Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 3rd, '07

[JackSpratts]

Christian Group Preps To Attack Wii
Brian Crecente

A tipster sends word that The Porn Talk, a site backed by a secretive faith-based ministry in California, is prepping to attack Nintendo's Wii and other gaming devices, calling them "portals to porno" in a press release.

In the press release, leaked to Kotaku today, The Porn Talk founder Mike Foster does his best to stoke up some fear about the Wii saying that even though the device has parental controls, "parents don't see a need for them because they are unaware of the porn capabilities."

With a headline that reads "The Wii's Dirty Little Secret," the story's caustic tone is more off-putting than what little facts are presented. The full press release is on the jump.

I find it funny that a site that seems to go to so much effort to hide its ties to religion and ministry work is using the phrase dirty little secret.

The Wii's Dirty Little Secret

The Wiittle Porn Problem For Nintendo's Best Selling Game Console

CORONA, CA - The Nintendo Wii gaming console has a wiittle porn problem. That's right; this seemingly innocent family game console has a dirty little secret. It has the dubious ability to access pornography via the internet and most parents are not aware of this fact according to www.ThePornTalk.com

Like many new gaming technologies, the Wii's wireless internet capabilities make it a portal to porno. "Parents think the computer is the only way for their kids to get porn on the internet. Unfortunately, they are dead wrong," says Mike Foster, founder of ThePornTalk.com. "Gaming devices like the Wii and the PSP aren't just for fun games anymore. You're able to surf the net, chat with friends, email, and view porn because of its internet access. Kids know this but parents don't!"

Wireless internet (Wi-Fi) technology allows electronic devices like Nintendo's Wii to wirelessly connect to the internet. Airports, Starbucks, schools, and even entire cities give people the opportunity to log on the internet with a Wi-Fi device like the Wii or even Sony's PSP. "This makes it very difficult to monitor as a parent. You can easily put safeguards in your house but it's impossible to monitor in a Wi-Fi world," says Foster. "Even though the Nintendo Wii has parental controls, parents don't see a need for them because they are unaware of the porn capabilities."

The Nintendo Wii has become the best-selling video game console in the United States, outselling Microsoft and Sony competitors in the month of January, 2007. Because of its success many websites have taken advantage of its online capability. Several companies have changed the look and functionality of their web sites to accommodate the Wii. The porn industry is also implementing these changes to their sites. Porn websites are taking the look of the Wii's home page and menus and modeling their own sites after them. Porn sites are even converting their video clips so that they can run on the Wii.

So the solution lies in parents getting the facts and then talking to their children about expectations for online activity. Foster believes that, "Whether it is the home computer or these new gaming consoles, porn is easily accessible. The Wii is an amazing console and tons of fun but parents need good info on how to keep kids safe."

About ThePornTalk.com
ThePornTalk.com is an innovative web resource that helps parents talk to their kids about porn and internet dangers. The site features conversation starters, videos, a weekly podcast, parent's stories and other resources. Contributors to the site include child advocates, pastors, therapists, and kids themselves.
http://kotaku.com/gaming/wii/christi...wii-239994.php





Home schooling

Teens Heavy Porn Users: Study
Michelle Mark

A groundbreaking study on porn use by 13- and 14-year-old teens shows an alarming number are watching "more times than they can count" and their parents are unaware.

"If you're 13 and you can't put a number on the times (you've used porn), that's a little frightening," University of Alberta researcher Sonya Thompson said, adding 35% of boys fell into that category along with 8% of girls.

"It's a concern in terms of kids' sexual health and role modelling. It seems this is a very big influence on their socialization."

Thompson said she hopes the survey results act as a wakeup call to parents about what their kids are up to.

She also said sexually curious teens who are watching porn are getting the wrong messages about healthy sexuality and don't distinguish between actors getting paid to perform and real-world sexuality.

"Parents need to be talking to their kids about porn in a non-judgmental way and to keep the conversation happening," said Thompson, who is also a sexual health educator.

In spring of 2003, Thompson analyzed responses to an hour-long questionnaire from 429 rural and urban Grade 8 students aged 13 to 14. She asked about their exposure to and use of sexually explicit material on TV, DVDs, movies and the Internet, as well as about their interaction with their parents about such material.

Thompson said she got the idea for the study after she noticed more and more students asking questions about explicit and hardcore sexual activity.

"I knew they had to be getting that from seeing it somewhere, but it's not something anyone talks about - especially in school," she said, adding she would like to see the topic addressed in the sexual health curriculum.

The Internet was the most common way for kids to get access to porn, with about three-quarters of students reporting such contact.

Thompson found almost one-quarter of the boys watched pornographic DVDs or videos "too many times to count" and 35% said the same about Internet smut. The corresponding figures for girls were 4% and 8%.

Thompson also found that boys tend to prefer privacy while viewing porn, but will sometimes invite other boys to watch with them. Girls, on the other hand, more often watch in same-sex pairs or in mixed-gender groups.

A spokesman for Alberta Education said while there is nothing in school curriculums specifically addressing pornography use, high school kids are taught about healthy and unhealthy behaviour in relationships.
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Features...f-3658873.html





DA: NYC Man Sold Kids' Cartoon Costumes `for Porn Film'
AP

A man has been charged with selling knockoff costumes of popular children's cartoon characters -- including Barney and Dora, Superman and Scooby Doo -- to a person he believed to be a porn film producer, according to the Queens district attorney.

Julio Quevedo, 43, of Queens, was charged with trademark counterfeiting, District Attorney Robert Brown said Tuesday.

An investigation into Quevedo's alleged operation began last year after the DA's office was contacted by Hit Entertainment, the licensed trademark holder of many of the animated children's characters that suspected Quevedo was illegally selling bogus adult-size versions of its children's costumes.

"A one-man counterfeiting operation like the one discovered here is capable each year of fleecing legitimate owners of trademark products out of tens of thousands of dollars, substantial sums in lost royalties," Brown said in a statement.

During a sting operation an undercover private investigator purchased a fake Bob the Builder from Quevedo for $250, Brown said. Then an undercover agent from the DA's office, posing as the investigator's wife, told Quevedo she needed costumes for roles in erotic movies. Quevedo took her to a storage facility on Saturday that contained an assortment of costumes, including Thomas the Tank Engine and Tasmanian Devil, Brown said.

Hit Entertainment and Warner Brothers were brought to the scene and verified that the costumes were counterfeit, he said.

Brown said Quevedo told investigators that his family had been selling the bogus costumes for four years, and that his father-in-law manufactured them at a factory in Lima, Peru.

Quevedo was arraigned Saturday in Queens Criminal Court on the counterfeiting charge, and faces up to four years in jail if convicted. He was released without bail and told to return to court on March 13.

Neither he nor his lawyer could be reached for comment.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1032709





Berners-Lee Pushes Congress on 'Nondiscriminatory' Web
Anne Broache

World Wide Web father Tim Berners-Lee told politicians on Thursday that it's critical to shield his seminal innovation from control by a single company or country.

A top priority for policymakers going forward must be "making sure the Web itself is the blank sheet, the blank canvas, something that does not constrain the innovation that's around the corner," the knighted engineer told a U.S. House of Representatives panel that writes Internet and telecommunications laws.

That means ensuring anyone can use the Web regardless of what software or hardware they're running, which Internet service provider supplies their connection, which language they speak, and what disabilities they have, Berners-Lee said. He was the sole witness invited to speak at a hearing here titled "The Future of the World Wide Web," the first of a series of events designed to keep politicians up to speed on communications issues.

Although he has previously voiced support for Net neutrality, Berners-Lee on Thursday stopped short of taking a position on the various bills on that topic proposed in Congress in the past year.

"I can say I feel that a nondiscriminatory Internet is very important for a society based on the World Wide Web," he said. "I think that the communications medium is so important to society that we have to give it a special treatment."

Proponents of Net neutrality define the concept as prohibiting network operators, such as Verizon and Comcast, from being allowed to charge content companies like Google and Amazon.com extra fees for prioritization. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), who arranged the hearing, was among the chief sponsors of a legislative proposal last year that would put that mandate into law.

Perhaps in a nod to the issue's divisiveness, with Republicans tending to reject the idea of new laws, Markey on Thursday issued a disclaimer to his colleagues. "Before end of year, we're going to hear from all sides on that issue so that everyone's perspective is heard," he said.

Berners-Lee was largely greeted with awe and accolades from the politicians who showed up for the day's hearing. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) said he considered the World Wide Web consortium director one of the rare individuals who has "truly made the world a different and better place" and proclaimed it an honor to be in the same room with him.

Berners-Lee's views on digital rights management (DRM) technology drew questioning, however, from Rep. Mary Bono (R-Calif.), who was once married to singer-turned-Congressman Sonny Bono. Berners-Lee, who emphasized a belief in offering standardized technology on a royalty-free basis, referred in his written statement to Apple's "closed, non-standard technology for its copy protection" as an example of a factor that has inhibited the company's online music sales growth. Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself recently suggested abandoning the approach.

"How would creators be compensated in a world free of DRM?" Bono asked him.

Berners-Lee said a better approach would be to devise software capable of tracking whether a person owns a particular file. "It won't stop you, but it will let you know if you're playing music you shouldn't listen to because you backed up someone else's machine and you got access to it," he said.

"Is that not the equivalent of having the speed limit but no enforcement of the speed limit?" Bono replied.

Berners-Lee suggested closed DRM regimes were akin to enforcing a speed limit by requiring the offending car to "grind to a halt" and added, "I am inclined to try to make software that allows you to do the right thing first."
http://news.com.com/Berners-Lee+push...3-6163616.html





A Domain Just Right for Mobile Web Surfing
Eric Sylvers

Help is on the way for Internet surfers who have steered clear of the wireless Web because text, photographs and icons seem to find their way to the most random of spots on their phone's small screen.

DotMobi, a venture backed by 12 companies and an industry association, has created the ".mobi" domain name, which identifies an Internet address just like .com, .net, .edu and .org, except that it guarantees that a Web site has been tailored for the small screen of a mobile phone. The dot- mobi sites have fewer graphics, photos and overall content than their sister sites that are accessed from a computer. More than 375,000 dot-mobi domain names have been registered, and about 25,000 are operational, the company said in Barcelona at an industry conference this month. The first site went online in September.

Wei Wei, a Chinese pop star who has sold more than 200 million discs, announced at the conference that she would make her new album available first exclusively on her new dot-mobi site, www.weiwei.mobi. On the same site, her fans can download ring tones, video clips, wallpaper and pictures.

Though still relatively unknown, dotMobi, which is based in Dublin, is backed by a powerful group of investors including Nokia, Ericsson, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefónica, Telecom Italia Mobile, Google, Microsoft and the GSM Association, which represents 700 cellphone operators around the world.

"Consumers are not happy with the mobile Internet because it just doesn't function well," Neil Edwards, chief executive of dotMobi, said during an interview this month at the conference in Barcelona. "The dot-mobi domain was established to offer mobile Internet users a domain they can trust, somewhere they can go and be sure that the site will function on their mobile phone."

Numerous studies have shown that cellphone users are reluctant to surf the Web from their cellphones for various reasons including the difficulty, time and cost of downloading standard Internet pages to a mobile phone.

According to the GSM Association, more people have an Internet-ready mobile device than have a computer with Internet access. Yet just 14 percent of cellphone users in Britain accessed the Web for news and information in the fourth quarter, 10 percent in the United States, 7.6 percent in France and 3.2 percent in Germany, according to research by M:Metrics, a cellphone market research group based in Seattle. But while mobile surfing is struggling in Europe and America, it has caught on in Japan, where, according to the government, 69 million people were accessing Internet content from phones at the end of 2005, about 75 percent of all cellphone users.

An internal study done by dotMobi found that 88 percent of GSMA members had Web sites that were not suited for viewing on a phone.

DotMobi, officially know as a TLD, for top level domain, sells the dot-mobi names to resellers who then market them to companies and individuals, typically at about $10 an address, according to Edwards.

"Everybody down to local shops has an Internet presence on computers, but that's just one channel," Edwards said. "They should realize the potential of the mobile Web to reach people. The success of the mobile Internet hinges on there being quality content that is easy to access."

Some companies have versions of their regular Web site that have been optimized for mobile phones, but in most cases the sites have long addresses. Instead, with a dot-mobi address, users need only substitute ".com" with ".mobi."

Despite the list of industry heavyweights supporting the project, critics say that dot-mobi interferes with what they refer to as "device neutrality." Tim Berners-Lee, one of the inventors of the World Wide Web, has said the Web must function independently of the hardware, software or network used to access it.

The World Wide Web Consortium, know as W3C, an organization that defines standards for the Web, and other proponents of "device neutrality" have argued that the technology already exists to send tailored content from existing Internet sites to specific devices with different screen sizes. The situation is further muddled, W3C argues, by the question of whether dot-mobi Web pages will link only to other dot-mobi pages.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...wireless26.php





T-Mobile Disses Opera, Says "Get Less!"

Testing some T-Mobile phones recently, I once again ran into T-Mobile's annoying policy of banning third-party applications from accessing the Internet on their phones. Like so many infringements on our liberties, this started stealthily with a few devices but now covers their entire product line.

This means T-Mobile feature phone users are prohibited from surfing the Web with Opera Mini, checking maps on Google Local for Mobile, listening to podcasts with Mobilcast, and using any other form of software not pre-approved by T-Mobile.

T-Mobile cites meaningless "security" concerns as reasons for attempting to severely cripple the mobile software development industry, but their hypocrisy is painfully clear when you remember that these apps work fine on T-Mobile's network, using T-Mobile SIM cards, if you buy your phone directly from a manufacturer like NokiaUSA.com.

This idiotic policy doesn't even work in T-Mobile's interests. Third party software encourages people to use data services, which encourages them to sign up for data plans, which makes T-Mobile money. A more liberal policy on mobile apps also might help the nation's #4 carrier win customers away from control freaks like Verizon, with their strictly limited set of applications.

T-Mobile's motto is "get more." So it's painfully ironic that nowadays, they let you "get less" -- locking out much of what their phones can do in a pointless, incomprehensible attempt at control. My solution: instead of buying phones through T-Mobile, go direct to manufacturers or through independent retailers that offer non-T-Mobile-branded GSM phones, then drop your T-Mobile SIM card in. (It'll work fine.) That way you'll get your T-Mobile service, and much, much "more."
http://www.gearlog.com/2007/01/tmobi...a_says_get.php





In Pursuit of a Faster Chip
John Markoff

Imagine how useful it would be to stand on a street corner and then walk diagonally through a block to get to your destination more quickly.

That is essentially the new approach taken by Cadence Design Systems, a maker of software tools for chip designers, in laying out microchip wires.

Until now the semiconductor industry has made "Manhattan Rules" the standard for routing the wires used to connect switches in microprocessors and memory chips. As a result, for almost all semiconductor chips today, wires are run only along horizontal and vertical axes, not diagonally.

Modern integrated circuits are actually three-dimensional. In the Cadence system, several layers route lines diagonally while others run horizontally and vertically. As in conventional chips, the multiple levels of wires are separated by layers of insulating material and interconnected through holes referred to as vias.

Computer chips are among today's most complex machines. The complexity is handled by software tools that allow chip engineers to use specialized programming languages that directly instruct chip-making equipment.

The transistor count of the most complex chips has surpassed the human population of the planet, and the average chip has a mile of wires, the thinnest of which are only a few hundred atoms across.

Cadence says its alternative design approach, called X Architecture, will help cope with the growing complexity while adding significantly to the speed, efficiency and performance of a generation of smaller chips that are just starting to appear.

It recently gained two major converts to its design: Agere Systems, a maker of next-generation cellphones, and Teranetics, which makes high-speed networking gear for corporate data centers. The companies report big savings, particularly in power consumption, deriving directly from the fact that diagonal routing cuts the total wire length necessary to run over the surface of a silicon chip.

Advocates of the technology say that as the chip industry moves to the next manufacturing generation, known as 65 nanometers, techniques that help reduce complexity are becoming crucial.

"The risks associated with getting designs out are going up dramatically," said Handel Jones, president of IBS, an industry consulting firm based in Los Gatos, California. Anything that reduces risk, he argues, will be welcomed.

But there are also skeptics. Cadence and its competitor Synopsys are the Hertz and Avis of the chip design world, and Synopsys engineers say they have examined the Cadence technology and found its performance and power efficiency to be less than Cadence has claimed.

