But after he staged “Who’s Afraid of Representation” — a piece incorporating the true story of a civil servant who killed some of his colleagues when he was fired from his job — in late 2005, officials from Lebanon’s Interior Ministry called him in and demanded that he eliminate portions of the performance.

Since then, performance spaces have been reluctant to stage anything without prior approval from the censorship board. So this summer Mr. Mroué decided to take his chances with the censors.

After a weeklong struggle with Mr. Mroué over parts of the script, the censorship board banned the performance on Aug. 14.

“I expected to have to cut from the text,” Mr. Mroué said. “But I didn’t expect it to be stopped in such a violent way.”

He appealed the decision and was rebuffed. The censors would not provide an explanation. When he started receiving offers of political cover from various factions, he said, he knew that the fight he had on his hands was no longer his own, and that the performance risked being used anyway.

“How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke” was to have been presented on Aug. 18 at Art Lounge, a fashionably disheveled gallery that doubles as a bar and boutique on the outskirts of the city in the drab Karantina industrial district.

Reached by telephone, the owner of the space, Nino Azzi, said he was relieved. “It’s better to sort out all the legalities in advance,” he said. “It’s a bit delicate right now.”

A year after fighting between Israeli troops and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the country remains on tenterhooks. The lingering specter of the long civil war is reinforced by a standoff between pro-government and opposition parties, and by continued fighting between the Lebanese Army and Islamists in the north.

Mr. Mroué and his contemporaries were once considered part of a postwar generation, but they have not entirely escaped Lebanon’s cyclical violence. Mr. Mroué is more aware of that than most.

“We know we are in the midst of a cold civil war,” he said. “There may be no fighting, but we know the fighters are there. Even the younger generation is ready to fight.”

Born in Beirut in 1967, Mr. Mroué studied theater at the Lebanese University, where he met Ms. Saneh, his wife and frequent collaborator.

When they were in their early 20s, the couple created a stage adaptation of “The Journey of Little Gandhi,” a novel by the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury. Since then they have collaborated formally and informally on an ever more multidisciplinary body of work that includes videos and installations combining photography, text and sculpture.

Yet theater remains the spine of their art. Few of the theater directors who were active in the 1980s are staging plays in Beirut now. Mr. Mroué and Ms. Saneh have helped sustain Lebanese theater by pushing it into the realm of performance art.

With a string of formally inventive, astringent performance pieces to their credit, they are to Beirut what the Wooster Group is to New York: a blend of avant-garde innovation, conceptual complexity and political urgency, all grounded in earthy humor.

“Rabih is a thinker,” said Walid Raad, one of Lebanon’s best-known artists. “There are concepts, plays, figures, texts and forms — and Rabih has something to say to, and about, them. At the same time, it always seems as if his dialogue is in the service of the present and future, in Lebanon and elsewhere.”

George Arbid, a architect and university professor who follows Mr. Mroué’s work closely, said, “He is seriously interested in the local audience, and yet his work travels everywhere.”

Local presentations of Mr. Mroué’s work are becoming increasingly rare. He has been part of the international art circuit since 2002, traveling extensively to biennials and theater festivals as far afield as Sydney, Australia; Seoul, South Korea; and Tokyo, where “Nancy” had its world premiere in March. When he does perform for the Beirut public, it constitutes a major cultural event.

In Mr. Mroué’s view, a Beirut audience would have implicitly understood the genesis of his latest piece. “It came out of a real fear of another civil war,” he said. “For those of us who already lived through one, we can live through almost anything — but not that, not again.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/18/theater/18perf.html





China Arrests or Warns 60 for Spreading Rumours

Police in east China have arrested or warned 60 people for spreading rumours by SMS or on the Internet so far this year and specified the threat of modern communications to society, state media said on Tuesday.

China has an army of cyber-police who patrol the Internet for unfavourable content, but their targets are more often politically sensitive subjects than pornography.

Xia Cunxi, a public security spokesman in the eastern province of Jiangsu, said 60 were accused of spreading rumours, lies or offensive messages, the official China Daily said in its online edition.

"Rumours spread by modern means of communication can be a greater menace to society than those spread by word of mouth," Xia was quoted as saying.

The report did not specify how the cases were dealt with or how many suspects were arrested and charged.

In one case, police in July detained two men who sent text messages to more than 200 relatives or friends, claiming people with AIDS were spreading the disease by using toothpicks at restaurants and returning them to their containers, it said.

An Internet posting alleged that police chased a man riding a motorcycle with his son on the back, causing the death of the son who had won a place in a prestigious university.

In April, police launched an immediate investigation after a posting claimed a school in Jiangsu would be the site of a shooting spree with a death toll exceeding that of the Virginia Tech shootings in the United States just days earlier.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/200708...553508c_1.html





US Kills Controversial Anti-Terror Database
Layer 8

Long criticized for keeping track of regular everyday citizens, the government’s anti-terror database will officially close Sept. 17. The Threat and Local Observation Notices or TALON, was established in 2002 by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz as a way to collect and evaluate information about possible threats to U.S. servicemembers and defense civilians all over the world.

Congress and others protested its apparent use as an unauthorized citizen tracking database. The TALON system came under fire in 2005 for improperly storing information about some civilian individuals and non-government-affiliated groups on its database. The Air Force developed TALON, or the Threat and Local Observation Notice system in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a way to gather data on possible terrorist threats.

Anti-war groups and other organizations, protested after it was revealed last year that the military had monitored anti-war activities, organizations and individuals who attended peace rallies. The Defense Department conducted a four-point review of the system in December 2005 and, as a result, purged a large amount of information that was deemed unnecessary from the database, the DoD said in a release. The Defense Department Inspector General reviewed TALON, and in a report dated June 27, 2007, found that the program legally gathered and maintained information on individuals and organizations.

It is being closed because reporting to the system had declined significantly, and it was determined to no longer be of analytical value, said Army Col. Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman said I a release. The announcement was not unexpected as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made it clear in April he wanted to change the Pentagon's intelligence gathering operations and said TALON would likely be shut down. The department is working to develop a new reporting system to replace TALON, but in the interim, all information concerning force protection threats will go to the FBI's Guardian reporting system.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/18609





School Pulls Critical Facebook Site
Charles Mandel

Dalhousie University says it had a Facebook group pulled that wrongly accused the institution of abusing animals during scientific research.

The group gained 15,000 members last week, showing just how quickly information on social-networking websites can spread, and the challenges businesses and institutions face as they deal with defamatory material online.

The case has caused one Internet expert to warn that institutions will continue to deal with the problem as online social networking grows.

“What we’re seeing is that all of these new technologies and Internet applications are double-edged swords,’’ said Philippa Lawson, executive director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa.

“I think there is no question that we’re going to see a vast increase in the number of complaints about this kind of thing.”

Dalhousie says it had the group shut down not because of its popularity, but because the information was incorrect and no forum for debate existed within the group.

The group was called “Stop Dogs and Puppies from being murdered at Dalhousie University” and alleged the school still used the animals in scientific research.

Charles Crosby, a spokesman for the school, said the school hasn’t used any dogs in its research for well over a decade.

Posted to the group was an image of a dog looking lonely and scared. That did not come from the university, although it was meant to look that way, Crosby said.

It wasn’t until the creator of the site, listed as Amy Scott, shut down all discussion on the group that Dalhousie decided to contact Facebook and have the group pulled.

Crosby said so long as debate occurred around the subject, the school didn’t have a problem, but once discussion was discontinued, the school took action.

Jason MacIsaac, a web designer in Halifax, said he just learned Thursday the school had shut down the group to which he belonged. He said many people believe the school is using dogs in its research and called the yanking of the group an infringement on free speech.

MacIsaac believes the school should have opened its own Facebook group and offered testimony, photos and written proof that it wasn’t using dogs in research rather than yanking the other group. “It wasn’t a malicious smear campaign at all.”

Scott also has an online petition calling for the university to stop using dogs in research. She could not be reached for comment.

Facebook staff did not return a request for an interview or reply to e-mailed questions.

Dalhousie has tried unsuccessfully to reach Scott as well to discuss the problem with her. Crosby said the university has no plans at this time to pursue a defamation suit. Nor will the school try and pull the online petition even though it’s incorrect, according to Crosby.

The university “predominantly” uses rodents and insects in research now, Crosby said, adding that the welfare of animals at the school is a top priority.

“This is important life-saving research that these researchers are engaged in.”

Crosby said the rapid sign-up to the group last week speaks to the technology. “It’s quite viral in the way it spreads. You can spread good news, bad news, and information about an event.

“It seems to spread very quickly because once people sign on, it just spreads like wildfire from there.”

Lawson said such technology possesses fantastic social benefits, but can also be used in ways which harm individuals and society. “We’re going to see many, many more cases. I would be surprised if this is not a snowballing kind of problem.”
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/na...0f02ab3&k=4865





Crackdown on Public Service Snoops
Ben Woodhead

FEDERAL government agencies have uncovered dozens of cases of employees improperly accessing confidential client records following the launch of new systems to track snooping.

Government agencies are considering criminal charges against some of their employees

The crackdown has led to a spate of resignations and the Child Support Agency is reviewing a number of breaches as it considers whether or not to press criminal charges against former employees.

The reports come a year after a series of sackings at Centrelink and the Australian Taxation Office, where hundreds of staff were caught accessing client records that they were not authorised to view.

Child Support Agency general manager Matt Miller said breaches by employees were uncovered after its fraud detection systems were strengthened in November last year.

The software has since been used to audit 45,000 client records, with three confirmed cases of improper access detected and one possible instance still under investigation.

"The Child Support Agency places paramount importance on customer privacy and has zero tolerance of unauthorised access of customer records," general manager Matt Miller said.

