Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 21st, ‘06

[JackSpratts]

Warm and Fuzzy TV, Brought to You by Hamas
Craig S. Smith

GAZA, Jan. 13 - Hey kids, it's Uncle Hazim time!

Hazim Sharawi, whose stage name is Uncle Hazim, is a quiet, doe-eyed young man who has an easy way with children and will soon preside over a children's television show here on which he'll cavort with men in larger-than-life, fake-fur animal suits on the Gaza Strip's newest television station, Al Aksa TV.

But Captain Kangaroo this is not. The station, named for Islam's third holiest site, is owned by Hamas, the people who helped make suicide bombing a household term.

"Our television show will have a message, but without getting into the tanks, the guns, the killing and the blood," said Mr. Sharawi, sitting in the broadcast studio where he will produce his show.

"I will show them our rights through the history," he said, "show them, 'This is Nablus, this is Gaza, this is Al Aksa mosque, which is with the Israelis and should be in our hands.' "

The new station is part of the militant Palestinian group's strategy to broaden its role in Palestinian politics and society, much as Hezbollah did in Lebanon. The station began broadcasting terrestrially on Jan. 7, and Hamas is working on a satellite version that would give it an even wider reach, like Hezbollah's Al Manar TV, which is watched throughout the Arab world.

"Their success encouraged us," said Fathi Hammad, Al Aksa TV's director. He said that Hamas had tried to find an existing broadcaster to accept its programming but that no one would take it.

"The Arab satellite broadcasters Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya both turned us down," he said, sitting beneath the seal of Hamas, which depicts the Dome of the Rock (which stands alongside Al Aksa mosque in Jerusalem) between crossed swords and an idealized map of Palestine. "Even Iraq and Saudi Arabia refused."

In 2003, after the Palestinian Authority granted Hamas a broadcast license covering both radio and television, the group started the Voice of Al Aksa, which quickly became one of the most popular radio stations in the Gaza Strip. It took more than two years to assemble the expertise and equipment necessary to start the television station.

The current 12 hours of daily television programming, which has the unfinished look of public-access cable television in the United States, consists primarily of readings from the Koran, religious discourse and discussions of women's issues, such as Islamic fashion, child-rearing tips and the right of women to work, which Hamas supports. It will eventually feature a sort of Islamic MTV, with Hamas-produced music videos using footage from the group's fights with Israeli troops. There will even be a talent search show, a distant echo of "American Idol."

But its biggest star will be Mr. Sharawi, whose radio show for children was the Voice of Al Aksa's biggest hit.

Mr. Sharawi, 27, wearing a long black leather coat with a hood over a green suit and tie, fixed with a pin, looks like a straight-and-narrow Sunday school teacher. In fact, he got his start working with children at his mosque while studying geology at Islamic University in Gaza. His hair is parted in the middle, his beard trimmed as neatly as a suburban lawn.

He said the head of Hamas's radio station spotted him leading children's games at his mosque and asked him to do a children's radio show two years ago. The show has become so popular, his appearances at occasional Hamas-sponsored festivals draw as many as 10,000 children at a time.

Mr. Sharawi will not take visitors to see him do his radio broadcast because the studio's location is a heavily guarded secret. In 2004, an Israeli Apache helicopter fired three rockets into the station's previous studio not long after Mr. Sharawi and his colleagues had fled.

Everybody involved in the television station is worried about another attack, but Mr. Sharawi said he is ready to die if it comes. "The messengers don't care if they lose their lives for the sake of revealing the message," he said.

As he describes it, his television show, which begins in a few weeks, will teach children the basics of militant Palestinian politics - the disputed status of Jerusalem, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and the Palestinian refugees' demand for a right to return to the lands they lost to Israel in the 1948 war - without showing the violence that Hamas's pursuit of those goals entails.

The show will alternate between Uncle Hazim and his animal characters in the studio taking live phone calls from children and video clips recorded outside. Mr. Sharawi said he would leaven the sober and pedantic material with fun and games, including such standards as egg-and-spoon races, eating apples on a string or "tug of war, which will show children that the more you cooperate with others, the more you win."

Mr. Sharawi said he would dress up in different costumes to suit the show's locale: a sailor suit while taping on the beach, a track suit when in the park, even a Boy Scout uniform while hiking through the small patches of empty land that serve as Gaza's wilderness.

"We will invite real Boy Scouts to come and talk to us about camping," Mr. Sharawi said, warming to his theme (the Palestinian Scout Association is a member of the World Organization of the Scout Movement).

Through it all, Mr. Sharawi will be accompanied by animal-costumed sidekicks to provide comic relief. Hamas will rent the Egyptian-made plush costumes - a fox, a rabbit, a dog, a bear and a chicken, already gray and matted from wear - from a production company run by a Hamas supporter who has just emerged from two years in Israeli jails.

When asked if the animals will have names, Mr. Sharawi looked slightly nonplussed and said: "Bob. Bob the Fox, for example."

He said he was inspired by a children's program on Saudi television in which a young veiled woman and a Mickey Mouse-like character take calls from kids. Fingering a string of bright green plastic prayer beads, a pale blue prayer rug lying on the chair beside him, he tries to reconcile Hamas's bloody attacks that kill innocent children with his role as mentor.

"These are one of the means used by the Palestinians against Israel's F-16's and tanks," he said of the suicide attacks, giving a stock answer. "We're doing our best to avoid involving children in these issues, but I cannot turn the children's lives into a beautiful garden while outside it's the contrary."

He gets up to fiddle with a magnesium light stand in the studio, which is furnished with five beige upholstered chairs and a dusty desk in front of a rattan screen decorated with plastic grape leaves.

The show, which will be broadcast on Friday mornings, the beginning of the Muslim weekend, will be preceded by an hour of cartoons, including a serialized life of the Prophet Muhammad, and that universal send-up of deadly conflict, Tom & Jerry.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/18/in...rtner=homepage





Rating (and Finding) the Movie Raters
David M. Halbfinger

Kirby Dick was steamed. Somebody would have to pay.

It was sometime in 2004, and he had run out of patience. Too many independent filmmakers, people just like him, he said, were being made offers they couldn't refuse: cut cherished scenes from their movies or get smacked with an NC-17 and disappear into commercial oblivion.

Director pals told him what he suspected already: the secretive, too-powerful Motion Picture Association of America was hammering independent filmmakers with tough ratings while letting the major studios off easy. You couldn't reason with the ratings board, the indies bleated; it wouldn't even let you argue, on appeal, that your new movie was tamer than a film that got an R or a PG-13 rating the year before.

The ratings board's anonymous members had few clear standards for evaluating movies, his indie friends whispered. Small wonder, they griped, that movies with gay sex scenes, or even lingering female orgasms - like scenes cut from Kimberly Peirce's "Boys Don't Cry" and "The Cooler" by Wayne Kramer - were verboten, while gore fests and straight-sex scenes seldom got as much of a reaction out of the board.

Mr. Dick had heard enough. The board was asking for a beat-down. And he was the man for the job.

So Mr. Dick (whose earlier films include "Twist of Faith," about sexual abuse by a priest, and "Derrida," about the philosopher Jacques Derrida) got the Independent Film Channel to stake him a modest bankroll, somewhere south of $1 million. He hired a private eye - a kind-hearted lesbian named Becky Altringer, who was as eager as shamuses come and expounds on her sexuality in the film. And he locked and loaded his video camera.

Their hit job - complete with secret video and car chases - took months to pull off, but he and Ms. Altringer had staying power. And Mr. Dick is planning to wrap it all up in a celluloid bow next week, at the Sundance Film Festival, where his documentary - "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" - will have its premiere. IFC is hoping to find a theatrical distributor before showing the film on the channel later this year.

A spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association's Classification and Ratings Administration, Kori Bernards, said she was "anxious to see the final cut" of Mr. Dick's movie. "We don't agree with his assessment of the ratings board, but obviously we respect his creative rights," she said, after taking issue with some of his methods and disputing most of his assertions, as relayed by a reporter. But when asked if the board was considering litigation, she first said she doubted so, but called back to clarify: "I don't know," she said.

Indeed, Mr. Dick's one-sided smackdown of a movie wallops the ratings board - the brainchild of Jack Valenti, the longtime head of the Motion Picture Association - every which way but evenhandedly.

Officials never responded to his requests for on-camera interviews, he says. But Mr. Dick got directors like Ms. Peirce, Mr. Kramer and others with ratings beefs - Atom Egoyan ("Where the Truth Lies"), Jamie Babbit ("But I'm a Cheerleader"), Mary Harron ("American Psycho"), Kevin Smith ("Jersey Girl") and John Waters ("A Dirty Shame") - to air their many grievances. He included snippets from their movies, including some that had been cut to get less restrictive ratings.

Matt Stone, a co-creator of "South Park," tells of getting radically different treatment for the independently made sex comedy "Orgazmo," which was rated NC-17 in 1997, than for "Team America: World Police," which Paramount distributed with an R rating in 2004.

The Newsweek reviewer David Ansen calls the board a joke: "Though it's supposed to protect children, it's turning us all into children."

Richard Heffner, a former head of the ratings board, argues that the board at least ought to include experts on the effects of sex and violence on children, rather than making parenthood the only qualification for participation.

And to bolster his point about a bias against gay sex, Mr. Dick and his producing partner, Eddie Schmidt, put together a wicked split-screen montage showing nearly identical scenes of gay sex in movies that got NC-17 ratings side by side with straight-sex scenes in R-rated ones.

But the heart of Mr. Dick's movie - which beats to the funk rhythm of a soundtrack that could be straight out of "Shaft" - is his attempt to penetrate the shroud of secrecy surrounding the ratings board and its members.

Ms. Bernards, the ratings board spokeswoman, said the board's members are not identified publicly to protect them from undue outside influence. But in an interview, Mr. Dick argued that transparency would be a better policy, particularly since representatives from the film studios, who are most likely to want to influence ratings decisions, are able to work closely with the ratings board's top officials anyway.

So he and the private eye - and her lover's teenage daughter, Lindsey, who proved as adept with a hidden camera as she was at taking down license-plate numbers - cased the Encino, Calif., citadel of the Motion Picture Association for months. They staked out its guarded, gated entrance, tailed employees to lunch, sifted through their trash.

Their big break came when Ms. Altringer, peering through binoculars at the association's guard shack, spotted a list of phone extensions inside. A few phony phone calls later, she had pieced together a list of all eight members of the ratings board.

That wasn't enough for Mr. Dick: he and Ms. Altringer then tailed each member of the board. They caught one at a yoga studio, another eating lunch, a third speeding on the freeway - all on camera. They named all names.

(In the view of the prey, the hunt was not quite as innocent as Mr. Dick's movie makes it seem. Ms. Bernards said that members of the ratings board and other motion picture association employees, unaware of Mr. Dick's project, believed they were being stalked, and that the association had asked the police to step in at one point. She also said that one ratings-board member had received an ominous-sounding e-mail message from someone involved in Mr. Dick's investigation, referring to the person's child and school.)

At last, on Nov. 29, Mr. Dick gave in to the impulse that he said had been irresistible right from the outset: he submitted his unfinished movie for a rating.

It didn't take long for word to come back: "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" was rated NC-17, for "some graphic sexual content."

Mr. Dick's movie did not stop there. He appealed the board's ruling to another supersecret body, the Classification and Rating Appeals Board, whose members are mainly theater-chain and studio executives. They were not sympathetic. On Dec. 21 they rejected his appeal, 10-0.

But Mr. Dick was not through. His movie shows - albeit using an animated stand-in - a ratings-board lawyer sternly telling him that he was not permitted to know the names of the members of the appeals board.

"Absolutely not," the lawyer, identified as Greg Goeckner, a deputy general counsel of the Motion Picture Association, tells Mr. Dick. "You don't need to know those names."

"That doesn't seem right," Mr. Dick replies. "That seems like a star chamber or something."

"I'm not going to tell you those names," Mr. Goeckner says flatly.

Mr. Dick again lands the last punch. He and Ms. Altringer have already identified the 10 members of the appeals board, by staking out a hearing. Again, he names all names.

(In the interview, Mr. Dick said that he wanted to identify the ratings and appeals board members and "put them in a bind," hopefully to persuade the ratings board to abandon its secretive policy. But Ms. Bernards said that the ratings board would not be "subjected to blackmail by a movie." She added that the film remained unrated, because Mr. Dick has changed it, by adding the appeals sequence, since it was first assigned its NC-17.)

Finally, Mr. Dick, whose last documentary, "Twist of Faith," was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004, also reveals, somewhat ominously, that representatives from the Roman Catholic Church and from the National Council of Churches sit in on the appeals process.

Again, Ms. Bernards, the ratings board spokeswoman, said there was a simple explanation. Years ago, she said, Catholics and Protestants questioned the appeals process's integrity. "So we invited them to observe, and ever since then they have," she said. "No one else has asked."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/mo...es/16unra.html





Filmmaker Is Snarled in Legal Web
David M. Halbfinger

Nick Cassavetes is loath to label his new movie - "Alpha Dog," about a group of suburban, teenage gangster wannabes who corner themselves into committing cold-blooded murder - a mere cautionary tale about wayward youth and missing-in-action parents.

At the very least, though, it's a cautionary tale for writer-directors thinking of tackling a breaking news story as their next subject.

When he set out to chronicle the life and alleged crimes of Jesse James Hollywood, a San Fernando Valley man who prosecutors say kidnapped and ordered the execution of Nicholas Markowitz, 15, in 2000, Mr. Cassavetes had reason to think he was on stable ground. Four of the five men indicted were behind bars. Mr. Hollywood, on the lam, had eluded the best efforts of the F.B.I. and the television show "America's Most Wanted" and seemed gone for good.

But with half of his movie filmed and already millions of dollars over his starting budget of $9 million, it was with a little chagrin, much shock and mixed feelings for the many people he had interviewed along the way - perpetrators, witnesses and victims - that Mr. Cassavetes turned on the news last March to see that Mr. Hollywood, then 25, had been arrested in Brazil and would be coming home to stand trial in Santa Barbara.

The easy, if costly, part of what came next was revising his movie, which stars Bruce Willis, Justin Timberlake and Sharon Stone: Mr. Cassavetes tossed several days' and about $500,000 worth of film, and added some more, to tailor his thinly veiled story - about a tough-talking marijuana dealer named Johnny Truelove, played by Emile Hirsch - to the newly changing facts.

But what has given new meaning to post-production snags has been Mr. Cassavetes's continued entanglement in the legal battle being fought by Mr. Hollywood's very real-life prosecutor, Ron Zonen, and defense lawyer, James Blatt. Last summer, he was subpoenaed when Mr. Blatt accused Mr. Zonen of misconduct and sought unsuccessfully to have him removed from the case for cooperating with Mr. Cassavetes and giving him access to nonpublic records. In November, a judge ordered Mr. Cassavetes's researcher, Michael Mehas, who is writing a book on the case, to turn over notes and tapes from his interviews to the defense. And Mr. Blatt is now threatening to seek an injunction against the release of Mr. Cassavetes's movie - which is to have its premiere on Jan. 27 at the Sundance Film Festival and is set for release by New Line - lest every potential jury member go see it and be tainted.

Mr. Cassavetes said he was not worried. "I don't believe he has the power to enjoin a movie, if he wanted to," he said of Mr. Blatt. He also said he had been subpoenaed again recently, and "I'll cooperate as much as my memory allows."

Mr. Cassavetes's recall may waver, but his command of the facts of the Hollywood case, as evidenced in "Alpha Dog," was prodigious. While the names and places have been changed - to satisfy the providers of errors and omissions insurance, he said - the movie amounts to Mr. Cassavetes's voluminously documented and carefully weighed best guess of what happened when Mr. Hollywood and his pals grabbed Mr. Markowitz, the younger brother of a rival drug dealer who owed him $1,200. His body was found six days later in a shallow grave.

"It's almost hard to believe this story, and I was determined to get to the bottom of it, which I'm not sure I ever did," he said in an interview.

Mr. Cassavetes, 46, said his eldest daughter, then a student at a high school that Mr. Hollywood had once attended, turned him on to the story of the young fugitive, a cult hero to teenagers in the valley. Mr. Cassevetes, the son of the late director John Cassavetes, said he saw reminders of his own youth: he had been kicked out of three high schools - "for fighting, every day" - and he recalled "thinking I was a tough guy just because I decided to be one."

"I saw that these kids had done the same thing, and I saw where it led," he said. "This kid who was the triggerman, Ryan Hoyt, never had so much as a ticket before. He went right from a clean record - though he wasn't a model citizen - to death row at San Quentin." Mr. Cassavetes said he was struck by, and reminded of, the "affectation" of toughness, and how that kind of posturing can seem to box someone into behaving that way. "We watch violent images on TV, we revere violence, but we're not raised violently," he said. "And when we're put in a situation, we act how we think we should act, as opposed to how we've been trained to or how we have a history of acting."

In the course of his research, Mr. Cassavetes gained the trust of Mr. Hollywood's father, Jack Hollywood, a convicted drug dealer in his own right who is now serving a prison sentence in Arizona. "I found out from Jack lots of stuff that no one on the planet knows except for me," he said, though he said the fugitive son's whereabouts was not something he was told or asked about. "I did not want to know that, because I didn't want to be part of a criminal investigation," he said.

So what secrets had he learned? "Hypothetically, if this were true, and I'm not saying that it is, I might've talked about how he got his kid out of the country, the processes of doing that. Hypothetically, I might have talked about what happened when he got out of the country and how he got to the different place than he was before. How drug operations might have gone, what the situation was with Jesse, how things worked."

Mr. Cassavetes also said he learned from Jack Hollywood the inside story of how Jesse was captured - a version that until now has not been published, and that did not make it into his film. "I know what happened," he said coyly. "I just don't know if I can tell you."

Then he decided to share. "This is what I believe happened," he said. "There was a family member that, by coincidence, was going to Brazil for a vacation. Jack heard about it and went, 'What?' He doesn't want anybody in the family going down to Brazil, because - this would assume that he knows, and I'm not sure that he knew where his son was, so disclaimer-disclaimer-disclaimer - tough position to be in, because nobody knows, and you can't stop the relative, and he can't tell the relative. But apparently that conversation might have happened.

"The person went down; soon as she stepped off the plane she got grabbed by Interpol; she got sweated till she gave up the phone number," Mr. Cassavetes said. "Clearly a dumb move. I believe it went like, 'If you're down there for a few months and everything looks good, check on him.' Interpol impersonates her voice, and it's done. Imagine the amount of guilt if you'd made a dumb move like that."

While he juggles promoting his movie and responding to subpoenas, Mr. Cassavetes is working on a new screenplay, adapting the novel "God Is a Bullet" by Boston Teran. It's the story, set in Southern California, of a father who descends into a murderous, raping, drug-dealing cult to rescue his kidnapped teenage daughter.