"It's not a new concept — it's been around since designers used litho paper and cut it by hand," said Steve Meir, vice president for engineering at Synopsys, based in Sunnyvale, California.

The Cadence designers say they are confident that the benefits are there.

"The math is clear — if you can go diagonally, the wires will be 30 percent shorter," said Aki Fujimura, a Cadence senior vice president, who helped develop the technology at Simplex Solutions, which Cadence acquired in 2002.

Still, he acknowledges that it has been a struggle to persuade the industry to use the technology.

Intel, the largest maker of chips, has also turned its back on Cadence, choosing instead to invest in a smaller firm, Magma Design Automation.

Although Cadence is now run by a former top-ranking Intel executive, Mike Fister, Intel executives argue that the Magma tools offer a time-to-market advantage that trumps all other considerations.

Cadence's biggest challenge may ultimately be more cultural than technical, said Daniel Hutcheson, president of VLSI Technology, a semiconductor market research firm in Santa Clara, California.

Although the industry has a reputation for innovation, the ruthless pace of chip-making advances, requiring new systems at 18-month intervals, makes engineers leery of trying alternative approaches, he said.

"They're like penguins with the ice melting around them," Hutcheson said. "They keep doing the same thing."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...iness/chip.php





Shoot the Piano Player
Denis Dutton

IT seemed almost too good to be true, and in the end it was. A conscientious pianist who had enjoyed an active if undistinguished career in London falls ill and retreats to a small town. Here she undertakes a project to record virtually the entire standard classical repertoire. Her recordings, CDs made when she was in her late 60s and 70s, are staggering, showing a masterful technique, a preternatural ability to adapt to different styles and a depth of musical insight hardly seen elsewhere.

Born in 1928, the pianist, Joyce Hatto, was the daughter of a music-loving London antiques dealer. As a teenager, she said, she kept practicing during the Blitz, hiding under the piano when the bombs were falling. She claimed later to have known the composers Ralph Vaughn Williams, Benjamin Britten and Carl Orff, to have studied Chopin with the French virtuoso Alfred Cortot and taken advice from the pianist Clara Haskil. She was Arnold Bax’s favored interpreter for his “Symphonic Variations.”

Ms. Hatto made recordings from the 1950s until 1970 — some Mozart and Rachmaninoff — but tending toward light-music potboilers: Hubert Bath’s “Cornish Rhapsody” and Richard Addinsell’s “Warsaw Concerto.” Her career was already in decline when she was given a cancer diagnosis in the early 1970s. She retired to a village near Cambridge with her husband, a recording engineer named William Barrington-Coupe, and a fine old Steinway that Rachmaninoff himself had used for prewar recitals in Britain.

Then came one of the strangest turns in the history of classical music. Starting in 1989, Joyce Hatto began recording CDs for a small record label run by her husband. She began with Liszt, went back to cover Bach and all of the Mozart sonatas and continued with a complete Beethoven sonata set. Then on to Schubert and Schumann, Chopin and more Liszt. She played Messiaen. Her Prokofiev sonatas (all nine) were tossed off with incredible virtuosity. In total she recorded more than 120 CDs — including many of the most difficult piano pieces ever written, played with breathtaking speed and accuracy.

Intriguingly, she gave to the music a developed although oddly malleable personality. She could do Schubert in one style, and then Prokofiev almost as though she was a new person playing a different piano — an astonishing, chameleon-like artistic ability.

We normally think of prodigies as children who exhibit some kind of miraculous ability in music. Joyce Hatto became something unheard of in the annals of classical music: a prodigy of old age — the very latest of late bloomers, “the greatest living pianist that almost no one has heard of,” as the critic Richard Dyer put it for himself and many other piano aficionados in The Boston Globe.

Little wonder that when she at last succumbed to her cancer last year at age 77 — recording Beethoven’s Sonata No. 26, “Les Adieux,” from a wheelchair in her last days — The Guardian called her “one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced.” Nice touch, that, playing Beethoven’s farewell sonata from a wheelchair. It went along with her image in the press as an indomitable spirit with a charming personality — always ready with a quote from Shakespeare, Arthur Rubinstein or Muhammad Ali. She also had a clear vision of the mission of musical interpreters, telling The Boston Globe: “Our job is to communicate the spiritual content of life as it is presented in the music. Nothing belongs to us; all you can do is pass it along.”

Now it has become brutally clear that “passing along” is exactly what she was up to. Earlier this month, a reader of the British music magazine Gramophone told one of its critics, Jed Distler, that something odd happened when he slid Ms. Hatto’s CD of Liszt’s “Transcendental Études” into his computer. His iTunes library, linked to a catalogue of about four million CDs, immediately identified it as a recording by the Hungarian pianist Laszlo Simon. Mr. Distler then listened to both recordings, and found them identical.

Since then, analysis by professional sound engineers and piano enthusiasts across the globe has pushed toward the same conclusion: the entire Joyce Hatto oeuvre recorded after 1989 appears to be stolen from the CDs of other pianists. It is a scandal unparalleled in the annals of classical music.

Ms. Hatto usually stole from younger artists who were not household names, although on the basis of the reviews she received, they richly deserved to be. Her recording of Chopin mazurkas seems to be by Eugen Indjic; the fiendishly difficult transcription of Chopin studies by Leopold Godowsky are actually recordings by Carlo Grante and Marc-André Hamelin; her Messiaen recordings were by Paul S. Kim; her version of the “Goldberg” Variations of Bach at least in part by Pi-Hsien Chen; the complete Ravel piano music by Roger Muraro. As reports come in, the rip-off list grows daily.

Her concerto recordings are even more brazen. The CD labels say they were made with the National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, always conducted by one René Köhler. Mr. Barrington-Coupe told a reporter that this was his name for a pick-up orchestra of Polish émigrés whom, he said, came out from London to record at a venue he now refuses to reveal. He declined to further discuss the orchestra on the grounds that they were employed “below union rates.” No one has yet been able to find a single reference to this René Köhler outside of the Joyce Hatto recordings, nor have any members of the orchestra come forward to confirm Mr. Barrington-Coupe’s story.

In a rapturous review of Ms. Hatto’s playing of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto, one critic said of the orchestra musicians: “It doesn’t matter who they are, their playing is tight and hot.” Actually, it did matter, since they have turned out to be the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, performing with the formidable Yefim Bronfman. Her version of the Brahms Second Concerto is Vladimir Ashkenazy’s, with the Vienna Philharmonic under Bernard Haitink laboring in the name of René Köhler and his non-union Poles.

Since the news broke, some have likened the exploits of Joyce Hatto to the notorious 20th-century Vermeer forger Han van Meegeren. But the differences are significant. Van Meegeren’s success was based as much on presentation — stories of old Italian families impoverished before World War II and needing quick cash — as on artistic plausibility. After he confessed, it was not hard for anyone to see that his dreadful fakes had more in common with each other than with any original Vermeers.

Joyce Hatto, however, was not a pianistic forger. In order to forge a piano performance, she would have had to record Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” herself and sell it to the world as a lost recording by, say, William Kapell. She was instead a plagiarist: she stole other pianists’ work and, with only a few electronic alterations, sold it as her own.

Although the critics who praised Van Meegerens’s “Vermeers” as masterpieces were in the end rightly humiliated, the same should not be true of those who praised Ms. Hatto’s recordings. They may have been fooled, but their opinions were not foolish, because the artists she ripped off played beautifully.

Yet the Joyce Hatto episode is a stern reminder of the importance of framing and background in criticism. Music isn’t just about sound; it is about achievement in a larger human sense. If you think an interpretation is by a 74-year-old pianist at the end of her life, it won’t sound quite the same to you as if you think it’s by a 24-year-old piano-competition winner who is just starting out. Beyond all the pretty notes, we want creative engagement and communication from music, we want music to be a bridge to another personality. Otherwise, we might as well feed Chopin scores into a computer.

This makes instrumental criticism a tricky business. I’m personally convinced that there is an authentic, objective maturity that I can hear in the later recordings of Rubinstein. This special quality of his is actually in the music, and is not just subjectively derived from seeing the wrinkles in the old man’s face. But the Joyce Hatto episode shows that our expectations, our knowledge of a back story, can subtly, or perhaps even crudely, affect our aesthetic response.

The greatest lesson for us all ought to be, however, that there are more fine young pianists out there than most of us realize. If it wasn’t Joyce Hatto, then who did perform those dazzlingly powerful Prokofiev sonatas? Having been so moved by hearing “her” Schubert on the radio, I’ve vowed to honor the real pianist by ordering the proper CD, as soon as I find out who it is. Backhanded credit to Joyce Hatto for having introduced us to some fine new talent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/26/op...5&ei=5087%0 A





EMI to Apple, Microsoft: Ditching DRM is Going to Cost You
Ken Fisher

Earlier this month it was widely reported that EMI was indeed ready to cast DRM into the dark abyss and earn the company the honorable status of being the first major music label to realize that DRM alienates honest customers. As it turns out, the company is indeed open to the possibility of ditching DRM, but they expect to be paid well for it, and the online music retailers aren't ready to meet their demands.

EMI is the only major record label to seriously consider abandoning the disaster that is DRM, but earlier reports that focused on the company's reformist attitude apparently missed the mark: EMI is willing to lose the DRM, but they demand a considerable advance payment to make it happen. According to Bloomberg, EMI has backed out of talks for now because no one will pay what they're asking. No dollar amounts are known at this time.

Online music giants Apple and Microsoft, along with smaller players including RealNetworks and Yahoo! Music, sought to indulge EMI's demands by waving leafy-green dollar bills at the company, but it wasn't what EMI asked for, and the company subsequently put the talks on hold. Warner's renewed interest in EMI is likely another contributing factor to EMI's own cold feet: Warner's leadership is devoted to DRM, making the DRM-free discussions all the more circumspect.
Down with DRM, up with prices?

While it has become a truism in tech enthusiast circles that 'no DRM equals more sales,' EMI and other record companies are pleased enough with the status quo that they expect any "risk" to be shouldered by retailers. If a "non-DRM tax" of sorts were applied to music, online retailers would have no choice but to increase the cost of downloadable music.

Some readers have indicated to us that they'd happily pay more for DRM-free downloadable music from an online retailer, yet it is unclear as to why DRM-free music should cost more. To return to a point made famous by Steve Jobs, the overwhelming majority of CDs sold today already come without DRM on the discs. Furthermore, pirated copies of music are readily available online. As a result, it's not very clear to us why online music that is sold without DRM would need to cost more, but given the razor-thin margins in that market, a "no DRM tax" is quite likely to be passed on directly to consumers.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070225-8916.html





Music Executives Judge Jobs, Lament Losses
Greg Sandoval

The discussions at a music conference here Tuesday started with an all-around bashing of Apple CEO Steve Jobs before moving to the plethora of issues plaguing the music industry.

Apple, digital rights management (DRM) and the public's willingness to pirate music were discussed, debated and lamented once more by attendees of the Digital Music Forum East conference.

"We're running out of time," Ted Cohen, managing director of music consulting firm TAG Strategic, told the roughly 200 attendees. "We need to get money flowing from consumers and get them used to paying for music again."

The call to arms by Cohen, who was moderating a panel discussion titled "The State of the Digital Union," comes as the music industry suffers through one of the worst slumps in its history.

CD sales fell 23 percent worldwide between 2000 and 2006. Legal sales of digital songs aren't making up the difference either. Last year saw a 131 percent jump in digital sales, but overall the industry still saw about a 4 percent decline in revenue.

That has the industry pointing fingers at a number of things they believe caused the decline.

At the opening of the conference, some of the panel members lashed out at Jobs. Members said Jobs' call three weeks ago for DRM-free music was "insincere" and a "red herring."

"Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats," Jobs wrote in a letter that rocked the music industry. "In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat."

Jobs' position was perceived by many in the music industry as a 180-degree shift in direction. The view expressed at the conference is that Apple has maintained a stranglehold on the digital music industry by locking up iTunes music with DRM.

Cohen told the audience that if Jobs was really sincere about doing away with DRM, he would soon release movies from Disney--the studio Jobs holds a major stake in--without any software protection. An Apple representative declined to comment on Tuesday on remarks made by the panel.

Panel member Mike Bebel, CEO of Ruckus music service, said: "Look, I don't think anybody is necessarily down on Apple. The problem is the proprietary implementation of technology...and it's causing everybody else who is participating in the marketplace--the other service providers, the labels, the users--a lot of pain. If they could simply open it up, everybody would love them."

The role of DRM
Panel members--who included Thomas Gewecke, Sony BMG senior vice president, and Gabriel Levy, general manager of RealNetworks Europe--were divided about what the music industry should do about DRM in general.

Most of the panel members, save for Greg Scholl, CEO of independent music label The Orchard, believe that some form of DRM is necessary.

Scholl said flatly that DRM doesn't work. "The idea that DRM gives us choice isn't right," he said.

"The economics of the business are over for good and aren't ever going to be the way they were before," Scholl said. This is a position that some in the music industry are starting to warm up to.

In January, EMI said it was reviewing a request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to allow reverse engineering of its digital rights management software. That EMI would even consider the proposal was seen in many circles as a step forward by the anti-DRM camp.

Gewecke also defended record labels against the criticism that the music industry has its head in the sand and just doesn't understand the Digital Age. He said that Sony BMG is working with technologists and retailers, and is constantly is looking for technological solutions to some of the industry's problems.

He also said that despite all the bad news, there's plenty for the sector to be encouraged about.

"We routinely talk to companies about what's different," Gewecke said. "We're constantly looking for where value is being created in a business model. We are being flexible. There's still an evolution that has to happen. I say it's an optimistic time considering there's more music being listened to now than ever before. There's more opportunities to monetize the music. We want to be out there looking for new ideas and companies."
http://news.com.com/Music+executives...3-6162729.html





How FairPlay Works: Apple's iTunes DRM Dilemma
Dan

Understanding how Apple’s FairPlay DRM works helps to answer a lot of questions: why it hasn’t been replaced with an open, interoperable DRM that anyone can use, why Apple isn’t broadly licensing FairPlay, and why the company hasn’t jumped to add DRM-free content from indie artists to iTunes.

The Quandary of Interoperable DRM
Why can't the music industry just adopt an open standard for DRM? The simple answer is that the basic concept of interoperable DRM makes no sense.

Since the point of DRM is to limit interoperability by using secrets, there is no open way to deliver a DRM system that does what it's supposed to do. If it were open, then it wouldn't be secret. When the secrets get out, it's now open, but it no longer works as DRM.

If that logic isn’t too difficult to fathom, here's another wrinkle to complicate things: the industry has already adopted interoperable frameworks for DRM. One is the MPEG-4 AAC standard, which is used by Apple in iTunes.

The earlier MP3 file format had no provision for DRM. However, the newer AAC format was designed with an open mechanism for companies to extend the format using their own DRM implementation. That's as open as DRM can possibly get: an agreed upon system for putting secrets in a specific place.

It's still a secret, but it's at least a known unknown. While anyone can access and play a standard AAC file, to use a DRM-protected AAC file they need to know the secret to decoding that particular file.

Advanced Audio Coding
AAC was developed by some of the same audio experts that created the original MP3 standard: the Fraunhofer Institute, Dolby, Sony, and AT&T. It was adopted as an open standard a decade ago this year, although it has been updated and expanded since.

Royalty payments are required for using the MP3 format for distributed content, but no licenses or fees are required to stream or distribute content in AAC, making it a more attractive format for streaming content, such as Internet radio. AAC also offers better compression, support for more channels of audio, and requires less processing power to decode than MP3.

By default, iTunes rips songs from CD using AAC. Most modern devices, from media players to mobile phones, can now play AAC sound files. In addition to iTunes, AAC has also been adopted by Sony for use on the PlayStation Portable and the PlayStation 3, and many other music players beyond the iPod.

It's also the format used by XM satellite radio and most digital satellite TV, part of the MPEG 4 standard and adopted by the 3GPP, the partnership creating media standards for 3G mobile GSM networks.

An Enigma, Wrapped in a Riddle, Shrouded in Mystery
The AAC songs purchased from the iTunes music store are protected with Apple’s FairPlay DRM. Without knowing the FairPlay secrets, other parties can't play them.

In order to create a system that could manage access to billions of songs sold to millions of users, yet keep things simple and flexible, FairPlay uses sets of keys that work together to make sure that the system, even if it is cracked, still maintains Apple's commitment to music labels by limiting any damages.