"Of the three confirmed cases all three staff members resigned prior to determination of Code of Conduct proceedings. Despite this the agency is continuing the assessment of these cases in order to determine if criminal charges should proceed."

Mr Miller said the agency would continue to expand the software it used to detect unauthorised access of client records.

Medicare Australia, meanwhile, has confirmed 49 instances of staff inappropriately browsing confidential records after it launched a review program during the 2007 financial year.

The program included the introduction of a detection system that was modelled on data matching rules used by Centrelink, which has uncovered more than 790 instances of staff spying since 2004.

"Medicare Australia takes browsing very seriously and has a dedicated unit in place to proactively review staff access to Medicare Australia information," an agency spokeswoman said.

"Where unauthorised access is detected, swift and appropriate disciplinary and/or legal action is taken."

The spokeswoman said 147 investigations into possibly inappropriate access were launched during the first year of the program and in 63 cases the employees were cleared of wrongdoing.

"Forty-nine cases were finalised with a range of disciplinary action being taken, including information or formal counselling, written reprimands and fines. A number of operators resigned either before or after the completion of the investigation into their case," she said.

A further 35 cases are yet to be finalised.

The spying incidents came despite ongoing efforts by federal government agencies to beef up computer systems and education programs designed to detect and stamp out improper access to sensitive client records.

Mr Miller said 3500 agency employees had received fraud training since July last year and all staff were retrained at least every two years.

Medicare Australia staff are warned about the consequences of browsing client records whenever they log on and all staff access to records is monitored.

A spokesman for Centrelink said the agency had compiled data on unauthorised employee access to client records during the 2007 financial year and the information would be published in the agency's annual report.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15306,00.html





What’s Off the Record at N.H.T.S.A.? Almost Everything
Christopher Jensen

A “family” of crash test dummies used in vehicle safety tests. (Photograph released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration)

If you want to know something as simple as who heads the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, don’t bother to ask the safety agency’s communications office. Without special permission, officials there are no longer allowed to provide information to reporters except on a background basis, which means it cannot be attributed to a spokesman.

Without such attribution, there are few circumstances under which most reporters will report such information. This makes for interesting dealings with the office charged with providing information about the nation’s top automotive safety agency.

So, I will end the suspense about the boss’s identity. The administrator is Nicole R. Nason, who took over on May 31, 2006, after she was appointed to the post by President Bush.

And it is she who put the big hush on one of the government’s most important safety agencies. I found this out recently when I asked to talk to an N.H.T.S.A. researcher about some technical safety issues in which he had a great deal of expertise. Agency officials told me I could talk to the expert on a background basis, but if I wanted to use any information or quotes from him, that would have to be worked out later with a N.H.T.S.A. official. The arrangement struck me as manipulative, and I declined to agree to it.

It seems that Ms. Nason has adopted a policy that has blocked virtually all of her staff — including the communications office — from providing any information to reporters on the record, which means that it can be attributed.

As an alternative I was told I could interview Ms. Nason on the record (instead of the expert on the subject of my article). I declined, failing to see how her appointment as administrator — she was trained as a lawyer — made her a expert in that subject.

When I said I would like to talk to Ms. Nason on the record about her no-attribution policy, she was not available.

The agency’s new policy effectively means that some of the world’s top safety researchers are no longer allowed to talk to reporters or to be freely quoted about automotive safety issues that affect pretty much everybody.

“My God,” said Joan Claybrook, who was N.H.T.S.A. administrator from 1977 to 1981 and is now president of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group. Given that N.H.T.S.A. is the leading source of automotive safety information in the United States, its researchers are public officials and people are entitled to “know what information they have, whether it is on paper or in their heads,” Ms. Claybrook said.

The policy of allowing information to be attributed only to political appointees is intermittently enforced around other parts of the Department of Transportation, including the Federal Railroad Administration. But it is a radical change from the way N.H.T.S.A has operated for at least 20 years. In the past, reporters could talk to its experts and the agency was proud to discuss its research and accomplishments.

Ms. Nason felt it was necessary for N.H.T.S.A. to have a “central spokesperson” and “we were finding a lot of stuff did not need to be on the record,” David Kelly, her chief of staff, told me. He also insisted, after our telephone conversation, that he did not want to be quoted and had intended to speak only on background. (My notes show no such request.)

So that central spokesperson is Ms. Nason, whose previous job was assistant secretary for governmental affairs in the Department of Transportation. “In that position, she was responsible for oversight of congressional affairs, coordinating all legislative and nonlegislative relationships between the D.O.T. and Congress,” according to her N.H.T.S.A. biography. If she has any experience in keeping a Congressman from skidding out of control, that could come in handy now that she is speaking for an entire agency of seasoned safety experts.
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2007...st-everything/





School Uniforms Track Kids
Stefanie Olsen

Parents already have a way to monitor kids' phone calls and text messages, and soon they might have the means to track children wearing school uniforms.

An English manufacturer of uniforms is considering adding satellite tracking devices to its line of school clothing so that parents can locate their child's whereabouts at all times, according to an article from the Daily Telegraph in Australia. The manufacturer, Lancashire-based Trutex, believes there is a demand for such clothing. In a recent survey of its own, the company found that 59 percent of 800 parents surveyed were interested in buying uniforms with embedded Global Positioning Systems.

Still, it seems unlikely that a teenager would willingly wear a GPS-laced outfit. According to the article, only half of kids 12 and under (who were surveyed) said that they wouldn't mind wearing the clothes.
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-976...&subj=NewsBlog





We can hear you now

Classified Surveillance Intel Revealed

McConnell confirms AT&T, Verizon, others help government with wiretaps
AP

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell pulled the curtain back on previously classified details of government surveillance and of a secretive court whose recent rulings created new hurdles for the Bush administration as it tries to prevent terrorism.

McConnell’s comments were made in an interview with the El Paso Times last week and posted as a transcript on the newspaper’s web site Wednesday.

The revelations raised eyebrows for their frank discussion of previously classified eavesdropping work conducted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA.

Among the disclosures:

• McConnell confirmed for the first time that the private sector assisted with President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program. AT&T, Verizon and other telecommunications companies are being sued for their cooperation. “Now if you play out the suits at the value they’re claimed, it would bankrupt these companies,” McConnell said, arguing that they deserve immunity for their help.
• He provided new details on court rulings handed down by the 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves classified eavesdropping operations and whose proceedings are almost always entirely secret. McConnell said a ruling that went into effect May 31 required the government to get court warrants to monitor communications between two foreigners if the conversation travels on a wire in the U.S. network. Millions of calls each day do, because of the robust nature of the U.S. systems.
• McConnell said it takes 200 hours to assemble a FISA warrant on a single telephone number. “We’re going backwards,” he said. “We couldn’t keep up.”
• Offering never-disclosed figures, McConnell also revealed that fewer than 100 people inside the United States are monitored under FISA warrants. However, he said, thousands of people overseas are monitored.

Even as he shed new light on the classified operations, McConnell asserted that the current debate in Congress about whether to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will cost American lives because of all the information it revealed to terrorists.

“Part of this is a classified world. The fact that we’re doing it this way means that some Americans are going to die,” he said.

Official: FISA is a necessary tool
McConnell was in El Paso, Texas, last week for a conference on border security hosted by House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas. The spy chief joined Reyes for an interview with his local paper.

At the end of the interview, McConnell cautioned reporter Chris Roberts that he should consider whether enemies of the U.S. could gain from the information he just shared in the interview, Roberts said. McConnell left it to the paper to decide what to publish.

McConnell appeared days after Congress passed a temporary law to expand the government’s ability to monitor suspects in national security investigations — terrorists, spies and others — without first seeking court approval in certain cases. The highly contentious measure expires in six months.

After Sept. 11, Bush authorized the terrorist surveillance program to monitor conversations between people in the United States and others overseas when terrorism is suspected. Until January, no warrants were required. But as the Democratic Congress took over, the Bush administration decided to bring the program under the oversight of the FISA court.

McConnell said the court initially ruled that the program was appropriate and legitimate. But when the ruling had to be renewed in the spring, another judge saw the operations differently. This judge, who McConnell did not identify, decided that the government needed a warrant to monitor a conversation between foreigners when the signal traveled on a wire in the U.S. communications network.

Did official reveal too much?
McConnell said the government got a temporary stay on the ruling, but it expired at the end of May. “After the 31st of May, we were in extremis because now we have significantly less capability,” he said.

At the same time, the intelligence community was wrapping up years of work on a National Intelligence Estimate on threats to the homeland — an analysis that is considered its most comprehensive judgment. It found the threat was increasing, McConnell noted.

Because he sees FISA as a major tool to keep terrorists out of the country, McConnell said he pressed Congress to change the law.

McConnell’s interview raised concerns at the Justice Department, where senior officials questioned whether the intelligence chief had overstepped in discussing the secret FISA court.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse referred questions to McConnell’s office, where his spokesman Ross Feinstein declined to comment.

In a phone interview, Michigan Rep. Peter Hoekstra said he never felt at liberty to discuss some of the information that McConnell did, including the FISA court rulings, but the executive branch gets to decide what is classified. “What I think it tells you is how important they believe it is to get this FISA thing done right,” said Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

Pushing back on accusations
He said McConnell is hurt by the personal attacks on him during the FISA recent debate. Among them, Democrats have alleged that he negotiated in bad faith and was too beholden to the White House.

In addition, Hoekstra said he thinks McConnell wanted to push back on accusations that the legislation gave the attorney general unprecedented new powers. “I think they felt they had to become more public,” he said.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20396282/





Transcript: Debate on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
Chris Roberts

The following is the transcript of a question and answer session with National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell.

Question: How much has President Bush or members of his administration formed your response to the FISA debate?