It is no great leap of logic to suggest that Mr. Cassavetes may be drawing from the same well as he did with "Alpha Dog."

"I'm guilty of it - of being too busy with your everyday life to properly spend enough time with your children to figure out what's going on with them," he said. "You can check in, and you say, 'Are you all right?' But it's not like being on a farm or spending a lot of time in the house. We all live really global, Internetty lives. Kids have more power than they did before. They have cars, they can get around, they have dough, and there's always some person that's got something going on that can get everybody killed."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/18/mo...lph.html?8hpib





Sundance, for Indies, Soft Kiss Before Dying
Manohla Dargis

Starting today and for the next 10 days, thousands of movie industry types, media purveyors and lookie-Lous will descend on the resort town of Park City, Utah, to partake in that collective fiction known as the American independent film movement. In other words, they will brave that annual combustion of hype, creative endeavor and wind chill called the Sundance Film Festival. They will elbow through overcrowded parties, gossip about and perhaps even broker backroom deals and gawk as starlets the size of swizzle sticks haul off bags of free jeans and other goodies. They may see Paris Hilton try to stop traffic. They will pretend not to care.

And, oh yeah, some of these festivalgoers will watch movies, lots of movies. This year's roundup includes 120 features, both fiction and nonfiction, along with 73 shorts. Some of this work will have been shot on old-fashioned celluloid; much, if not most, will be shot in digital video and look it. As always, some of this work will be good, most will be adequate and the outright stinkers will be as modest in number as the gems. Some of the better entries will, as Noah Baumbach's "Squid and the Whale" did last year, secure sizable deals and enter the cultural slipstream. Other films, like Craig Brewer's "Hustle & Flow," which made the loudest noise last year, will leave with big money and find an audience without ever finding a place in the zeitgeist.

Because each Sundance is the same, only different, this year's selection hits familiar notes. The documentary selection includes a tearjerker about a wrongly convicted prisoner, "The Trials of Darryl Hunt"; last year's entry on the same subject was the similarly affecting "After Innocence." Well-intended and formally bland, these are the kind of feel-good-about-feeling-bad movies that solicit the audience's righteous indignation, something always in supply at Sundance. As in years past there are also docs about dysfunction ("Thin"), Sudan's lost boys ("God Grew Tired of Us") and America at war ("Iraq in Fragments"). There is the obligatory look at the black (bad) experience, this time courtesy of "American Blackout," and a film about The New York Times crossword puzzle editor, Will Shortz, "Wordplay," which occupies the fun-with-letters slot that should have been occupied by the former Sundance-reject "Spellbound."

It's déjà vu all over again with the fiction films as well. This year's opening-night film, Nicole Holofcener's "Friends With Money," is a touching ensemble piece about a group of entwined Angelenos, just like last year's opening-night film, Don Roos's "Happy Endings." Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the loner with love woes in Mr. Roos's film; Jennifer Aniston plays that same part in Ms. Holofcener's film. This year's closing-night film, Nick Cassavetes's "Alpha Dog," centers on a group of young, morally vacant Southern Californians, most underage or barely legal, whose promiscuous drug use leads to a kidnapping. The same story line, idiot kids and wasteland milieu were in one of last year's premieres, Arie Posin's "Chumscrubber," a strained social satire made in the key of "American Beauty."

Many Sundance entries come to the festival looking for distribution (and leave still looking), while others are in attendance as part of their release campaigns. "Alpha Dog" will be released this spring by New Line, a division of Time Warner, so you will get a chance to watch this fitfully entertaining story based on the exploits of the F.B.I. poster boy Jesse James Hollywood, who was wanted on drug-dealing charges. "Friends With Money," which was paid for by Sony Pictures Classics, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, will be released on April 7. The engaging British comedy "Kinky Boots," which will be released by the Weinstein-free Miramax, comes via the division of Buena Vista that distributes films in the United Kingdom for Walt Disney, Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures, and will hit theaters April 14.

Times have changed. When the independent film movement of the 1980's emerged with the likes of Spike Lee, among others, it suggested that the movie business had made real room for filmmakers who could bridge the gap between art and industry. These were filmmakers who were more commercially accessible than avant-garde artists like Stan Brakhage and independent visionaries like Charles Burnett, who could, or so it was hoped, attract the same sort of niche audience that bought into Sub Pop before Warner Brothers did. Disney threw a wrench into the works when it snapped up Miramax Films in 1994, causing endless debate about what constituted an independent film and why. Could a division of a media conglomerate remain independent? You bet! Well, at least if that division kept calling itself independent.

These days, the lines between the studios and their specialty divisions are more blurred than ever, as evidenced by a lot of stories pegged to the current Oscar front-runners. The persistence of the myth that these specialty divisions are independent is a fascinating if understandable phenomenon. After all, some of those divisions, like Miramax, were independent once upon a time, while others, like Sony Pictures Classics, maintain a highly polished veneer of independence. But there is a reason why that division is called Sony Pictures Classics - why it's Warner Independent Pictures and Fox Searchlight. Like their big studio siblings, these divisions have access to the kind of infrastructural muscle that real independents do not. For them, independence is principally a matter of branding, and of course, good taste, integrity and all the rest.

The special divisions have been good for American mainstream cinema, but they seem to have been murder on the little guys. The current landscape is a mass of confusion, with too many small films fighting for the same specialty audience. Good movies open only to close before they can find an audience and many never make it out of the major markets. At festivals like Sundance, the specialty divisions often scoop up the choice offerings, leaving the nominal crumbs (some rather tasty) to smaller distributors. Sometimes these crumbs turn into modest theatrical successes, but without advertising money and the support of the major media outlets they may not last in theaters long enough for you to ignore them. You may catch up with these films later on DVD, but where is the fun - the collective experience, the images bigger than life - in that?

All of which is a roundabout and admittedly grudging way of saying that despite the hype and the frigid climes Sundance remains invaluable - wildly annoying, but invaluable. The American independent film movement may be a fiction, but it is the fiction we now live by. And the truth is that every year Sundance programmers unearth work that is aesthetically and sometimes even politically venturesome - work that is truly independent in the best, most unburdened sense of that oft-abused word. Last year, some of the most thought-provoking, soul-stirring films at the festival remained lamentably under the radar, including Robinson Devor's "Police Beat," Travis Wilkerson's "Who Killed Cock Robin?," Kyle Henry's "Room," William Greaves's "Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2½" and Andrew Wagner's "Talent Given Us." Sundance had them even if not everyone noticed. Mr. Wagner went on to distribute his film himself; the rest remain without distribution.

Here is hoping that one day you get the chance to see them too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/movies/19sund.html





DIY

This Is Not Spinal Tap: A Concert Film by Fans
Lorne Manly

In the decades since Woodstock, many a concert film has gotten mired in its own clichés. Cameras on booms swoop high over the crowd. Handheld cameras off to the side lovingly capture guitarists teasing out notes or windmilling riffs. Obligatory shots of ululating fans follow - all, increasingly, on pristine high-definition video.

But as the Beastie Boys set out to commemorate a concert at Madison Square Garden, the hip-hop group had a different idea. Why not smash the model?

They decided to lend hand-held video cameras to 50 fans, told them to shoot at will, and then presented the end result in movie theaters in all its primitive, kaleidoscopic glory.

The result of this brainstorm is "Awesome ... ," which will be shown Saturday night at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, before being released by ThinkFilm in late March. The movie is more than a new twist on an old form. "Awesome" - its full title praising the fans' involvement in the final film cannot be printed in this newspaper - plugs into some of the currents surging through the media and entertainment worlds.

Technology has unmoored some the constructs that have girded those businesses for decades, giving the consumers of pop culture a growing ability to watch or listen to their entertainment on their own terms and on their own time, and re-evaluating the role of traditional distribution companies. "Awesome" pushes that tension further, giving the ultimate user a chance to actually create the content. "It's the democratization of filmmaking," said Jon Doran, a producer of the movie.

As with most films, of course, there is a benevolent despot - read, a director - involved. And that would be Adam Yauch, who is known as MCA in the band, but who prefers the archly pretentious nom de plume Nathanial Hörnblowér for his directorial and photographic endeavors.

New York punk rockers turned rappers turned caring hip-hop artists and family men, members of the Beastie Boys have more than most musicians used technology to involve fans in the creative process. They have been posting a capella songs on www.beastieboys.com, for instance, and inviting fans to use those building blocks for remixes of their own.

While perusing the message boards on the site one day in mid-2004, Mr. Yauch came across a concert photo snapped by a fan with his cellphone and found himself taken with the shakiness and rawness of the image. "The energy of it looked cool, and I thought it would look interesting to document a whole concert," Mr. Yauch said.

Three days before the October 2004 concert at Madison Square Garden, the Beastie Boys decided to go ahead. The band posted a notice on its Web site seeking volunteers. The instructions were simple: " 'Start it when the Beastie Boys hit the stage and don't stop till it's over,' " recalled one cameraman, Fred Zilliox, a 35-year-old cook from Keansburg, N.J. "Other than that, it was up to us to do whatever we wanted."

The camera-toting fans took those instructions to heart. They shot the band, they shot the fans, they shot their fellow camera operators. Four even took their cameras along on their bathroom breaks.

"I wasn't very jumpy," said Sharon Gruber, a 26-year-old fan from Bayside, Queens, who was sitting in the top-most row of the Garden. "I basically shot a lot of close-ups of the stage."

Then Mr. Yauch, Mr. Doran, assorted editors and others took over. The postproduction phase stretched more than a year as they waded through nearly 60 angles and about 100 hours of material. (The band supplemented the 50 camera-wielding fans with five friends who had digital video cameras and several high-quality cameras fixed on stage.)

Though one of Mr. Yauch's favorite concert films is "Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii," "it's basically the antithesis of this movie," Mr. Yauch said with a laugh.

"Live at Pompeii," filmed in 1971 in a 2,000-year-old amphitheater devoid of fans, is filled with languid shots without a cut, some shots lasting five minutes. The longest cut in "Awesome" barely breaks a minute. Many shots clock in at less than a second. All told, the hour-and-a-half "Awesome" contains 6,732 edits.

ThinkFilm, the independent distributor behind films like "Murderball," picked up the movie last fall for a fee in the low seven figures. (The film will cost the Beastie Boys about $1.2 million when the sampling fees are added in; the band returned all the Hi-8 Sony cameras (a step above a typical camcorder) to the stores where they were bought, in some cases for a full refund.

"I loved the notion that this was a film for the fans, by the fans," said Mark Urman, head of ThinkFilm's theatrical division.

The film will open on March 31 in 10 to 15 markets, including New York and Los Angeles; a DVD will be released about three months later. But to attract people who may not be hard-core Beastie Boys fans - the band's latest album, "Solid Gold Hits," has sold fewer than 140,000 copies since its release in November - ThinkFilm and the band are lining up other promotions.

At Sundance the Beastie Boys will be the headliners at a party next week being given by MySpace, the social-networking Web site, to celebrate the debut of its filmmaker-community site. And MySpace will hold a contest urging its members to create a video of one of two Beastie Boys songs, "Sabotage" and "Shake Your Rump."

MySpace, in its two years of existence, has allowed more than 660,000 aspiring bands and solo artists to upload their music to the site, where it can then be discovered by the site's nearly 50 million members and perhaps even by music labels. "We're trying the same thing for filmmakers - a platform for our users to express themselves creatively," said Chris DeWolfe, the company's chief executive.

Independent filmmakers will be able to put their films on the site, allowing users to stream and watch selected work at no charge and making it possible to network with other filmmakers. But while music label representatives regularly troll MySpace, it remains to be seen whether studio executives will follow suit and deviate from the typical way talent is discovered.

Still, movie executives understand the business is changing, and they may end up combing through what promises to be a virtual slush pile of submissions. "I don't rule it out," Mr. Urman of ThinkFilm said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/movies/19awes.html





A Name in the Credits? Over His Dead Body
Christopher Maag

Chuck Lamb might be the world's chattiest dead guy.

His favorite topic is how he is fast becoming the most famous dead body alive. "Isn't it incredible?" said Mr. Lamb, 47, who speaks at a volume that most people reserve for rock concerts. "I had no idea it would blow up like this."

Mr. Lamb became Dead Body Guy on Dec. 5, when he put up his Web site, deadbodyguy.com. The site features photos of Mr. Lamb playing dead in various scenes around his house. Crushed by his garage door. Electrocuted in the bathtub. One series shows Mr. Lamb lying face-down in a bowl of chicken soup, above a caption that reads "Dying from bird flu."

His wife, Tonya, took the photos. She also prepared jars of fake blood, which she keeps in the pantry for future use.

By staging his own death, Mr. Lamb hopes to attain a modest form of immortality. He says he always wanted to become a famous actor. Instead, at age 47 he finds himself with six children, working as a computer programmer for Nationwide Insurance. Mr. Lamb has deep creases under his eyes, skin as pale as copy paper, precious little hair and no acting experience. Any notions he once held of becoming the next Sean Connery died long ago.

But Mr. Lamb's dream of fame lingered. "Just once," he said, "I want to have my name in the credits of a movie or a TV show."

His dream was stalled until last month, when he realized that anybody could play dead. By posing as a corpse on the Internet, he thought, perhaps he could win a role as a lifeless extra on "CSI: Miami." He took two days to build the Web site, then waited for someone to notice.

It was a short wait. Deadbodyguy.com received 300,000 hits in its first three weeks. There were 530 hits from Uruguay, 6 from Iran. In two hours, the site received 2,000 hits from Spain. "I'm huge in Spain," he said.

CNN labeled deadbodyguy.com one of its Web sites of the week. USA Today ran a small story. That was all the prodding needed by representatives of the infotainment industry, who spend their days trawling for weird news. They deluged Mr. Lamb with interview requests. Dead Body Guy soon appeared on more than 100 local TV stations, in places like Nacogdoches, Tex., and Honolulu.

He has also been mentioned on over 300 radio shows.

"That some regular guy in Columbus would play dead just to get famous is fascinating to me," said Van Patrick, a radio host for KCMO-AM in Kansas City who featured Mr. Lamb earlier this month. "I'm both repulsed and attracted to it," Mr. Patrick said.

All this attention places Mr. Lamb in the outermost orbit of fame: the Internet hotlink star. Every week, it seems, e-mail accounts across the country fill with messages titled, "Check this out," and text that begins, "I usually never pass on Web sites like this, but ... " Once it was dancing hamsters. This week it is Dead Body Guy's turn.

Even with over a quarter-million hits, Mr. Lamb has not received any movie offers. But he has been invited to the Los Angeles Film Festival in June, where he will be presented with the Special Achievement Award for Self-Promotion. He also will play dead on the red carpet as film actors step over his body. "Do you know how many thousands of actors in L.A. would kill for the publicity he's getting right now?" said Al Bowman, a festival organizer.

Not to mention start-up movie festivals. "He gets to say he's an award-winning act," Mr. Bowman said. "And we can promote ourselves by presenting Dead Body Guy, as seen on CNN."

And Dead Body Guy has coattails. Mr. Lamb paid Anne Howard, a publicist based in Montreal, $35 to write his first press release. Now she is trying to represent him as he sends demo tapes to Jay Leno and "Saturday Night Live." "If this works out, I just hope he remembers me," Ms. Howard said.

Part of Dead Body Guy's appeal is that he is a regular guy with a modest dream. But playing dead is turning Mr. Lamb's life upside down. His boss grew angry at the number of news media calls he was taking at work. Now, whenever he does an interview, Mr. Lamb must sneak out of his cubicle, run to another floor, find an empty conference room and lock himself inside.

One night he became so engrossed returning e-mail messages to the Web site that he forgot his wife's request to take a basket of laundry to the basement. "That's when I said, 'Whoa, I need to get a grip,' " Mr. Lamb said.

Officially, Mr. Lamb is sticking to Dead Body Guy's original goal. "Just one movie credit and I'm done," he said.

Meanwhile, he is waiting to hear back from a producer at the Conan O'Brien show. He has booking a flight to New York to meet with an agent. "I want to leave a little legacy," Mr. Lamb said. "I'd like to have a bridge named after me."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/national/17dead.html





Advertising

A February in Overdrive: Super Bowl and Olympics
Stuart Elliott

BRACE yourselves, a billion-dollar advertising blitz is coming to a TV set near you.

Arriving first, on Feb. 5, are the commercials on ABC during the Super Bowl, traditionally the biggest day of the year for Madison Avenue. Then, five days later, come the commercials during the NBC coverage of the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, which is to run through Feb. 26. Marketers in competitive categories like automobiles, credit cards, fast food and telecommunications will spend an estimated $1.1 billion on thousands of commercials during those two sports events.

The concentrated ad onslaught is emblematic of a growing trend. As technology like digital video recorders makes it easier for consumers to avoid TV commercials, marketers seek to make spots more memorable by running them during programs that large audiences still perceive as must-see big events, which they go out of their way to watch. Such big-event TV includes awards shows like the Oscars and premieres of popular series like "24," along with live sports events including the Olympics and the Super Bowl.

The prices for commercials during big-event TV are invariably higher. For instance, ABC, part of the Walt Disney Company, is charging an estimated average of $2.5 million for each 30-second spot during Super Bowl XL on Feb. 5. That is almost five times the cost of the highest-priced commercial during a regular program. Prices vary during the 416 hours of Olympic coverage on NBC and its sibling NBC Universal networks; the most expensive commercials are $700,000 to $750,000 for each 30 seconds.

But as TV viewership increasingly splinters, and commercials are increasingly zipped past or zapped, the rates for such special events may not be too high to pay, particularly for purveyors of mass-market products.

The Super Bowl, for example, is usually the most-watched show in a given year, with an audience of 90 million. And more than 120 million people tuned in for the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding showdown during the 1994 Winter Games.

"Fragmentation means more and more shows get lower and lower ratings," said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. "Events like the Super Bowl are arguably the only places advertisers can reach everyone in the U.S. at one time."

That means the pressure is on to come up with stand-out spots, Mr. Calkins said, because expectations are very high.

"Some succeed at it," he added. "Some fail."

Indeed, advertisers acknowledge the daunting task that confronts sponsors of big-event TV.

"Certainly, when you're dropping in excess of two million for a commercial you've got to pinch yourself to make sure it's the right thing to do," said Richard Castellini, vice president for consumer marketing at CareerBuilder.com in Chicago, an online job search service that is owned by Gannett, Knight Ridder and the Tribune Company.