A look at how FairPlay works helps to understand why Apple doesn't want to share the system with third party download stores and player manufacturers, and what would be involved in mixing DRM-free content into the iTunes Store.

iTunes Accounts and Authorizations
Prior to buying content from the iTunes Store, a user has to create an account with Apple's servers and then authorize a PC or Mac running iTunes.

During authorization, iTunes creates a globally unique ID number for the computer it is running on, then sends it to Apple's servers, where it is assigned to the user's iTunes account. Five different machines can be authorized.

When a user buys a song from the iTunes Store, a user key is created for the purchased file. The AAC song itself is scrambled using a separate master key, which is then included into the protected AAC song file. The master key is locked using the user key, which is both held by iTunes and also sent to Apple’s servers.

Protected, purchased content is locked within iTunes; songs are not scrambled on Apple's server. This speeds and simplifies the transaction by delegating that work to iTunes on the local computer.

The result is an authorization system that does not require iTunes to verify each song with Apple as it plays. Instead, iTunes maintains a collection of user keys for all the purchased tracks in its library.

To play a protected AAC song, iTunes uses the matching user key to unlock the master key stored within the song file, when is then used to unscramble the song data.

Every time a new track is purchased, a new user key may be created; those keys are all encrypted and stored on the authorized iTunes computer, as well as being copied to Apple's servers.

When a new computer is authorized, it also generates a globally unique ID number for itself and sends it to Apple, which stores it as one of the five authorizations in the user account.

Apple's server sends the newly authorized machine the entire set of user keys for all the tracks purchased under the account, so all authorized systems will be able to play all purchased songs.

An iTunes computer can be authorized by multiple iTunes user accounts; for each account, iTunes maintains a set of user keys.

Exploiting Authorizations in FairPlay
When a computer is deauthorized, it deletes its local set of user keys and requests Apple to remove the authorization from its records.

If the keys are backed up, users can deauthorize their systems, then restore the keys and authorize a new set of computers, resulting in more than five machines that can all play the existing purchased music.

However, any new music purchased on the newly authorized systems will create new keys, and the previously de-authorized machines will not be able to play the new purchases because they can't obtain the new keys.

iTunes Keys on the iPod
Any number of iPods can be used with an authorized computer running iTunes. Once an iPod is connected, it downloads all the user keys from iTunes so it can unlock and play any protected tracks. If that copy of iTunes is authorized to play songs from multiple accounts, all of the accounts' user keys are uploaded.

The iPod makes no decisions about which tracks it can play, it simply is given user keys for all the songs it contains by iTunes.

If iTunes has songs in its library, but lacks the keys to play them--from another account, or on a deauthorized computer that has dumped its keys--it will simply not copy the protected songs to the iPod.

There is no way unplayable protected songs can be copied to the iPod without the user keys to play them, because iTunes will not let this happen. This again delegates the burden of DRM to iTunes, making the iPod simpler.

That also explains why users can't dock a single iPod with different users’ iTunes and suck up all their music; the only option available is to replace the music on the iPod with the music from the new iTunes library.

Since iTunes manages all the music on an iPod, there is no way to sync an iPod with multiple iTunes libraries; the iPod simply wasn’t given the intelligence to mange multiple libraries.

With iTunes 7 however, Apple added the ability for an iPod registered with an iTunes account to sync purchased songs with any of the five machines authorized by that account. Each copy of iTunes can update the user keys on the iPod and add new purchased tracks, ensuring that the iPod can play all the music copied to it.

Cracking FairPlay in iTunes
Because protected AAC songs are scrambled with an encrypted master key, it is practically impossible to unscramble protected song files.

Instead, crackers typically attempt to steal the user keys so they can simply decrypt songs in the same matter as iTunes does. This is like breaking into a bank vault by stealing the combination rather than trying to smash through the vault walls.

The user keys themselves are stored encrypted by iTunes, on the iPod, and on Apple's server. However, as the keys are used there are opportunities to either steal them or hijack the song data after it is unlocked. In either case, the unlocked song can be recovered and dumped into an unlocked file.

Jon Johansen, known as DVDJon for his involvement in cracking the Content Scrambling System DRM used on DVDs, discovered multiple methods for stripping the encryption from FairPlay protected files while working to build an iTunes client for Linux:

•The first, distributed as QTFairUse, grabbed song data after it was unlocked and uncompressed by iTunes, and then dumped the raw stream into a large container file, requiring further processing afterward.

•The second, written by Johansen for the open source VLC media player--and reused in PlayFair, Hymn, JHymn and other derivatives--intercepts unlocked but not yet uncompressed song files, creating a small, ready to play, unencrypted AAC file.

•The third, originally used in PyMusique, a Linux client for the iTunes Store, pretends to be iTunes. It requested songs from Apple's servers and then downloaded the purchased songs without locking them, as iTunes would.

•The fourth, used in FairKeys, also pretends to be iTunes; it requests a user's keys from Apple's servers and then uses these keys to unlock existing purchased songs.

All of these exploits only work on song of a specific, known user account. They will not work against protected tracks obtained from an unknown user. FairPlay encryption has never been cracked to the point where anyone can open up any encrypted content, in the way that the CSS DRM on DVDs has.

Because iTunes happily converts protected AAC songs into standard, unprotected AAIF CD files when burning a CD, there isn't much point for a user trying to attack the system or steal its keys. The main reason for trying to defeat FairPlay is to exploit the system for the benefit of third parties.

RealNetworks and the Rhapsody Attack
The most obvious example is Real's attempt to sell its own DRM music that could play on the iPod. Since Real's own Helix DRM does not work on the iPod, Real created software that decrypts its own DRM music, then encodes it in a FairPlay-like package that could play on the iPod with DRM intact.

Apple responded by issuing a bizarre statement saying it was "stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod," and then threatened to drop the DMCA bomb.

After that excessive posturing, Apple did what it should have done silently: it simply disabled Real tracks from playing. Since then, Apple and Real have squabbled back and forth, but since Apple controls the whole FairPlay system, it has had little problem in preventing Real's DRM from working on the iPod.

Jon Johansen, DRM Profiteer
After releasing a number of open source utilities to strip the DRM from FairPlay protected songs, Johansen decided that it would be more advantageous to get paid for his work.

He now works for DoubleTwist Ventures, selling third parties the ability to sell DRM music that can play on the iPod, just like Real had been trying to do itself.

Apple has worked tirelessly to stop attempts by Real, DoubleTwist, and Johansen's open source software to defeat its FairPlay system. Is the company worried about losing revenue to Real and other store competitors? Well, since Apple makes very little direct revenue from iTunes Store purchases, that's not likely.

After all, the company provides free podcast content in iTunes; if Apple were desperately trying to get revenue out of the iTunes Store, it would be foolish to promote free alternative content. Microsoft has made no effort to foster any support for podcasts on the Zune for example.

Why Apple Cares About DRM
The real impetus behind blocking FairPlay cracks is that Apple has to answer to the labels it licenses its music from; if Apple allows crackers to break the system and recover songs, it has to pay damages to the RIAA.

Apple obviously doesn't want to pay for damages, nor does it really want to continue developing an increasingly sophisticated DRM system under constant attack from smart crackers armed with financial incentives to exploit it.
The only reason Apple maintains FairPlay is to preserve access to licensed content from the music labels for the iPod and the Mac, QuickTime, and iTunes platforms.

Why Apple Doesn't Care About DRM
Foes of DRM have joined with foes of Apple to beat the company up over its efforts to keep FairPlay secure.

That's why Steve Jobs announced that the company would be happy to drop its DRM efforts, if only the labels would agree to license their music for sale in iTunes without DRM.

After years of negotiating with the RIAA, Jobs' probably knows that the labels are unlikely to give up their DRM demands. His comments really serve to point out that Apple benefits little from DRM, a rebuttal of the attacks from EU regulators that claim Apple’s FairPlay gives it a monopoly and restricts free trade.

As Jobs pointed out, the majority of music is being sold on CDs, and lacks any sort of DRM protection. As long as CDs are sold, it makes little sense for the labels to demand that iTunes sells music with unbreakable DRM, while EU regulators also chime in to demand that Apple share its DRM system with rivals. Two birds, one stone.

Jobs basically told the EU to bark up the record labels’ tree, which happens to be rooted in their own backyard.

If the labels allowed Apple to sell music without DRM, the iPod and iTunes Store could only become more popular. Even if download sales crashed because of rampant piracy, the only real loss would be the labels’, who take the vast majority of revenues from download sales. If sales went up, Apple would do even better.

There is really no way Apple would lose from abandoning DRM, unless doing so would cause the labels to pull out of the iTunes Store and try to resurrect Real's Helix or Microsoft's Janus as an alternative DRM system instead.

That’s the threat posed by allowing competitors to sell DRM that works on the iPod. As long as the playing field is level, Apple can compete. If Real were allowed to sell iPod-playable DRM, or if the iPod supported Microsoft’s Janus DRM, suddenly Apple would be competing against label-friendly DRM and lose any leverage.

Apple isn’t a fan of DRM because as long as it is accepted, the potential exists for the Mac, iPod, iTunes, and QuickTime to be shut out of the market by an industry ready to drink Bill Gates’ Palladium FlavorAid.

At the same time, Apple obviously can't just turn off its DRM and sell the labels’ songs unencumbered without their blessing. Is there any middle ground?

Apple’s Problem With DRM
A number of analysts have frothed all over themselves to call Jobs a lying hypocrite, saying that if Jobs didn't secretly love DRM, he'd offer songs in iTunes without DRM right now. There are labels and independents willing to sell their music without DRM.

Anti-DRM frothers have praised Yahoo! for making a spectacle of offering a few tracks from select artists as MP3s. Indeed, why can’t Apple be like Yahoo! and offer a handful of unprotected songs with limited appeal?

The reason Yahoo! is talking about MP3s is because its PlaysForSure business doesn’t get much attention. Apple doesn’t have the same problem, so it doesn’t need to make a meaningless show about offering a dozen MP3s.

The reason that Jobs isn't interested in DRM is not because of a desperate need for attention, nor a religious fervor for open sharing and caring, but rather because DRM only poses a risk and expense to Apple, with negligible benefit. Adding some DRM-free content to iTunes fails to solve the problem.

FairPlay’s Negligible Benefit to Apple
FairPlay may make PlaysForSure-based products from Creative and other Microsoft aligned rivals slightly less appealing because they "won't work with iTunes," but since those players work fine with CDs and have stores of their own, the real reason nobody's buying them is not because of the DRM in the iTunes Store.

PC enthusiasts like to complain that iTunes for Windows doesn’t even work very well, so when they complain that the majority of the market is hopelessly and inextricably tied to iTunes, well, it makes a for a good laugh.

Any slight competitive edge afforded to the iPod by Apple's FairPlay DRM is vastly overshadowed by the development expense and risk Apple incurs supporting a DRM system that only really benefits the RIAA.

So why isn't Apple jumping to adopt DRM-free indie content, to prove to its partner music labels that DRM is unnecessary to support sales?

John Gruber of the Daring Fireball seems to feel that the problem is one of labeling and consumer confusion.

As he points out, Apple already marks content in the iTunes Store as "clean" or "explicit," so why not sell music as "unencumbered" or "FairPlay," and let users decide?

Why iTunes Can't Mix DRM and non-DRM Content
The real answer seems to be simpler: the iTunes Store is designed to manage purchases along with their keys.

Offering DRM-free tracks next to protected songs in the iTunes Store would require significant changes to how iTunes works, and could inadvertently open up new exploits to the remaining DRM system, complicating the system further. The real rub is that it would do nothing to solve Apple’s real problem.

Apple wants things to be simpler and more efficient, not to offer DRM-free indie tracks next to DRM songs. Duh.

Apple isn't professing a lack of interest in DRM as a ruse to court the favor of DRM-haters, nor is it an ideological exercise in being free-content hippies. The company just doesn’t want to be burdened with maintaining a system that is complex, expensive to maintain and police, and which threatens to expose Apple to risk.

As long as the majority of music is being sold on wide-open, unprotected CDs, FairPlay DRM really serves little purpose beyond giving the RIAA members a false sense of security. If CDs were copy protected, DRM would make more sense as a tool in managing loss.

Making Things Worse
Mixing non-DRM music into iTunes does nothing to solve Apple's problem, it only complicates matters. Apple would have to update the iTunes software so it could download songs and skip encryption and key storage for non-DRM tracks.

Apple would also have to rework its servers to manage purchased tracks without dealing with keys. It would also have to update the iPod to manage purchased track syncing without trying to use keys. It would then need to spend time making sure all those changes didn’t introduce bugs or exploitable vulnerabilities in FairPlay.

That's a lot of engineering work to create a system that duplicates the effort of existing stores that already offer the minority of tracks available as MP3s. There simply isn't a large enough demand for the indie music available on MP3; that’s also why it is not popular enough to be carried by the big pop labels.

Whose Idea Was This?
If Apple were making huge profits from selling music, it might make sense. However, Apple sells music in the iTunes Store to make sure content is available for the iPod. Apple knows there’s no big profits in reselling music.

If online music stores were making money, the world’s number two store wouldn't be an outfit selling MP3s of artists that the big five labels won't even carry. Besides the iTunes Store, which is only earning a small profit, there are no significant, profitable online stores selling popular music.

That's simply a fact: selling other people's music is a low profit business for everyone apart from the big labels. Until they choose to sell their music without DRM, it makes no sense for Apple to outdo itself creating an even more complex system to sell unpopular music that is already available elsewhere.

The same logic also applies to the small number of pop bands ready to sell their music without DRM: compared to the volume of music sold through the big labels, they simply don’t matter.

What About Licensing FairPlay?
The record labels don't want to give up DRM. They also don't share Apple's problems with FairPlay--that it’s a big job to maintain and constantly under siege--because they are protected by their licensing contracts with Apple, which demand damages if FairPlay is ever cracked and not immediately repaired.

The labels’ only problem with DRM is that Apple's FairPlay is the only commercially successful version for downloads. For the labels, that's a liability, because it gives Apple a huge amount of leverage in its negotiations.

What’s involved in Apple licensing FairPlay? The next article takes a look.

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http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM...610E66A46.html





Forget DRM. It's the Music
Charles Cooper

Pushing my vacuum cleaner around the living room last week, I suddenly did a double take. Chockablock with records, cassettes and CDs, the wall unit across from me contained my 35-year-old history as a music consumer.

Truth be told, I did download a few digital-music files here and there during Napster's heyday in the late 1990s. (Personal note to the RIAA: They've all since been deleted. I swear on my pet rock.) But I paid for most of the rest of my collection, down to the last penny. I bet you can say the same for the majority of the music-listening public.

So it was with a mix of amusement and disappointment that I read about the recent get-together for music industry executives earlier in the week, where the folks invited as talking heads took turns bashing Apple CEO Steve Jobs and offering pale prescriptions about how to fix what ails their business.
Blaming peer-to-peer technology has become the convenient undertaking of our times.

I don't want to get into an argument about which generation created the best music. Personally, I'm partial to jazz and classical, though I can't deny that I dig a lot of hip-hop. But is it possible--or even likely--that the falloff in music sales has more to do more with the quality of contemporary music than with digital piracy? We obviously have an enormous appetite for schlock, but there are limits.

With all due respect to the high-quality bands working for a living, the studios have always chosen the easy out by shoving numbingly formulaic, bad music down the public's throat. For most of the post-war era, that was the way things worked. Then came the Internet, which ushered in the revenge of the music buyer.

The studios shouldn't be surprised at what happened. Throughout their history, they routinely targeted Top 40 titles at teenagers and early twentysomethings. The irony is that these folks make up the demographic most likely to pirate music.
The studios have always chosen the easy out by shoving numbingly formulaic, bad music down the public's throat.

Instead of threatening to sue their own (potential) customers, why don't they do more to monetize the growing demand for oldies and indie music? Fans clearly are willing to pay it. What's so hard about finding a way to make that work? With a little creativity, the studios could find ways to better promote musicians who cater to these--and other--demographic categories, in which digital piracy isn't the fashion. All the consumer wants in return is a fair value.

Instead, the industry's best and brightest continue to look elsewhere.

For instance, they insist on clinging to digital right management as if it were a lifeboat. Pardon the cliche, but that ship has sailed. The endless wrangling over Jobs' call to get rid of DRM is so irrelevant. Same goes for their tired refrains, blaming the likes of you and me for their plight.