Answer: Not at all. When I came back in, remember my previous assignment was director of the NSA, so this was an area I have known a little bit about. So I came back in. I was nominated the first week of January. The administration had made a decision to put the terrorist surveillance program into the FISA court. I think that happened the 7th of Jan. So as I come in the door and I'm prepping for the hearings, this sort of all happened. So the first thing I want to know is what's this program and what's the background and I was pretty surprised at what I learned. First off, the issue was the technology had changed and we had worked ourselves into a position that we were focusing on foreign terrorist communications, and this was a terrorist foreigner in a foreign country. The issue was international communications are on a wire so all of a sudden we were in a position because of the wording in the law that we had to have a warrant to do that. So the most important thing to capture is that it's a foreigner in a foreign country, required to get a warrant. Now if it were wireless, we would not be required to get a warrant. Plus we were limited in what we were doing to terrorism only and the last time I checked we had a mission called foreign intelligence, which should be construed to mean anything of a foreign intelligence interest, North Korea, China, Russia, Syria, weapons of mass destruction proliferation, military development and it goes on and on and on. So when I engaged with the administration, I said we've gotten ourselves into a position here where we need to clarify, so the FISA issue had been debated and legislation had been passed in the house in 2006, did not pass the Senate. Two bills were introduced in the Senate, I don't know if it was co-sponsorship or two different bills, but Sen. (Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.) had a bill and Sen. Specter had a bill and it may have been the same bill, I don't know, but the point is a lot of debate, a lot of dialogue. So, it was submitted to the FISA court and the first ruling in the FISA court was what we needed to do we could do with an approval process that was at a summary level and that was OK, we stayed in business and we're doing our mission. Well in the FISA process, you may or may not be aware ...

Q: When you say summary level, do you mean the FISA court?

A: The FISA court. The FISA court ruled presented the program to them and they said the program is what you say it is and it's appropriate and it's legitimate, it's not an issue and was had approval. But the FISA process has a renewal. It comes up every so many days and there are 11 FISA judges. So the second judge looked at the same data and said well wait a minute I interpret the law, which is the FISA law, differently. And it came down to, if it's on a wire and it's foreign in a foreign country, you have to have a warrant and so we found ourselves in a position of actually losing ground because it was the first review was less capability, we got a stay and that took us to the 31st of May. After the 31st of May we were in extremis because now we have significantly less capability. And meantime, the community, before I came back, had been working on a National Intelligence Estimate on terrorist threat to the homeland. And the key elements of the terrorist threat to the homeland, there were four key elements, a resilient determined adversary with senior leadership willing to die for the cause, requiring a place to train and develop, think of it as safe haven, they had discovered that in the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now the Pakistani government is pushing and pressing and attempting to do something about it, but by and large they have areas of safe haven. So leadership that can adapt, safe haven, intermediate leadership, these are think of them as trainers, facilitators, operational control guys. And the fourth part is recruits. They have them, they've taken them. This area is referred to as the FATA, federally administered tribal areas, they have the recruits and now the objective is to get them into the United States for mass casualties to conduct terrorist operations to achieve mass casualties. All of those four parts have been carried out except the fourth. They have em, but they haven't been successful. One of the major tools for us to keep them out is the FISA program, a significant tool and we're going the wrong direction. So, for me it was extremis to start talking not only to the administration, but to members of the hill. So from June until the bill was passed, I think I talked to probably 260 members, senators and congressmen. We submitted the bill in April, had an open hearing 1 May, we had a closed hearing in May, I don't remember the exact date. Chairman (U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas) had two hearings and I had a chance to brief the judiciary committee in the house, the intelligence committee in the house and I just mentioned the Senate, did not brief the full judiciary committee in the Senate, but I did meet with Sen. (Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.) and Sen. (Arlen Specter, R-Pa.), and I did have an opportunity on the Senate side, they have a tradition there of every quarter they invite the director of national intelligence in to talk to them update them on topics of interest. And that happened in (June 27). Well what they wanted to hear about was Iraq and Afghanistan and for whatever reason, I'm giving them my review and they ask questions in the order in which they arrive in the room. The second question was on FISA, so it gave me an opportunity to, here I am worrying about this problem and I have 41 senators and I said several things. The current threat is increasing, I'm worried about it. Our capability is decreasing and let me explain the problem.

Q: Can't you get the warrant after the fact?

A: The issue is volume and time. Think about foreign intelligence. What it presented me with an opportunity is to make the case for something current, but what I was really also trying to put a strong emphasis on is the need to do foreign intelligence in any context. My argument was that the intelligence community should not be restricted when we are conducting foreign surveillance against a foreigner in a foreign country, just by dint of the fact that it happened to touch a wire. We haven't done that in wireless for years.

Q: So you end up with people tied up doing paperwork?

A: It takes about 200 man hours to do one telephone number. Think about it from the judges standpoint. Well, is this foreign intelligence? Well how do you know it's foreign intelligence? Well what does Abdul calling Mohammed mean, and how do I interpret that? So, it's a very complex process, so now, I've got people speaking Urdu and Farsi and, you know, whatever, Arabic, pull them off the line have them go through this process to justify what it is they know and why and so on. And now you've got to write it all up and it goes through the signature process, take it through (the Justice Department), and take it down to the FISA court. So all that process is about 200 man hours for one number. We're going backwards, we couldn't keep up. So the issue was ...

Q: How many calls? Thousands?

A: Don't want to go there. Just think, lots. Too many. Now the second part of the issue was under the president's program, the terrorist surveillance program, the private sector had assisted us. Because if you're going to get access you've got to have a partner and they were being sued. Now if you play out the suits at the value they're claimed, it would bankrupt these companies. So my position was we have to provide liability protection to these private sector entities. So that was part of the request. So we went through that and we argued it. Some wanted to limit us to terrorism. My argument was, wait a minute, why would I want to limit it to terrorism. It may be that terrorists are achieving weapons of mass destruction, the only way I would know that is if I'm doing foreign intelligence by who might be providing a weapon of mass destruction.

Q: And this is still all foreign to foreign communication?

A: All foreign to foreign. So, in the final analysis, I was after three points, no warrant for a foreigner overseas, a foreign intelligence target located overseas, liability protection for the private sector and the third point was we must be required to have a warrant for surveillance against a U.S. person. And when I say U.S. person I want to make sure you capture what that means. That does not mean citizen. That means a foreigner, who is here, we still have to have a warrant because he's here. My view is that that's the right check and balances and it's the right protection for the country and lets us still do our mission for protection of the country. And we're trying to fend off foreign threats.

Q: So are you satisfied with it the way it is now?

A: I am. The issue that we did not address, which has to be addressed is the liability protection for the private sector now is proscriptive, meaning going forward. We've got a retroactive problem. When I went through and briefed the various senators and congressmen, the issue was alright, look, we don't want to work that right now, it's too hard because we want to find out about some issues of the past. So what I recommended to the administration is, 'Let's take that off the table for now and take it up when Congress reconvenes in September.'

Q: With an eye toward the six-month review?

A: No, the retroactive liability protection has got to be addressed.

Q: And that's not in the current law?

A: It is not. Now people have said that I negotiated in bad faith, or I did not keep my word or whatever...

Q: That you had an agenda that you weren't honest about.

A: I'll give you the facts from my point of view. When I checked on board I had my discussion with the president. I'm an apolitical figure. I'm not a Republican, I'm not a Democrat. I have voted for both. My job is as a professional to try to do this job the best way I can in terms of, from the intelligence community, protect the nation. So I made my argument that we should have the ability to do surveillance the same way we've done it for the past 50 years and not be inhibited when it's a foreigner in a foreign country. The president's guidance to me early in the process, was, 'You've got the experience. I trust your judgement. You make the right call. There's no pressure from anybody here to tell you how to do it. He did that early. He revisited with me in June. He did it again in July and he said it publicly on Friday before the bill was passed. We were at the FBI, it's an annual thing, we go to the FBI and do a homeland security kind of update. So he came out at noon and said, 'I'm requesting that Congress pass this bill. It's essential. Do it before you go on recess. I'm depending on Mike McConnell's recommendations. And that was the total sum and substance of the guidance and the involvement from the White House with regard to how I should make the call. Now, as we negotiated, we started with 66 pages, were trying to get everything cleaned up at once. When I reduced it to my three points, we went from 66 pages to 11. Now, this is a very, very complex bill. I had a team of 20 lawyers working. You can change a word in a paragraph and end up with some major catastrophe down in paragraph 27, subsection 2c, to shut yourself down, you'll be out of business. So when we send up our 11 pages, we had a lot of help in making sure we got it just right so it would come back and we'd say wait a minute we can't live with this or one of the lawyers would say, 'Wait we tried that, it won't work, here's the problem.' So we kept going back and forth, so we sent up a version like Monday, we sent up a version on Wednesday, we sent up a version on Thursday. The House leadership, or the Democratic leadership on Thursday took that bill and we talked about it. And my response was there are some things I can't live with in this bill and they said alright we're going to fix them. Now, here's the issue. I never then had a chance to read it for the fix because, again, it's so complex, if you change a word or phrase, or even a paragraph reference, you can cause unintended ...

Q: You have to make sure it's all consistent?

A: Right. So I can't agree to it until it's in writing and my 20 lawyers, who have been doing this for two years, can work through it. So in the final analysis, I was put in the position of making a call on something I hadn't read. So when it came down to crunch time, we got a copy and it had some of the offending language back in it. So I said, 'I can't support it.' And it played out in the House the way it played out in the House. Meantime on the Senate side, there were two versions being looked at. The Wednesday version and the Thursday version. And one side took one version and the other side took the other version. The Thursday version, we had some help, and I didn't get a chance to review it. So now, it's Friday night, the Senate's voting. They were having their debate and I still had not had a chance to review it. So, I walked over, I was up visiting some senators trying to explain some of the background. So I walked over to the chamber and as I walked into the office just off the chamber, it's the vice president's office, somebody gave me a copy. So I looked at the version and said, 'Can't do it. The same language was back in there.'