CareerBuilder made its first Super Bowl appearance last year with three commercials by the Chicago agency Cramer-Krasselt, all featuring a man annoyed at work by boisterous chimpanzees. The pitch in all three was the same: Isn't it time to visit Careerbuilder.com and find a better job? It was a huge gamble, but the spots and a related online promotion proved tremendously popular among viewers of the game.

"I recouped the money I spent on the ads in three weeks' time," Mr. Castellini said, "so it's almost a no-brainer to come back." CareerBuilder is buying two 30-second spots, with the monkeys again in starring roles, during Super Bowl XL.

Another first-time Super Bowl sponsor returning for 2006 is Emerald of California nuts, sold by Diamond Foods, with a brain-teasing 30-second spot by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, part of the Omnicom Group.

"We are a new brand in a very, very tough category, and being on the Super Bowl was a great way to tell consumers and retailers that we are here to stay," said Tim Cannon, marketing director at Diamond Foods in Stockton, Calif.

The humorous Emerald spot that ran last February, also by Goodby, Silverstein, contributed to a sales increase of "about 56 percent in the four weeks after the Super Bowl," Mr. Cannon said, compared with the previous month. The commercial during this year's Super Bowl will be part of a broad campaign that will also include online and print ads.

Another brand that was a Super Bowl rookie in 2005, the Degree for Men antiperspirant sold by Unilever, has also signed up for a second appearance in the game. The spot for Super Bowl XL is adapted from a successful European commercial, set in a make-believe city whose only residents are stuntmen. The humorous spot was created by the London office of Lowe Worldwide, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies.

The challenge for sponsors was summarized by Jay Kolpon, vice president for marketing and new business at the Bayer Consumer Care division in Morristown, N.J.

"We want to get people to hear our message, but the Super Bowl is not like typical advertising," said Mr. Kolpon, whose company will run a 30-second spot for Aleve pain reliever in the game. It is certainly not a brand known for the humorous or extravagant spots that typically finish high on the Super Bowl hit parade.

So, Bayer Consumer Care asked its agency, Energy BBDO in Chicago, to produce "a Super Bowl-worthy commercial," Mr. Kolpon said, "with a bit of a twinkle in it as it says in an entertaining way that Aleve allows you to be your best self." Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock on "Star Trek," will appear in the Aleve spot by Energy BBDO, part of the BBDO Worldwide unit of Omnicom.

The fact that the Olympics starts so soon after the Super Bowl ends has led some Super Bowl ad mainstays to pass this time, particularly those that spend huge sums to be official sponsors of the United States or International Olympic Committees. Among them are McDonald's and Visa USA.

With McDonald's missing from the Super Bowl, Burger King is coming in, for the first time in 11 years. Credit card companies like MasterCard International may turn up to compensate for Visa's absence.

The Kleenex brand of tissues prefers to sponsor the Olympics, said Steve Erb, assistant marketing director for Kleenex at Kimberly-Clark in Neenah, Wis., because "Kleenex is a global brand with a presence in 175 countries and the Olympics is a global stage."

Also, the consumers who buy Kleenex - primarily women with children - identify more closely with the individuals who compete in the Olympics "and the moms, dads and coaches who get them there," Mr. Erb said, than with professional football players.

Kleenex will for the first time run commercials during the Olympics with a sports theme; spots by JWT in New York, part of the WPP Group, show a young hockey player facing off against a surprising goalie.

The spots are part of a broader campaign that also includes a partnership with an NBC Web site (nbcolympics.com) centered on three Olympic athletes and their mothers, whom consumers can follow through a dedicated Web site (kleenexmoments.com); a sweepstakes with a dedicated Web site (usgoldgame.com); and store displays.

Other major sponsors of the Winter Games include Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Eastman Kodak, John Hancock, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson and Nike.

Advertisers that will run spots during both the Olympics and Super Bowl include Anheuser-Busch, General Motors and Procter & Gamble.

Super Bowl XL advertisers also include Ameriquest Mortgage, Disney, FedEx and the New Line and Warner Brothers units of Time Warner. The Sprint unit of Sprint Nextel will sponsor the halftime show, featuring the Rolling Stones, and also run two commercials during the game.

"The stakes are high and that does raise the anxiety level," said Mike Goff, vice president for national advertising at Sprint Nextel in Overland Park, Kan. "We've entered this with our eyes wide open."

To help create commercials that viewers will like and remember, the company and its agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day in New York, part of the TBWA Worldwide division of Omnicom, "looked at a reel of recent Super Bowl spots," Mr. Goff said, "put 13 potential commercials in test and are doing additional research on 4 of them."

"You can assume there is one that features an animal," he added, laughing, referring to the popularity of the CareerBuilder chimps and a menagerie's worth of other beasts that have been stars of Super Bowl spots.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/18/bu...dco.html?8hpib





Google to Buy Radio Advertising Company
Eric Auchard

Web search company Google Inc. said on Tuesday it agreed to pay $102 million for radio advertising firm dMarc Broadcasting Inc., in a deal that could eventually be worth up to $1.24 billion.

Privately held dMarc of Newport Beach, California connects advertisers to radio stations through an automated advertising system, simplifying the process of selling, scheduling and delivering ads, said Google, of Mountain View, California.

"This is the first major 'public' statement that Google intends to be a kind of one-stop shop for its advertisers," analyst Greg Sterling of Kelsey Group wrote on his Web log.

The move into radio ad-buying could be followed by expansion into the television ad-buying market by the world's leading provider of Web search-based online advertising, he said.

Google said it agreed to an up-front cash payment of $102 million and additional payments totaling up to $1.14 billion over the next three years. The additional payments would depend on revenue and ad inventory goals being met, it said.

It said dMarc technology would be integrated into the Google AdWords business to create a new radio ad distribution channel for Google advertisers.

The deal is expected to close in the first quarter.

Google has sought to enter new industries almost as quickly as its market value has appreciated. Most recently, Google has launched an Internet video service offering CBS Corp. <CBS.N> television shows and basketball games.

Sterling said that similar deals could follow that thrust Google more deeply into the television advertising market.

He pointed to Spot Runner, a local cable television buying service, that he said "is a similar example of a kind of company that we would expect Google to also want to acquire -- or at least a similar capability -- to extend into TV."

Martin Pyykkonen, a financial analyst with Hoefer & Arnett in Boulder, Colorado, said the acquisition is another sign of Google's desire to move beyond online advertising.

"As you move upstream and start to talk to Fortune 1000 accounts, those companies want to deal with multiple channels -- radio, TV (and) print," Pyykkonen said, referring to various advertising distribution routes.

As Google expands into these other media, the danger is that the company will be seen as more of a competitor with advertising agencies -- potentially putting it in competition with some of its biggest buyers, Pyykkonen cautioned.

Google's stock price has more than quadrupled since its initial public offering in 2004.

Shares of Google fell $1.70, or less than 1 percent, to $464.55 on the Nasdaq after trading as high as $469.90 earlier.

(Additional reporting by Kenneth Li in New York)
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...RS&srch=google





Size matters?

Marketers Interested in Small Screen
Matt Richtel

Forget the 30-second spot on a 50-inch high-definition TV. How about a three-second message on the tiniest of screens?

Television-style advertising is coming to a mobile phone near you. It is part of a broader push by marketers to create a new generation of "up close and personal" ads by delivering video, audio, banner displays and text clips over a device carried by most American adults.

Marketers said they were particularly excited about the prospect of eventually using cellphones, many of which are equipped with global positioning systems, to send ads to consumers based on their location. With that information, marketers could, in theory, send pitches from retailers to cellphone users who might be in the vicinity of a store.

Cellphone-based marketing could be "the silver bullet we've been looking for in advertising for a long time," said Laura Marriott, executive director of the Mobile Marketing Association, a consortium of wireless carriers, ad agencies, technology companies and advertisers.

But ads on cellphones pose serious concerns, say consumer advocacy groups. Critics argue that Madison Avenue, having plastered ads on all kinds of empty spaces - like billboards, building facades and the sides of buses - may soon be intruding on a gadget that has become as common as a wallet.

"This is part of the creep of advertising into every nook and cranny of our lives," said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a nonprofit consumer group. "This is advertising right in your face."

The wireless carriers say the risk of losing customers is a strong incentive to keep down the marketing noise. It is illegal for carriers to sell phone numbers to telemarketers. And in their contracts with content providers, like CBS Sports and other channels, the carriers can keep out advertisers who send unsolicited messages.

By law, carriers are not allowed to divulge information on a subscriber's location unless that individual gives permission. One idea being floated by carriers and advertisers is to offer consumers incentives, like reduced monthly phone fees, if they agree to receive ads.

For now, mobile marketing is still rudimentary. But that is expected to change quickly, with phone-based ads incorporating more sophisticated graphics and videos this year.

Some marketers have already started to send simple text ads to cellphone screens when consumers use Web browsers on their phones to visit certain Internet sites. Other marketing campaigns urge consumers to use their phones to send text messages to advertisers to receive special offers.

In March, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel plan to test how consumers react to short video ads on their phones. But the carriers, fearful of upsetting customers, said they were not planning to deploy this broadly.

ESPN, the sports network, which offers a service that sends scores, text stories and video highlights to cellphones, plans to start running short video clips later this year from advertisers like Visa USA, Nike and Hilton Hotels. Other companies starting tests or full-blown campaigns - with video, banner ads or full-screen images - include American Express, Microsoft, and Pepsi, among other major brands.The size of the mobile phone advertising market was only $45 million in 2005, but is expected to grow to $1.26 billion by 2009, Roger Entner, a telecommunications industry analyst with Ovum, a market research firm, said.

Jon Raj, vice president of advertising and emerging media with Visa USA, said he expected to see many new ad formats that could combine the text, video and the location-based nature of the phone.

"Unlike the computer, or a magazine or television," he said, "the phone is a piece of you."

That quality, which makes mobile marketing so powerful, could also make phone ads widely disliked and force carriers to use them very cautiously, said Edward Snyder, a financial analyst and co-founder of Charter Equity Research, where he covers the cellular phone industry.

Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless, said the company had "no immediate plans" to send video ads to cellphone screens widely.

Another limiting factor is phone technology; only a small fraction of phones can play video, though many can use browsers to surf the Web and display some content.

The wireless industry and some advertisers say they have spent several years figuring out how to deliver unobtrusive messages. The carriers have adopted a voluntary code of conduct developed with the Mobile Marketing Association, which permits sending commercial messages only to consumers who agree to receive ads. For instance, a consumer must send a text note asking for information or click on a banner ad for the full pitch.

"This has to be approached delicately because there's a fine line between adding value to a customer and intruding," said Pragnesh Shah, vice president of product innovation at Sprint Nextel. Still, Mr. Shah said he saw enormous potential in delivering advertising on a device that is always on and carried everywhere.

One example of mobile advertising is a brand campaign for Visa USA, begun in September, in which consumers send a five-letter text code to receive weather reports. The reports come back with a banner: sponsored by Visa. The credit card company has also signed a contract with ESPN to have three-second animated images run before phone users receive ESPN sports updates.

Also in September, Microsoft started sending mobile ads to its business customers, showing the Microsoft Office logo when customers viewed certain Web pages from their handsets. Other companies are sending banner ads that direct consumers to call, say, a hotel, in one click.

And last summer, MasterCard International sent text messages to consumers who searched for restaurants on their handsets, offering them the chance to win free lunches at restaurants in their neighborhoods.

In theory, ads could be made even more personal. A message might say: "Use this card in the store coming up on your left and you'll get x-percent off," said Michael Lao, MasterCard's vice president for global media and new channels. But this futuristic feature would be possible only if carriers developed a system in which subscribers could choose to be tracked.

Web publishers are also getting into mobile marketing by selling advertising space next to the content they deliver to cellphones. In December, for instance, the Weather Channel started its first mobile advertising campaign, coupling weather reports with small banner ads for American Express.

The Weather Channel is one of more than 40 content producers working with Third Screen Media, a company with offices in Boston and New York that helps Web sites, advertisers and carriers integrate marketing for cellphones.

Thomas J. Burgess, the chief executive of Third Screen, said his customers' mobile ad budgets had risen from an average of $20,000 for a campaign a year ago to $150,000 to $250,000 today. He said the company had just signed its largest deal ever, a $1.6 million contract for a one-year campaign with an entertainment industry advertiser that he declined to name.

One reason for growing interest in cellphone ads, Mr. Burgess said, is the relatively high rate at which customers click on banner ads on mobile screens. The click- through rate is around 4 percent on phones, compared with 1 percent on the Internet, he said.

Mr. Burgess attributes the higher response rate to a greater ability to aim ads at particular consumers based on factors like time of day and the kind of handset they are using.

Ujjal Kohli, chief executive of Rhythm NewMedia, a start-up in Mountain View, Calif., which is developing video advertising technology, said he had hopes that mobile marketing, by being very personal and intimate, could solve some of the frustrations advertisers have with consumers ignoring television commercials - no matter how big the monitor.

"The tiny screen may be the answer," Mr. Kohli said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/te...16mobile.html?





A Producer of Hip-Hop Gets Behind an Heiress
Lola Ogunnaike

The year 2005 was a very good one for the hitmaking producer Scott Storch. For dozens of weeks, singles like Mario's "Let Me Love You," 50 Cent's "Candy Shop" and "Just a Lil Bit" and Lil' Kim's "Lighters Up" - all of which he helped create - topped the Billboard charts and blasted from radio stations around the country. And he is the man behind "Run It," the ubiquitous ditty that single-handedly kick-started the career of the R&B singer Chris Brown.

But as Mr. Storch, 32, strolled about a Louis Vuitton store in Miami one recent December afternoon, buying everything his well-paid heart desired, he looked anything but happy when talk shifted from $300 sneakers to awards. He, it turns out, was outraged and "shocked" that he did not receive a Grammy nomination for producer of the year alongside the likes of Danger Mouse, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and the Neptunes.

"It's all political," he groused as sales assistants with dollar signs in their eyes zipped about. "It has to do with your visibility. It has to do with who got passed over for it before. You have to play the political game, and I was too busy making hit music to play the political game."

While producers like Kanye West, Dr. Dre and Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes enjoy superstar status moonlighting as rappers, easily switching between the microphone and the mixing board, Mr. Storch, who does not perform, has preferred to toil in relative obscurity, producing hits for the likes of Beyoncé ("Baby Boy," "Naughty Girl," "Me, Myself and I"), Fat Joe ("Lean Back") and a host of others. "I'm not the guy trying to be all up in the videos and be a celebrity," he said. "I feel like I'm going to lose a certain amount of my privacy if I do that."

As a result, Mr. Storch may be the most important hip-hop producer that you've never heard of. And the fact that he is white and Jewish still comes as a surprise to many. (He has called himself the Meyer Lansky of hip-hop.)

"That definitely threw me off at first," Mr. Brown said. "I mean, I was really surprised by that. I just assumed he was African-American."

His color has in no way hindered his success, Mr. Storch said. A compact man who is rarely seen without sunglasses (even at night), he said he produced 80 tracks last year, charging anywhere from $80,000 to $90,000 a song, the going rate for A-list producers. Unlike that of a number of his peers, his sound is not readily identifiable. He is as comfortable working with pop stars like Christina Aguilera as he is with fledgling rappers like Chamillionaire. Because much of today's successful hip-hop and pop music is driven by melody and beat rather than lyrical content, the importance of the producer has increased exponentially.

In the coming months Mr. Storch's hitmaking ability will be put to the ultimate test. He spent a significant portion of last year working with the celebutante Paris Hilton on her debut album, which is scheduled for release this summer. Ms. Hilton has already proven adept at selling books, perfume, racy videotapes and hamburgers, but will she be able to push albums? Yes, the producer is betting. "I think Paris's album is going to take everyone by surprise," he said confidently. Still, walking into the project, Mr. Storch admitted, he had felt some trepidation. "I remember having a conversation with Dr. Dre, and he said: 'Scott, this is a risk. You can either have incredible success or big failure. But risk is good.' " He decided to gamble.

Later in the evening, at a Miami studio, he played a handful of tracks from Ms. Hilton's album. "Jealousy" was clearly aimed at her ever-shrinking, ex-best-friend Nicole Ritchie. And on "It's Like That," destined for the clubs, Ms. Hilton, in a breathy, digitally enhanced register, can be heard cooing, "Gonna lose my clothes/You like that don't you/Let's get exposed/You know you want to."

While Mr. Storch compared Ms. Hilton's sound to Cyndi Lauper's and Blondie's, he tap-danced when asked if Ms. Hilton could actually hold a note. "If people are given the right circumstances and the right track and the right melody, it's about the conviction," he said. "It's not necessarily about being a God-given virtuoso."

Sure.

Mr. Storch and Ms. Hilton became an item during their time together. The two showed up hand in hand at the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards, and he did buy her a Bentley. (He also purchased one for his ex-girlfriend Lil' Kim when they were an item.) Did the two mix business and pleasure? "It's always a pleasure working with Paris," Mr. Storch said with a sly chuckle. "We were good friends. Let the world figure that out. I take the high road."

Shortly before his whirlwind shopping spree that afternoon, Mr. Storch and his entourage, which included his manager; his silent but leggy Brazilian girlfriend; a reggaetón artist, Nox; and several other hangers-on, were listening to old-school classics at his four-bedroom home in Indian Creek Village, a tony community. His yacht, named Storchavelli, was docked in the back. A fleet of luxury cars was parked in the driveway and in the garage. He owns 13 vehicles, including a racing-green 1974 Jaguar, a white Lamborghini, a black Mercedes Maybach, a butterscotch-colored Rolls-Royce and a Mercedes McClaren SLR, a sleek $600,000 limited-edition ride that has been known to reduce grown men to tears. "I drive something different every day," he said nonchalantly, as he strolled past a 1960 Bentley. "It's just my hobby."

In addition to the flashy automobiles, he enjoys even flashier baubles. A diamond-encrusted Piaget watch twinkled on his wrist, while a 32-carat canary-yellow rock dwarfed his pinkie. "I feel like this is a badge of honor," he said, rubbing the ridiculously massive ring. "It's a symbol of hard work, the music that I've made and all the hours that I've spent in the studio." Throughout the day, Mr. Storch, a pack-a-day-type, chain-smoked Marlboros and inhaled prodigious amounts of marijuana. "I'm getting you totally baked right now, aren't I?" he asked this reporter at one point as she sat engulfed in a pungent cloud of secondhand smoke.

He was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Philadelphia and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the son of a court reporter and a singer. He began playing piano at 9, and by 13 he was convinced that a life in music was for him. "I would see musicians performing at weddings and bar mitzvahs, and I knew that at the very worst I could do that," Mr. Storch said. He dropped out of high school in ninth grade to pursue his dream full time. In the early 1990's he was a keyboardist for the Roots, a neo-soul band, but eventually began to feel stifled creatively. "I wanted to work with all kinds of music, and they had a very specific sound," he said.