To wit: Ted Cohen, who directs music consulting for Tag Strategic, says the solution is "to get money flowing from consumers and get them used to paying for music again."

Really? It's not as if we haven't been paying all along. With all the high-powered MBAs in their employ, it's hard to fathom why the music industry can't move beyond finger-pointing and develop a more creative approach. I can understand the angst expressed by Cohen and his music industry cohorts about the future, but squeezing music fans for a few more shekels isn't the answer.

These folks are still shell-shocked from the Napsterization of their business, which has suffered a 23 percent decline in worldwide sales the last six years. Blaming peer-to-peer technology has become the convenient undertaking of our times. But it's useful to recall that people didn't stop buying books or maps when the Xerox machine hit. Customers will pay for worthwhile products, even if they can get free lower-quality copies.

There's a better reason to explain what's gone wrong. It's the product, stupid.

Then again, maybe I'm simply showing my age.
http://news.com.com/Forget+DRM.+Its+...3-6163766.html





New "Watermark" System Scours the Net for Infringement, Notifies Owners
Ken Fisher

Watermarks date back at least to the 13th century, when paper manufacturers found a way to "mark" sheets with an unremovable, barely-visible signature to denote either the paper's origin, ownership, or both. Watermarks have come a long way, and companies such as Macrovision and Digimarc have made a king's ransom offering "digital watermarking technology" to today's purveyors of content.

These days, digital watermarking is now being tasked to make money on unauthorized file distribution. The proposition is simple: what if video and audio content flowed freely online, sans DRM, but owners were somehow compensated when files were played or accessed? That's the basic idea behind Digimarc's latest patent.

According a patent filing at the US Patent and Trademark Office, Digimarc's "Method for monitoring internet dissemination of image, video and/or audio files" is a monitoring service that scans the Internet, consuming content as it goes. The system downloads audio, video and images, and then scans them for watermarks. If it finds a watermark it recognizes, the system then contacts that mark's registered owner and informs them of the discovery.

Digimark announced their successful patent application this month, but the patent has been a long time coming. It was first filed in November of 1998, long before the YouTubes and MySpaces of the world existed. Now Digimarc is promoting the monitoring system as the cure to what ails these social networking sites. According to Bruce Davis, Digimarc chairman and CEO, the system could help build "viable business models" in an arena rife with "disruptive changes in entertainment distribution and consumption."

"Much of the repurposed content on YouTube, for example, contains copyrighted entertainment," Davis said in a statement. "If social networking sites implemented software to check each stream, they could identify copyrighted subject matter, create a report, negotiate compensation for the value chain and sell targeted advertising for related goods and services. There is no need to impede consumers. In fact, the specific identification of the content could guide provision of related goods, services and community designed to maximize the consumer’s enjoyment of the entertainment experience."

For the system to work, players at multiple levels would need to get involved. Broadcasters would need to add identifying watermarks to their broadcast, in cooperation with copyright holders, and both parties would need to register their watermarks with the system. Then, in the event that a user capped a broadcast and uploaded it online, the scanner system would eventually find it and report its location online. Yet the system is not designed to hop on P2P networks or private file sharing hubs, but instead crawls public web sites in search of watermarked material. As such, this "solution" is more geared towards sites like YouTube and less towards casual piracy, which rarely involves posting things to a web site.

Generally we've laughed off most watermarking solutions because they seemed like solutions in search of a problem. Now that Google has learned the hard way that content owners want to be paid when their content shows up on YouTube, we may see more of these "solutions" in the future.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070227-8937.html





'Harry Potter' Author Fights e-Book Fraud on eBay
Candace Lombardi

Children's author J.K. Rowling may or may not have garnered the equivalent of a temporary injunction against eBay over the sale of fraudulent Harry Potter e-books, depending on how you interpret court documents.

Rowling and Warner Bros., which produces the Harry Potter movies, filed a lawsuit in India in 2004 against several eBay sellers and eBay itself over unauthorized copies of e-books that appeared on Baazee.com (the former name and domain name for what is now eBay India).

On November 16, 2004, an initial request for an injunction was denied by Justice Mukul Mudgal of the High Court of Delhi after A.S. Chandhiok, eBay's senior counsel for the case, petitioned the court. Chandhiok argued that there was no need for an injunction because eBay was willing to remove the sellers in question, their advertisements for the e-books and the listings for the unauthorized e-books from its Baazee.com site.

On January 24, 2007, Judge A.K. Sikri from the High Court of Delhi signed an order that, depending on how his language is interpreted, would make the voluntary action on the part of eBay "absolute till the disposal of the suit." The next hearing, cross-examinations of the plaintiffs' witnesses in the case, is scheduled for May 28.

eBay confirmed that it is the "defendant No. 5" referred to in the documents. But eBay spokeswoman Nichola Sharpe said in an e-mail that the wording of the January order is not a direct injunction against eBay, but a confirmation that one is not needed because it willingly removed the fraudulent sellers, sellers' listings and sellers' advertisement from its India site.

Akash Chittranshi, the local plaintiffs' attorney for the case in India, as well Neil Blair, Rowling's agent at Christopher Little, say otherwise. They assert that upon further hearings on the details of the case, the court changed its mind as to whether an injunction was needed and that on January 24, 2007, issued an injunction against eBay, as well as the sellers.

"In 2004 the Judge only wanted to consider eBay's reply to the claims made before granting the Order...after which the matter was taken up by the Court in January 2007 when the injunction was made absolute against all the defendants in the matter till conclusion of the proceedings and was served upon them all," said Chittranshi in an e-mail.

"My clients expect eBay to take whatever steps it needs to take to comply with the court's order," he said.

Whether an injunction was served on eBay or just the sellers on eBay could have greater implications with regard to eBay's legal obligations to police counterfeiters.

LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton filed suit in France against eBay in September for not doing enough to stop the sale of counterfeit versions of products such as handbags over its site, according to a report by Business Week. Tiffany & Co. also filed suit in federal district court in New York in 2004. Both cases are still ongoing.

Rowling announced in early February that her final installment of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is scheduled for release on July 21 in the U.K. and U.S.

CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report.
http://news.com.com/Harry+Potter+aut...3-6163620.html





Surveillance Cameras Get Smarter
Stephen Manning

The next time you walk by a shop window, take a glance at your reflection. How much do you swing your arms? Is the weight of your bag causing you to hunch over? Do you still have a bit of that 1970s disco strut left?

Look around - You might not be the only one watching. The never-blinking surveillance cameras, rapidly becoming a part of daily life in public and even private places, may be sizing you up as well. And they may soon get a lot smarter.

Researchers and security companies are developing cameras that not only watch the world but also interpret what they see. Soon, some cameras may be able to find unattended bags at airports, guess your height or analyze the way you walk to see if you are hiding something.

Most of the cameras widely used today are used as forensic tools to identify crooks after-the-fact. (Think grainy video on local TV news of convenience store robberies gone wrong.) But the latest breed, known as "intelligent video," could transform cameras from passive observers to eyes with brains, able to detect suspicious behavior and potentially prevent crime before it occurs.

Surveillance cameras are common in many cities, monitoring tough street corners to deter crime, watching over sensitive government buildings and even catching speeders. Cameras are on public buses and in train stations, building lobbies, schools and stores. Most feed video to central control rooms, where they are monitored by security staff.

The innovations could mean fewer people would be needed to watch what they record, and make it easier to install more in public places and private homes.

"Law enforcement people in this country are realizing they can use video surveillance to be in a lot of places at one time," said Roy Bordes, who runs an Orlando, Fla.-based security consulting company. He also is a council vice president with ASIS International, a Washington-based organization for security officials.

The advancements have already been put to work. For example, cameras in Chicago and Washington can detect gunshots and alert police. Baltimore installed cameras that can play a recorded message and snap pictures of graffiti sprayers or illegal dumpers.

In the commercial market, the gaming industry uses camera systems that can detect facial features, according to Bordes. Casinos use their vast banks of security cameras to hunt cheating gamblers who have been flagged before.

In London, one of the largest users of surveillance, cameras provided key photos of the men who bombed the underground system in July 2005 and four more who failed in a second attempt just days later. But the cameras were only able to help with the investigation, not prevent the attacks.

Companies that make the latest cameras say the systems, if used broadly, could make video surveillance much more powerful. Cameras could monitor airports and ports, help secure homes and watch over vast borders to catch people crossing illegally.

Intelligent surveillance uses computer algorithms to interpret what a camera records. The system can be programmed to look for particular things, like an unattended bag or people walking somewhere they don't belong.

"If you think of the camera as your eye, we are using computer programs as your brain," said Patty Gillespie, branch chief for image processing at the Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Md. Today, the military funds much of the smart-surveillance research.

At the University of Maryland, engineering professor Rama Chellappa and a team of graduate students have worked on systems that can identify a person's unique gait or analyze the way someone walks to determine if they are a threat.

A camera trained to look for people on a watch list, for example, could combine their unique walk with facial-recognition tools to make an identification. A person carrying a heavy load under a jacket would walk differently than someone unencumbered - which could help identify a person hiding a weapon. The system could even estimate someone's height.

With two cameras and a laptop computer set up in a conference room, Chellappa and a team of graduate students recently demonstrated how intelligent surveillance works.

A student walked into the middle of the room, dropped a laptop case, then walked away. On the laptop screen, a green box popped up around him as he moved into view, then a second focused on the case when it was dropped. After a few seconds, the box around the case went red, signaling an alert.

In another video, a car pulled into a parking lot and the driver got out, a box springing up around him. It moved with the driver as he went from car to car, looking in the windows instead of heading into the building.

In both cases, the camera knew what was normal - the layout of the room with the suspicious bag and the location of the office door and parking spots in the parking lot. Alerts were triggered when the unknown bag was added and when the driver didn't go directly into the building after parking his car.

Similar technology is currently in use by Marines in Iraq and by the subway system in Barcelona, according to ObjectVideo, a Reston, Va., firm that makes surveillance software.

ObjectVideo uses a "tripwire system" that allows users to set up virtual perimeters that are monitored by the cameras. If someone crosses that perimeter, the system picks it up, sends out an alert, and security staff can determine if there is a threat.

Company spokesman Edward Troha predicts the technology, currently designed primarily to protect borders, ports and other infrastructure, could be adapted to help prevent retail theft or guard private homes.

The Jacksonville Port Authority uses ObjectVideo software as part of its security measures to watch the perimeter of the Florida port that handles 8.7 million tons of cargo and thousands of cruise ship passengers each year. The surveillance system sends real-time video from anywhere at the port of possible intruders to patrol cars.

Still, industry officials say the technology needs to improve before it can be widely used. There are liability issues, such as if someone is wrongly tagged as a threat at an airport and misses a flight, said Bordes. Troha warns humans are still essential to intelligent video, to tell, for example, if a person in a restricted area is a danger or just lost.

And the cameras can only see so much - they can't stop some threats, like a bomber with explosives in a backpack. They can't see what you are wearing under your jacket - yet.

"That is an eventual goal, but we're not there yet," said Chellappa.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/2007...ce-cameras.htm





Justice Department Takes Aim at Image-Sharing Sites
Declan McCullagh

The Bush administration has accelerated its Internet surveillance push by proposing that Web sites must keep records of who uploads photographs or videos in case police determine the content is illegal and choose to investigate, CNET News.com has learned.

That proposal surfaced Wednesday in a private meeting during which U.S. Department of Justice officials, including Assistant Attorney General Rachel Brand, tried to convince industry representatives such as AOL and Comcast that data retention would be valuable in investigating terrorism, child pornography and other crimes. The discussions were described to News.com by several people who attended the meeting.

A second purpose of the meeting in Washington, D.C., according to the sources, was to ask Internet service providers how much it would cost to record details on their subscribers for two years. At the very least, the companies would be required to keep logs for police of which customer is assigned a specific Internet address.

Only universities and libraries would be excluded, one participant said. "There's a PR concern with including the libraries, so we're not going to include them," the participant quoted the Justice Department as saying. "We know we're going to get a pushback, so we're not going to do that."

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been lobbying Congress for mandatory data retention, calling it a "national problem that requires federal legislation." Gonzales has convened earlier private meetings to pressure industry representatives. And last month, Republicans introduced a mandatory data retention bill in the U.S. House of Representatives that would let the attorney general dictate what must be stored and for how long.

Supporters of the data retention proposal say it's necessary to help track criminals if police don't immediately discover illegal activity, such as child abuse. Industry representatives respond by saying major Internet providers have a strong track record of responding to subpoenas from law enforcement.

Wednesday's meeting represents the latest effort by the Bush administration to increase the ability of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to monitor Internet users. Since 2001, the administration has repeatedly pushed for more surveillance capabilities in the form of the Patriot Act and a follow-up proposal that--if it had been enacted--would have given the FBI online eavesdropping powers without a court order for up to 48 hours.

Often invoking terrorism and child pornography as justifications, the administration has argued that Internet providers must install backdoors for surveillance and has called for routers to be redesigned for easier eavesdropping. President Bush's electronic surveillance program, which was recently modified, has drawn an avalanche of lawsuits.

ISP snooping timeline

In events first reported by CNET News.com, Bush administration officials have said Internet providers should keep track of what Americans are doing online. Here's the timeline:

June 2005: Justice Department officials quietly propose data retention rules.

December 2005: European Parliament votes for data retention of up to two years.

April 14, 2006: Data retention proposals surface in Colorado and the U.S. Congress.

April 20, 2006: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says data retention "must be addressed."

April 28, 2006: Democrat proposes data retention amendment, followed by a Republican.

May 26, 2006: Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller pressure Internet and telecom companies.

September 26, 2006: Politicians suggest that Web hosts and registrars might have to comply. Search engines are also mentioned.

January 18, 2007: Gonzales says administration will ask Congress for new laws.

February 6, 2007: Republicans introduce mandatory data retention "Safety Act."

The Justice Department's request for information about compliance costs echoes a decade-ago debate over wiretapping digital telephones, which led to the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. To reduce opposition by telephone companies, Congress set aside $500 million for reimbursement and the legislation easily cleared both chambers by voice votes.

Once Internet providers come up with specific figures, privacy advocates worry, Congress will offer to write a generous check to cover all compliance costs and the process will repeat itself.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday. The U.S. Internet Service Provider Association, which has been critical of data retention proposals before, declined to comment.

Because the Justice Department did not circulate a written proposal at the private meeting, it's difficult to gauge the effects on Web sites that would be forced to record information on image uploads for two years. Meeting participants said that Justice officials (including Brand, the assistant attorney general for legal policy and a former White House attorney) did not answer questions about anonymously posted content and whether text comments on a blog would qualify for retention.

In practice, some Web businesses already make it a practice to store personal information forever. Google stores search terms indefinitely, for instance, while AOL says it deletes them after 30 days.

David Weekly, a San Francisco-area entrepreneur who founded popular Wiki-creation site PBWiki.com, said the Justice Department's proposal would be routinely evaded by people who use overseas sites to upload images. (PBWiki, which recently raised $2 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures, lets people embed photographs on pages they create with a point-and-click editor.)

If the proposal were to become law, PBWiki would already be in compliance, Weekly said. "We already keep all that data pretty much indefinitely because it's invaluable for us to mine and figure out how people use services," he said. "How do they use services now versus a year ago? Was February a bad month for traffic?...We already have the data there. It's already searchable. It's already indexed."
http://news.com.com/Justice+Departme...3-6163679.html





Homeland Security Offers Details on Real ID
Declan McCullagh

Hundreds of millions of Americans will have until 2013 to be outfitted with new digital ID cards, the Bush administration said on Thursday in a long-awaited announcement that reveals details of how the new identification plan will work.

The announcement by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security offers a five-year extension to the deadline for states to issue the ID cards, and proposes creating the equivalent of a national database that would include details on all 240 million licensed drivers.

According to the draft regulations (PDF), which were required by Congress in the 2005 Real ID Act and are unlikely to assuage privacy and cost concerns raised by state legislatures:

• The Real ID cards must include all drivers' home addresses and other personal information printed on the front and in a two-dimensional barcode on the back. The barcode will not be encrypted because of "operational complexity," which means that businesses like bars and banks that require ID would be capable of scanning and recording customers' home addresses.

• A radio frequency identification (RFID) tag is under consideration. Homeland Security is asking for input on how the licenses could incorporate "RFID-enabled vicinity chip technology, in addition to" the two-dimensional barcode requirement.