Q: What was it?

A: Just let me leave it, not too much detail, there were things with regard to our authorities some language around minimization. So it put us in an untenable position. So then I had another version to take a look at, which was our Wednesday version, which basically was unchanged. So I said, well certainly, I'm going to support that Wednesday version. So that's what I said and the vote happened in the Senate and that was on Friday. So now it rolled to the House on Saturday. They took up the bill, they had a spirited debate, my name was invoked several times, not in a favorable light in some cases. (laughs) And they took a vote and it passed 226 to 182, I think. So it's law. The president signed it on Sunday and here we are.

Q: That's far from unanimous. There's obviously going to be more debate on this.

A: There are a couple of issues to just be sensitive to. There's a claim of reverse targeting. Now what that means is we would target somebody in a foreign country who is calling into the United States and our intent is to not go after the bad guy, but to listen to somebody in the United States. That's not legal, it's, it would be a breach of the Fourth Amendment. You can go to jail for that sort of thing. And If a foreign bad guy is calling into the United States, if there's a need to have a warrant, for the person in the United States, you just get a warrant. And so if a terrorist calls in and it's another terrorist, I think the American public would want us to do surveillance of that U.S. person in this case. So we would just get a warrant and do that. It's a manageable thing. On the U.S. persons side it's 100 or less. And then the foreign side, it's in the thousands. Now there's a sense that we're doing massive data mining. In fact, what we're doing is surgical. A telephone number is surgical. So, if you know what number, you can select it out. So that's, we've got a lot of territory to make up with people believing that we're doing things we're not doing.

Q: Even if it's perception, how do you deal with that? You have to do public relations, I assume.

A: Well, one of the things you do is you talk to reporters. And you give them the facts the best you can. Now part of this is a classified world. The fact we're doing it this way means that some Americans are going to die, because we do this mission unknown to the bad guys because they're using a process that we can exploit and the more we talk about it, the more they will go with an alternative means and when they go to an alternative means, remember what I said, a significant portion of what we do, this is not just threats against the United States, this is war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Q. So you're saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?

A. That's what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently, but for whatever reason, you know, it's a democratic process and sunshine's a good thing. We need to have the debate. The reason that the FISA law was passed in 1978 was an arrangement was worked out between the Congress and the administration, we did not want to allow this community to conduct surveillance, electronic surveillance, of Americans for foreign intelligence unless you had a warrant, so that was required. So there was no warrant required for a foreign target in a foreign land. And so we are trying to get back to what was the intention of '78. Now because of the claim, counterclaim, mistrust, suspicion, the only way you could make any progress was to have this debate in an open way.

Q. So you don't think there was an alternative way to do this?

A. There may have been an alternative way, but we are where are ...

Q. A better way, I should say.

A. All of my briefs initially were very classified. But it became apparent that we were not going to be able to carry the day if we don't talk to more people.

Q. Some might say that's the price you pay for living in a free society. Do you think that this is necessary that these Americans die?

A. We could have gotten there a different way. We conducted intelligence since World War II and we've maintained a sensitivity as far as sources and methods. It's basically a sources and methods argument. If you don't protect sources and methods then those you target will choose alternative means, different paths. As it is today al-Qaida in Iraq is targeting Americans, specifically the coalition. There are activities supported by other nations to import electronic, or explosively formed projectiles, to do these roadside attacks and what we know about that is often out of very sensitive sources and methods. So the more public it is, then they take it away from us. So that's the tradeoff.

Diversity In The Intelligence Community

Q: I wanted to ask you about the diversity question. This has major ramifications here, we have this center of excellence program that's recruiting high school kids, many of whom wouldn't qualify if first generation American citizens weren't allowed.

A: So you agree with me?

Q: It does sound like something that would benefit this area that would also allow you to get people from here who are bicultural and have an openness to seeing things ...

A: You're talking about Hispanics?

Q: Yes.

A: Hispanics are probably the most under-represented group if you think of America, what the ethic makeup of America, Hispanics are the most under-represented group in my community. Now, that said, and should increase that Hispanic population and programs like this will do that. That's why the outreach. But also we need, particularly with the current problem of terrorism, we need to have speakers of Urdu and Farsi and Arabic and people from those cultures that understand the issues of tribes and clans and all the things that go with understanding that part of the world. Varying religions and so on. Because it is, it's almost impossible, I've had the chance to live in the Middle East for years, I've studied it for years, it's impossible to understand it without having some feel for the culture and so on. So while I'm all for increasing the diversity along the lines we talked about, I'm also very much in favor of first generation Americans from the countries that are causing issues and problems.

Q: What is the status of that program.

A: It is not in statue. It is not in policy. It has been habit. So we've stated, as a matter of policy, that we're not going to abide by those habits.

Q: And that's already the case?

A: Yes, and are we making progress? Not fast enough, but we will make progress over time.

Q: How do you measure that?

A: Very simple, you get to measure what are you and where are you trying go and are you making progress. I wrestled with this years ago when I was NSA ....

Q: You don't want quotas, though?

A: Quotas are forbidden so we set goals. My way of thinking about it is what is your end state? Now some would say that federal governments should look like America, whatever that is. OK, that sounded like a reasonable metric, so I said, 'Alright, what does America look like?' So I got a bunch of numbers. I said, 'Alright, what do we look like?' and it didn't match, and as I just told you, the one place where there's the greatest mismatch is Hispanic. It's much closer, as matter of fact, people would be surprised how close it is across, at least my community among the other minorities. Now, that said, numbers don't necessarily equal positioning in the organization. So that's another feature we have to work on, is placement of women and minorities in leadership positions.

Q: So, you're quantifying that as well?

A: Yes.

Terrorist Activity On The Nation's Southwest Border

Q: There seems to be very little terrorist-related activity on the Southwest border, which is watched very closely because of the illegal immigration issue. Can you talk about why it's important to be alert here?

A: Let me go back to my NIE, those are unclassified key judgements, pull them down and look at them. You've got committed leadership. You've got a place to train. They've got trainers and they've got recruits. The key now is getting recruits in. So if the key is getting recruits in. So, if you're key is getting recruits in, how would you do that? And so, how would you do that?

Q: I'd go to the northern border where there's nobody watching.

A: And that's a path. Flying in is a path. Taking a ship in is a path. Coming up through the Mexican border is a path. Now are they doing it in great numbers, no. Because we're finding them and we're identifying them and we've got watch lists and we're keeping them at bay. There are numerous situations where people are alive today because we caught them (terrorists). And my point earlier, we catch them or we prevent them because we've got the sources and methods that lets us identify them and do something about it. And you know the more sources and methods are compromised, we have that problem.

Q: And in many cases we don't hear about them?

A: The vast majority you don't hear about. Remember, let me give you a way to think about this. If you've got an issue, you have three potential outcomes, only three. A diplomatic success, an operational success or an intelligence failure. Because all those diplomatic successes and operations successes where there's intelligence contribution, it's not an intelligence success. It's just part of the process. But if there's an intelligence failure ...

Q: Then you hear about it.

A: So, are terrorists coming across the Southwest border? Not in great numbers.

Q: There are some cases?

A: There are some. And would they use it as a path, given it was available to them? In time they will.

Q: If they're successful at it, then they'll probably repeat it.

A: Sure. There were a significant number of Iraqis who came across last year. Smuggled across illegally.

Q: Where was that?

A: Across the Southwest border.

Q: Can you give me anymore detail?

A: I probably could if I had my notebook. It's significant numbers. I'll have somebody get it for you. I don't remember what it is.

Q: The point is it went from a number to (triple) in a single year, because they figured it out. Now some we caught, some we didn't. The ones that get in, what are they going to do? They're going to write home. So, it's not rocket science, word will move around. There's a program now in South America, where you can, once you're in South American countries, you can move around in South America and Central America without a visa. So you get a forged passport in Lebanon or where ever that gets you to South America. Now, no visa, you can move around, and with you're forged passport, as a citizen of whatever, you could come across that border. So, what I'm highlighting is that something ...

Q: Is this how it happened, the cases you're talking about?

A: Yes.

http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_6685679





The C.I.A. Report

The C.I.A. inspector general’s report on the agency’s failures before Sept. 11 was devastating — but not because it showed that America’s spies missed the rise of Al Qaeda. George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, rang the Qaeda alarm. He sent a memo to the entire intelligence community saying that he wanted no effort spared in the “war” with Osama bin Laden. He took on the president’s closest advisers to agitate for a strike on a Qaeda base in Afghanistan.

The disturbing thing was that this all happened under President Bill Clinton. When George W. Bush won the White House, Mr. Tenet seems to have shifted his priorities. The C.I.A. chief suddenly seemed consumed with hanging on to his job (through such innovative antiterrorism measures as naming the C.I.A.’s Langley, Va., headquarters for Mr. Bush’s father).

The Bush team was so busy in 2001 trying to upend America’s global relationships according to a neo-conservative agenda that the then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, did not see any urgency in reports that Al Qaeda was determined to strike in the United States. Mr. Tenet later helped hype the “slam dunk” intelligence that Mr. Bush used to justify diverting the military from the war of necessity against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to the war of choice in Iraq.

Another disturbing aspect of the report released on Tuesday was its date, June 2005, which neatly sums up Mr. Bush’s policies on transparency and accountability — he doesn’t believe in either. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the report wasn’t released in 2005. Mr. Bush had just given Mr. Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his “pivotal” role in fighting Al Qaeda.