The rapper Eve, a Philadelphia native, introduced him to Dr. Dre, and life would never be the same. "Dre opened the door for me, and just having my name mentioned next to his raised my stock," said Mr. Storch, who played keyboards on Dre tracks like "Still D.R.E." "Doors that were once closed to me were swinging wide open."

With the song "Lean Back," the summer anthem of 2004, his career shot into the stratosphere, he said. "People don't even come to me for a single anymore," he said. "Now they want their first single," the initial release that will instantly put an album on the radio. And, according to Mr. Brown, "it's money well spent."

He is currently in the studio with Ice Cube, Method Man and Jessica Simpson, and he wants to start his own record label. But Mr. Storch has no plans to significantly raise his profile in 2006.

"For the past 13 years people have thought that I was the new guy because they don't know who I am," he said. "If I can be the new guy for another 10 years, then I'll be all right."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/ar...tor.html?8hpib





Tuning Tech Catches On With Guitarists
Richard Defendorf

No matter how accomplished they are, musicians who play fretted instruments spend a lot of time playing out of tune.

Strings stretch and bind. Fluctuations in humidity and string tension cause instrument necks to bow, arch and twist. Something--it is not always clear what--throws string pitch out of whack. Professional players on stage and in recording sessions find themselves twisting tuner knobs between every song and sometimes in the middle of songs.

"It is maddening that we play instruments that do not stay in tune for very long," Mike Marshall, one of the top mandolin and guitar players on the acoustic-music scene, wrote during a recent online discussion on the topic. "This seems a bit insane, considering the fact that we are surrounded by so much incredible technology."

Technology, it turns out, does offer a remedy for tuning problems--at least for those who play electric guitars. Backers and users of an electronic system called the Performer say it offers a big leap beyond the ubiquitous electronic pitch readers that, while reasonably accurate, still require the player to tune manually. It's also seen as a way to let players use the same instrument for a variety of musical purposes.

Those attributes have helped sell the system to rock icons Graham Nash, Jimmy Page and Joe Perry, along with other concert- stage veterans.

With the touch of a button, The Performer is designed to automatically tune open, unfretted strings to whatever notes the player programs into the system's computer. The retuning can happen any time the player has a moment to strum on open strings, even in the middle of a song.

It works via a system of sensors, computer electronics and miniature motors and mechanics designed for installation in the bodies of Fender's Stratocaster and Telecaster guitars, and Gibson USA's Les Paul.

In their quest for new and distinctive sounds, guitar players can easily load up on pre-amplifiers, digital sound processors and other effects gear designed to change the sound of the instrument with the touch of a foot pedal. Using alternate tunings is another way to change the sound and enhance the playability of a guitar, but it often is handled in a very low-tech way--manually. Onstage or in the studio, when it is impractical to spend several minutes retuning, professionals typically pretune several guitars and switch from one to another between songs.

Onstage or in the studio, when it is impractical to spend several minutes retuning, professionals typically pretune several guitars and switch from one to another between songs.
As it is currently offered, The Performer is designed to readjust the tension on all six strings simultaneously in about five seconds, with the push of a button. A small LCD screen cut into the guitar body displays the note, octave and "cent value" of each string. (A cent is a unit of relative pitch; there are 1,200 cents in one octave). Neil Skinn, the man who developed the system, says the gadget's tuning is accurate to within 2 cents.

Skinn says he began exploring automatic-tuning concepts as a hobby in 1983. His design for The Performer's tension-correcting mechanical devices, which help pull and release the string ends, was inspired by the rocker arms on oil derrick jack pumps. Coming up with an electronic sensor system and writing a software program that could control the system, though, proved much harder.

By the end of 1985, Skinn had decided that the cost of producing an automatic tuner--which at the time would have worked only for standard tuning--made further development unfeasible. But two years later, while enrolled in an electrical-engineering program and working for a scientific-instruments company, Skinn discovered that the vibration analysis at the heart of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy--a tool commonly used to analyze organic compounds--also could be paired with magnetic pickups to accurately determine pitch.

A colleague, meanwhile, developed software that could calibrate the pickup and mechanical systems so that string pitch could be changed while the strings vibrated. By 1988, Skinn had quit school and had begun raising funds that would enable him to work on the project full time.

It took more than a decade, however, to get The Performer to operate the way it does today, with a sound sensor system and software that tunes to a wide range of note combinations but also "touches up" the pitch on each string as tensions change and the guitar neck bends and twists.

"Everyone who got a (Performer installation) up to '98 has a prototype of some sort," said Skinn, who formed a company called TransPerformance to develop the system and retrofit guitars, which he does in his Fort Collins, Colo., home workshop. "It was a really slow process, and each guitar was different from the one before."

So far, he estimated, he has installed 200 Performer systems.

The pros sign up
TransPerformance's first client was Jimmy Page. Skinn said he managed to get a videotape to the Led Zeppelin guitarist that showed how the system worked. Page invited him to a recording studio in Reno, Nev., for a closer look and commissioned a Performer installation in a Les Paul model guitar. Skinn said he delivered the retrofitted instrument in late 1990. It went back and forth between Page and Fort Collins three or four times for re-engineering.

"Sometime in '91, he said, 'This is it.' He started playing it onstage," Skinn said.

The next customer was Aerosmith's Perry. Over the years, mostly through word of mouth, TransPerformance attracted avid amateur players and a fair number of other well-known professionals, including Tom Keifer (Cinderella), Mark Slaughter, Pat Metheny, Mick Fleetwood, Robert Hunter, Kenny Loggins, Eddie Van Halen, Peter Frampton, Sonny Landreth and young guitar phenom Matt Curran. Page now owns three guitars equipped with the system.

The justification for spending a lot of money on an automatic tuning device such as this is, in the end, as much about expanding musical options as it is about convenience.
A Performer costs $3,400, including installation, which takes about a month. The electronics and motors are off-the- shelf, though most of the mechanical parts are custom-made. The system weighs about 3.5 pounds, adding about 8 ounces to the overall weight of the instrument, once the guitar body (typically solid mahogany or ash with a maple top) is routed out to accommodate the electronics and machinery.

Accustomed to assuaging concerns that retrofitting a guitar will change its sound, Skinn pointed out that the electronics, hardware and setup for the instrument's pickups, volume and tone adjustments remain unaltered and separate from the automatic tuning system, which is powered by a 12-volt cable that plugs into the guitar body. Optional battery packs are available for those who want to play on a wireless system.

The justification for spending a lot of money on an automatic tuning device such as this is, in the end, as much about expanding musical options as it is about convenience. The Performer is designed to tune to any of eight notes (seven half steps) on the first string and any of nine notes (eight half steps) on each of the other five strings. In other words, it is capable of 229,376 tunings, of which there are at least 60,000 nameable tunings.

Word of the tuner's versatility caught the attention of William Eaton, a guitarist who also is director of the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery, in Phoenix. Eaton said he heard about the system a few years ago and visited Skinn's shop.

"I played Jimmy Page's guitar before it got shipped and it sold me right there," Eaton said.

A composer of world and new-age music, Eaton performs three or four times a week, often with small ensembles. He is building a harp guitar with two necks and a poplar-frame body that will accommodate a Performer, soon to be installed. He says he'll store about 30 tunings in the system, allowing him to write songs for a wider range of chords and work with pitch intervals that would be difficult or impossible to play on standard tuning.

"Rather than change guitars during a performance," he said, "this would allow me to make dramatic changes (to the same instrument) in a few seconds."

The need to carry only one instrument, Eaton added, will make air travel to and from performance dates easier.

Skinn, 50, said moral support from his family and investors, and feedback from clients, particularly those who play for a living, helped him persevere through countless hours of re-engineering.

An ongoing source of frustration, Skinn noted, is that most requests for automatic tuners come from acoustic-instrument players. But unless they're interested in retrofitting one of the solid-body acoustics for which Skinn has adapted The Performer, or they have luthiery skills like Eaton's, he has to turn them away. The weight, bulkiness and design of the system make it unsuitable for acoustic guitars, whose sound is derived not only from the vibrations of strings but from vibrations of the thin tone woods that comprise acoustic instruments' hollow bodies.

Which means that players like Mike Marshall will--for the time being, at least--continue to tune manually, one note at a time.
http://news.com.com/Tuning+tech+catc...3-6014002.html





Vaporware no longer – it’s available now

New Technology Boosts Hard Drive Capacity
Matthew Fordahl

Seagate Technology LLC has started shipping a notebook PC hard drive that overcomes an obstacle many feared would be a major roadblock to the further expansion of disk capacity - and the overall growth of the storage industry.

The new approach that aligns bits of data vertically rather than horizontally enables Seagate - and other drive vendors - to further boost the density of drives without increasing the risk of scrambling data.

Since the first hard drive was introduced 1956, bits have been arranged in a flat, horizontal fashion on the spinning platters. To boost capacity, engineers reduced the size of the particles whose magnetic state is what actually remembers data.

But with some drives now topping out at 500 gigabytes, the miniaturization is nearly at its limit. Made any smaller, the particles can begin to interfere with the magnetism of their neighbors. The result is disastrous for data.

By storing bits in a vertical, or perpendicular, arrangement, engineers are able to boost capacity by taking advantage of the real estate that is freed up.

It's a major change that all drive makers are in the process of undertaking, said John Donovan, vice president at the research firm TrendFocus.

"It a whole new way of doing things," he said. "Not only do you have to change the thinking, but the tooling, the way the heads and disks interact with each other."

Seagate's new drive, the Momentus 5400.3, was being shipped as of Monday, the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company said. The shift to perpendicular recording allows it to bump up the maximum capacity of its notebook drive to 160 gigabytes from 120 gigabytes.

The 2.5-inch drive costs $325, compared to about $240 for the 120 gig model. Seagate plans to extend the new recording technology to other notebook drives, as well its 1-inch drives used in handheld gadgets and 3.5-inch drives for desktop PCs.

"Our transition to perpendicular technology increases our ability to meet the needs of our growing customer base," said Karl Chicca, general manager of Seagate's Personal Storage unit.

Other drive makers also have either announced products or plans that include perpendicular recording. At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, Toshiba unveiled its second 1.8-inch drive that relies on the new technology.

Perpendicular recording has benefits beyond boosting storage density by reducing the need for additional components, said Mike Hall, a Seagate spokesman.

"If you can reduce the component count, you reduce the power drawn, you reduce the heat and you reduce the wear and tear," he said.

In the next three to five years, the new technology is expected to increase maximum drive capacities five fold, Hall said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Foldable Solar Battery Charger: A Radiant Solution
[Via Treehugger]

If power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then where does the unlimited power of the sun fit into the picture? Sundance Solar's PowerFilm 10-Watt Foldable Solar Battery Charger F15-600 weighs only 9 ounces, but it kicks out 10 watts of power to charge your notebook, cell phone, PDA, iPod, or just about anything else you've got handy. And when you're not using it, you can roll it up and throw it in your glove box. At $299, it ain't cheap. But if you're planning on being off the grid for a while, it'll keep you juiced and ready to work.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/





Mesh ups

Sharing Broadband to Increase Speed
John Markoff

Two West Coast start-up companies have built new wireless technologies that take to heart Benjamin Franklin's exhortation to hang together rather than hang separately.

Both Mushroom Networks, which was started at the University of California, San Diego, and WiBoost Inc., based in Seattle, have built prototypes of simple wireless systems that make it possible for groups of neighbors to share their D.S.L. or cable Internet connections.

Both companies said that sharing high-speed lines might enable users in small neighborhood clusters to download files and Web pages up to 10 times faster.

The two companies, which developed their technologies separately, are taking slightly different approaches. But in both cases, neighbors would be able to connect relatively standard wireless routers that would permit their computers to receive data in parallel from multiple D.S.L. or cable network connections. The idea is similar to adding lanes to a freeway to improve traffic flow.

WiBoost, which is also the name of the company's technology system, now requires an antenna mounted outside the home. The company is exploring ways to license its technology to manufacturers and hopes to make WiBoost devices available for $200 to $300. In flat areas with minimal obstructions, the system might be able to link homes separated by several miles, with do-it-yourself installation.

Mushroom Networks is conducting trials using a device called an access point aggregator that is similar to a conventional home Wi-Fi router. It is intended to be used to connect homes or businesses that are closer together.

In principle, these technologies could work for a large group of neighbors, even with just a few Internet access points. That capacity - which could reduce the cost of Internet access considerably for its users - could, however, create substantial opposition from Internet service providers. Many of them are vigilant about restricting the sharing of individual network access points.

Both companies said they were going to great lengths to assure service providers that they did not plan to become bandwidth Napsters, a reference to the music file- sharing company that raised havoc with the audio recording industry.

The idea of linking several Internet data channels for greater speed is not a new one, but exploring a consumer application for the technology is a fresh notion, said Rene L. Cruz, a University of California computer scientist and founder of Mushroom Networks.

"We're pretty excited about the concept," he said. "We're looking for validation and we're looking for market demand."

The technology has merits, said George Henny, the president of Whidbey Telecom, an independent telecommunications firm based on Whidbey Island, Wash.

"There is an interesting potential for this technology," he said, "and it would be fun to put it in place."

The concept is related to the concept of wireless mesh networking, a technique that is used to extend Wi-Fi and related wireless networking standards over large areas by relaying Internet data among wireless receivers.

In this use, the two firms are exploiting the fact that most computer networks are used in an irregular or "bursty" fashion. Even though large numbers of users download e- mail, Web pages or music and video files, most of the time the networks sit idle, waiting for a computer user to strike a key or issue a command.

The capacity utilization rates of modern data networks have long been known to be remarkably low.

"Our studies show that, averaged across all users, the utilization is less than 1 percent of the total capacity," said James Baker, president of WiBoost.

Telephone companies may oversubscribe the capacity of their D.S.L. lines by an average of 14 to 20 times, said Mr. Cruz, and some researchers estimate that rate to be as high as 200 to 1. But because the networks are so underutilized, they can be used efficiently despite substantial oversubscription.

Neither Mr. Cruz nor Mr. Baker is certain of receiving the blessing of Internet service providers, which often go to great lengths to prohibit their customers from sharing service with others.

"We don't want freeloaders," said Mr. Baker. "We don't want the perception that it might be something that the I.S.P. might not like."

Both companies have approached Internet providers to discuss their ideas, and they said they had received some indications of interest.

One selling point stressed by both companies is that the technology is a simple way for D.S.L. providers to match the higher bandwidth offered by cable companies.

Moreover, the technology could be used as a "viral" marketing technique by Internet service providers if existing customers persuaded neighbors to sign up for service to take advantage of the wireless accelerator.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/te...mushroom.html?





Mark Cuban Asks For Tiered Internet Service Model
Anders Bylund

Broadcast.com cofounder, Dallas Mavericks owner, and budding entertainment mogul Mark Cuban's latest blog entry makes the case for a multitiered Internet, with priority given to the applications that really matter. The essence of Cuban's argument is that some applications are more important than others, so the 'Net should be divided into various priority levels. In the words of the entrepreneur himself:

The internet is a great enabler and equalizer ... because it can help people in ways that can change and save their lives.

Medical and home diagnostic applications require bandwidth. They also require a quality of service that cant be interrupted because little Johnny down the road is trying to download the entire NBC schedule for his freshman highschool class. To enable mission critical applications, you have to have mission critical reliability. And that mission critical reliability has to be able to reach any home that a broadband connection can reach. To do that you need multiple tiers of service.

While that certainly sounds noble on the surface, there are a few holes in his argument when it comes to network technology, because many of the arguments he makes can be easily opposed. He envisions a future where Grandma Olga gets her medical checkups done online, and only little Johnny stands between the remote MD getting biometrics and hi-res images of her lesions at 60 FPS, and complete medical disaster. I fail to see the criticality of this sort of application getting network priority, unless there's remote-controlled surgery involved. Even then, chances are that no doctor would take on any remotely critical tasks via online delivery with anything less than an absolute guarantee that bandwith and latency problems would not interfere with the medical outcome. That level of service assurance goes beyond a simple tiered network model.

A look back at our previous coverage will give you a fuller appreciation of the concept of Network Neutrality, and why the Orbiting HQ would be full of rather disappointed writers if the tiered model became a reality. We've covered self- interested arguments in favor of a tiered Internet lately, but this time the argument is being made with an altruistic- sounding precept. Cuban does say that other applications would take advantage of the same high-level service, and that the availability of guaranteed high speed throughput would enable a new age of killer apps, but he fails to name any examples besides the rather unrealistic medical vision.

So why is there all of a sudden a need to impose traffic shaping measures on the whole of the Internet? Cuban claims that Internet traffic growth is outstripping the growth of the underlying infrastructure, and that there's nothing we can do about that:

We can try all the tricks we want. Edge servers, peer to peer, it won't matter. Just like a 20 lane highway is still going to have gridlock if enough cars use it, so will the 'Net.

Traffic overload does not cause any of the slowdowns users currently see, though. When there is a slowdown, it's either because your local network is slow—cable modem users might sympathize here—or because the server is having network issues. In the first case, Cuban seems to have a point, but the simpler solution then is to run a T3 line into your basement if you really need your speed. Fiber To The Premises is coming, and powerline delivery, and WiMax... I'm just saying, you have some options besides cable and DSL. Don't worry about rural areas, because Cuban doesn't. The second scenario, slow server-side delivery, is where the business you're trying to reach needs to upgrade their network or their servers, and perhaps both. Akamai is doing brisk business with high-traffic customers such as Yahoo! or the iTunes Music Store, and online video delivery is growing without bringing the backbone to a gridlocked standstill. And with the stated lack of network growth, some other network infrastructure companies should be in the red, too: Cisco, Juniper Networks, JDS Uniphase, Alcatel, Nortel... But wait, these are all multibillion- dollar outfits, and all are profitable again after a few lean post-bubble years. Somebody is buying and presumably installing new equipment, and lots of it. Add in the dark fiber left over from the bubble days, and there seems to be quite a bit of extra bandwidth to tap into if need arises.

Besides a perceived lack of network capacity, how would Cuban propose that we identify and authenticate "important" content? It's pretty much a given that any such scheme would bring out a hacker or two, bent on making ther next-gen file sharing or music streaming app run over the highest-level service channels. OK, so charge more for access to the better levels, right? Okay, but how is that different from what we have today? If your ISP is too slow, sign up for faster service. If traffic is too slow at your favorite sites, well, sometimes there's a subscription site that will outperform the free alternatives, and sometimes your content provider will just have to bite the bullet and upgrade something. There are ways around every problem.