• States must submit a plan of how they'll comply with the Real ID Act by October 7, 2007. If they don't, their residents will not be able to use IDs to board planes or enter federal buildings starting on May 11, 2008.

• Homeland Security is considering standardizing a "unique design or color for Real ID licenses," which would effectively create a uniform national ID card.

Thursday's draft regulations arrive amid a groundswell of opposition to the Real ID Act from privacy groups, libertarians and state officials. On Wednesday, the National Governors Association endorsed a bill by Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, that would reduce Homeland Security's power to order states to comply with the law.

The draft rules, which are not final and will be subject to a public comment period, also include a more detailed estimate of how much it will cost to comply. The National Conference of State Legislatures and other state groups estimated last year that states will have to spend more than $11 billion. But Homeland Security says the total cost--including the cost to individuals--will be $23.1 billion over a 10-year period.

Another section of the 162-page regulations says that states have until December 31, 2009 to certify that they're on the path toward fully complying with the Real ID Act.

Push for repeal continues

Opponents of the Real ID Act, who have been advising states to publicly oppose the system, said that the draft rules are insufficiently privacy-protective and reiterated their call for a repeal of the entire law.

"We still need dramatic legislative action from Congress," said Tim Sparapani, legislative counsel for the ACLU, which runs the RealNightmare.org site. "We've got to wipe out the underlying act."

Sparapani and his allies of more than 50 groups, including the National Organization for Women and United Automobile Workers, sent a letter on Monday endorsing a bill to repeal the Real ID Act. The letter says it was a "poorly-conceived law that can never be made to work in any fair or reasonable manner."

The ACLU believes Collins' bill is only a half-hearted step that doesn't go as far as it should. Other proposals include one from Rep. Thomas Allen, a Maine Democrat, that would rewrite the Real ID Act, insert privacy safeguards, and hand $2.4 billion to states over an eight-year period. On Wednesday, Sen. John Sununu, a New Hampshire Republican, and Daniel Akaka, a Hawaii Democrat, reintroduced a broader bill to repeal portions of the existing law.

Some state governments, such as Maine, already have come out against the Real ID Act--a move that effectively dares the federal government to continue even when some states refuse to participate. At least eight states (including Arizona, Georgia, and Vermont) have had anti-Real ID bills approved by one or both chambers of the legislature.

For their part, proponents of the Real ID Act say it's designed to implement proposals suggested by the 9/11 Commission, which noted that some of the hijackers on September 11, 2001 had fraudulently obtained state driver's licenses. But not all did: at least one hijacker simply showed his foreign passport and walked onto the airplane that day.

The Bush administration and many congressional Republicans have defended the Real ID Act as a way to stop future terrorist attacks and deter illegal immigrants. "Raising the security standards on driver's licenses establishes another layer of protection to prevent terrorists from obtaining and using fake documents to plan or carry out an attack," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in a statement. "These standards correct glaring vulnerabilities exploited by some of the 9/11 hijackers who used fraudulently obtained drivers licenses to board the airplanes in their attack against America."

A 23-page report released this week by Janice Kephart, a former lawyer with the 9/11 Commission, defended the Real ID Act by calling it a "significant step in enhancing our national and economic security and our public safety." Kephart is now president of 9/11 Security Solutions.

States bowing out of Real ID requirements is "not the way to secure America," the report says. "Embedding identity security into state-issued (ID card) systems will take significant planning to fulfill the requirements of Real ID and significant financial resources for the 'brick and mortar' start-up costs. Congress must step up to the plate and make securing of identity documents the national priority that our citizens deserve."

The Real ID Act passed Congress as part of an $82 billion military spending bill that also included funds for tsunami relief. No up-or-down vote on solely the Real ID Act took place in the entire Congress, though the House of Representatives did approve the rules by a 261-161 vote.
http://news.com.com/Homeland+Securit...3-6163509.html





News Not Fit to Print?
Katrina vanden Heuvel

Last weekend, I wrote here about the history of US government attempts to suppress information. My case study was the Kennedy Administration's successful effort to delay publication of the New York Times' story about CIA planning for the Bay of Pigs disaster. (Since then, several generations of Times editors have publicly regretted that decision. "Our biggest failures," Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote last year, "have generally been when we failed to dig deep enough or to report fully enough. After the Times played down its advance knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy reportedly said he wished we had published what we knew and perhaps prevented a fiasco.")

Yet in these last two days, the Times has acceded to Bush Administration requests to withhold information from the American public.

In yesterday's edition, the paper of record reports that it was "asked to withhold any mention of [Cheney's] trip until he had left Pakistan." What conceivable national security purpose was served by swearing the press pool to secrecy about this trip? And doesn't accepting these ground rules play into the hands of a hyper-secretive Vice-President whose signature contribution to our security has been misleading us into a disastrous war and carpet bombing our constitutional system? The secrecy does expose a national security problem: the "war" on terror is a rank failure and Pakistan is not the stable country that White House talking points try to sell us.

Here's another instance of White House pressure. A front page article in Monday's New York Times --providing conditional evidence of Iranian weapons in Iraq--acknowledges that the paper acceded to Bush Administration requests that it withhold specific details about the weapons. As the Times reported: "In the course of the detailed briefing on the Hilla discovery, Maj. Marty Weber, an explosives expert, said that most of the E.F.P.s in Iraq use C-4 plastic explosive manufactured in Iran. At the request of the Bush Administration, The Times is withholding some specific details about the weapons to protect intelligence sources and methods."

Hours after the story appeared, Congressman Dennis Kucinich issued a statement -- "The New York Times Plays into Bush Administration's Hand." "The White House," Kucinich says, "is up to its old scams again: Providing information by anonymous sources ..... This time, however, they added another trick to their bag: providing the information and prohibiting the Times from publishing it.....The New York Times should not print unsourced, unattributed assertions and then voluntarily hide the details from the American public..." The paper, he went on to argue, "is playing into the Administration's hand and providing further justification for an attack on Iran."
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?bid=7&pid=170263





Police Blotter: Wife e-Surveilled in Divorce Case
Declan McCullagh

"Police blotter" is a weekly News.com report on the intersection of technology and the law.

What: Husband uses keystroke logger to spy on wife's suspected relationship with another woman, who sues to prevent the records from being used in the divorce case.

When: U.S. District Judge Thomas Rose in the southern district of Ohio rules on February 14.

Outcome: Rose denies request for injunction preventing the electronic documents from being introduced as evidence in the divorce case.

What happened, according to court documents:
Once upon a time, tempestuous divorces might have included one spouse snooping through the other's private correspondence or eavesdropping on private conversations taking place in another room.

That kind of snooping was, for the most part, entirely legal. But when the same kind of snooping happens in electronic form, it can be a federal crime. (Last year, Police Blotter covered the case of the Garfinkel divorce. Another case involving spyware arose a year earlier.)

That may or may not be the case here. Jeffery Havlicek filed for a divorce from his wife Amy Havlicek in Ohio's Greene County Common Pleas Court. Amy had been chatting through e-mail and instant messages with a woman named Christina Potter. Jeffery suspected that Potter and his wife, Amy, were romantically involved in a lesbian "relationship of some sort," his attorney would later say in a legal brief.

Around that time, Jeffery installed some sort of monitoring software on the family computer--a Dell Precision 220 that was located in the guest room, was used by multiple family members including teenage children, and did not have a password on it most of the time. (There is disagreement about why the software was installed; Jeffery says it was in part because of his daughter's increased use of the Internet.)

Jeffery has admitted this much. In a sworn affidavit (PDF), he said that he installed an unnamed monitoring utility in September 2005, three months before his wife moved out of their home. The affidavit said the utility "collects keyboard typing, screen shots, and requested access to Web sites...The keyboard typing utility logs the time and sequence of keystrokes...The screen shot logging feature is similar to hitting the 'print screen' button on most keyboards. It saves an image of what appears on the monitor."

He also admitted to downloading e-mail from his wife Amy's Web-based e-mail account, but claimed it was authorized because she had chosen to save her username and password through the browser's "remember me" feature.

In total, Jeffery has acknowledged compiling 80 keyboard and Web site log files in HTML format, more than 2,000 individual screen snapshots in JPEG format, six video tapes, six audio tapes, and numerous other files including "24 electronic documents from diaries, love letters, etc."

He planned to use that vast array of electronic evidence as ammunition to win his divorce case. Eventually his lawyer showed some of the correspondence between Amy Havlicek and Christina Potter to Amy's own attorney. In an affidavit (PDF), Potter claims that the correspondence was also shown to neighbors and a court-appointed custody evaluator "to harass, annoy, and inflict emotional injury on me."

Potter, his wife's alleged paramour, responded by filing a federal lawsuit designed to shut Jeffery up. She asked for an injunction barring any "disclosure" or "dissemination" of the electronic documents, including preventing them from being used in the divorce case taking place in state court.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a federal law, was violated during the recording, Potter claimed. ECPA (18 USC Section 2511) bans anyone from disclosing "to any other person the contents of any wire, oral, or electronic communication" that was obtained illegally.

Potter lost. U.S. District Judge Thomas Rose said that ECPA does not permit courts to disallow such evidence, saying that appeals courts "have concluded that Congress intentionally omitted illegally intercepted electronic communications from the category of cases in which the remedy of suppression is available." He also rejected her request for a broader injunction, saying it would violate Jeffery's freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment.

Rose did say, however, that "disclosure of the information in state court by Jeffery Havlicek or his attorney" might be "actionable civilly or criminally." He suggested that the "remember me" option probably didn't give Jeffery an implied right to view his wife's e-mail messages. And he ordered Jeffery to provide Potter, his wife's alleged paramour, with the complete set of electronic evidence that he had planned to use in the divorce case.

Excerpt from Rose's opinion:
Because the suppression provision excludes illegally intercepted wire and oral communications from the courtroom, but does not mention electronic communications, several courts, including the Sixth Circuit, have concluded that Congress intentionally omitted illegally intercepted electronic communications from the category of cases in which the remedy of suppression is available.

With this distinction in mind, the court finds that it does not have the authority to forbid the disclosure of the allegedly intercepted communications to the state official determining custody of the Havliceks' children or any other state court proceeding. This is not to imply, however, that disclosure of the information in state court by Jeffery Havlicek or his attorney might not be actionable civilly or criminally under 18 USC (Section) 2511. In any event, the court's inability to enjoin the presentation of this evidence in state court does not resolve the question of whether the injunction on disclosing this information in other context should issue. Therefore, the court will proceed to consider the appropriateness of relief in this case, beginning with plaintiff's chances of succeeding on the merits.

Defendant's response to the motion for preliminary injunction claims that the keystroke recording and screen shot recording software do not record communications contemporaneously with the transmission of the communications. Contemporaneousness was an element originally introduced to 18 USC (Section) 2511 when the law applied only to wire and oral communications...

We conclude that the term "electronic communication" includes transient electronic storage that is intrinsic to the communication process for such communications. That conclusion is consistent with our precedent...

Moreover, the court views the screen shot software as distinct from the keystroke software in regards to the interstate commerce requirement. In contrast to the keystrokes, which, when recorded, have not traveled in interstate commerce, the incoming emails subjected to the screen shot software have traveled in interstate commerce. Additionally, there is no evidence before the court to allow any conclusion that the technical aspects of the instant case result in Potter's claim being defeated by a lack of contemporaneousness, even if the court were to find this element necessary...

Defendant raises another hurdle to success on the merits, however, by referring to the case of United States v. Ropp, which focuses on the requirement in 18 USC (Section) 2510(12) that the interception be of an interstate or foreign communication or be of a communication affecting interstate commerce. Ropp notes that keystroke software records the entirely internal transmission from the keyboard to the CPU, and records all keystrokes, whether they initiate signals destined to travel in interstate commerce or not. The decision, however, seems to read the statute as requiring the communication to be traveling in interstate commerce, rather than merely "affecting" interstate commerce. It seems to this court that the keystrokes that send a message off into interstate commerce "affect" interstate commerce...

Because the ECPA does not provide for the relief of suppression of illegally intercepted electronic communications sought to be used as evidence in a court case, and because a balancing of plaintiff's impending irreparable harms and the public interest in the requested injunction against plaintiff's likelihood of success on the merits of her claims weighs in favor of not granting the requested injunction, plaintiff's motion for preliminary injunction, Doc. 16, is denied.
http://news.com.com/Police+blotter+W...3-6163368.html





People With WiFi Spend More Time Online
Nate Anderson

Internet users with a home wireless connection check news and e-mail more than users with just a wired broadband connection, according to new research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. A survey of 798 Internet users found that 72 percent of wireless users check e-mail at least once a day, while only 63 percent of wired broadband users do so. The same pattern held true for reading news online, suggesting that wireless access offers "relentless connectivity" that might change a person's online behavior.

Even among Internet users, though, wireless use remains fairly low. The survey found that 34 percent of current Internet users have made a WiFi connection at some point in the past, and only 19 percent of Internet users have WiFi at home.

Who are these people? They tend to be younger than the general Internet-using population. Wireless users are currently concentrated between 18 and 49 years of age, while the general Internet population is concentrated between 30 and 64. Wireless users also tend to be male; men accounted for 56 percent of all wireless users, but only 46 percent of all Internet users.

The survey also found, to no one's surprise, that cellphones and laptops are the preferred ways of connecting wirelessly to the Internet among young people. While 40 percent of Internet users under 30 have laptops (the vast majority of which have WiFi) and 40 percent have Internet-ready cell phones, only 17 percent own a PDA with wireless capabilities.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070225-8918.html





Your Wi-Fi Can Tell People a Lot About You
Joris Evers

Simply booting up a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop can tell people sniffing wireless network traffic a lot about your computer--and about you.

Soon after a computer powers up, it starts looking for wireless networks and network services. Even if the wireless hardware is then shut-off, a snoop may already have caught interesting data. Much more information can be plucked out of the air if the computer is connected to an access point, in particular an access point without security.

"You're leaking all kinds of information that an attacker can use," David Maynor, chief technology officer at Errata Security, said Thursday in a presentation at the Black Hat DC event here. "If the government was taking this information from you, people would be up in arms. Yet you're leaking this voluntarily using your laptop at the airport."

There are many tools that let anyone listen in on wireless network traffic. These tools can capture information such as usernames and passwords for e-mail accounts and instant message tools as well as data entered into unsecured Web sites. At the annual Defcon hacker gathering, a "wall of sheep" always lists captured login credentials.

Errata Security has developed another network sniffer that looks for traffic using 25 protocols, including those for the popular instant message clients as well as DHCP, SMNP, DNS and HTTP. This means the sniffer will capture requests for network addresses, network management tools, Web sites queries, Web traffic and more.

"You don't realize how much you're making public, so I wrote a tool that tells you," said Robert Graham, Errata Security's chief executive. The tool will soon be released publicly on the Black Hat Web site. Anyone with a wireless card will be able to run it, Graham said. Errata Security also plans to release the source code on its Web site.

The Errata Security sniffer, dubbed Ferret, packs more punch than other network sniffers already available, such as Ethereal and Kismet, because it looks at so many different protocols, Graham said. Some at Black Hat called it "a network sniffer on steroids."

Snoops can use the sniffer tools to see all kinds of data from wireless-equipped computers, regardless of the operating system.

For example, as a Windows computer starts up it, it will emit the list of wireless networks the PC has connected to in the past, unless the user manually removed those entries from the preferred networks list in Windows. "The list can be used to determine where the laptop has been used," Graham said.

Apple Mac OS X computers will share information such as the version of the operating system through the Bonjour feature, Graham said. Bonjour is designed to let users create networks of nearby computers and devices.

Additionally, computers shortly after startup typically broadcasts the previous Internet Protocol address and details on networked drives or devices such as printers that it tries to connect to, Graham said.

"These are all bits of otherwise friendly information," Graham said. But in the hands of the wrong person, they could help attack the computer owner or network. Furthermore, the information could be useful for intelligence organizations, he said.

And that's just the data snoops can sniff out of the air when a laptop is starting up. If the computer is then connected to a wireless network, particularly the unsecured type at hotels, airports and coffee shops, much more can be gleaned. Hackers have also cracked basic Wi-Fi security, so secured networks can't provide a security guarantee.

In general, experts advise against using wireless networks to connect to sensitive Web sites such as online banking. However, it is risky to use any online service that requires a password. The Errata Security team sniffed one reporter's e-mail username and password at Black Hat and displayed it during a presentation.