But it’s distressing that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, still says that he would not have released the report if the Democratic-led Congress had not required it. Like his predecessor, Porter Goss, who also quashed the report, General Hayden does not seem to have much confidence in the American people. “It will, at a minimum, consume time and attention revisiting ground that is already well plowed,” he said, adding that the inspector general’s office cannot do its work unless it is hush-hush.

We could not disagree more. The recommendations of the inspector general were tepid — a panel should decide whether senior leaders should be called to account on relatively narrow issues — and the administration has already refused to comply. But more broadly, the obsession with secrecy and refusal to accept public scrutiny have made a tragic mess of national security policy.

Americans still don’t have the full story of how Mr. Bush hustled them into a war in which United States soldiers are trapped without hope of victory. Congress has rushed to pass profoundly dangerous changes to the constitutional fabric — the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, recent changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — without real deliberation.

The good news is that Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, now runs the Senate Intelligence Committee, and he forced the release of this report. He also is pushing the committee to finally finish its investigation into the creation of the myth of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

This is not about plowing old ground. Ignoring the mistakes of the past dooms a nation to repeat them. Just look at the comparison Mr. Bush drew yesterday between Iraq and Vietnam. The only lesson he found in the nation’s last foreign quagmire of a war was that it ended too quickly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/op...23thu1.html?hp





E-Voting Predicament: Not-So-Secret Ballots
Declan McCullagh

Ohio's method of conducting elections with electronic voting machines appears to have created a true privacy nightmare for state residents: revealing who voted for which candidates.

Two Ohio activists have discovered that e-voting machines made by Election Systems and Software and used across the country produce time-stamped paper trails that permit the reconstruction of an election's results--including allowing voter names to be matched to their actual votes.

Making a secret ballot less secret, of course, could permit vote selling and allow interest groups or family members to exert undue pressure on Ohio residents to vote a certain way. It's an especially pointed concern in Ohio, a traditional swing state in presidential elections that awarded George Bush a narrow victory over John Kerry three years ago.

Ohio law permits anyone to walk into a county election office and obtain two crucial documents: a list of voters in the order they voted, and a time-stamped list of the actual votes. "We simply take the two pieces of paper together, merge them, and then we have which voter voted and in which way," said James Moyer, a longtime privacy activist and poll worker who lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Once the two documents are merged, it's easy enough to say that the first voter who signed in is very likely going to be responsible for the first vote cast, and so on.

"I think it's a serious compromise," said David Dill, a Stanford University computer science professor who has followed electronic voting issues closely. "We have a system that's very much based on secret ballots. If you have something where voters are involuntarily revealing their votes, it's a very bad practice."

Moyer and fellow activist Jim Cropcho tested this by dropping by the election office of Delaware County, about 20 miles north of Columbus, and reviewing the results for a May 2006 vote to extend a property tax to fund mental retardation services. Their results indicate who voted "yes" and who voted "no"--and show that local couples (the Bennets, for instance) didn't always see eye-to-eye on the tax.

Patrick Gallaway, communications director for Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, said on Friday that his boss had already been planning to begin a "comprehensive" review of e-voting machines as part of a campaign pledge she made before taking office in January. He said the review now is likely to include a look at the ES&S voter privacy concern as well.

ES&S machines are used in about 38 states, according to the Election Reform Information Project, created by the Pew Center on the States. Of those states, Arkanasas, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia are among those using ES&S iVotronic machines with paper audit trails.

Other suppliers of electronic voting machines say they do not include time stamps in their products that provide voter-verified paper audit trails. Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart Intercivic both said they don't. A spokesman for Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions), said they don't for security and privacy reasons: "We're very sensitive to the integrity of the process."

An ES&S spokeswoman at the Fleishman-Hillard public relations firm downplayed concerns about vote linking. "It's very difficult to make a direct correlation between the order of the sign-in and the timestamp in the unit," said Jill Friedman-Wilson. (ES&S iVotronic machines are used in 10 Ohio counties, mostly in the center of the state, according to a map on the BlackBoxVoting.org watchdog site.)

"That is so fatally flawed," Friedman-Wilson said about Moyer's and Cropcho's analysis. "It doesn't take into consideration any of the times that there would be interaction with a voter and a poll worker before the ballot is activated." As for the interaction of Ohio open records law with ES&S logs, she said that "it is most appropriate that the secretary of state's office and others who are responsible for carrying out elections respond to questions regarding Ohio election law and procedure."

Timestamps + Ohio law = trouble

One explanation is ES&S had never expected that the paper with the time stamps, known as a voter verified paper audit trail, or VVPAT, would be made public under state open records laws.

A report evaluating ES&S security prepared by Compuware auditors two years for the Ohio secretary of state--marked "Confidential" but available on the Internet (PDF)--does warn about keeping electronic time stamps. It says that the electronic representation of votes, called the Cast Vote Records, "should not have time stamp associated with it" and must be randomized to protect privacy.

But the auditors viewed timestamps on the physical printout, called the audit log, as needed to detect "tampering" with the ES&S iVotronic hardware. "All actions to the iVotronic are recorded in the audit log with a time stamp," the report said. "This includes opening and closing the polls, voting, inserting invalid voting cards, loss of power, and supervisor access."

David Wagner, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, said electronic storage of votes in the order that voters cast them is a recurring problem with e-voting machines.

"This summer I learned that Diebold's AV-TSX touchscreen voting machine stores a time stamp showing the time which each vote was cast--down to the millisecond--along with the electronic record of that vote," Wagner said in an e-mail message. "In particular, we discovered this as part of the California top-to-bottom review and reported it in our public report on the Diebold voting system. However, I had no idea that this kind of information was available to the public as a public record."

The July 20 report on Diebold, written by Wagner and five Princeton University researchers for the California secretary of state, cites the electronic time stamp as a voting privacy concern. "If the time when each voter checks in is recorded in the poll log book, an attacker with access to the log book could correlate this data with the timestamps to determine how voters voted," the report says. "Alternatively, observers in the polling place could note the time when target voters cast their votes and find the corresponding vote records in the ballot results file."

Ohio law allows just this. Section 3501.13 of state law says "the records of the board and papers and books filed in its office are public records and open to inspection." Anyone who interferes with the public's right to inspect the records, in fact, is guilty of a misdemeanor.

Of course, the correlation may not be perfect. If Voter No. 1 signs in but gives his space in line to Voter No. 2 who's in a hurry, a reconstruction of the votes based on public records will incorrectly identify their votes.

Having multiple machines and multiple lines can also create a randomization effect, but Moyer says that in his experience as a poll worker there's only one line that feeds into multiple machines. In addition, he says, poll workers log the voter into the ES&S iVotronic, which starts the time-stamped entries and means there's no additional randomization of voters taking different amounts of time to start the process.

A uniquely Ohio problem?
Even though other states do use the ES&S iVotronic paper trails, they don't necessarily make them available for public perusal.

Natasha Naragon, a spokeswoman for the Arkansas secretary of state, said she knew of no way to disable the time stamps on the voting machines' printed output. But, she said, "our law does not allow for public access to our voted ballots" and said they remain sealed unless there's a recount.

Iowa's procedures seem designed precisely to avoid the Ohio situation. "Iowa has an administrative rule, because the paper trail is in voter sequence, that prohibits providing to any of the bodies that have access to the paper rolls any information that would allow them to link individual ballots on paper roll to the voters," said Sandy Steinbach, the state's director of elections.

Computer scientists and security experts say restricting the public's access to e-voting paper trails by tinkering with open records laws is insufficient--it doesn't protect against, for instance, an insider perusing the ballots and reconstructing them.

They do say paper trails are necessary to provide a physical check on what could be a buggy or maliciously programmed machine. But they offer three suggestions: deleting the time stamp, not keeping a list showing in which order people vote, and adding a paper slicer and shuffler to randomize how the physical audit trail is recorded.

Lorrie Cranor, director of the Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, says that "you need to have mixing either in the recording of the orders of the voters or the votes, or preferably both."

"Audit trails are really important, but so is privacy," she said. "Many of the vendors of (e-voting machines) have actually put ID numbers on the paper records, which also could be used to reconstruct which voter is associated with a vote."

Moyer and Cropcho have posted a summary of their findings on their Web site, ThePublicBallot.org.

For its part, ES&S claims that printing out time stamps is recommended by standards adopted in 2002 by the Federal Election Commission.

ES&S spokeswoman Friedman-Wilson pointed to two sections of the standards, one of which says "all audit record entries shall include the time-and-date stamp." The other says error messages, critical system status messages, and a record of a voter "activating and casting each ballot" should be part of the audit log. (It does not, however, explicitly mandate that the outcome of the vote be printed.)

"Because the voter verifiable paper audit trail is one element of the audit function of a voting unit, one could interpret these guidelines as requiring the time stamp have citations within the guidelines," Friedman-Wilson said in an e-mail message.

Johnnie McLean, the deputy director of the North Carolina Board of Elections, said: "Our public records laws don't include that paper record. A voted ballot is considered confidential." In West Virginia, secretary of state spokesman Ben Beakes said: "There would be no way to match the time with the voter because in our poll book system, all you would find is an alphabetical list of the people they voted, not the time they came into the polling place."

Ohio, by contrast, may be unique. "It's my understanding from our legal staff that a public document consists of anything that is in the public domain," said Gallaway, the secretary of state's communications director. "I think that both of those (the time-ordered poll books and the time-stamped paper trail) would be considered that."

That has left computer scientists, already alarmed about the security of e-voting machines, dismayed at the interaction between time stamps and Ohio laws. "Security and privacy and the integrity of the voting system depend not only on the technology, but also on the procedures and the combination of the two," said Stanford's Dill. "This is a case where the combination of technology and procedures are working together to create a privacy threat."