The identity of the writer makes me question the motives behind the writing. Cuban is trying to run an entertainment business in 2929 Productions, and online delivery is already part of the agenda of that business. And you don't invest in a major league sports team unless you think that entertainment is worth something. Yet he outlines a plan to devalue his own line of business, without much benefit to the more important apps that don't exist yet. What does Cuban stand to gain from limiting his own business potential? I'm not sure how the tiered Internet as envisioned by Cuban would benefit his business.

Mark Cuban's business record and the wealth it brought him have ensured that his words will carry considerable weight; stack that on top of AT&T's recent actions and Verizon's favorable attitude to a tiered Internet, and it seems possible that Google's protests might have been in vain.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060117-5996.html





Internet Freeloaders

Should Google have to pay for the bandwidth it consumes?
Adam L. Penenberg

The Internet has always been about democracy—what the geeks who designed it call "network neutrality." Data, whether e-mail, a Web page, or video, get sent as packets that are reassembled at the end of their journeys. All packets are created equal, and Internet service providers deliver them without prejudice, based on their network's speed and capacity.

Telecommunications and cable companies—let's call them telco-cable— want to change that. Verizon, Comcast, and their ilk have been lobbying Congress to transform the Internet into a two-tiered system. By tagging content, broadband providers would ensure that their own packets (or those from companies paying them protection money) get preferential treatment and reach subscribers faster than second-tier content. This would give companies like Verizon a tremendous advantage as they roll out their own television and VoIP telephone services.

Telco-cable companies have spent billions to lay down broadband pipe and want a return on their investment. They are tired of bandwidth hogs like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft getting a free ride. This was fine when the Internet consisted mostly of e-mail and static Web pages. With the advent of online video, Internet telephony, and IPTV, Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth want content providers to share the cost. Their reasoning: If Google is going to introduce a video service, shouldn't it have to pay for some of the bandwidth it scarfs down?

But it isn't just the Googles of the Web that are soaking up bandwidth. According to the U.K.-based technology firm Cachelogic, peer-to-peer traffic accounts for 80 percent of the traffic of so-called last-mile providers, companies like Verizon and Time Warner Cable that take broadband that final mile into your home. All of this demand for video, music, and file-sharing could create bottlenecks for Verizon and Time Warner—the ones who hook up your home to the data grid.

As a result, telco-cable has been lobbying Congress to rewrite the Telecommunications Act of 1996. A draft of the new bill would codify "network neutrality" (which to this point has been voluntary) and forbid network service providers from blocking or otherwise sabotaging content. Usually fierce competitors, these gatekeepers can agree on one thing: They want to strike the network neutrality clause. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and eBay want to keep it. If telco-cable wins, it will be able to set up separate tiers, forcing Google to pay up or ride in the slow lane.

At this month's Consumer Electronics Show, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg explained, "We have to make sure that they [application providers] don't sit on our network and chew up bandwidth. We need to pay for the pipe." Perhaps, but what Verizon proposes is to charge twice for broadband: first to subscribers, then to content providers. In essence, telcos and cable companies want to privatize the Internet—a model we've pretty much left behind since the days of CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL.

If the telcos and cable companies get their way, we'll have a Balkanized Web. Content providers who can afford to pay for premium service will market superior products to consumers with fast connections. Everyone else will make do with second-class companies at second-class speeds.

The business model that this most resembles is cable television. There's one key difference, though. In the cable world, the service providers pay channels for the rights to broadcast their shows. In the system that telco-cable is proposing for the Internet, the content providers—who provide the services that make customers clamor for broadband in the first place—would have to pay for the privilege of being included.

Not all content providers are taking this lying down. Business 2.0's Om Malik reports that Google has been buying up miles of "dark" fiber— unused fiber-optic cable—at severely depressed prices. Malik believes that Google plans to "blanket major cities with Wi-Fi," including San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and New York. Given Google's ethos, its Wi-Fi would probably be free, with revenue derived from targeted advertising. Obviously, the telcos and cable companies would have trouble competing with that. Even if telco-cable is successful in implementing a two-tiered Internet plan, another workaround could be municipal wireless networks, like those being built in Philadelphia. (No wonder Verizon has been fighting them tooth and nail.)

There's a far better solution than Verizon charging Google to use its bandwidth or Google becoming a service provider itself. What about having subscribers pay for the bandwidth they consume? Just like you buy variable rate cell-phone plans and pay for electricity based on how much you use, your broadband bills should be calculated the same way. That way, heavy Net users could subsidize the Internet for those who don't use it as often, and access would be available for anybody who wants it. Then content would remain free, and everyone would benefit.





And no Skype for you either

ipoque Releases Skype(TM) Filter and Extends Product Line
Press Release

ipoque releases new VoIP filter module for its line of PRX traffic managers which support detecting and blocking of Voice over IP traffic including SkypeTM. The new entry-level Gigabit Ethernet appliance PRX-250 is added to the PRX line. Prices for all Fast Ethernet models have been reduced.

Leipzig, Germany (PRWEB) January 16, 2006 -- The new Traffic Manager PRX-250 closes the gap between ipoque's enterprise and entry-level models. It features three Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and—similar to the Fast Ethernet models—passive cooling for maximum reliability. It achieves a packet rate of 60,000 packets/s and a throughput of 250 Mbit/s. Packet latency is below one millisecond.

The PRX traffic managers classify network traffic based on application layer signatures (currently peer-to-peer-based file sharing, Voice over IP, instant messenger). Classified traffic can be logged, shaped or blocked. The traffic manager operates as a transparent bridge for easy integration into existing network infrastructures without configuration changes necessary. Administration is done via a simple and self-explanatory Web interface making expensive staff training dispensable.

With the introduction of the PRX-250, ipoque reduces the prices for all Fast Ethernet models.

Skype(TM) Detection with the VoIP Module

Modular extensions for various application classes can be installed optionally. ipoque releases the new Voice over IP module for detecting and blocking of Skype(TM) and SIP connections.

The high proliferation of Skype(TM) clients, their strong encryption for Internet voice calls and their ability to circumvent firewall systems cause various problems. Among them are a significantly increased traffic volume, potential interference with other applications and the violation of national legislation for traffic monitoring and interception. Furthermore, Skype(TM) clients in company networks pose a security threat. This makes the VoIP module an interesting option for company network operators, Internet service providers and national carriers.

Also available for the PRX traffic managers are modules for filtering, shaping and blocking of peer-to-peer-based file sharing and for blocking of instant messengers. File sharing causes significantly more than 50% of the Internet traffic, and most files contain copyright-protected material. The usage of instant messengers cause problems mostly in company networks. They pose severe security risks and degrade staff productivity.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/1/prweb332240.htm





RevConnect 0.674k

Added by: A^C^E
Date: 17.01.06
Time: 16:52:55
Platform: Windows
Category: File Sharing
Downloaded 762 time(s)

RevConnect is a file sharing program based on DC++. It is fully compatible with the Direct Connect network.

Features:

· Multiple Source Downloading: Download one file from multiple users at the same time without corruption! This can vastly improve your download speeds.
· Automatically Recycle Excessive Sources: Prevent users from exhausting precious free slots in the network.
· Credit System: The credit system is used to reward users contributing to the network, i.e. uploading to other clients.
· Secure User Identification: Clients in the network are identified by a unique 384 bit RSA public key, it's used to grant earned credits with other users.
· Kademlia: A hub independent en more effective search engine.
· Magnet Link and Bitzi Lookup: Find and recommend quality files with ease. Take a look at the Share Masters for magnet links (and to post your own).
· Enhanced Auto Search: Once you decide your downloads, you never need find sources by yourself.

http://addict3d.org/index.php?page=downloadfile&ID=3695





Small Start-Up Releases Free File Sharing Service
Press Release

ByteRocket, a small start-up firm located in Dayton, Ohio, has just released a new file sharing service, call MyOtherDrive. This permits users to share any media type, pictures, movies, music. Anyone can create a new account an immediately have 2GB of storage space available.

Dayton, Ohio (PRWEB) Jan 14, 2006 -- ByteRocket, a small start-up firm located in Dayton, Ohio, has released a new file sharing Internet service, call MyOtherDrive. The website name is myotherdrive.com. The site is currently in beta.

Anyone with Internet access can create an account on the site and get 2GB of free storage space. The site handles photographs especially well, making it a real competitor with Snapfish, OFoto, AOL, and the others.

In addition to competing with the photo sharing sites, it indirectly competes with file sharing sites such as Kazaa and eDonkey. There is one important difference between myotherdrive and these "public" file sharing sites - myotherdrive.com users can share their files only with others they identify.

This site is great for sharing photos and movies from your digital camera with family and friends. It is also useful for sharing work files with fellow business associates. Because it is available on the Internet, and protected by username/password, business users can use the service to "park" large files so that they can move them from one computer to another when there is no direct connection between the computers.

The site runs as a Java applet that looks similar to the Microsoft Windows(r) Explorer(r) or ACDSee, permitting the user to create a folder "hierarchy" on the left side of the screen, and files on the right. File types that are recognized such as images, display as thumbnails. Any file type can be stored on myotherdrive.

The site includes a user manager utility that allows you to permit users to access subsets of your directories. Useful for limiting family to family related photos, and friends to friend related content.

In a nutshell, the site is essentially a free 2GB harddrive with a Explorer(r)-style interface, making the storage available anywhere Internet access is available.

This is ByteRocket's first public site. The company has plans to release other useful "personal" sites similar to myotherdrive.com over the coming year. Check it out - myotherdrive.com.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/1/prweb332234.htm





Surveillance

U.S. Is Pressing Google for Data on Searches
Katie Hafner and Matt Richtel

The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to compel Google, the Internet search giant, to turn over records on millions of its users' search queries as part of the government's effort to uphold an online pornography law.

Google has been refusing the request since a subpoena was first issued last August, even as three of its competitors agreed to provide information, according to court documents made public this week. Google asserts that the request is unnecessary, overly broad, would be onerous to comply with, would jeopardize its trade secrets and could expose identifying information about its users.

The dispute with Google comes as the government is moving aggressively on several fronts to obtain data on Internet activity to achieve its law enforcement goals, from domestic security to the prosecution of online crime. Under the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, for example, the Justice Department has demanded records on library patrons' Internet use.

Those efforts have encountered resistance on privacy grounds.

The government's move in the Google case, however, is different in its aims. Rather than seeking data on individuals, it says it is trying to establish a profile of Internet use that will help it defend the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 law that would impose tough criminal penalties on individuals whose Web sites carried material deemed harmful to minors.

The law has faced repeated legal challenges. Two years ago, the Supreme Court upheld an injunction blocking its enforcement, returning the case to a district court for further examination of Internet-filtering technology that might be an alternative in achieving the law's aims.

The government's motion to compel Google's compliance was filed on Wednesday in Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif., near Google's headquarters in Mountain View. The subpoena and the government's motion were reported on Thursday by The San Jose Mercury News.

In addition to records of a week's worth of search queries, which could amount to billions of search terms, the Google subpoena seeks a random list of a million Web addresses in its index.

Charles Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said on Thursday that three Google competitors in Internet search technology - America Online, Yahoo and MSN, Microsoft's online service - had complied with subpoenas in the case.

Mr. Miller declined to say exactly how the data would be used, but according to the government's legal filings, it would help estimate the prevalence of online material that could be deemed harmful to minors and the effectiveness of filtering software in blocking it. Opponents of the pornography law contend that filtering software could protect minors effectively enough to make the law unnecessary.

The government's motion calls for Google to surrender the information within 21 days of court approval.

Although the government has modified its demands in talks with Google since last year, Google made it clear on Thursday that it would continue to fight. "Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and their demand for information overreaches," said Nicole Wong, Google's associate general counsel, referring to government lawyers. "We had lengthy discussions with them to try to resolve this, but were not able to, and we intend to resist their motion vigorously."

Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was hired by the Justice Department to analyze search engine data in the case, said in legal documents that search engine data provided crucial insight into information on the Internet.

"Google is one of the most popular search engines," he wrote in a court document related to the case. Thus, he said, Google's databases of Web addresses and user searches "are directly relevant."

But Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch, an online industry newsletter, questioned the need for such a subpoena. "Is this really something the government needs Google to help them with?" he said. "They could go create their own searches."

MSN declined to speak directly to the case but released a statement saying it generally "works closely with law enforcement officials."

Mary Osako, a Yahoo spokeswoman, said the company complied with the subpoena "on a limited basis." And Andrew Weinstein, a spokesman for AOL, said that company gave the Justice Department a generic list of anonymous search terms from a one-day period.

Susan P. Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York, said she could understand why the companies complied. "There's this real perception that if you're not with us you're against us," she said. "So the major companies will cooperate with enormously burdensome requests just to avoid future vengeance being wreaked on them" by the Justice Department.

In its brief history, Google has made "Don't be evil" an operating principle, even as it has come to endure scrutiny and criticism over its increasing inroads into a variety of businesses beyond Web searches, from advertising to mapping.

And Google and its rivals have been criticized for their business practices in China, where Google and MSN have filtered keywords like "human rights" and "democracy" out of their search-engine results.

While its court filings against the Justice Department subpoena have emphasized the burden of compliance and threat to its trade secrets, Google also pointed to a chilling effect on its customers.

"Google's acceding to the request would suggest that it is willing to reveal information about those who use its services," it said in an October letter to the Justice Department. "This is not a perception Google can accept. And one can envision scenarios where queries alone could reveal identifying information about a specific Google user, which is another outcome that Google cannot accept."

For its part, the Justice Department said the data received from Google's rivals showed that the search query information did not contain "any additional personal identifying information" and that trade secrets would be protected under procedures at the trial court.

"Google thus should have no difficulty in complying in the same way as its competitors have," the government's motion said.

Critics of the effort to subpoena Google say the immediate issue is not pornography or privacy, but whether the government has established its need for the information.

"The government's attitude, apparently, is that it's entitled to information without justification," said Aden Fine, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has led the fight against the 1998 pornography law. "Like everyone else in litigation, they need to justify their request for information."

Even as the government has yet to put the 1998 law into effect, the pornography industry has faced a legal offensive on other fronts. Congress in recent years has increased the resources and sharpened the laws available to the Justice Department to go after makers of hard-core videos and other content.

At the same time, though, the industry is booming, recording $12.6 billion in revenue in 2005 from distribution of sexually explicit content, and from other forms of entertainment, like strip clubs. A big reason for the growth is technology, with sales from Internet distribution hitting $2.5 billion in 2005, according to testimony given to the Senate on Thursday.

American Web sites that show explicit content get as many as 60 million visitors a day, according to testimony given to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation by Paul Cambria, general counsel for the Adult Freedom Foundation, an organization that represents the interests of the pornography industry.

In fighting the 1998 law, the civil liberties union has argued that whether or not pornography is available on the Internet, the law is unconstitutional because it will limit the distribution of acceptable forms of free speech. Under the law, Web site operators face criminal charges for publishing sexually explicit material unless they have a way of verifying that viewers are over 17.

Whatever the courts ultimately decide on the pornography law at issue, however, Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, said the Google case pointed to a larger struggle for the identity of the Internet.

"Search engines are at the center of that battle, both here and in other countries," said Professor Wu. "By asserting its power over search engines, using threats of force, the government can directly affect what the Internet experience is. For while Google is fighting the subpoena, it's clear that if they lose, they will comply."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/te...rtner=homepage





Report Questions Legality of Briefings on Surveillance
Scott Shane

A legal analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concludes that the Bush administration's limited briefings for Congress on the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping without warrants are "inconsistent with the law."

The analysis was requested by Representative Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who said in a Jan. 4 letter to President Bush that she believed the briefings should be open to all the members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

Instead, the briefings have been limited to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate and of the Intelligence Committees, the so-called Gang of Eight.

Since 2002, the security agency has intercepted the international phone calls and e-mail messages of some Americans and others in the United States who the agency believes are linked to Al Qaeda. The eavesdropping was authorized by an executive order signed by President Bush but without the court warrants usually required.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday scheduled an open hearing on the eavesdropping program for Feb. 6. The hearing, titled "Wartime executive power and the N.S.A.'s surveillance authority," is expected to include testimony from Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

In an interview on Wednesday, Ms. Harman, of California, said she had been invited to another briefing on the program at the White House on Friday and had urged senior administration officials to open the session to the full committees.

She declined to name the officials, but a Congressional staff member said they were Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff; and David S. Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Mr. Cheney's office oversees the briefings on the surveillance program.

Of the Congressional Research Service analysis, Ms. Harman said, "It's a solid piece of work, and it confirms a view I've held for a long time."

A White House spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity because the program was classified, said, "We continue to brief the appropriate members of Congress as we have been for the last several years."

A spokesman for Representative Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Mr. Hoekstra was traveling and had not seen the report.

The spokesman, Jamal D. Ware, said that Mr. Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican, believed the briefings had been adequate for Congressional oversight but that he was open to expanding them.

"The chairman is taking it under consideration and does support some expansion of the number of Intelligence Committee members who are briefed," Mr. Ware said.

The Congressional Research Service memorandum, sent to the Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, explores the requirement in the National Security Act of 1947 that the committees be kept "fully and currently informed" of intelligence activities. It notes that the law specifically allows notification of "covert actions" to the Gang of Eight, but says the security agency's program does not appear to be a covert action program.

As a result, the memorandum says, limiting the briefings to just eight members of Congress "would appear to be inconsistent with the law."

The memorandum, written by Alfred Cumming, a national security specialist at the research service, does lay out several possible defenses for the administration's position. "The executive branch may assert that the mere discussion of the N.S.A. program generally could expose certain intelligence sources and methods to disclosure," it says.

In a related action, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington, said it would file suit against the Justice Department for failing to release documents on the eavesdropping program that it had requested under the Freedom of Information Act. A department spokesman said the department gave an initial response to the center's request within three days of its receipt on Dec. 16, saying it had approved expedited handling for the request.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/politics/19nsa.html





Two Groups Planning to Sue Over Federal Eavesdropping
Eric Lichtblau

Two leading civil rights groups plan to file lawsuits Tuesday against the Bush administration over its domestic spying program to determine whether the operation was used to monitor 10 defense lawyers, journalists, scholars, political activists and other Americans with ties to the Middle East.

The two lawsuits, which are being filed separately by the American Civil Liberties Union in Federal District Court in Detroit and the Center for Constitutional Rights in Federal District Court in Manhattan, are the first major court challenges to the eavesdropping program.

Both groups are seeking to have the courts order an immediate end to the program, which the groups say is illegal and unconstitutional. The Bush administration has strongly defended the legality and necessity of the surveillance program, and officials said the Justice Department would probably oppose the lawsuits on national security grounds.

Justice Department officials would not comment on any specific individuals who might have been singled out under the National Security Agency program, and they said the department would review the lawsuits once they were filed.