People who have the option of using a Virtual Private Network when connected to a wireless network should use it to establish a more secure connection, experts suggest. Also, on home routers WPA, or Wi-Fi Protected Access, offers improved security over the cracked WEP, or Wired Equivalent Privacy.

"The best solution is to be aware of the danger," Graham said. "Everyone doesn't need to work from a coffee shop."
http://news.com.com/Your+Wi-Fi+can+t...3-6163666.html





Sony Chops Price on Blu-Ray Player
Nate Anderson

Sony has announced its plans to slash the price of high definition, according the Associated Press. At a New York press conference, Sony talked up its forthcoming BDP-S300 Blu-ray player. The big selling point? Its $599 price.

The move is clearly a reaction to the lower cost of HD DVD players, which are already available for less than the new Blu-ray machine. Still, $599 is far more palatable than the $1,000 price tag of Sony's current flagship player, the BDP-S1.

In addition to the lower price, the unit comes in a smaller form factor, and it can play CDs. It's also the same price as Sony's PS3, which includes a Blu-ray drive and can be had for $499 or $599. For customers who have no interest in shooting aliens, though, Blu-ray just got far more affordable.

Perhaps the HD DVD/Blu-ray format war will have one positive result after all—more quickly driving down the cost of next-generation players in general. The HD DVD consortium has been stressing the format's lower manufacturing costs for some time, and there's a good chance that a manufacturer will attempt to undercut Sony even further before the BDP-S300 launches this summer.

Whatever format wins the battle for your wallet, this is good news for next-gen movie buffs.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070226-8925.html





The Puzzling Story of Why Microsoft Prevents Some Vista Upgrades
AP

After years of delays and billions in development and marketing efforts, it would seem that Microsoft Corp. would want anyone who possibly can to buy its new Windows Vista operating system. Yet Microsoft is making it hard for Mac owners and other potentially influential customers to adopt the software.

Microsoft says the blockade is necessary for security reasons. But that is disputed. The circumstances might simply reflect a business decision Microsoft doesn't want to explain.

The situation involves a technology known as virtualization.

Essentially, it lets one computer mimic multiple machines, even ones with different operating systems. It does this by running multiple applications at the same time, but in separate realms of the computer.

Virtualization has long been used in corporate data centers as a way to increase server efficiency or to test programs in a walled-off portion of a machine.

The technology also has been available for home users, but often at the expense of the computer's performance.

But now that Macintosh computers from Apple Inc. use Intel Corp. chips, just like Windows-based PCs, virtualization programs let Mac users easily switch back and forth between Apple's Mac OS X operating system and Windows. That could appeal to Mac enthusiasts who want access to programs that only work on Windows, including some games.

Consequently, the launch of Vista seemed to be a good opportunity for Parallels Inc., a subsidiary of SWsoft Inc. that sells virtualization products.

Unlike Apple's free Boot Camp programme that lets Windows run on a Mac, Parallels' $80 virtualization product for Macs does not require users to have just one operating system running at a time. Parallels runs Windows in a, well, window on the Mac desktop.

Parallels also sells a $50 version for Windows PCs - which would let people run both Vista and its predecessor, Windows XP, so they can keep programme that aren't yet Vista-compatible.

The price of the virtualization software does not include a copy of Windows. And to get that copy, buyers have to agree to Vista's licensing rules - a legally binding document. Lurking in that 14-page agreement is a ban on using the least expensive versions of Vista - the $199 Home Basic edition and the $239 Home Premium edition - in virtualization engines.

Instead, people wanting to put Vista in a virtualized programme have to buy the $299 Business version or the $399 Ultimate package.

Macs account for less than 5 percent of personal computers in the U.S., but Ben Rudolph, Parallels' marketing manager, says they nonetheless represent a market he's surprised to see Microsoft present with roadblocks.

``Vista is undeniably cool and undeniably important,'' Rudolph said. ``This is really an opportunity to reach people who normally wouldn't be using Windows, whether it would be Mac users or Linux users.''

The least-expensive versions of Vista actually would work in virtualization programme. But Microsoft wants to restrict it because of new security holes spawned by the technology, according to Scott Woodgate, a director in Microsoft's Vista team.

Lately Intel and rival chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. have built virtualization-friendly hooks directly into microprocessors. The goal was to make virtualization work better, but Woodgate argues that the move created a security flaw _ essentially that malicious programme can run undetected alongside an operating system.

Indeed, last year a security analyst showed how AMD chips with virtualization support made computers vulnerable to such an attack. (That researcher, Joanna Rutkowska, said she presumed it would work on Intel-based systems as well, but she didn't have time to try).

AMD challenged the feasibility of such an attack and said virtualization did not decrease computer security. Intel concurred; spokesman Bill Calder called Rutkowska's claims ``overstated.''

But Microsoft took notice. Woodgate said Microsoft considered banning virtualizing Vista entirely, on all versions. But ultimately, he said, his team decided that the most technically savvy users, or people in companies with tech support, probably could handle Vista in virtualization programme, while home users should be steered away.

The prohibition applies not only to third-party virtualization products like Parallels, but also to Microsoft's own Virtual PC software, which is available as a free download. (It does not apply to Apple's Boot Camp product, which is not virtualization software.)

``We're balancing security and customer choice,'' Woodgate said.

However, there doesn't seem to be much evidence that technically savvy people wouldn't want the less expensive versions of Vista. Rudolph at Parallels said virtualization customers often just need the most basic version of Windows possible to let some favored application run.

Plus, even though Microsoft will let virtualization products run the higher-priced versions of Vista, some powerful features in those editions are also forbidden in virtualization. The license agreement prohibits virtualization programme from using Vista's BitLocker data-encryption service or from playing music, video or other content wrapped in Microsoft's copyright-protection technology. Microsoft says virtualization's security holes make those features dangerous as well.

Rudolph believes many users will be so confused that they avoid Vista altogether.

Of course, that's Microsoft's decision to make, and it seems logical if you buy the security argument.

But not everyone agrees a virtualization lockdown is justified. In fact, virtualization has been considered a security enhancement. If applications run within their own walls, malicious code can be confined to that zone and not infect the rest of the computer.

``Nobody's complained to us that there's security issues with our products,'' said Srinivas Krishnamurti, director of product management at EMC Corp. unit VMWare, which plans to release a product for Macs this summer.

In a statement e-mailed after the interview, Krishnamurti added: ``The Vista licensing limitation is akin to the industry saying, `Hey, consumer, when you connect your PC to the Internet, there is a chance you can download adware, spyware or malware so we don't think you should connect to the Internet using a browser.' The world would be a very different place if the industry made that decision in the '90s.''

Rudolph acknowledged that ``there's always going to be a security risk in any piece of software.'' But he added that if Parallels ``was really not that secure, we would have heard about it substantially.''

And even Rutkowska, who argued that her virtualization attack last year _ which she called ``Blue Pill'' _ proved a glaring weakness in the technology, said Microsoft's decision regarding Vista would make no difference. ``I really don't see how Microsoft could use this mechanism to prevent Blue Pill from loading,'' she said.

Apple would not take a position: Spokeswoman Lynn Fox said Mac users who want to run Windows in virtualized programme should ask the virtualization vendors about security.

Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, said virtualization may indeed introduce new complexities and security challenges. ``But they're not greater than the technical issues surrounding some of the other features (Microsoft) decided to include,'' he said. ``I don't buy that virtualization is dangerous.''

Cherry believes what's really going on is that Microsoft wanted to create more differences between the multiple editions of Vista, presumably giving people more reason to buy the most expensive versions.

But Microsoft's Woodgate insisted that this was not a marketing decision.

``We are absolutely working with our partners to resolve this security issue,'' he said.
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus...0702270940.htm





U.S. DOT Bans Windows Vista, Explorer 7, and Office 2007

Tens of thousands of federal workers are prohibited from upgrading to the latest versions, according to memos seen by InformationWeek.
Paul McDougall

Citing concerns over cost and compatibility, the top technology official at the federal Department of Transportation has placed a moratorium on all in-house computer upgrades to Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system, as well as Internet Explorer 7 and Office 2007, according to a memo obtained Friday by InformationWeek.

In a memo to his staff, the DOT's CIO Daniel Mintz says he has placed "an indefinite moratorium" on the upgrades as "there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade."

Among the concerns cited by Mintz are compatibility with software applications currently in use at the department, the cost of an upgrade, and DOT's move to a new headquarters in Washington later this year. "Microsoft Vista, Office 2007, and Internet Explorer [7] may be acquired for testing purposes only, though only on approval by the DOT chief information officer," Mintz writes.

The memo is dated Jan. 19. In an interview Friday, DOT chief technology officer Tim Schmidt confirmed that the ban is still in effect. "We're analyzing different client software options and also integration issues," says Schmidt. Among the options the Transportation Department is weighing as a possible alternative or complement to Windows Vista are Novell's Suse Linux and, for a limited group of users, Apple's Macintosh hardware and software, he says.

Schmidt says the Transportation Department hasn't ruled out upgrading its computers to Windows Vista if all of its concerns about the new operating system -- the business version of which was launched late last year -- can be resolved. "We have more confidence in Microsoft than we would have 10 years ago," says Schmidt. "But it always makes sense to look at the security implications, the value back to the customer, and those kind of issues."

The DOT's ban on Vista, Internet Explorer 7, and Office 2007 applies to 15,000 computer users at DOT proper who are currently running the Windows XP Professional operating system. The memo indicates that a similar ban is in effect at the Federal Aviation Administration, which has 45,000 desktop users.

Compatibility with existing applications appears to be the Transportation Department's major concern. According to a separate memo, a number of key software applications and utilities in use in various branches of the department aren't Vista compatible. Among them are Aspen 2.8.1, ISS 2.11, ProVu 3.1.1, and Capri 6.5, according to a memo issued by staffers at the DOT's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

Any prolonged ban on new Microsoft technologies by the federal government could have a significant impact on the software maker's bottom line, as Microsoft sells millions of dollars in software to the feds annually.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=197700789





Windows Genuine Advantage's Newest Setting: "You Might Be a Pirate"
Ken Fisher

Windows Genuine Advantage is an anti-piracy tool loathed by many, tolerated by some, and even appreciated by others. How you feel about it may depend in part on whether or not you've been caught in its snares: the "authentic software" validation tool is known to have falsely identified thousands of "pirated" Vista installs.

As Microsoft steps up its war against piracy, the company has decided to slightly nuance Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA). Rather than identify users as either in the clear or not, the company has added a third classification for users who set off some, but not all of WGA's undisclosed piracy-detection functionality. Users will now find that Windows XP installs are labeled as genuine, non-genuine or "not sure."

While Microsoft has not responded to requests for comment, it's quite obvious what is going on here: Microsoft has added "not sure" as a way of cutting down on the number of false positives associated with WGA. As many as one in five PCs were failing WGA checks, but this new setting should both reduce this and give Microsoft the chance to investigate further the kinds of things that are landing folks in the "not sure" category.

Although the Windows Genuine Advantage Notification tool is "optional," Microsoft is in the process of pushing out the tool as a "critical" and thus automatic update (affectionately dubbed WGA Notifications 1.7 KB905474). The update has been known about for over a month, but users are just now seeing it show up as a critical update to Windows XP.

WGA has stirred controversy in recent months as the software was revealed to phone home to Microsoft, raising no shortage of privacy concerns. As I have argued, the move from a one-time authenticity check to constant monitoring (which is what WGA represents) is driven by Microsoft's modular OS plans, exemplified by Anytime Upgrade on Windows Vista. Post-installation exploits will become increasingly common as Microsoft and other companies turn to selling modular add-ons online, and Microsoft apparently feels as though WGA is one of the best ways to secure that business. Last week Steve Ballmer made it quite clear that Microsoft expects WGA to generate more sales for Microsoft, especially in developing nations.

WGA isn't likely to ever make many friends, but the company knows that it will earn fewer enemies if the tool doesn't accuse the wrong people of piracy. In the meantime, if you received a "not sure" rating from WGA, I'd love to hear from you.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070226-8922.html





Sledgehammered

Vista Activation Cracked by Brute Force
Charlie Demerjian

IT LOOKS LIKE Microsoft's unhackable OS activation malware has been hacked.

There is an active thread at the Keznews forums (account needed), and a summary on its main page about the crack.

It is a simple brute force attack, dumb as a rock that just tries keys. If it gets one, you manually have to check it and try activation. Is is ugly, takes hours, is far from point and click, but it is said to work. I don't have any Vista installs because of the anti-user licensing so I have not tested it personally.

The method of attack has got to be quite troubling for MS on many grounds. The crack is a glorified guesser, and with the speed of modern PCs and the number of outstanding keys, the 25-digit serials are within range. The biggest problem for MS? If this gets widespread, and I hope it will, people will start activating legit keys that are owned by other people

It won't take long for boxes bought at retail to be activated before they are bought, and the people who plunk down money for the mal^h^h^hsoftware for real get 'you are a filthy pirate' messages. Won't that be a laugh riot at the MS phone banks in Bangalore.

So, what do you do? There is really no differentiating between a legit copy with a manually typed in wrong key and a hack attempt. Sure MS can throttle this by limiting key attempts to one a minute or so on new software, but the older variants are already burnt to disk. The cat is out of the bag.

The code is floating, the method is known, and there is nothing MS can do at this point other than suck it down and prepare for the problems this causes. To make matters worse, MS will have to decide if it is worth it to allow people to take back legit keys that have been hijacked, or tell customers to go away, we have your money already, read your license agreement and get bent, we owe you nothing.

This is ugly for MS, and if it allows you to take back your legit keys, how long do you think it will take before people catch on to the fact that you can call in and hijack already purchased keys once you generate one that someone else activated?

No, this is a mess, and the problem is the very malware activation and anti-consumer licensing that MS built into Vista. Then again, it is kind of hard to feel sorry for them the way they screw their paying customers. We'll give it three days before there is a slick GUI version with all the bells and whistles.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37941





Maybe not

Brute Force Keygen a Phoney

fact is the brute force keygen is a joke, i never intended for it to work. I have never gotten it to work, everyone should stop using it!

everyone who said they got a key a probably lying or mistaken!

i suggest everyone uses the 120 day 3x rearm method.
http://keznews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2782





Falling Into the Vista Trap
Tim Weber

Microsoft promises to wow people who are upgrading from Windows XP to its new operating system, but with the joys of Windows Vista comes plenty of pain.

I know, I know, I'm a sucker for technology.

The shiny new Vista disk was sitting on my desk, and I just couldn't resist giving it a try.

Even though I fell for Vista's promise - more security and certainly much more fun than tired old Windows XP - I tried not to be stupid.

I knew my four-year-old PC might have trouble coping with Vista, not least because of its wheezing graphics card.

When I bought it, my Dell Dimension 8200 was fairly state-of-the-art (a few stats for the experts: Pentium 4 processor running at 2GHz, 384MB of RAM, a 64MB graphics card, and a Creative SB Live audio card).

Since then I had added memory (to 768MB), a second hard disk, extra USB ports and a Wifi card.

A blunt message

But this was probably not enough, so I downloaded Microsoft's Vista Upgrade Advisor.

Microsoft's message was blunt but useful: Yes, my computer could happily run Vista, but it would need a few crutches and new body parts. Step-by-step instructions told me how to avoid problems:

· Get a new graphics card with at least 128MB memory;
· download new software for the Linksys Wifi network card, to sync my PDA with Outlook and to make good use of my multimedia keyboard;
· download the latest version of my Kaspersky Antivirus software.
· With a few minor exceptions, the rest of my set-up was given a clean bill of health, including my webcam and printer.

It turned out to be tricky to find the right graphics card. Most shopping websites were useless in providing information on Vista compatibility.

At least a dozen times, I discovered in the small print on manufacturers' websites that there were no Vista drivers for that particular piece of hardware. I finally settled on a Nvidia GeForce 6200 with 256MB memory.

Now here is the dirty little secret of all the expensive PC helpers out there. Upgrading hardware is really easy.

As long as you make sure the new hardware fits into the slots that come with your computer and does not overburden its power supply, it's usually just a case of carefully lifting out the old and slotting in the new piece of kit.

Do check the manual, though, to see whether you need to install the driver software for your new equipment before or after putting it in.

If you are still worried, go online. You can find plenty of videos and manuals providing step-by-step guides on how to do it.