CNET News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this report
http://news.com.com/E-voting+predica...3-6203323.html





Gunman Who Shot Wallace Is to Be Freed
Brenda Goodman

Arthur Bremer, the gunman who tried to kill Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama as he campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, will be released from prison this year, a Maryland prison official said Thursday.

In 1973, Mr. Bremer was sentenced to serve 53 years for shooting Mr. Wallace and wounding three others at a campaign stop in Laurel, Md. The bullet that lodged in Mr. Wallace’s spine paralyzed his legs, and he used a wheelchair until his death in 1998.

Mr. Bremer has served 35 years of his original sentence, and managed, through credits for good behavior and steady job performance as a prison clerk, to earn an earlier release date, said Ruth A. Ogle, a program manager at the Maryland Parole Commission.

“The computer says he has never had an infraction,” Ms. Ogle said. “Arthur apparently figured out how to stay out of trouble.”

Mr. Bremer is scheduled to be released from the Maryland Correctional Institute in Hagerstown on Dec. 16, but he may be out sooner as he continues to cut time off his sentence.

He will continue to be supervised by the Maryland Parole Commission until 2025, the maximum expiration of his sentence, and a special condition of his parole will be that he stay away from political figures and events.

“He can’t be around political candidates or any elected official,” Ms. Ogle said. “He can’t go to a rally, a public appearance, a political dinner, anything like that.”

In 1996, the commission denied Mr. Bremer’s application for parole, saying early release would mean “open hunting season” on politicians.

Mr. Bremer has said he had hoped to gain celebrity by assassinating President Richard M. Nixon, but settled for trying to kill Mr. Wallace instead.

While Mr. Bremer failed, he became an inspiration for the would-be assassin Travis Bickle in the 1976 film “Taxi Driver.” That film, in turn, is said to have inspired an attempt by John W. Hinckley Jr. on the life of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Mr. Hinkley said he was trying to show his love for Jodie Foster, one of the film’s stars.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/us/24bremer.html





Howard Row Over Wikipedia Edits
BBC

Staff in the Australian prime minister's department have been accused of editing potentially damaging entries in online encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

Workers made 126 edits on subjects such as immigration policy and Treasurer Peter Costello, a local daily said.

The details came from a new website that tracks those who make edits. Staff from the CIA and the BBC among others have also made changes, it has shown.

A spokesman for PM John Howard said he had not asked staff to edit Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is an internet-based free encyclopaedia that anyone can add to or make changes to.

Defence Department

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, a worker in Mr Howard's department added the word "allegedly" to the assertion that immigration detainees were subject to inhumane conditions.

Changes were also made to the online profile of Peter Costello, Mr Howard's deputy and treasurer. A derogatory nickname - Captain Smirk - was removed.

A link was also added to a section on the children overboard affair of 2001.

The government had claimed that a group of asylum seekers had thrown their children into the sea to ensure they were rescued by the Australian navy - something later disproved by a Senate inquiry.

An employee added a link highlighting a Senate report which criticised a former government adviser who had claimed that Mr Howard misled the Australian public over the affair.

The new website, Wikipedia Scanner, also identified computers at Australia's Defence Department as being behind more than 5,000 changes to the site, the daily said.

Although many of the edits were factual or unrelated to the government, the department said on Friday that it had acted to block staff from editing the site.

"Defence has closed personal edit access down, though employees will still be able to browse Wikipedia for information purposes," a spokesman said.

Australia's opposition Labor leader Kevin Rudd said it was legitimate for staff to make changes of a factual nature, but that it was wrong for public servants to re-edit history.

Wikipedia Scanner cannot pinpoint individual editors, but it can identify the organisation whose computer network was used to make the change.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ic/6961575.stm





Rudd Admits to US Strip Club Visit
Glenn Milne

OPPOSITION Leader Kevin Rudd has admitted visiting a New York strip club during a drunken night while representing Australia at the United Nations.

Mr Rudd yesterday issued a statement to The Sunday Telegraph, confirming he went to the club.

But he said he could not recall what happened at the night spot because he had "had too much to drink".

"If my behaviour caused any offence to anybody whatsoever that evening, I of course wholeheartedly apologise," he said.

Mr Rudd went to the Manhattan "gentlemen's club" Scores in September, 2003, when he was Shadow foreign affairs minister.

Bipartisan observer

He was in New York at taxpayers' expense as a bipartisan observer at the UN.

Mr Rudd went to the club, which is a well-known haunt of UN diplomats and journalists, with New York Post editor Col Allan and Northern Territory Labor MP Warren Snowdon.

Discussions about Mr Rudd's actions have been current in diplomatic and political circles for some time.

But last week a Canberra-based source approached The Sunday Telegraph and confirmed accounts of the evening.

A 'perfect gentleman'

Mr Allan (an employee of News Corporation, parent company of the publisher of NEWS.com.au) then confirmed he and the Opposition Leader had been to a "gentlemen's club".

"Yes, we went out for a drink," Mr Allan said.

"Yes, it was at a gentleman's club and he (Mr Rudd) behaved like a perfect gentleman."

Confronted with the revelations yesterday, Mr Rudd said he recalled attending a dinner with Mr Allan and Mr Snowdon in New York in 2003.

"After dinner, Mr Allan suggested to Mr Snowdon and I that we all go on for a drink. Mr Snowdon and I agreed," he said.

"By that stage, I had had too much to drink.

"With the benefit of hindsight, I should not have gone on for a further drink.

"Not withstanding the fact that I had had too much to drink, I have no recollection (nor does Mr Snowdon) of any incident occurring at the nightclub - or of being asked to leave.

"It is our recollection that we left within about an hour."

'Warned against touching dancers'

But, according to some sources, Mr Rudd was warned against touching the dancers by Scores management.

Reports of Mr Rudd's behaviour reached senior Australian diplomats serving in the US at the time.

One of those diplomats, who insisted on anonymity, confirmed to The Sunday Telegraph a version of events involving "inappropriate behaviour".

It is understood that Mr Rudd and Mr Snowdon complied with the management directive.

"I have never been informed of any report of these events to any Australian diplomat," Mr Rudd wrote.

"I would have thought given the time that has elapsed since then that I would have been informed or the matter made public as it would have been in the possession of the Government.

Admission to wife

"At the time, I raised these matters with my wife Therese and the circumstances surrounding them.

"I indicated to Therese that it would have been far better for me to have simply returned to my hotel after dinner.

"I have never claimed to be perfect but I make no excuses.

"I take full responsibility for my actions."

Mr Rudd said he has met with Mr Allan in New York on at least three occasions.

The trip, which cost taxpayers $18,000, was conducted under the auspices of the Parliamentary Entitlements Act.

Under this Act, the Prime Minister gives specific permission for the visit to proceed and the recipient is formally regarded as representing Australia whilst overseas.

At the time of publication, Mr Snowdon had not returned The Sunday Telegraph's calls.
http://www.news.com.au/sundaytelegra...001028,00.html





Australian Author Threatened Over Japan Royals Book

The Australian author of a controversial book on Japan's Crown Princess Masako said on Tuesday he had received death threats, ahead of the book's Japanese-language release this week.

The Japanese government has said that the original version of Ben Hills' "Princess Masako - Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne" was an insult to the royal family and had sought an apology from him.

A Tokyo-based publisher will release the Japanese version of the book on Wednesday, months after another publisher's plans for a translation were scrapped, prompting Hills to complain that Tokyo had censored his work.

Hills said he had received several anonymous e-mails in the run-up to the translation's publication.

"'Die white pork' was one of them," he told Reuters by telephone. "Of course I feel threatened. I'm not very amused."

Hills said in the book -- which he has described as "an Oriental Charles and Diana story" -- that 43-year-old Masako, a Harvard-educated former diplomat, was suffering from severe depression, not a mild "adjustment disorder" as described by the Imperial Household Agency, which manages royal affairs.

Masako has been largely out of the public eye in recent years due to a stress-related mental illness which palace watchers say was caused by the pressures of adapting to rigid royal life, including pressure to bear a male heir.

Masako and Naruhito have one daughter, 5-year-old Princess Aiko, who cannot ascend the throne under the current males-only succession law.

Japan's Foreign Ministry sought an apology and "appropriate steps" from Hills regarding the book in February, but did not comment at the time on aspects such as his assertion that Princess Aiko may have been conceived through in vitro fertilization.

Kyodo news agency said the Japanese edition's publisher had also been threatened by an ultra-nationalist group to stop the publication.

Hills said publishing the book in Japanese was a matter of freedom of speech.

"I'm very happy that it's being published in Japanese because I think that it doesn't matter whether the Japanese people like it or don't like it," he said.

"What matters is that they should have the chance to read it and judge for themselves."
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/...ss-author.html





Book Chief: Conservatives Want Slogans
Alan Fram

Liberals read more books than conservatives. The head of the book publishing industry's trade group says she knows why _ and there's little flattering about conservative readers in her explanation.

"The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: 'No, don't raise my taxes, no new taxes,'" Pat Schroeder, president of the American Association of Publishers, said in a recent interview. "It's pretty hard to write a book saying, 'No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes' on every page."

Schroeder, who as a Colorado Democrat was once one of Congress' most liberal House members, was responding to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll that found people who consider themselves liberals are more prodigious book readers than conservatives.

She said liberals tend to be policy wonks who "can't say anything in less than paragraphs. We really want the whole picture, want to peel the onion."

The book publishing industry is predominantly liberal, though conservative books by authors like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and pundit Ann Coulter have been best sellers in recent years. Overall, book sales have been flat as publishers seek to woo readers lured away by the Internet, movies and television.