Brian Roehrkasse, spokesman for the Justice Department, added Monday that "the N.S.A. surveillance activities described by the president were conducted lawfully and provide valuable tools in the war on terrorism to keep America safe and protect civil liberties."

The lawsuits seek to answer one of the major questions surrounding the eavesdropping program: has it been used solely to single out the international phone calls and e- mail messages of people with known links to Al Qaeda, as President Bush and his most senior advisers have maintained, or has it been abused in ways that civil rights advocates say could hark back to the political spying abuses of the 1960's and 70's?

"There's almost a feeling of déjà vu with this program," said James Bamford, an author and journalist who is one of five individual plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit who say they suspect that the program may have been used to monitor their international communications.

"It's a return to the bad old days of the N.S.A.," said Mr. Bamford, who has written two widely cited books on the intelligence agency.

Although the program's public disclosure last month has generated speculation that it may have been used to monitor journalists or politicians, no evidence has emerged to support that idea. Bush administration officials point to a secret audit by the Justice Department last year that reviewed a sampling of security agency interceptions involving Americans and that they said found no documented abuses.

The Center for Constitutional Rights plans to sue on behalf of four lawyers at the center and a legal assistant there who work on terrorism-related cases at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and overseas, which often involves international e-mail messages and phone calls. Similarly, the plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit include five Americans who work in international policy and terrorism, along with the A.C.L.U. and three other groups.

"We don't have any direct evidence" that the plaintiffs were monitored by the security agency, said Ann Beeson, associate legal director for the A.C.L.U. "But the plaintiffs have a well-founded belief that they may have been monitored, and there's a real chilling effect in the fear that they can no longer have confidential discussions with clients or sources without the possibility that the N.S.A. is listening."

One of the A.C.L.U. plaintiffs, Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, said that a Stanford student studying in Egypt conducted research for him on political opposition groups, and that he worried that communications between them on sensitive political topics could be monitored. "How can we communicate effectively if you risk being intercepted by the National Security Agency?" Mr. Diamond said.

Also named as plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit are the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has written in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; Barnett R. Rubin, a scholar at New York University who works in international relations; Tara McKelvey, a senior editor at The American Prospect; the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers; Greenpeace, the environmental advocacy group; and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country's largest Islamic advocacy group.

The lawsuits over the eavesdropping program come as several defense lawyers in terrorism cases have begun challenges, arguing that the government may have improperly hidden the use of the surveillance program from the courts in investigating terrorism leads.

Bill Goodman, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, said that in suing in federal court to block the surveillance program, his group believed "without question" that Mr. Bush violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs wiretaps, by authorizing the security agency operation.

But Mr. Goodman acknowledged that in persuading a federal judge to intervene, "politically, it's a difficult case to make."

He added: "We recognize that it's extremely difficult for a court to stand up to a president, particularly a president who is determined to extend his power beyond anything envisioned by the founding fathers. That takes courage."

The debate over the legality of Mr. Bush's eavesdropping program will be at the center of Congressional hearings expected to begin next month. Former Vice President Al Gore entered the fray on Monday with a speech in Washington that accused Mr. Bush of running roughshod over the Constitution.

American liberties, Mr. Gore said, "have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power."

"As we begin this new year," he continued, "the executive branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/politics/17nsa.html





Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends
Lowell Bergman, Eric Lichtblau, Scott Shane and Don Van Natta Jr.

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, Robert S. Mueller III, raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked senior administration officials about "whether the program had a proper legal foundation," but deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official said.

President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a "vital tool" against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved "thousands of lives."

But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

"We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration."

Intelligence officials disagree with any characterization of the program's results as modest, said Judith A. Emmel, a spokeswoman for the office of the director of national intelligence. Ms. Emmel cited a statement at a briefing last month by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the country's second-ranking intelligence official and the director of the N.S.A. when the program was started.

"I can say unequivocally that we have gotten information through this program that would not otherwise have been available," General Hayden said. The White House and the F.B.I. declined to comment on the program or its results.

The differing views of the value of the N.S.A.'s foray into intelligence-gathering in the United States may reflect both bureaucratic rivalry and a culture clash. The N.S.A., an intelligence agency, routinely collects huge amounts of data from across the globe that may yield only tiny nuggets of useful information; the F.B.I., while charged with fighting terrorism, retains the traditions of a law enforcement agency more focused on solving crimes.

"It isn't at all surprising to me that people not accustomed to doing this would say, 'Boy, this is an awful lot of work to get a tiny bit of information,' " said Adm. Bobby R. Inman, a former N.S.A. director. "But the rejoinder to that is, Have you got anything better?"

Several of the law enforcement officials acknowledged that they might not know of arrests or intelligence activities overseas that grew out of the domestic spying program. And because the program was a closely guarded secret, its role in specific cases may have been disguised or hidden even from key investigators.

Still, the comments on the N.S.A. program from the law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, many of them high level, are the first indication that the program was viewed with skepticism by key figures at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the agency responsible for disrupting plots and investigating terrorism on American soil.

All the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. It is coming under scrutiny next month in hearings on Capitol Hill, which were planned after members of Congress raised questions about the legality of the eavesdropping. The program was disclosed in December by The New York Times.

The law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said the program had uncovered no active Qaeda networks inside the United States planning attacks. "There were no imminent plots - not inside the United States," the former F.B.I. official said.

Some of the officials said the eavesdropping program might have helped uncover people with ties to Al Qaeda in Albany; Portland, Ore.; and Minneapolis. Some of the activities involved recruitment, training or fund-raising.

But, along with several British counterterrorism officials, some of the officials questioned assertions by the Bush administration that the program was the key to uncovering a plot to detonate fertilizer bombs in London in 2004. The F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials also expressed doubts about the importance of the program's role in another case named by administration officials as a success in the fight against terrorism, an aborted scheme to topple the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch.

Some officials said that in both cases, they had already learned of the plans through interrogation of prisoners or other means.

Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration pressed the nation's intelligence agencies and the F.B.I. to move urgently to thwart any more plots. The N.S.A., whose mission is to spy overseas, began monitoring the international e-mail messages and phone calls of people inside the United States who were linked, even indirectly, to suspected Qaeda figures.

Under a presidential order, the agency conducted the domestic eavesdropping without seeking the warrants ordinarily required from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which handles national security matters. The administration has defended the legality of the program, pointing to what it says is the president's inherent constitutional power to defend the country and to legislation passed by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Administration officials told Mr. Mueller, the F.B.I. director, of the eavesdropping program, and his agency was enlisted to run down leads from it, several current and former officials said.

While he and some bureau officials discussed the fact that the program bypassed the intelligence surveillance court, Mr. Mueller expressed no concerns about that to them, those officials said. But another government official said Mr. Mueller had questioned the administration about the legal authority for the program.

Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. program said the agency collected much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by tracing phone numbers in the United States called by suspects overseas, and then by following the domestic numbers to other numbers called. In other cases, lists of phone numbers appeared to result from the agency's computerized scanning of communications coming into and going out of the country for names and keywords that might be of interest. The deliberate blurring of the source of the tips caused some frustration among those who had to follow up.

F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained that they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor who was familiar with the eavesdropping programs said intelligence officials turning over the tips "would always say that we had information whose source we can't share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected Qaeda operative." He said, "I would always wonder, what does 'suspected' mean?"

"The information was so thin," he said, "and the connections were so remote, that they never led to anything, and I never heard any follow-up."

In response to the F.B.I. complaints, the N.S.A. eventually began ranking its tips on a three-point scale, with 3 being the highest priority and 1 the lowest, the officials said. Some tips were considered so hot that they were carried by hand to top F.B.I. officials. But in bureau field offices, the N.S.A. material continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new bunch of tips meant more "calls to Pizza Hut," one official, who supervised field agents, said.

The views of some bureau officials about the value of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance offers a revealing glimpse of the difficulties law enforcement and intelligence agencies have had cooperating since Sept. 11.

The N.S.A., criticized by the national Sept. 11 commission for its "avoidance of anything domestic" before the attacks, moved aggressively into the domestic realm after them. But the legal debate over its warrantless eavesdropping has embroiled the agency in just the kind of controversy its secretive managers abhor. The F.B.I., meanwhile, has struggled over the last four years to expand its traditional mission of criminal investigation to meet the larger menace of terrorism.

Admiral Inman, the former N.S.A. director and deputy director of C.I.A., said the F.B.I. complaints about thousands of dead-end leads revealed a chasm between very different disciplines. Signals intelligence, the technical term for N.S.A.'s communications intercepts, rarely produces "the complete information you're going to get from a document or a witness" in a traditional F.B.I. investigation, he said.

Some F.B.I. officials said they were uncomfortable with the expanded domestic role played by the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies, saying most intelligence officers lacked the training needed to safeguard Americans' privacy and civil rights. They said some protections had to be waived temporarily in the months after Sept. 11 to detect a feared second wave of attacks, but they questioned whether emergency procedures like the eavesdropping should become permanent.

That discomfort may explain why some F.B.I. officials may seek to minimize the benefits of the N.S.A. program or distance themselves from the agency. "This wasn't our program," an F.B.I. official said. "It's not our mess, and we're not going to clean it up."

The N.S.A.'s legal authority for collecting the information it passed to the F.B.I. is uncertain. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires a warrant for the use of so-called pen register equipment that records American phone numbers, even if the contents of the calls are not intercepted. But officials with knowledge of the program said no warrants were sought to collect the numbers, and it is unclear whether the secret executive order signed by Mr. President Bush in 2002 to authorize eavesdropping without warrants also covered the collection of phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

Aside from the director, F.B.I. officials did not question the legal status of the tips, assuming that N.S.A. lawyers had approved. They were more concerned about the quality and quantity of the material, which produced "mountains of paperwork" often more like raw data than conventional investigative leads.

"It affected the F.B.I. in the sense that they had to devote so many resources to tracking every single one of these leads, and, in my experience, they were all dry leads," the former senior prosecutor said. "A trained investigator never would have devoted the resources to take those leads to the next level, but after 9/11, you had to."

By the administration's account, the N.S.A. eavesdropping helped lead investigators to Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver and friend of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Faris spoke of toppling the Brooklyn Bridge by taking a torch to its suspension cables, but concluded that it would not work. He is now serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison.

But as in the London fertilizer bomb case, some officials with direct knowledge of the Faris case dispute that the N.S.A. information played a significant role.

By contrast, different officials agree that the N.S.A.'s domestic operations played a role in the arrest of an imam and another man in Albany in August 2004 as part of an F.B.I. counterterrorism sting investigation. The men, Yassin Aref, 35, and Mohammed Hossain, 49, are awaiting trial on charges that they attempted to engineer the sale of missile launchers to an F.B.I. undercover informant.

In addition, government officials said the N.S.A. eavesdropping program might have assisted in the investigations of people with suspected Qaeda ties in Portland and Minneapolis. In the Minneapolis case, charges of supporting terrorism were filed in 2004 against Mohammed Abdullah Warsame, a Canadian citizen. Six people in the Portland case were convicted of crimes that included money laundering and conspiracy to wage war against the United States.

Even senior administration officials with access to classified operations suggest that drawing a clear link between a particular source and the unmasking of a potential terrorist is not always possible.

When Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, was asked last week on "The Charlie Rose Show" whether the N.S.A. wiretapping program was important in deterring terrorism, he said, "I don't know that it's ever possible to attribute one strand of intelligence from a particular program."

But Mr. Chertoff added, "I can tell you in general the process of doing whatever you can do technologically to find out what is being said by a known terrorist to other people, and who that person is communicating with, that is without a doubt one of the critical tools we've used time and again."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/po... ner=homepage





High-Tech Prison to Open in Netherlands
Toby Sterling

A high-tech prison opening this week where inmates wear electronic wristbands that track their every movement and guards monitor cells using emotion-recognition software.

Authorities are convinced the jail in Lelystad _ quickly dubbed "the Big Brother Prison" by the local press _ represents the future of correctional facilities: cheap and efficient, without coddling criminals or violating their fundamental rights.

Detainees will be kept in six-man dormitory cells. They will do their own cooking, washing and organize their own daytime schedules via a touch-screen monitor at the foot of their beds.

"We hesitate to compare it to a youth hostel because the biggest part of being punished is that you've lost your freedom," Justice Ministry spokesman Hans Janssens said.

Prisoners have limited choices for their activities _ electives include drug education classes and exercise _ and they are locked in their cells at night.

Unlike the "Big Brother" television program, camera surveillance is limited to public spaces _ not on bunk beds or in bathrooms.

Cells are equipped with microphones that relay information to the prison's control center, where software analyzes sound volume and rhythm to alert guards when a violent confrontation between inmates may be taking place.

Prison officials expect to save money: The estimated cost per prisoner is $125 per night, compared with $170 at other Dutch prisons. Because monitoring is easier, the Lelystad facility requires far fewer guards.

Pieter Vleeming of the European Organization for the Protection of Prisoner's Rights said prisoners should be given more opportunity for self-improvement and job training, though he generally gave the prison positive marks.

"From a punishment point of view there are no objections," he said. "You could call it progress."
http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/s...toryId=1146412





Korea To Use Robocops
Kim Tae-gyu

By the 2010s, Korea is expecting to see robots assisting police and the military, patrolling the neighborhoods and going on recon missions on the battlefield.

The Center for Intelligent Robots on Monday said the state-backed agency plans to check the feasibility of security robots by convening a 40-member planning committee late this week.

``If the robots prove to be viable technically and commercially, we will be able to begin developing them late next year,'' said Lee Ho-gil, head of the center.

When completed, the outdoor security robots will be able to make their night watch rounds and even chase criminals, according to Lee.

The government also seeks to build combat robots. They will take the shape of a dog or a horse, with six or eight legs or wheels.

Toward that end, the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) and the Defense Ministry will combine to channel a total of 33.4 billion won ($33.9 million) through 2011.

``The robots will be directed by a remote control system or move autonomously via their own artificial intelligence systems,'' MIC project manager Oh Sang-rok said.

``The two sophisticated robots will be empowered by the country's state-of-the-art mobile network, thus enabling mass production at an affordable price,'' Oh noted.

Smart robots need three basic functions of sensing, processing and action. Thus far, robotics researchers have tried to cram the three into a single dummy, causing expenses to soar.

Instead, the planned robots will be receiving most sensing and processing capabilities via a Web connection. Only the ability of movement will be located in the robot.

``In a nutshell, the mobile robot offers a hardware platform for the smart functions provided by the country's advanced network connected to the super computers,'' Oh said.

Korea boasts the world's highest penetration of high-speed Internet with roughly 12 million out of total 15.5 million households hooked up to the always-on connection.

On top of their use in national defense and social security, the MIC hopes to use the network robots for the private sector late this year.

``Three kinds of households machines will commercially debut this October. They will sell for 1-2 million won, a price that will not scare off customers. The low price is possible since they are empowered by outside networks instead of incorporated software,'' Oh said.

The three sorts of wheeled robots will be used for various applications: cleaning rooms, health-care programs, Internet connection, home monitoring or reading books to kids.

The mechanical servants, some of which have the ability to re-charge automatically, can also order Chinese food and pizza by connecting to the local network.

The MIC already finished a test run of the household robots late last year by installing them in 64 households and two post offices in Seoul and its vicinity.

Hyung Tae-gun, director general at the MIC, expected the robots will sell up to 3,000 units for this year alone and the sales will surge in the near future.

``Recently Japan unveiled household service robots priced at up to 10 million won, almost 10 times as expensive as ours. So you can guess the competitiveness of our network robots,'' Hyung said.
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/2006...7112710160.htm





Anonymity on a Disk
Quinn Norton

To many privacy geeks, it's the holy grail -- a totally anonymous and secure computer so easy to use you can hand it to your grandmother and send her off on her own to the local Starbucks.

That was the guiding principle for the members of kaos.theory security research when they set out to put a secure crypto-heavy operating systems on a bootable CD: a disk that would offer the masses the same level of privacy available to security professionals, but with an easy user interface.

"If Granny's into trannies, and doesn't want her grandkids to know, she should be able to download without fear," says Taylor Banks, project leader.

It's a difficult problem, entailing a great deal of attention to both security details and usability issues. The group finally unveiled their finished product at the Shmoo Con hacker conference here Saturday, with mixed results.

Titled Anonym.OS, the system is a type of disk called a "live CD" -- meaning it's a complete solution for using a computer without touching the hard drive. Developers say Anonym.OS is likely the first live CD based on the security-heavy OpenBSD operating system.

OpenBSD running in secure mode is relatively rare among desktop users. So to keep from standing out, Anonym.OS leaves a deceptive network fingerprint. In everything from the way it actively reports itself to other computers, to matters of technical minutia such as TCP packet length, the system is designed to look like Windows XP SP1. "We considered part of what makes a system anonymous is looking like what is most popular, so you blend in with the crowd," explains project developer Adam Bregenzer of Super Light Industry.

Booting the CD, you are presented with a text based wizard-style list of questions to answer, one at a time, with defaults that will work for most users. Within a few moments, a fairly naive user can be up and running and connected to an open Wi-Fi point, if one is available.

Once you're running, you have a broad range of anonymity-protecting applications at your disposal.

But actually using the system can be a slow experience. Anonym.OS makes extensive use of Tor, the onion routing network that relies on an array of servers passing encrypted traffic to permit untraceable surfing. Sadly, Tor has recently suffered from user-base growth far outpacing the number of servers available to those users -- at last count there were only 419 servers worldwide. So Tor lags badly at times of heavy use.

Between Tor's problems, and some nagging performance issues on the disk itself, Banks concedes that the CD is not yet ready for the wide audience he hopes to someday serve. "Is Grandma really going to be able to use it today? I don't know. If she already uses the internet, yes."

Experts also say Anonym.OS may not solve the internet's most pressing issues, such as the notorious China problem: repressive governments that monitor their population's net access, and censor or jail citizens who speak out against the government.

Ethan Zuckerman, fellow with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, works extensively with international bloggers and journalists, many of whom live under constant threat from their own governments. He see Anonym.OS as a blessing for some -- but not for those at the greatest risk.

"I think it's going to be tremendously useful for fairly sophisticated users when they are traveling, but where it may not be as effective as people would hope is in counties where the government is really seriously about locking down the net, constraining internet access," Zuckerman says.

Because most people in the developing world use the internet from shared desktop environments, services for them have to consider office place and cyber cafe-based computer situations. "Rebooting isn't often an option," explains Zuckerman, who would like to see anonymity solutions move toward minimally invasive strategies like the TorPark, a USB key that allows access to a Tor enabled browser without rebooting, and private proxies matched up one by one with dissidents.