Then I followed the task list drawn up by Microsoft. The Upgrade Advisor even provided direct links for downloading new drivers and other software.

Taking one more precaution, I made a full back-up of all my documents to an external hard drive.

A good start

Finally I was ready to go.

I had read somewhere that a Vista installation would take 20 minutes. Not if you upgrade from XP.

After three-and-a-half hours of churning, at long last the Vista logo filled my screen.

It was the beginning of a day of anguish.

At first sight, everything had worked fine: All user accounts, complete with documents and software, were present and accounted for.

Vista looked slick. Its user interface was clear and set-up seemingly easy. The XP gobbledegook had disappeared from dialogue boxes.

Installing the new wifi driver and anti-virus software was a cinch.

Software worked straight away - whether it was Microsoft Office, Firefox or my very old copy of Photoshop Elements.

Feel the pain

But soon the problems began to mount:

· Where was the internet? I could see my router, but nothing beyond - even after a full day of tinkering with various network wizards. My BBC laptop proved that this was not a problem with my router or ISP.
· Why did my Philips webcam refuse to work? The Upgrade Advisor had explicitly said it would.
· What hardware was responsible for the three driver errors flagged up by Vista? One seemed to be the sound card - oh yes, why did I have no sound? But which mysterious "PCI input device" was lacking a driver? And what was the "unknown device" flagged up by Vista?
· Why did I get a "disk is full" error message every time I tried to install my keyboard's new Intellitype software? Why did Vista refuse to uninstall the XP-version of Intellitype?
· I knew that Apple had failed to make iTunes Vista-ready, so I didn't even try.
· But why did Microsoft's successor of Activesync, called Windows Mobile Device Center, refuse to hook up Outlook to my trusty old Pocket PC?

Fiddling around with Vista's settings, I soon found myself deep below its slick interface.

And the deeper I got, the more the look and jargon of dialogue boxes took me back into the world of XP.

It took me one day to get online. The detail is tedious and highly technical: reinstalling drivers and router firmware didn't work, but after many trial and error tweaks to Vista's TCP/IP settings, I had internet access.

Once online, Creative's website told me that my sound card was a write-off. No Vista support would be forthcoming.

Grudgingly I ordered a new one. After installing it, the hardware error messages disappeared; the three different errors flagged up by Vista were all triggered by my old sound card.

I also realised that my computer really needed more memory. Annoyingly, my Dell uses an unusual flavour of memory, called RDRAM, which is rare nowadays.

Two lost and one successful eBay auctions later, I installed one extra gigabyte of memory.

So far the upgrade to Vista had cost me about £130.

Not cheap, but probably fair value, as it will have extended the life-cycle of my PC by about two years.

Bearing a grudge against Philips, Dell and Microsoft

But a few problems refuse to go away and are both expensive and aggravating.

My Philips ToUCam still doesn't work, and plenty of angry forum debates are testament to the distinct lack of Vista support provided by Philips.

Even worse, Vista still refuses to talk to my Dell Axim X5 Pocket PC, which is a mere three-and-a-half years old.

I like my PDA. It saved my bacon when my laptop died on a reporting trip. Over five days, I filed 14 stories using the Axim and its foldable keyboard.

I don't want to buy a new one - at least, not until I find an affordable smart phone that is both slim and has a slide-out keyboard (what's on the market right now is too bulky for my taste).

But my Axim uses the Pocket PC 2002 operating system, and Microsoft has decided that Vista will work only with Pocket PC 2003 and higher.

A top Microsoft executive, who does not want to be quoted by name, tells me that "the refresh rate on [mobile] devices is typically 18 months, from our research - hence the view that most Pocket PC 2002 devices would no longer be in use.

"Our view (which may be incorrect) is that those people using the latest Desktop [operating system] would potentially also be using later devices as well."

Well, I have a surprise for Microsoft: They are wrong, not least judging from the discussions on various forums I've been to while hunting for a solution.

While Microsoft leaves me out in the cold, Dell is no help either.

Delving into a Dell support forum, I realise the company practises tough love. Very briefly, a couple of years ago, Dell offered X5 customers an upgrade to Pocket PC 2003. Not anymore.

So I can either throw away my Axim and invest another £200 or £300 (for a PDA and webcam), or roll back to XP and wave Vista goodbye.

To Vista or not to Vista

I find myself caught in the Vista trap. Quite apart from the pain of having to reinstall XP, I do like Vista.

It's slick, it's fast, it is very user-friendly. I like its applications - for example, Windows Picture Gallery, which could become a serious competitor to my favourite image browser, Faststone.

However, there are still plenty of wrinkles. The Windows "sidebar" may look nicer than Google desktop, but it crashes regularly and infuriates me because its "gadgets" can not be customised.

I've had two Vista crashes so far - not a blue but a black screen - and that really shouldn't happen. I can't even remember my last XP crash.

And everywhere I look, there are blogs and forums full of people who have problems with software drivers and suffer the poor customer support of the hundreds of hardware and software vendors that make up the Windows ecosystem.

So would I do it again?

The answer is no. Do what I originally had planned to do. Wait for half a year until the driver issues are settled and then buy a new PC.

Once that's in place, you can upgrade and tinker with your old machine, to give to your parents or children.

You will probably enjoy Vista, but there's little reason to do it the hard way.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ss/6407419.stm





Bill Gates Makes the (Bogus) Case for More (Cheap) Foreign Labor
Jon Stokes

In an op-ed in yesterday's Washington Post, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates argues yet again in favor of raising the cap on H1-B foreign worker visas from its present number of 65,000. Gates' basic argument boils down to this: fewer students at American universities are opting for computer science degrees, which means that we need to raise the H1-B cap so that the software industry can import more foreign labor to fill those jobs that Americans—for whatever reason—don't seem to be equipped for.

Of course, the fact that the importation of cheap foreign labor into the software industry job market hampers American programmers' ability to compete and leads to depressed wages overall is never mentioned by Gates as a major reason why a computer science degree just isn't that attractive any more to Americans. Who wants to spend four or five years getting a CS degree, only to be priced out of the job market by foreign programmers who are willing to work for less in exchange for a green card?

But Bill Gates would vigorously dispute my assertion that Microsoft pays its H1-B workers any less than they pay American workers to do the same programming job, and indeed a big part of Gates' case for raising the cap is built on his claim that H1-B workers are paid the same salaries as American workers. Unfortunately for Gates, that particular claim, which he himself has made in the Washington Post before, is falsifiable.
Gates' H1-B flap

In March of last year, Washington Post columnist David Broder interviewed Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Microsoft's efforts to persuade Congress to raise the cap on the number of H1-B visas that the government grants to foreign workers. Like many large companies in the tech industry, Microsoft would like to be able to hire more workers through the H1-B program, ostensibly because of a grave shortage of technical talent here at home.

In the interview, Broder reports that Gates made the following claim about the salaries of Microsoft's H1-B hires: "As Gates said, these [H1-B workers] are highly paid, highly qualified individuals. Salaries for these jobs at Microsoft start at about $100,000 a year."

This indirect quote, and the column from which it's drawn, went largely unnoticed until earlier this month, when a cross-post about the column appeared at the popular progressive blogs MyDD and DailyKos before being picked up in this blog entry at Networkworld. The post, written by Robert Oak, the anti-outsourcing activist behind NoSlaves.com, attempted to refute Gates' apparent claim that H1-B salaries at Microsoft really do start at "about $100,000 a year." The argument that Oak went on to make is that Gates flat-out lied to Broder about the salaries that Microsoft pays H1-B workers in an attempt to cover up the alleged fact that Microsoft is backing higher H1-B caps solely so that the company can import more cheap foreign labor. There is no shortage of American computer talent, argue Oak and other outsourcing and H1-B opponents—American companies like Intel and Microsoft just want to hire foreigners because they can pay them less.

Let's take a closer look at what Oak argued, and at Microsoft's response to Ars regarding questions about Gates' comments.
A closer look at Microsoft's H1-B salaries

Oak began his refutation of Gates' claim with the assumption that Microsoft's foreign worker hiring practices are just like those in the rest of the software industry, i.e., a tech company makes a non-citizen a job offer under the H1-B program, and the company also promises to sponsor the new hire for a green card if he or she takes the job. The H1-B program, then, is pitched to foreign workers as a path to a much-coveted green card, and to the permanent-resident status that a green card confers.

Whenever Microsoft submits a green card application on behalf of a worker, the company is required by law to publish that worker's salary. So a colleague of Oak's, Dr. Ron Hira, did an analysis of Microsoft's published green card data in Excel. Hira found that only 3.3 percent of the company's green card applicants were being paid $100,000/year or higher at the time their applications were submitted to the program. The rest earned below $100,000/year, with a substantial number of them earning significantly below that number.

Oaks contends that this analysis of Microsoft's green card data proves that Gates lied to Broder about the company's H1-B salaries, in order to perpetuate the myth of an American tech talent shortage and to mask the real reason why Microsoft wants to be able to hire more H1-Bs.

So did Gates lie to Broder?

For Gates to be a liar, then two conditions would have to be met.
Broder's indirect quote would have to faithfully reflect a claim made by Gates. In other words, we have to believe that David Broder didn't somehow make up this salary claim and then attribute it to Gates.

Oaks' initial assumption that most or all of Microsoft's green card applicants are currently working for the company through the H1-B program would have to be correct.

Regarding condition #1 above, I asked Microsoft if the company would vouch for the accuracy of Broder's characterization of Gates' comments. A Microsoft spokesperson replied with the following statement:

The need to attract and retain talent is vital. The positions we seek to fill are for those with the highest levels of skill available and for which there are no U.S. candidates. Competition for that talent is global and intense. As we highlighted in a letter to Congress last year, "The H-1B program has strong wage requirements and other protections for U.S. workers. Moreover, Microsoft compensates its H-1B workers at the same high levels as U.S. workers, and at levels substantially above the government set "prevailing wages" for each occupation (although some critics have confused the 'prevailing wage' level for what Microsoft actually pays its employees), for example:

Software Development Engineers averaged over $109,000 in total direct compensation in 2005.
Program Managers averaged over $110,000 in total direct compensation in 2005."

This isn't exactly an iron-clad statement from Microsoft that the company pays its H1-B hires $100,000/year or more, but it does reiterate the company's standard claim that it pays its H1-B workers more than the prevailing wage for each position. I'll take it as a de facto confirmation of the substance of Gates' reported remarks, even if it doesn't explicitly affirm their specifics.

I also asked Microsoft about point #2. Specifically, I asked what percentage of Microsoft's green card applicants were enrolled in the H1-B program at the time that they applied for a green card. The company got back to me with the following response:

We hire H1-Bs with a view to making them permanent U.S. residents (i.e., getting them green cards) but Federal Government processing delays and the overall lack of green card availability for high skilled workers means that we're only able to turn-over about 20% of our H1B hires into green card holders annually—this backlog has created opportunities for foreign competition to lure talent away from Microsoft and other U.S. companies because our immigration system makes it impossible for these high skilled individuals and their families to stay in the U.S..

This statement makes it pretty clear that Microsoft has a typical view of the H1-B as a path to a green card, which means the vast majority (if not all) of Microsoft's green card applicants—only 3.3 percent of whom make more than $100,000/year—are working for the company on an H1-B visa. So it looks like Gates "misspoke himself," to use a favorite Beltway euphemism, when he told Broder that Microsoft's H1-B workers start at $100,000 a year.

Postscript: Criticisms of the H1-B program

One major criticism of the H1-B program has been that it's a source of cheap labor for the tech industry. Some companies would rather hire an H1-B worker who'll work for a lower salary in exchange for the promise of a green card than hire an American worker at the prevailing wage. My own past reporting on the impact of the H1-B program put the problem as follows:

Importing foreign labor via the H1B visa program is a fantastic way to boost American competitiveness if there's a real shortage of expertise in the American labor market. If there isn't a real shortage, then it's strictly a way for American companies to bring in cheap labor at lower wages by dangling the promise of a green card in front of potential hires. This kind of activity exerts a downward pressure on wages across the entire field and ultimately prices American labor out of the market.

In the rest of that post, I develop the above argument in more detail, and provide an example of what I'm talking about. So if you want to learn more, then that post is a good place to start.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070226-8924.html





Ripping MP3s from Last.fm with Linux, Streamripper and LastFMProxy

The tools

- Linux (I'm using Ubuntu)
- Streamripper (I'm using version 1.61.27)
- LastFMProxy
- Last.fm account


Installing LastFMProxy..

wget http://vidar.gimp.org/wp-content/upl...oxy-1.1.tar.gz

tar -xzf lastfmproxy-1.1.tar.gz

cd lastfmproxy-1.1/

vi config.py

# Stick your last.fm username and password between the quotes below.
username = "yourusername"
password = "yourpassword"


Now save the file and exit the editor (vi/nano/mcedit/etc)


Installing Streamripper

Download it.

tar -xzvf streamripper-1.61.27.tar.gz
cd streamripper-1.61.27
./configure
make
sudo make install
In Ubuntu or Debian just do apt-get install streamripper


Running LastFMProxy

First make sure you read the README
cd lastfmproxy-1.1
./main.py &
Note: if you have just created a username on Last.fm you need to "tell" it what kind of music you like, so after running LastFMProxy point your browser to one of these addresses:
http://localhost:1881/lastfm://globaltags/rock
http://localhost:1881/lastfm://globaltags/dance
http://localhost:1881/lastfm://artis...similarartists
http://localhost:1881/lastfm://artis...similarartists
There is more information about this in the README


Running Streamripper and ripping MP3s

streamripper http://localhost:1881/lastfm.mp3
Connecting...
stream: last.fm
server name: last.fm Streaming Server
bitrate: 0
meta interval: 16000

[buffering - | ] - Wait...
[ripping... ] The Rapture - Infatuation [ 4.59M]
[ripping... ] Scissor Sisters - Take Your Mama Out [ 4.15M]



The end!

Posted by Alex

http://linuxmonitor.blogspot.com/200...ith-linux.html





Fair Use Amendment Introduced to the DMCA
Thomas Mennecke

There's been a big chill in the United States when it comes to technological progress that skirts the boundaries of copyright law. P2P and file-sharing developers know this all too well, as such development with the exception of BitTorrent, has come to a virtual standstill. Thanks to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), the right of consumers to make backups of rightfully owned entertainment has become stifled.

For example, if a consumer wishes to make a backup copy of a legally purchased DVD, such a venture would not be possible (well, legally) because the DMCA prohibits individuals from circumventing copyright protection devices. 321 Studios, the company that created DVD X Copy, learned this lesson the hard way, and was sued into oblivion. Their software utilized a decrypting engine called DeCSS to make perfect backup copies, which is a classic example of breeching the DMCA.

More recently, there's been a steaming fair rights debate with the arrival of high definition video. Currently, there's virtually no way to make backup copies of one's high definition video collection, unless a - gasp - VCR is used. This lack of fair use support was one of the motivating factors behind the circumvention of AACS, the device used to "protect" high definition movies. In reaction to this stringent copy protection, Muslix64, the individual who pioneered the defeat of high definition protection, told Slyck.com, "I'm just an upset customer. My efforts can be called "fair use enforcement!"

There are also a few pioneers in the United States House of Representatives attempting to amend the DMCA in favor of the consumer. The Bill, named Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship Act of 2007 (H.R. 1201), or Fair Use Act for short, was introduced today by U.S. Representatives Rick Boucher (D-VA) and John Doolittle (R-CA.)

"The fair use doctrine is threatened today as never before. Historically, the nation's copyright laws have reflected a carefully calibrated balanced between the rights of copyright owners and the rights of the users of copyrighted material. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act dramatically tilted the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection at the expense of the public's right to fair use," Boucher said. "The FAIR USE Act will assure that consumers who purchase digital media can enjoy a broad range of uses of the media for their own convenience in a way which does not infringe the copyright in the work," Boucher explained.

The Bill details several rights it hopes to give back to consumers, educators, and software/hardware designers. In an effort to pacify concerns of the entertainment industry (and to give the Bill a snowball's chance), the Bill does not contain "fair use defense to the act of circumvention." In other words, it doesn't establish a blanket safe harbor provision to all acts of circumvention.