Rove, President Bush's departing political adviser, is known as a prodigious reader. White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Schroeder was "confusing volume with quality" with her remarks.

"Obfuscation usually requires a lot more words than if you simply focus on fundamental principles, so I'm not at all surprised by the loquaciousness of liberals," he said.

"As head of a book publishing association, she probably shouldn't malign any readers," said Mary Matalin, a GOP strategist who oversees a line of books by conservative authors, Threshold, at Simon & Schuster, the publishing arm of CBS Corp. Matalin said conservatives and others aren't necessarily reading less, but are getting more information online and from magazines.

The AP-Ipsos poll found 22 percent of liberals and moderates said they had not read a book within the past year, compared with 34 percent of conservatives.

Among those who had read at least one book, liberals typically read nine books in the year, with half reading more than that and half less. Conservatives typically read eight, moderates five.

By slightly wider margins, Democrats tended to read more books than Republicans and independents. There were no differences by political party in the percentage of those who said they had not read at least one book.

The poll involved telephone interviews with 1,003 adults and was conducted August 6 to 8. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

___

AP Manager of News Surveys Trevor Tompson and AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/fn/5071902.html





Vintage Bradbury, Packaged Anew
David Shaftel

Though slowed by age, Ray Bradbury still speaks with exuberance. Hobbled by a stroke in 1999, he now dictates his work over the phone to his daughter in Arizona, who records and transcribes it before faxing edits back. Mr. Bradbury works in an overstuffed leather chair in a den lined by shelves of VHS tapes of classic movies and history texts. The room is crowded with models of dinosaurs, rocket ships and Jules Verne’s Nautilus submarine, his own dusty Emmy, a friend’s tarnished Oscar and a 52-inch flat-screen television not unlike the ones he presaged in “Fahrenheit 451.”

“I’m surrounded by my metaphors,” said Mr. Bradbury, who acknowledges that the science in his books is often faulty and serves only as a vehicle for his fiction. He’ll provide the inspiration, he says, and let the scientists worry about the particulars.

“The arts and sciences are connected,” he continued. “Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.”

As Ray Bradbury turns 87 on Aug. 22, the celebrated science fiction and fantasy writer is taking something of a victory lap, partly the result of mining his extensive files for rare and unfinished work. He will publish several long-forgotten works this summer, including experimental drafts and his earliest writings.

In September William Morrow will release “Now and Forever,” a collection of the never-released novellas “Leviathan ’99” and “Somewhere a Band Is Playing,” with an expanded, limited edition of the latter to be simultaneously released by an independent publisher. This caps a year in which Mr. Bradbury was awarded a special distinguished-career citation from the Pulitzer Board.

“Leviathan ’99,” which Mr. Bradbury describes as “ ‘Moby-Dick’ in outer space,” was started in the ’50s, and though he has revisited it sporadically over the years, it was originally intended as a radio script for Norman Corwin. It follows Ishmael Jones as he accompanies a blind, maniacal captain of the “largest interstellar spaceship ever built,” tracking a great white comet.

Mr. Bradbury intended “Somewhere a Band Is Playing” as a starring vehicle for Katharine Hepburn when he began it in 1956. In this novella, a reporter hops off a moving train, landing in a bucolic town where no one dies or grows old and where no children live.

“Somewhere a Band Is Playing” is vintage Bradbury, said Barry Hoffman, publisher of Gauntlet Press, which is releasing the novella accompanied by early drafts and fragments of a teleplay and screenplay.

“This is something that Bradbury’s been working on for more than 50 years, so we have a lot of variations that he played around with,” Mr. Hoffman said. Some versions are “more pessimistic” than the final draft, he said.

This summer Gauntlet released “Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths to ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ ” containing the stories, drafts and correspondence that culminated in what is perhaps Mr. Bradbury’s most enduring work.

Mr. Bradbury says he started “Somewhere a Band Is Playing” after seeing Ms. Hepburn in “Summertime.” “Over the years I kept working on it because I knew Katharine Hepburn, and I hoped I could finish it and give it to her, so that she could make a film of it,” he said during a recent interview in his home in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. “But the years just went by.”

Mr. Bradbury’s literary journey started with the fanzine Futuria Fantasia, which he self-published when he was 18 in 1939. The fanzine’s four issues were anthologized and reissued last month by Graham Press. The fanzine was bankrolled by Forrest J. Ackerman, one of science fiction’s greatest fans and the man said to have coined the term sci-fi; only 100 original copies were printed. They contain early work by such future science fiction luminaries as Hannes Bok and Robert Heinlein.

Mr. Bradbury concedes that his own stories in Futuria Fantasia — many of them published under pseudonyms, to make his stable of writers seem bigger — were crude. “I was still years away from writing my first good short story,” he said, “but I could see my future. I knew where I wanted to go.”

Mr. Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, said: “Futuria Fantasia has always been out of everybody’s grasp. Except for the very well-off fans who could afford to track copies down through collection or auction houses, nobody has ever seen them, let alone owned them.”

Though Mr. Bradbury’s critics have bristled at his comments that “Fahrenheit 451” was not a novel about censorship — a statement that the paper trail in “Match to Flame” seems to disprove — or that “The Martian Chronicles,” one of the most widely read science fiction novels, is not science fiction because of its fudged science, they agree on his contribution to the genre.

Mr. Bradbury’s special Pulitzer citation was “an enormous nod of respect from the mainstream media,” said Lou Anders, editorial director of the science fiction and fantasy imprint Pyr.

But Mr. Bradbury’s early works should be understood in their historical context, Mr. Anders said, not as representative of where the field is today. “I hope that anyone who comes to science fiction and fantasy cold — readers for whom ‘The Illustrated Man’ or ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ are their doorway in — will be inspired to look beyond these classic works to the new masters.”

Mr. Bradbury, who stopped the regular reading of science fiction decades ago, is comfortable in his outsider status, if a bit cantankerous. “I don’t need to be vindicated, and I don’t want attention,” he said. “I never question. I never ask anyone else’s opinion. They don’t count.”
http://nytimes.com/2007/08/22/books/22brad.html?8dpc





PZ Being Sued by “Crackpot”

There comes a time in every debunker’s life when they are threatened with a lawsuit. It’s the bar mitzvah of skepticism.

The story is generally the same. Skeptic writes an article debunking some form of nonsense, author of said nonsense gets a bee in their bonnet (the archaic form of "wild hair up their butt"), said author says they will sue the skeptic, said skeptic laughs it off.

I’ve had my share of emails and letters, generally ALL IN CAPS, saying that I am preventing some Earth-shattering result from coming to fruition and keeping the author — who compares himself to Einstein, Galileo, and Newton — from getting what they deserve.

The irony is obvious: they are getting what they deserve: a logical spanking. And generally, that’s the end of it. The crank never follows through, and we’re done with it.

But this time it’s different. A guy by the name of Stuart Pivar has written a tome that says that genetic biologists have their profession all wrong, and that only he knows the truth. In a blog entry (and some followups) PZ Myers pointed out that the guy is clearly wrong. I am no biologist, but it only takes a glance to see that this guy is, um, maybe not terribly accurate.

PZ called him a crackpot, and perhaps that’s where the trouble lies. Pivar is suing PZ. Normally this can be shrugged off as just another goofball rattling the cage. Unfortunately, Pivar is a wealthy businessman, and can actually afford to follow through. Most times the cranks make threats, but can’t afford a lawyer, and even if they could, the lawsuits have no merit.

Nor does this one, in fact. Besides the use of that single term, PZ takes apart the science and lack thereof of Pivar’s book. There can be no libel if no lie is committed in an attempt to defame, and PZ told the truth. In a sense, this is just more cage-rattling, even if it goes to court. But a judge will quickly dismiss the case, I would imagine.

In fact, and I almost hate to say this, I rather hope (just a little) it does go to court. Most judges take a very dim view of frivolous lawsuits. It’s pretty cut and dry that PZ is innocent, and Pivar is trying to shut him down due to a negative review. If it goes to court, Pivar might be in for a lot more than he bargained for.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2...d-by-crackpot/





Five easy big ones

Her Journey, All True
Alan Feuer

“I’m hopeless at this stuff,” Laura Albert had been saying as she stood in her apartment on a recent morning, placing objects into — then removing them from — a bag. Ms. Albert, the fiction writer better known as JT LeRoy, is blessed with gifts, though not a talent for logistics. She was running late for a road trip to Los Angeles, and her driving party — a Cuban-Dutch designer, a would-be film director and a reporter for The New York Times — had been waiting patiently since 10 a.m. It would be after 3 when they finally left.

Part of the problem was Ms. Albert’s vulnerability to distraction (she had spent the morning in pajamas talking on the phone and fixing breakfast for her son), though it didn’t help that with her cup of Chinese tea she had taken a Provigil, a narcolepsy pill. It left her feeling fuzzy at the edges, she confessed. In the end it took her seven hours to prepare the bag, nearly as long as the trip would take itself.

In the last two years Laura Albert has lost, in no particular order, her livelihood, her boyfriend, a piece of her identity, quite possibly her apartment and a civil fraud trial in Manhattan this spring, enacted, more or less, because she signed a movie contract with her nom de plume.

That, of course, was JT LeRoy, who served for years as her literary double and imaginary envoy to the world. As bookish folks have known for almost two years JT (a supposed addict, androgyne and son of a West Virginia prostitute) rose to stardom at the end of the millennium then fell from grace, shot down as a hoax.

You can learn a lot about a person on an eight-hour road trip down California’s blue roads, and that holds true for Laura Albert, as complex a character as one is wont to meet. The drive, down Highway 101, was ostensibly conducted to get the reporter to an interview with David Milch, the television writer (and one of Ms. Albert’s best and last supporters). Yet like many highway journeys through the state, it had a rather strange existence of its own.