But kaos.theory members say Anonym.OS is just the first step in making anonymity widely available. Future versions, they say, may run on a USB keychain. Additionally, they plan to implement Enigmail to allow encrypted e-mail for Thunderbird and Gaim Off The Record, which allows users to use instant messaging without their logs being tied to them.

David Del Torto, chief security officer of the non-profit CryptoRights group, says projects like Anonym.OS are heading in the right direction, but thinks the project overreaches by trying to be useful to everyone. "Grandmas are not the ones that need this right now.... My instincts tell me that it's a very small number of people (that can use Anonym.OS). You can't really solve this problem by simplifying the interface. It's almost impossible to anticipate everything a user can do to hurt themselves."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...w=wn_tophead_1





One Of My Favorite Sayings Is "All A Lock Does Is Keep An Honest Man Honest"
Jared Bouck

Back in my schooling days I had the opportunity to take the bane of most geek life's, a course on communications and public speaking. With an attitude of rebellion I chose the topic for the final, I was going to teach the entire class how to pick locks in 5 short minutes. With a couple overhead slides, some hair pins, and about 15 master locks I was successful in demonstrating to the class the extreme ease of picking locks. As the other students passed the locks around the class most of them were eventually met with the new reality they had to live in, for there ignorance was no longer the bliss they lived in.

While there is a decade or more of heated debates on the topic of humanity and honesty, it is with the fore mentioned biases that we are doing this project. I have been actively interested in locksmithing and more over lock picking for several years. Any time a new gadget comes out that speeds up the ability to pick a lock it is often extremely overpriced. One of these types of tools is the vibrating lockpick. 60-120 bucks for a vibrating lockpick was a bit ridiculous in my opinion, so I decided to come up with a cheep way of making a good vibrating lock pick. For about 9.00 and a half hour we have produced a comparable lockpick to the most expensive commercial ones.

Now I feel it important to state that this project in no ways will attempt to teach one how to pick locks. There are so many comprehensive articles out there on that topic that it would be a complete waste of time. But, here is a link to one of the more famous articles on the web for your learning interests. The MIT guide to lock picking.

The Oral-B Humming Bird

I am sure that not once in the product testing, and focus groups and marketing meetings did Oral-B ever think that there was a possibility that there vibrating flossier would be the central component of such a potentially questionable project. A very well build and engineered unit, the Oral-B flossier is compact and powerful. Using a standard AAA battery at 1.5 volt battery and a micro vibrating motor. At about 6.00 not to shabby for what you get.

Lockpicks

Lockpicks are nothing new as we know, and there are a lot of different type available depending on the type of lock your interested in picking. For our project we are going to be building the vibrating pick just for pin and tumbler style locks. The easiest lock pick for new comers to picking is the Rake. With that in mind we chose to use a manufactured lock pick. New picks can be purchased for about 2.00 and tension wrenches for about 1.50. But for those that are interested in making there own there are several materials and methods to make your own. All you need is some strong spring steel and a file. Hair pins work well as does the metal strips in some windshield wiper blades.

9V plug and battery

After a quick trip to radio shaq and about 50 cents for a nine volt battery connector and a buck or two for a nine volt battery we have our new power source. Now obviously it won't fit inside of the space for the triple "A" battery, so a longer cord on the nine volt plug is preferred.


Tools that we used ( I.E. you may want to use as well )

One note on power tools: use them at your own risk. Be sure to read and understand any and all documentation on the tools you use. No amount of documentation can make up for experience, but there are many people with serious eye injuries at the school of hard knocks. If you don't know what you are doing, don't do it and find some one that can help.


Screwdrivers
Pliers
Soldering iron
Super Glue or Epoxy
Wire cutters


materials overview - what parts will you need


disassembly - preparing for the real work


preparing for the real work


final assembly - so, was it worth it.


http://www.inventgeek.com/Projects/lockpick/Page1.aspx





Why PC Gamer Kicked Out Gold Farmers
Greg Vederman

In its February 2006 issue, PC Gamer announced that it would no longer accept advertising from Gold Farming agencies. Editor-in-chief Greg Vederman (pictured) shares his editorial from that issue, explains the thinking behind the decision, and talks about industry and reader reaction…
PCG’s Letter From the Editor, February, 2006:

Secret wars. We all fight them occasionally. And just like when Dr. Doom fought the Beyonder and temporarily stole his powers, or when Chuck Norris continued to roundhouse kick his way through Vietnam well into the ’80s, recently, the editors of PC Gamer have been embroiled in a secret battle of our very own. The enemy? MMO Gold Farmers.

Lately, 'gold farming' companies such as IGE and Power Leveling — companies whose business is the accumulation and (potentially illicit) real-world sale of virtual MMO property, including gold, in-game items, and characters — have begun running ads in magazines like ours. For the record, PC Gamer’s official stance on these types of companies is that they are despicable: not only do they brazenly break many MMOs’ End-User License Agreements, but they all-too-often ruin legitimate players’ fun.

To put it mildly, we here at PCG are furious that these types of ads ever made it into the magazine. We know that their presence has upset you, too, because we’ve received, read, and sympathized with all of your emails saying so. Take this recent heartfelt letter from a reader who goes by the name 'Rushlight' as a perfect example:

"Lately, in my beloved World of Warcraft, I’ve had to put up with an influx of farmers. They’ve driven me out of the end-game areas, stolen my crafting nodes, undercut me at auction houses, and tricked in-game monsters into attacking me so that they can meet their quotas. The biggest ad-sponsored WoW fan sites are bombarded with banners for gold and account sales. Even in-game, I get emails and whispers from spammers telling me the addresses of gold sellers. And now I crack open my new issue of PCG, only to be slapped in the face with even MORE gold ads? C’mon, guys! Have a heart for a poor besieged troll. Drop the gold advertisements, won’t you please?"

After months of behind-the-scenes talks with our sales department, I’m extremely proud to announce that starting with last month’s issue, PC Gamer will no longer accept ads or ad dollars from Gold Farmers. Screw them. As a company, we have agreed to turn down what literally amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual ad revenue so that you, as a reader, can game easy knowing that we’ve got your back. I challenge my fellow PC gaming mags and websites to follow our path and to help us close down these bastard companies by attrition.

For my part, I sincerely apologize to all of our readers for not being able to make this happen sooner. Unfortunately, 'the separation of church and state' that exists between PC Gamer’s ad sales team and editorial team make negotiations like this one tricky. But we’re all on the same page now. Good thing, too, because for a while there I felt like I was a big green dude in purple pants, bearing the weight of an entire mountain on my shoulders.

Next: Reaction

Even at this early stage (the issue only went on sale at newsstand in early January), the reaction has been, as I’m sure you can imagine, extremely positive. We’ve already received numerous emails from elated readers, thanking us for our stance. I’ve even taken a couple of phone calls from some very happy MMO publishers.

Honestly, though, we didn’t do this because we were looking for praise. Not at all.PC gaming mags and websites aren’t supposed to run ads like these and we know it. Our readers hate them, we hate them, game publishers hate them. It was important to me that we pull these ads because they never should have appeared in PC Gamer in the first place.

Unfortunately, companies like IGE make far too much money to simply up and disappear just because PC Gamer stopped taking their ads. But I’m hoping that if enough of us – enough magazines and websites – can get together and agree to bar them access to our various publications, that the number of gamers who use such services will begin to decline. And, of course, at some point soon, MMO publishers, collectively, are going to have make a strong push of their own – do more than just ban suspicious accounts – if they really want to get (and keep) farmers out of their games.

Inspired to subscribe

Getting back to those elated readers, here’s a sample of what they’ve been telling us:

"I just thought I'd let you know that your decision to no longer use gold farmer company ads in your magazine has inspired me to subscribe. I usually just pick up an issue here and there depending on what game is prominently featured, but if you're not supporting the gold farmers, then I want to support you as best I can. Thank you!"

And another: "Blizzard is trying to cope with the problem of gold farmers but I believe they have grown somewhat apathetic. Sure, they recently said that they closed 18,000 'hacker'accounts over three months, but it still has not really sent a message that gold farmers will not be tolerated. Your stance has sent that message. It's a hard line and I'm thrilled to see someone actually make it. Tell your sales department that I'll being renewing my subscription until the day I die."

Emails like these leave no doubt in my mind that we did the right thing. Now the industry as a whole must pull together to get rid of this scourge, these parasites. Otherwise, one of the most promising sectors of the market may eventually be consumed from within.
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?op...=2058&Itemid=2





Chinese WOW Players Speak Out
Ellie Gibson

Chinese World of Warcraft players are being discriminated against by English speakers who assume they're all gold-farmers, according to reports on Chinese-language website Tales of Warcraft.

More than 7,000 posters on the site's forum claim they have fallen victim to the problem, which is said to occur when Chinese players attempt to join groups. Apparently there is a common belief among English speaking players that most non-English speakers are gold farmers and are only playing for commercial gain.

As a result, players are asking anyone who wants to join a group to type one or two sentences in English. If the sentences contain spelling or grammar mistakes, the player is rejected. Since you have to join groups to complete certain quests in WOW, this is presenting many Chinese players with a serious problem.

Mark MacKay, owner of the WOW Gold Price List website, has condemned this practice in a statement which reads: "Over over 1.5 million World of Warcraft players are from China alone, with the majority of these players being non-English. While their has been recent publicity about the gold farm factories in China, it by no means justifies thinking that every Chinese or non- English speaking player is a gold farmer."

MacKay doesn't have an instant solution to the problem, but says that English- speaking WOW players should "Keep a more open mind and trust people a little more.

"This would go a long way to bringing some racial harmony to World of Warcraft and the world in general."
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=62500





Local news

Connecticut Probing Sale Of Cell Phone Records
Jeremy Pelofsky

Connecticut is investigating companies that may have illegally sold consumers' cell phone records, state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said on Wednesday.

"My office has an aggressive, ongoing investigation and will take any action appropriate to pursue any company illegally obtaining and profiting from personal cell phone records," Blumenthal said.

The investigation began in recent months after his office received a handful of complaints.

The Federal Communications Commission said last week it had launched an investigation into how companies obtained the phone records that are available for purchase on the Internet.

In Washington, a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation on Wednesday that would make it a crime to steal and sell records for cell phones, traditional landlines and Internet-based telephones.

The bill would criminalize the act of making false statements to obtain a customer's phone record or access records on the Internet without permission. It would also become a crime for a phone company employee to sell customer data without permission.

"Stealing a person's phone log can lead to serious personal, financial and safety issues for just about any American," said Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat.

Also sponsoring the bill was Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat. The bill would likely have to go through Specter's committee as well as the Senate Commerce Committee.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens said in a statement that the panel will review possible legislative options and "will hold a public hearing in the near future to investigate how to better protect phone records."

Reps. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, and Jay Inslee, a Washington Democrat, said they plan to offer similar legislation when the U.S. House of Representatives returns later this month.

Rep. Edward Markey, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce telecommunications and Internet subcommittee, also plans to offer legislation, according to his spokeswoman.

There are more than 200 million cell phone subscribers, according to a wireless industry organization, CTIA.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said last week the agency would take action against telephone carriers that failed to adequately protect consumers records. He also said it may be up to the Federal Trade Commission to take action against those who fraudulently obtain the data.

"Commission staff have been coordinating with FTC staff on activities underway in both agencies to address this disturbing conduct," Martin said in a January 13 letter.

T-Mobile, the No. 4 wireless carrier, owned by Deutsche Telekom AG <DTEGn.DE>, said on Wednesday it had sent cease and desist orders to a number of companies to stop the practice.

The biggest U.S. wireless carrier, Cingular Wireless, owned by AT&T Inc. <T.N> and BellSouth Corp. <BLS.N>, said last week it had obtained a temporary restraining order against Data Find Solutions and 1st Source Information Specialists Inc.

It said it had sued the companies alleging they "unlawfully obtained and disseminated Cingular customer records."

Web sites offering call records for a price include locatecell.com and datatraceusa.com. Reuters was unsuccessful in immediately contacting them.

Locatecell.com has posted a notice on its home page stating that queries regarding Cingular numbers "will not be accepted or processed at this time."

(Additional reporting by Sinead Carew in New York)
http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/s...toryId=1146492





Custom-Made Microbes, at Your Service
Andrew Pollack

There are bacteria that blink on and off like Christmas tree lights and bacteria that form multicolored patterns of concentric circles resembling an archery target. Yet others can reproduce photographic images.

These are not strange-but-true specimens from nature, but rather the early tinkering of synthetic biologists, scientists who seek to create living machines and biological devices that can perform novel tasks.

"We want to do for biology what Intel does for electronics," said George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard and a leader in the field. "We want to design and manufacture complicated biological circuitry."

While much of the early work has consisted of eye-catching, if useless, stunts like the blinking bacteria, the emerging field could one day have a major impact on medicine and industry.

For instance, Christina D. Smolke, an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, is trying to develop circuits of biological parts to sit in the body's cells and guard against cancer. If they detected a cancer-causing mechanism had been activated, they would switch on a gene to have the cell self-destruct.

Jay D. Keasling at the University of California, Berkeley, with part of $42.6 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is trying to take up to 12 genes from the wormwood tree and yeast and get them to work together in E. coli bacteria to produce artemisinin, a malaria drug now extracted from the wormwood tree.

J. Craig Venter, the maverick scientist who sequenced the human genome, wants to create microbes that produce hydrogen for use as fuel.

To be sure, scientists have been putting genes into bacteria and other cells for three decades. The term "synthetic biology" seems to include various activities, some of which are not altogether new.

"This has a catchy new name, but anybody over 40 will recognize it as good old genetic engineering applied to more complex problems," said Frances H. Arnold, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech.

Some synthetic biologists say they will go beyond genetic engineering, which often involves putting a single foreign gene into a cell. The human insulin gene, for instance, is put into bacteria, which then make insulin for use as a drug. But there have been genetic engineering projects involving multiple genes, so the number of genes alone is not enough to define synthetic biology.

Rather, the difference seems more about mind-set. "We're talking about taking biology and building it for a specific purpose, rather than taking existing biology and adapting it," Professor Keasling of Berkeley said. "We don't have to rely on what nature's necessarily created."

Also new is an engineering approach - the desire to make the design of life forms more predictable, like the design of a bridge. That could be because many leaders of the field are not biologists by training.

Ron Weiss of Princeton is a computer scientist. Michael Elowitz of Caltech trained as a physicist, and Drew Endy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a structural engineer. Mr. Endy and colleagues at M.I.T. have started a "Registry of Standard Biological Parts." The parts, called BioBricks, are strings of DNA that can perform certain functions like turning on a gene or causing a cell to light up.

In theory at least, these components can be strung together to build more complex devices, just as an electronic engineer might put together transistors, resistors and oscillators to build a circuit. Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Texas used some BioBricks to engineer bacteria so that a sheet of them could capture an image as photographic film does. The microbes were altered so that those kept in the dark produced a black pigment while those exposed to light did not.

Some scientists envision that biological engineers will one day sit at computers writing programs for cells, like software developers. But the code would be written in sequences of DNA, rather than computer language. When finished, the programmer would press the "print" button, as it were, and the DNA would be made to order.

The field is also starting to attract some investment. In June, venture capitalists put $13 million into Codon Devices, a startup company in Cambridge, Mass., that is developing a way to synthesize long stretches of DNA far less expensively than existing methods. The founders include Professors Church, Endy and Keasling.

Professor Keasling is also a co-founder of Amyris Biotechnologies, which is helping make the malaria drug. And Mr. Venter has started Synthetic Genomics to work on his energy-producing microbes.

What make the engineering approach possible are the inner workings of a living cell. Genes, made of DNA, contain the instructions for producing proteins, which carry out most functions in cells. Some proteins can bind to DNA, turning particular genes on or off. This interplay, which is one way that cells regulate themselves, is not too different from how electronic circuits function, with one transistor turning another on or off.

To make the blinking bacteria, for instance, Mr. Elowitz designed the biological equivalent of an electronic oscillator. It uses three genes that trump one another like the rock, scissors and paper in the children's game. Gene X makes a protein that turns off Gene Y. Gene Y makes a protein that turns off Gene Z. And Gene Z makes a protein that turns off Gene X.

So if Gene X is on, it will turn off Gene Y. But the absence of Protein Y allows Gene Z to turn on. Protein Z then turns off Gene X, allowing Gene Y to turn on, turning Gene Z off, and so on. So the three genes turn on and off in an endless cycle.

To make the bacteria blink, Mr. Elowitz programmed a gene for the production of a fluorescent protein to be turned on whenever Gene Z was off.

Some newer efforts involve trying to manipulate entire colonies of microbes to cooperate with one another. They take advantage of something called quorum sensing, a natural communications system that bacteria use to determine whether there are enough of them present to mount an attack.

The bacteria secrete a particular chemical into their environment that they and their brethren can detect. When many bacteria are present, the level of this chemical in the environment increases. The concentric circle bull's-eye pattern was made by engineering E. coli to respond to a quorum-sensing chemical from a different microbe.

Some bacteria were programmed to produce a green fluorescent protein at high concentrations of the chemical. Others were programmed to produce a red protein if exposed to a somewhat lower concentration.

The bacteria of both types were mixed together and spread on a surface. In the center were placed some microbes that emitted the chemical, which diffused away from the center. The bacteria closest to the center were exposed to a high concentration. Those programmed to respond to high concentrations turned green. Some of the bacteria further away turned red.

The work, published in Nature in April, was led by Mr. Weiss of Princeton and Professor Arnold at Caltech. Mr. Weiss, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and molecular biology, is now trying to use similar principles to help control the differentiation of stem cells into different types of tissues in different locations.

"That's how the body develops its organs," he said, "by relying on cell-to-cell communication."

The two scientists also published a paper in Nature the same month in which they used quorum sensing to control bacterial populations artificially, by engineering the microbes to turn on a suicide gene if the concentration of the quorum-sensing chemical grew too high. As soon as the first cells started killing themselves, the concentration of the chemical would drop, so the remaining cells could recover.

The demonstrations, however clever, also illustrate problems inherent in designing biological circuits, as opposed to silicon ones. One is that living things are always dividing and evolving.

Indeed, the population-control system breaks down within days because some of the bacteria mutate so that the suicide gene is not switched on.

Those bacteria, having a selective advantage, quickly take over the colony, said Lingchong You, lead researcher on the project at Caltech and now an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke.

Another challenge is that the genes of the circuit can interact with the native bacterial genes in unexpected ways.

There is also great variability among living creatures. The blinking bacteria, for instance, do not light up in unison, but at greatly varying rates. Even a newly formed daughter cell will not blink in sync with its mother cell, despite being almost identical genetically.

"You write the same software and put it into different computers, and their behavior is quite different," Mr. You said. "If we think of a cell as a computer, it's much more complex than the computers we're used to."

For that reason, some scientists say, it might be difficult ever to make biological engineering as predictable as bridge construction.

"There is no such thing as a standard component, because even a standard component works differently depending on the environment," Professor Arnold of Caltech said. "The expectation that you can type in a sequence and can predict what a circuit will do is far from reality and always will be."

The unpredictability could lead to safety risks. What if the novel organisms were somehow to run amok? In addition, the same technology could be used to synthesize known pathogens based on their published DNA sequences.

Scientists have already created a poliovirus from scratch and more recently recreated the 1918 pandemic flu virus.

"It's quite clear this technology could be dangerous" if misapplied, Mr. Endy of M.I.T. said.

The field is starting to grapple with whether it should be regulated and, if so, how. Scientists set up a safety framework for research when genetic engineering was invented in the 1970's.

Much of the concern centers on efforts to make entire microbes. Some scientists call this synthetic genomics as opposed to synthetic biology, though there is considerable overlap. A big concern is making pathogens by synthesizing their DNA based on published DNA sequences.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has given $570,000 to M.I.T., the Venter Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent policy research organization, to study the societal implications of synthetic genomes. The group hopes to have a report by midyear, said Gerald L. Epstein, senior fellow for science and security at the strategic studies center.

In March, the Health and Human Services Department set up the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity to give advice about research with potentially nefarious uses. That board in turn established a working group on synthetic genomics and synthetic biology that met for the first time in November.

David A. Relman, chairman of the working group, said the challenge was to weigh the promise of the field against the perils.

"We fully recognize the inherent beneficial and very positive attributes of all of this work," said Dr. Relman, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford, "and don't want to stifle it or curtail it or constrain it for no substantive reason."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/science/17synt.html





File This Under Data Overload
Jonathon Keats

As a young historian visiting the National Archives more than four decades ago, Allen Weinstein met an employee named Mr. Taylor who seemed to know the whereabouts of every document - from the Declaration of Independence to the latest Bureau of Mines report - in the entire block-long neoclassical complex. Mr. Taylor was still working there last February when Weinstein was sworn in as the ninth archivist of the United States.

Weinstein has a lot to say about the 84-year-old civil servant when I meet him in his vast office, furnished mostly in the generic colonial-federalist style favored by embassies and bed-and-breakfasts. It doesn't matter that I've come to talk about the new Electronic Records Archives project, which Lockheed-Martin will build at a cost of $308 million over the next six years. "What are your hopes for ERA?" I ask the nation's archivist. "What are your concerns?"

"I worry about losing Mr. Taylor," he mumbles, his voice barely audible. Weinstein is a lean man with sparse white hair, a round face drawn into a pout, and a laminated ID hanging over his necktie. He clings with both hands to the padded arms of his chair. "I worry about losing Mr. Taylor's expertise and the expertise of people like him. They've been living with history."

Several rooms away, one of Weinstein's deputies, Robert Chadduck, is trying to figure out how to live with history of the digital variety. As research director of ERA, he has set up his computer laboratory in the only space he could get: the conference room of the archives' National Historical Publications and Records Commission. On the shelves surrounding his three screens are hardcover reprints of writings by Frederick Douglass and John Marshall. He doesn't appear to notice the books as he paces the room, waiting for an assistant named Mark to call up some data he wants me to see. "ERA is unprecedented for the National Archives," Chadduck says, and his voice almost breaks with pride as he informs me that "it's identified in the president's budget as a major systems acquisition."

On the monitors behind Chadduck, I watch Mark mutely arrange the images. There's a topographical map of Hawaii, a fly-through simulation of the Great Lakes, and a virtual reality model of a NASA space platform. Each is stored on disk or tape in a different location: the National Archives' College Park storage facility, the University of Maryland, the San Diego Supercomputer Center. "The challenge is to create a transcontinental, persistent archive," one that can be accessed from anywhere, at any time, Chadduck says. But his sample fails to convey the vastness of the estimated 347 petabytes of data preserved in the archives in thousands of digital formats.

The National Archives has been receiving electronic materials since 1970, but plans for long-term preservation of it all didn't begin until 1998. And the government has only started to take it seriously in the past three years. "Isn't that a bit late?" I ask Chadduck. "I won't presume to speak for the White House," he replies testily. He directs my attention elsewhere, handing me a small poster cluttered with more logos than a stock car. There are insignias for the Library of Congress, the National Science Foundation, the Department of State, and the National Nuclear Security Administration, among others, each indicating a research partnership that the National Archives has recently established. These entities have been grappling with digital preservation for a while, and Chadduck hopes to benefit from their efforts. "We don't want to reinvent the wheel," he says.

So ERA will be a modular system, relying as much as possible on technologies (many of them open source) developed elsewhere. For example, one anticipated module will be responsible for determining what kind of software was used to create an incoming document. Another will translate it into a usable format. Others will handle distribution, backup, and searchability. The modules can be replaced or added as technology advances - there would never be a need to reengineer the entire system. Another boon, at least from a bureaucratic standpoint, is that nobody has to define the limits of what the system will actually do.

Of course, no matter how the system evolves between now and 2011, one module it won't encompass is Mr. Taylor. While Lockheed's design prototype emphasizes intuitive access for users ranging from amateur genealogists to career paper pushers, no software on the market today or in the future is likely to have the veteran archivist's idiosyncratic expertise, his intuitive grasp of the collection's contents.

Mr. Taylor is elusive these days. He hides in the stacks whenever Weinstein shuffles by. "He's afraid that the archivist is trying to retire him," explains Miriam Kleiman, another Taylor protégé. "Retire him?" Weinstein counters, enunciating his words for the first time since I've met him. "I want him to work 40 more hours a week."

He sighs. Weinstein has just been given the largest appropriation in National Archives history, for a system that will be the envy of every library around the world, but I see that it doesn't satisfy him in the least. "What happens next, I'm not sure, just not sure," he mutters.

The archivist of the United States looks down at the floor. What he really needs, no technology can provide.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...osts.html?pg=2





When Art and Science Collide, a Dorkbot Meeting Begins
Brian Braiker

The artists may have ceded SoHo to swanky shops and million-dollar digs, but once a month the scene at one of its remaining galleries might best be described as Revenge of the Nerds.

On a recent Wednesday, "dorkbot" was holding the first meeting of its sixth year at the Location One gallery. Scruffy hipsters toting six-packs, blinky Web developers arguing the merits of their preferred P.D.A. and an inordinate number of dreadlocked heads packed the gallery beyond capacity to hear three brief, charmingly unpolished lectures.

Founded five years ago by Douglas Repetto, the director of research at Columbia University's computer music center, dorkbot is an informal club of artists, techies and geeks who do "strange things with electricity," according to their motto. In five years, chapters of the club have sprung up in nearly 30 cities around the world, from Seattle to Rotterdam to Mumbai.

At every New York meeting, Mr. Repetto invites three people to deliver 20- to 30- minute presentations of their work, which tends to inhabit a no-man's land between science and art. A question-and-answer session follows, which serves as an informal peer review to help presenters hone their ideas, Mr. Repetto said.

"They're doing things, but they're not quite sure, What is this? Where does it fit?" Mr. Repetto said. "It doesn't belong in a gallery, and they can't write a paper on it."

This month's meeting was held on what may or may not have been Sir Isaac Newton's 363rd birthday, but the fact that history is unclear on that matter did not dissuade Mr. Repetto, 35, from enlisting him as the evening's mascot. Slides of Newton and Newton-related arcana flashed across a screen before the lectures began.

But what would Sir Isaac have made of Mikey Sklar?

Mr. Sklar, a UNIX engineer presenting at dorkbot for the second time, demonstrated how he had a $2 chip surgically implanted into his left hand - and why he did it. The Radio Frequency Identification tag under his skin uses the same technology that the E-ZPass system employs to identify cars on toll roads. Mr. Sklar, 28, said his tag unlocks his computer and accesses news feeds as part of an art project.

"This is a pretty crude attempt at becoming a little more cyborg," he explained to the audience, only half joking.

As for why he chose dorkbot for the debut of his body-hack, Mr. Sklar wrote in an e-mail message: "This forces me to get my act together. By that I mean I have to clearly document my project and come up with an explanation of why I did this work."

Also at the dorkbot meeting were Alyce Santoro, an artist who weaves funky textiles out of a "sonic fabric" of audiotape and cotton, and Luke DuBois, a composer and "computational artist," who discussed a process he developed called "time-lapse phonography."

Mr. DuBois used his application, essentially time-lapse photography for sound, to create a new piece of music out of the 857 songs that have appeared at the top of the Billboard charts since 1958. The result, called "Billboard," is a 37-minute-long drone: each hit song is reduced to its average timbre and key by an algorithm that speeds up the original work without giving it a chipmunk chirpiness.

"It's a great way to get a gestalt of a piece of music," Mr. DuBois explained.

With popular tech and culture Web sites like boingboing.net and gothamist.com linking to dorkbot listings (at dorkbot.org) and even presenters' home pages, the monthly event has also become one way for artists and engineers to generate publicity.

"I've gotten more links from dorkbot than from any other Web site," said Michelle Rosenberg, an artist who delivered a lecture on the history of hearing aids and presented her own headphone sculptures at a meeting last January.

"It was a group critique," she said. "The questions asked were informal and curious. You have a different group of people coming to dorkbot than would come to an art lecture."

And that, said Mr. Repetto, is the whole point.

"If you have to tell people you're giving a presentation at something called dorkbot," he added, "you can't be too serious."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/sc...ork.html?8hpib





The Essence Of A Geek
Matthew Broersma

When the dot-com bubble burst in late 2000 a lot of amateur and professional investors lost their shirts. It was a pretty embarrassing time for the financial markets and a time that a lot of people would choose to forget — but not everyone.

For a few years, an interest in computers and technology became inextricable linked with wealth and power — geek became chic. Technology companies suddenly became the focus of the kind of attention that had been reserved for the music or fashion industries. In the UK TV makers even went so far as to create a hip series, Attachments, based around the antics of a tech start-up.

True, much of this temporary kudos enjoyed by technologists was obliterated in the dot-com mushroom cloud, but not all. On some level, technology and technologists were permanently lifted a couple notches up the cool-o-meter. And that process, kick-started by the dot-com gold rush, has accelerated recently — motivated by a different and altogether more pervasive force. A plethora of seductive technologies typified by the Motorola V3 family or the iPod, combined with success of online services offered by Google and eBay, have slowly invaded the wider consciousness — inspiring a kind of techno-lust in the general public.

We're all geeks
IT industry analyst James Governor of RedMonk, claims that while it may not yet be cool or trendy to admit, a degree of technical sophistication has become expected. He claims that increasingly, "we're all geeks" — even if a lot of people don't care to admit it.

To illustrate his point, Governor recalls a recent conversation involving his wife and some of her friends — mostly women who would probably describe themselves as non-techies. One of the women pulled out a new Windows Mobile smartphone while protesting that she wasn't "a geek". Governor then politely enquired whether she had her email sychronised to the device — she did. This then initiated a conversation about mobile phone design — the last thing the technical analyst was expecting given the company. "You expect to have that kind of conversation with guys, but not with women," Governor says.

While some of Governor's comments may come across as sexist — they do illustrate the idea that a certain level of technical sophistication is increasingly becoming the norm rather than the exception. In fact if the levels of female interest in tech can be counted as some kind of barometer for a general geekiness pervading society then there seems to be some truth in the Governor's assertion that increasingly we are all nerds to some degree.

Technical sophistication
A recent survey by the Sci-Fi channel discovered that an increasing number of women could be included in the ranks of a new demographic it nick-named "New Geek". The research revealed that a third of the UK's total 6.9 million geeks were actually female. "Whereas once geeks were seen as solitary, embarrassing and uncool, the statistics show that New Geek is chic, popular and hugely influential," the researchers claimed.

"New Geeks", as described by the channel's research, are relatively young (83 percent are under 44) and well-off (21 percent have family income of more than £50,000) and are 125 percent more likely to visit pubs, clubs and bars than the average person.

However, while some commentators would admit that levels of technical literacy may indeed be on the rise, they disagree that this translates into an increase in the number of hardcore techies in existence. The defenders of geek — IT professionals on the whole — maintain that there is a definite dividing line between geeks and non-geeks; one has the interest and skills to actually make things, while the other merely uses them

Shakespeare's geek
All this begs the question, what exactly is a geek and what sets them apart? Historically, the word was associated with oddness. Possible predecessors include the medieval dialect words geck, from Low German, and gek, from Middle Low German, meaning "fool"; Shakespeare used the word "geck" in this sense in several plays. (For instance, from Cymbeline: "Why did you suffer Iachimo, slight thing of Italy, to taint his nobler heart and brain with needless jealousy; and to become the geck and scorn o' the other's villany?")

The modern word surfaced in American slang in the early 20th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and continued to refer to various kinds of oddballs. The OED records this example from the 1916 Wells Fargo Messenger: "A new Wells agent struck our town the other week, and say you never saw a more enthusiastic geek!" By the 1950s Webster's dictionary recorded that the word referred to a carnival sideshow weirdo "whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake".

At some point, the word began to be used to refer to people with an interest so obsessive that it puts them outside the mainstream — as it still is used to talk about people with an inordinate knowledge of, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. However, it's most immediate association is now with technology, and particularly with people who actually make technology work.

Too much Buffy
Somewhere along the line, geek also seems to have lost most of its negative connotations — unlike nerd and anorak, which still tend to be used as insults. The word's reclamation was probably a more or less deliberate effort on the part of geeky technology types who began using it to refer to themselves, say some. "It's a taking-back-the-language thing," says Jez Higgins, a freelance developer.

To some degree "geek" overlaps with "hacker", a word used as a badge of honour to mean a particularly adept programmer, though "hacker" has some extra moral implications that "geek" lacks. Most would agree that Bill Gates is a geek, but few would class him as a hacker, due to the perecieved quality of his company's technology and his taste for world domination. "He doesn't have the hacker's ethos," Higgins says.

Soul of a New Machine
The traditional idea of the geek (as opposed to the New Geek) seems to originate from the world of the sciences and the oddballs they tend to attract — people like Albert Einstein, who had a wardrobe full of identical clothing and saw nothing wrong with smoking cigarette butts collected off the street. Once computers started to become an important force in society, nonfiction accounts such as Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, Steven Levy's Hackers and Robert X. Cringely's Accidental Empires familiarised the public at large with the people behind the scenes — the nerdy, obsessive, and strangely heroic computer types who created modern computing in the 1970s and 1980s and commercialised the Internet in the 1990s.

More recently, figures from the world of open source or free software have come more into the public eye. Specificall, you have programmers such as Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel; Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software movement; and Eric Reynolds, author of the influential open source manifesto The Cathedral and the Bazaar . Some of these figures fulfil the public's image of the geek as a bit peculiar — reclusive, having difficulties with social behaviour and the rest of it.

Stallman, for example, had a very solitary childhood and has retained a reputation as an extremely uncompromising personality, as described by Sam Williams in a 2003 biography, Free as in Freedom. "His rhetoric is very seductive, but he's also got a very repellent side of his personality. He's a control freak, he's very meticulous," Williams remarked in an interview at the time of the book's publication. Reynolds is known for his efforts to build bridges between Stallman's world of free software and the compromised world of business through the open source movement. He is also a libertarian who, when given an award by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, responded with a note saying, "When I hear the words 'social responsibility,' I want to reach for my gun."

Autism = geek?
It has become commonplace to link typical programmer personality traits to Autistic Spectrum Disorder, and particularly to Asperger syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism. Wired Magazine even ran a lengthy investigation into a sharp rise in the number of autistic children born in the Silicon Valley area, though no conclusive link to the population of computer engineers there has ever been proven. While the relationship between Asperger-type personality traits and a talent for computer programming is difficult to pin down, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that one exists. As Hans Asperger himself wrote: "It seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential."

To those who consider themselves true geeks, however, personality traits are beside the point — what's important about a geek is the passion to understand the way things work, to the point of being able to construct working systems yourself. Programmers are admired not because of their fame or social status, but for the quality of the code they write.

This appreciation even has an aesthetic side to it, something that non-programmers often find surprising, says developer Higgins. "When people talk about code and whether it's any good, the criterion that's most damning is that it's ugly," he says. "There's a simplicity and elegance in the expression that's appreciated." This aesthetic side is often missed by the outside world, but it is a recurrent theme. For example, Stallman, despite his apparently ascetic view of the world, is said to be something of an epicure who appreciates being taken out for a fine dining experience.

Social changes
It isn't just that the fame of geeks that has increased; society itself has changed dramatically. Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, a 1981 account of introverted young computer engineers working 24-hour shifts to create a minicomputer, seemed like bizarre science fiction at the time, but by the end of the 1990s it was another matter. In her 2003 novel The Bug, veteran programmer Ellen Ullman described how the developer's universe seems to have taken over the outside world:

"The workstation in a cubicle. The morning begun not with hello but with a system prompt. Everyone's day begins like that now, but on that morning of March 5, 1984, only programmers and testers lived that way. From log-in to log-out, email to email, mouse click to mouse click — we were just then starting to make computers 'friendly' for everyone, preparing the world for a programmer's life.''

Ullman's point is that while computers are making wonderful things possible, they are also recreating the world in their own image. "Computers abhor error... [and] abhorring error is not necessarily positive," she says in a 1990s Salon.com interview. "We learn through error... so it affects us to have more and more of our life involved with very authoritarian, error-unforgiving tools. I think the more time you spend around computers, the more you get impatient with other people, impatient with their errors, impatient with your own errors."

ADD?
Ever more pervasive technologies have only heightened the effect, to the point where it has become a cliché. "Sure, a lot of geeks tend to have ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder], and we all have ADD now," says Governor. "I can't have a conversation with my mother for five minutes because I want to check IM. We are living these bizarre, mediated lives, and of course there are drawbacks."

This shift isn't a one-way street, however — we may be coming to resemble geeks a bit more, but through the growing importance of design, technology is also changing to be a bit more human. Strangely enough, many have found the emerging crop of digital video recorders, such as Sky+, far easier to use than the traditional VCR. Gadgets such as the iPod employ complex technology — it's even possible to install Linux on one — but they employ very simple interfaces.

The iPod's success was crowned at the end of last year with designer Jonathan Ive receiving a CBE, and many see such products as the direction geek culture will take next. A new crop of influential programmers, such as 37 Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson or Ubuntu Linux's Mark Shuttleworth, are not even particularly geeky.

"These kinds of people are where the next great successes are coming from, they're great designers and great coders, and also uber-communicators," says Governor. "Great design is a way to create huge new markets, and that is a lesson IT is learning."
http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/business/...9247523,00.htm

















Until next week,

- js.

















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