Over 400 miles the trip turned out to be a dreamlike blend of Kerouac and Freud, a barnstorm through the Santa Lucia range, with tears, antics, confessional moments and crab-meat enchiladas. Ms. Albert wore a pageboy cap and a pendant of a typewriter dangling at her neck; the film director shared the driving with the Cuban-Dutch designer; the in-car snack food was abundant and carefully selected as organic. Ms. Albert’s crimson wig (brought for a photo shoot to be held at journey’s end) sat atop a plastic-foam mannequin’s head, wedged amid the duffel bags in back. “I’m totally aware it sounds wacky,” Ms. Albert said somewhere south of Pismo Beach, “but I never really thought of it in terms of right or wrong, truth or lie. It was more like two computer programs running in my head. There was him, and there was me.”

These days there is only her, the all-consuming “him” having been replaced with lawyers’ bills and real-estate travails. At 41, Ms. Albert is bankrupt, crippled by her debts and living with a roommate and her young son, Trevor, in a San Francisco walk-up. Having been discovered, she no longer fears discovery; she fears herself. What now? Will there be more books? Without the shelter of a pseudonym, will she ever write again?

She still speaks frequently of JT LeRoy, though almost wistfully, like an old friend who is traveling abroad. He seems to reside these days in a distant corner of her psyche, still around but pushed into a corner by her landlord, her lawyer, her flabbergasted friends. She has moved away from her creation, but has not entirely moved on.

“There have to be people out there who see this little girl with her little problems for what it really is,” she said. “Call it a prank, a stunt, a hoax, whatever you want, but I feel I’m incidental to the process. The question now is, what are the ramifications down the road?”

The journalistic mind gets a little nervous hearing sentiments like this. After all Ms. Albert has veracity issues. Can she be trusted? What, in short, should be discarded? What believed?

Take, for instance, the following encounter in Atascadero, a cheerless town of bedding stores a few miles north of San Luis Obispo. The party stopped for coffee at a Starbucks and fell into a conversation with some gutter punks, pierced and dreadlocked, who were headed for Seattle. Might they have a ride?

They might, although the party’s car was headed south. And anyhow, Ms. Albert said, the police were on their tail. Or more precisely, the “po-po,” as she called them. The punks looked baffled and were clearly at a loss. After all, Ms. Albert, in her shades, might have been a late-day Bonnie Parker. Who could tell for sure? When they walked away, the film director, her longtime friend, shook his head and turned to hide a smile.

(On the night before the trip Ms. Albert, her son, her son’s friend and the reporter ducked into a taxi with the reporter’s luggage. The driver asked where they were from, and on the spot Ms. Albert told him she had just come in from New York City, fleeing a tornado that had ripped through town. She said the twister, which was real, had destroyed her home, which was not.)

The point is, what do you make of all of this? Pathology or provocation? Playful joke or a plain old-fashioned lie?

One somehow gets the sense with Laura Albert that it is all of these at once, that she is sometimes busting on the world yet just as often helpless in its midst. She has said that JT LeRoy was no financial ploy or literary trick but the “respirator” that permitted her to breathe. At the same time she acknowledges being well aware of the not-so-subtle subtext in the title of her last short-story collection: “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.”

The one indisputable fact is that Ms. Albert is a picky passenger. She asked for air-conditioning and then complained when it got cold. She had the driver switch the music several times. All the while the calls kept coming in. (Her cellphone has the bwee-oop ring tone of a Star Trek communicator.) Bwee-oop: her sister in New York. Bwee-oop: the Chinese woman who cooks and cleans her home. Bwee-oop: someone calling to celebrate the criminal acquittal of a friend.

Of the few people, outside friends and family, to embrace this personality, the most supportive has been Mr. Milch, who met her on the set of “Deadwood,” his television show, just before her identity would be revealed. He has remained Ms. Albert’s friend and something like her guiding star.

On the outskirts of Los Angeles it was gradually revealed that the audience with Mr. Milch had a secondary purpose: Ms. Albert wanted an excuse to see the man herself.

Mr. Milch’s office squarely sits in the L.A. Modern style: plate glass, track lights, a former waiter answering the phones. He hugged Ms. Albert in the lobby, wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt, then looked at the reporter. Skeptically, it seemed, he shook his hand.

After small talk had determined the reporter was indeed a human being, a request was made to turn the tape recorder off — at which point the interview became an intervention.

Mr. Milch was stern.

Shut your mouth, he told Ms. Albert. Quit this sick behavior. Disengage. Forget the press. Go home. Be still. Get healthy. Raise your child. And pray that you can write.

He then reached in his pocket and gave Ms. Albert five crisp hundred-dollar bills.

She took the money, and she sat down on the couch. She closed her eyes, opened her mouth; she tried, it seemed, not bursting into tears.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/arts/23albert.html





Light ’Em if You Got ’Em
Liesl Schillinger

THESE THINGS AIN’T GONNA SMOKE THEMSELVES

By Emily Flake.

122 pp, Bloomsbury USA.

$12.95.

BURNING BOOK

By Jessica Bruder.

352 pp, Simon Spotlight Entertainment.

$28.95.

IF you are one of the million adult New Yorkers who smoke cigarettes (that is, the ones who admit to city health officials that they do), 100-degree heat can’t keep you from taking your midmorning, midafternoon, mid-late-afternoon (etc.) smoking breaks. What could be more refreshing on a sultry August day than to stick a burning brand in your mouth and inhale so deeply that you hear your lungs crackle?

In her slim and jaunty new graphic novella, “These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves,” the cartoonist Emily Flake riffs on her perverse, self-destructive habit for an audience of willful creative types like herself who know cigarettes are bad for them but can’t bear to join the ranks of safe, tedious noninhalers. “Deep down,” she writes, “I feel just a tinge of distrust for nonsmokers.” Besides, she points out: no cigarettes, no smoke break. “You can’t just go out there and breathe for 10 minutes. If you’re not smoking, it’s called ‘loitering.’ ”

Ms. Flake, the creator of the offbeat comic strip “Lulu Eightball,” which runs in a handful of alternative weeklies (there is also a “Lulu Eightball” book), has been smoking for more than a decade. She recently turned 30, prompting dark reflections on the folly of her guilty pleasure. Calling her book “Half valentine, half Dear John letter,” she enlists her deadpan sensibility and plump line drawings (accented in a chipper shade of red) to revisit the glory days of Old Gold, Camel and Viceroy, when “cigarettes weren’t bad for you” and to commemorate the high points of her addiction.

“Here’s a magical vice trifecta,” she writes, beneath illustrations of a glass of bourbon, a cutting board piled with prosciutto and a sleek ashtray holding a single smug cigarette. “Enjoy together and it’s like angels are throwing a party in your mouth.”

She also acknowledges the devils. “As I understand it, it also gives you cancer,” she concedes. Still, the diva in her dreads other smoking-induced evils more. “Lungs, schmungs, it’s the crow’s feet and Farrah Fawcett lines that put the fear of God into me,” she writes. So why hasn’t she quit? The real reason seems to be that, like the cartoon rebels from Li’l Jinx to Dennis the Menace, she just doesn’t feel like it.

WHILE some tempt fate by lighting up closer to home, others travel hundreds, even thousands, of miles to participate in Burning Man, the annual pyromaniac ritual in the Nevada desert.

These so-called “burners” roll in by the thousands on the last Monday in August to the parched wasteland known as the playa (in the Black Rock Desert, not far from Reno) to set up a tent city amid clouds of dust, around a multistory human effigy. After a week of revelry, nudity, dehydration, sunburn and art-making, the burners incinerate the towering man (while dodging falling chunks of flaming debris) and then depart, taking all traces of their “ephemeropolis” with them.

Commentators have called the spectacle the “Bonfire of the Inanities.”

In “Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man,” Jessica Bruder, a reporter for The Oregonian in Portland, presents lavish pictorial evidence of this organized explosion of the mass id. Her book may not answer the “Why?” of Burning Man, but it certainly answers the “What?” and “How?” Combining hundreds of photos (many taken by Ms. Bruder) of the place, the players, the props and the art with streamers of ecstatic text, “Burning Book” is a scrapbook for pinwheel-eyed firebugs who just may hook a new generation.

The ritual dates to 1986, Ms. Bruder writers, when a college dropout and landscape gardener named Larry Harvey set fire to an eight-foot wooden man on a San Francisco beach. It has since become a conflagration that draws 40,000 people and has a budget of more than $8.5 million. Burning Man is so well known that it has been discussed on “The View” and has a free simulcast on the Internet.

So what is it like? The photos give a taste of the phantasmagoria: motorized giant cupcakes zooming across gray dust; a fiendishly grinning man wearing nothing but scarlet body paint, a codpiece and a watermelon headdress; human-scale games of Mousetrap and chess (on a glow-in-the dark neon board); and many, many naked people who look like they need a bath ... but don’t feel like it.

“People describe the scene as a confusing kaleidoscope of references,” Ms. Bruder writes. “Something like: Burning Man is Fellini directing ‘Alice in Wonderland’ on the set of ‘Mad Max’ in one of Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities,’ with props by Duchamp and Dalí, secondhand costumes from Barbarella, the Beatles, and Ringling Bros., casting by Hieronymus Bosch, and a planned premiere on Tatooine.”

More helpfully, she clarifies, “It’s an elaborate way of saying, ‘Man, you had to be there!’ that takes ten times as long.”

Before you take the plunge, know that Burning Man is an expensive habit ($200 to $300 for admission) and that, with the blazing sun, falling embers and erratic revelers, the experience is considered so dangerous that tickets come printed with a warning that by attending: “You voluntarily assume the risk of serious injury or death.”

Put that on a pack of Camels.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/fashion/19books.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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