Instead, the fair use provisions are narrow. The Bill seeks to amend the DMCA's circumvention provision by adding the following paragraph:

"(F) The prohibition contained in subparagraph (A)shall not apply to a person by reason of that person’s engaging in a non-infringing use of any of the 6 classes of copyrighted works set forth in the determination of the 2 Librarian of Congress in Docket No. RM 2005-11, as published as a final rule by the Copyright Office, Library of 4 Congress, effective November 27, 2006..."

If you read paragraph "A" of section 12-01 of the DMCA, it's fairly clear that no circumvention means no circumvention. "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

This Bill would effectively negate the burden of paragraph "A" if the circumvention is within the scope of the six classes of copyrighted works referenced above. No mention of DVD or optical disc circumvention and very narrow – and antiquated – in scope. The only circumvention provisions related to DVDs allow for “…consumers to circumvent a lock on a DVD or other audiovisual work in order to skip past commercials at the beginning of it or to bypass personally objectionable content…”, but not backup the work.

The reason for the such narrow provisions stem from previous attempts by Representatives Boucher and Doolittle to introduce much more aggressive fair use amendments. However because these previous attempts had a much wider circumvention scope, they were swiftly curtailed by the entertainment industry.

More relevantly the Bill will also empower librarians to 'ensure that they can circumvent a digital lock to preserve or secure a copy of a work or replace a copy that is damaged, deteriorating, lost, or stolen."

Perhaps most welcome to software and hardware designers is the provision to codify the Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc. ruling, otherwise known as the Betamax decision. “Subsection (b) would immunize these and other hardware companies, as well as entrepreneurs, from copyright infringement liability based on the design, manufacture or distribution of hardware devices (or components of those devices ) that are capable of a substantial, commercially significant non-infringing use.”

Additionally, the Bill seeks to limit "availability of statutory damages against individuals and firms who may be found to have engaged in contributory infringement, inducement of infringement, vicarious liability or other indirect infringement." In other words, the next time someone considers the creation of a new P2P network, they won’t have to worry so much about a potential $30 million judgment.

The Bill is a positive step forward, yet even if it were passed, it would not help those looking to make backup copies of their DVD collection. Like the DRM issue currently facing the authorized online music stores, this attempt is a small step forward in the effort to unlock the grip of the entertainment industry. Also read the section by section breakdown of this Bill here.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1420





RIAA Slams FAIR USE Act
Eric Bangeman

Although the FAIR USE Act introduced yesterday by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) will have little more than a symbolic effect on the DMCA, that isn't stopping the Recording Industry Association of America from unloading on the bill with both barrels. In a statement released earlier today by the RIAA, the group said that Rep. Boucher's bill would have the effect of kneecapping the DMCA.

"The DMCA has enabled consumers to enjoy creative works through popular new technologies," the RIAA said in a statement. "The DVD, iPod and the iTunes Music Store can all be traced to the DMCA. Online games, on-demand movies, e-books, online libraries, and many other services are coming to market because of a secure environment rooted in the DMCA's protections."

Well, the DVD precedes the DMCA by a couple of years, but the "secure environment" bit is accurate. The DMCA limits the availability of tools that can be used to circumvent DRM, so content creators are free to impose draconian limitations on how their customers can view and listen to content. Without the protection of the DMCA, Big Content would be forced to make its offerings more palatable to consumers.

Once again, the RIAA finds itself at odds with the Consumer Electronics Association. CEA President and Gary Shapiro is welcoming the FAIR USE Act, saying that it "will reinforce the historical fair use protections of constitutionally-mandated copyright law that are reflected in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)."

Shapiro and the CEA would get a significant boost from the bill, should it pass, due to provisions that would significantly shield electronics manufacturers from liability for infringement. The Act would make it difficult for rights-holders to receive statutory damages in most cases of infringement.

That sets off alarm bells for the RIAA. The FAIR USE Act "would repeal the DMCA and legalize hacking," says the RIAA. "It would reverse the Supreme Court's decision in Grokster and allow electronics companies to induce others to break the law for their own profit."

The RIAA also takes issue with the bill's narrow exemptions to the DMCA. "Proponents of H.R. 1201 claim it legalizes hacking only for 'noninfringing' uses," reads the RIAA's statement. "But as Congress recognized when it enacted the DMCA, the difference between hacking done for noninfringing purposes and hacking done to steal is impossible to determine and enforce. That's why Congress created a review process that takes place every three years to determine whether fair uses of copyrighted works are in peril—and why Congress gave the power to the Librarian of Congress to take away DMCA protections in cases where fair use is in danger."

Earlier today, we wondered if the copyright industry would "decide that Boucher's legislation is a way to buy off one of their most powerful adversaries on copyright issues, helping to undermine support for broader copyright reform efforts." It looks like we have our answer. Even though the FAIR USE Act doesn't do nearly enough to fix the very real problems with the DMCA or to shore up fair use, the content creation industry looks set to fight the legislation tooth and nail.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070228-8948.html





Japanese Trojan Attacks P2P File-Sharing Pirates
Stan Beer

In a case of a malware purveyor attacking pirate file-sharers, security vendor Sophos has warned of a bizarre Trojan horse which has been distributed on Japanese peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.

The Troj/Pirlames-A Trojan horse has been distributed on the controversial Winny file-sharing network in Japan, posing as a screensaver. However, if P2P users download and run the program their files are overwritten by pictures of a popular comic book star who abuses them for using Winny and threatens to expose them to the police if they don't stop using the system.

Programs, music files and email mailboxes are amongst the files targeted by the Trojan horse. EXE, BAT, CMD, INI, ASP, HTM, HTML, PHP, CLASS, JAVA, DBX, EML, MBX, TBB, WAB, HLP, TXT, MP3, XLS, LOG, BMP files are all overwritten by images contained inside the malicious code of comic book character Ayu Tsukimiya.

"This is one of the most bizarre pieces of malware we have seen in our labs for quite some time, but its data-destroying payload is no laughing matter," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "It acts as a timely reminder to companies that they may want to control users' access to P2P file-sharing software not just because they can eat up bandwidth, but also because they can present a security risk to your corporate data."

Isamu Kaneko, the author of the Winny file-sharing program, was convicted by a Japanese court in December 2006 for assisting in copyright violation. The rights and wrongs of the case have been widely debated on the internet.

The Pirlames Trojan horse is not the first piece of malware to take advantage of the Winny file-sharing network:

* In May 2006, Sophos reported that a virus had leaked power plant secrets via Winny for the second time in four months.

* The previous month, a Japanese anti-virus company admitted that internal documents and customer information had been leaked after one of its employees failed to install anti-virus software.

* Earlier in 2006, Sophos described how information about Japanese sex victims was leaked by a virus after a police investigator's computer had been infected.

* In June 2005, Sophos reported that nuclear power plant secrets had been leaked from a computer belonging to an employee of Mitsubishi Electric Plant Engineering.

* The police force in Kyoto, Japan, were left with red faces after a virus spread information about their "most wanted" suspect list in April 2004.

A survey conducted last year by Sophos reflects the serious concern that uncontrolled applications are causing system administrators. For example, 86.5% of respondents said they want the opportunity to block P2P applications, with 79% indicating that blocking is essential.
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/10056/53/





Trojan.Peacomm: Building a Peer-to-Peer Botnet

Symantec Security Response has seen some moderate spamming of a new Trojan horse. The threat arrived in an email with an empty body and a variety of subjects such as:

A killer at 11, he's free at 21 and kill again!
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has kicked German Chancellor Angela Merkel
British Muslims Genocide
Naked teens attack home director.
230 dead as storm batters Europe.
Re: Your text

The attachments may have any of the following filenames:
FullVideo.exe
Full Story.exe
Video.exe
Read More.exe
FullClip.exe

The attachment is not a video clip, but a Trojan horse program, which Symantec heuristic technology already detected as Trojan.Packed.8. Today's LiveUpdate definitions detect it as Trojan.Peacomm. Users of Symantec’s Brightmail Anti-Spam are also protected from this spam email.

The executable drops a system driver (wincom32.sys, also detected as Trojan.Peacomm), which injects some payload and hidden threads directly into the services.exe process, using a sophisticated technique similar to Rustock (see Mimi Hoang’s blog and Elia Florio’s blog). However, in spite of its name, wincom32.sys driver is not a "real" rootkit as it does not hide its presence or its registry keys in the system.

Once the computer is infected, Trojan.Peacomm attempts to establish peer-to-peer communication on UDP port 4000 with a small list of IP addresses, in order to download and execute more malicious files. If you use a personal firewall with egress filtering, you will be notified that the services.exe process is attempting to connect to a remote address on this port. Symantec’s Threat Management System shows a spike in traffic for UDP port 4000:

When it manages to connect to any of these initial IP addresses, it receives a list of additional IP addresses of infected machines and adds them to its list of available peers, building up a distributed network to aid in the download of more malware. The Trojan also keeps a "blacklist" of unsuitable peers. Part of this encrypted P2P configuration is stored in a file peers.ini stored in the %System% folder.

Currently the malware being downloaded is as follows:

game0.exe: A downloader + rootkit component – detected as Trojan.Abwiz.F
game1.exe: Proxy Mail Relay for spam which opens port TCP 25 on the infected machine – detected as W32.Mixor.Q@mm
game2.exe: Mail Harvester which gathers mail addresses on the machine and post them as 1.JPG to a remote server – detected as W32.Mixor.Q@mm
game3.exe: W32.Mixor.Q@mm
game4.exe: It contacts a C&C server to download some configuration file – detected as W32.Mixor.Q@mm

From a malware writer’s point of view, this strategy of using peer-to-peer communication presents clear advantages over the traditional botnet method of one (or a few) Command & Control server(s). First and foremost, it minimizes the chances of losing the botnet if you "cut the head" by bringing down the C&C server or redirecting the traffic. It also helps spread the load that such downloads would impose on a single server.

You are advised to update your products to the latest available security updates from Symantec. We also recommend following the safe computing practices and exercising caution when opening emails.
http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/s...g_a_peert.html





Is 'Making Available' Copyright Infringement?
Ray Beckerman

In 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America began a massive litigation campaign on behalf of the four major record companies against end users of peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, alleging widespread infringement of their sound recording copyrights. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000-25,000 suits have been brought to date, with hundreds of new complaints filed monthly.

While at first blush this battle might appear to be a simple fight between record companies and some alleged music file-sharers, it is actually much more significant because the litigation campaign rests upon a legal argument about the Copyright Act that, if accepted, would represent a major expansion of the present boundaries of U.S. copyright law. This theory could have an enormous impact on the Internet as we know it.

The argument is that even if a defendant has never copied or distributed a file illegally, the fact that he or she possesses a computer with a shared-files folder on it that contains copyrighted files "made available" over an Internet connection, this in and of itself constitutes infringement of the "distribution" rights of the sound recording copyright holder under Section 106(3) of the Copyright Act.

A motion to dismiss in the case, Elektra v. Barker, 05 CV 7340, scheduled to be argued Jan. 26 in the Southern District of New York, might represent either the death knell of this theory or the enthronement of it as a binding rule of law.

RIAA Research Behind Claims
The roots of the "making available" issue lie not in the RIAA lawyers' draftsmanship skills but in the limited investigation upon which the lawsuits are predicated. The RIAA's research begins and ends with its investigator, Tom Mizzone, who works for "antipiracy" company MediaSentry. Armed with proprietary software, Mizzone uses a pretextual P2P file-sharing account on Kazaa, Gnutella, iMesh, LimeWire and other P2P software providers to locate shared-file folders that contain recordings whose copyrights are owned by the Big Four.

Mizzone takes a screenshot, downloads a few of the songs and, through another proprietary process, determines the dynamic IP address assigned to the screenshot. Then the RIAA, armed with a court order, goes to the Internet service provider to get the name and address of the owner of the Internet-access account to which the dynamic IP address had been assigned at the time the screenshot was taken.

The RIAA then closes its investigation and simply sues the owner of the account identified by the ISP.

In its complaints, which are virtually identical in all 20,000-plus cases, it alleges, in conclusory terms, that the defendant is using an "online digital distribution system" to "download, distribute and/or make available for distribution" plaintiffs' recordings.

Since it does not know of any downloads or distributions, the RIAA can allege none except in conclusory terms. The one thing plaintiffs can allege with specificity is, in essence, "Here is a list of songs that someone with your Internet account was making available at a certain time and date."

The Players, the Arguments
The defendant in Barker is a Bronx nursing student. She moved to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6), arguing chiefly that the complaint failed with respect to "downloading" and "distributing" because it does not allege any specific acts of downloading or distributing. (The motion cites Marvullo v. Gruner & Jahr, 105 F.Supp.2d 225, 230 (S.D.N.Y. 2000); DiMaggio v. International Sports Ltd., 1998 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13468 (S.D.N.Y. 1998); Brought to Life Music, Inc. v. MCA Records, Inc., 2003 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 1967 (S.D.N.Y. 2003); Lindsay v. The Wrecked and Abandoned Vessel R.M.S. Titanic, 1999 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 15837(S.D.N.Y. 1999); and Stampone v. Stahl, 2005 WL 1694073 (D.N.J. 2005).)

In addition, the motion argues that merely "making available," without actual dissemination, is not a copyright infringement. (Barker cites Arista Records, Inc. v. MP3Board, Inc., 2002 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 16165 (S.D.N.Y. 2002); National Car Rental System, Inc. v. Computer Associates International, Inc., 991 F.2d 426, 434 (8th Cir. 1993) (citing 2 Nimmer on Copyright § 8.11[A], at 8-124); and In re Napster, Inc., 377 F.Supp.2d 796, 802 (N.D.Cal. 2005).)

The RIAA, in opposition, argues that "making available" would indeed constitute a violation of plaintiffs' right to "distribute" granted by 17 USC 106(3), relying chiefly upon the decision of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Hotaling v. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 118 F.3d 199 (1997), in which a chain of libraries had distributed a number of concededly unauthorized copies of the subject work to its various branches and included them in card catalogs, but kept no circulation records, thus making it impossible for plaintiff to prove actual dissemination.

In reply, Barker distinguished Hotaling as being limited to its unusual set of facts.

Upon learning of the RIAA's argument that merely "making available" is in and of itself a copyright infringement, several organizations sought, and were granted, leave to file amicus curiae briefs in support of Barker's motion.

The Computer & Communications Industry Assn. and U.S. Internet Industry Assn. filed a joint amicus brief arguing that the "distribution" right set forth in the Copyright Act is a specific, defined term and that the RIAA's proposed expansion would, if adopted by the court, "sweep into the reach of copyright law many activities not now covered by copyright law," making the boundaries of the distribution right "indeterminate and unpredictable, creating chilling effects on members of amici and virtually every other participant on the Internet."

As an example, they argued: "Companies routinely include in their Web pages hyperlinks that enable persons to navigate easily to other sites throughout the Web by use of browser software. Indeed, the Web is a collection of hyperlinks. Even though the use of hyperlinks makes content located elsewhere available to a Web user, it does not constitute a distribution of that content under section 106(3)."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation also submitted an amicus brief in support of Barker's motion, emphasizing an entirely different argument. EFF essentially assumed, for purposes of argument, that the complaint had adequately alleged Internet transmissions, and it argued that the "distribution right," as opposed to other rights under the Copyright Act, can never be implicated by mere ephemeral transmissions but relates solely to the dissemination of physical, tangible, material "copies" and "phonorecords." Picking up on the question raised by the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Agee v. Paramount, 59 F.3d 317 (2d Cir. 1995) -- whether "disseminations must always be in physical form to constitute 'distributions' " -- EFF argued in the affirmative based primarily on the language of 17 U.S.C. 106(3), its legislative history and the reasoning of Agee.

The MPAA came into the picture with an amicus brief supporting the RIAA.

And the U.S. Department of Justice weighed in, submitting a "Statement of Interest," in which it confined itself to rebutting EFF's argument. DOJ specifically disclaimed having any "interest" in the RIAA's "making available" argument, pointing out that it had never prosecuted anyone under the copyright laws for "making available."

Barker filed additional papers, one responding to the EFF's amicus brief, one responding to the DOJ's statement of interest, each pointing out that it was not necessary to reach the "ephemeral transmission vs. tangible physical object" issue because the RIAA had not pleaded any instances even of "ephemeral transmissions" with sufficient specificity to satisfy normal copyright infringement pleading standards.

Ready for Argument
The motion is fully briefed and is scheduled for oral argument this week before Judge Kenneth Karas.

I am not aware of any other cases attacking the sufficiency of the RIAA's complaint in which all of the principally affected industries and interests have weighed in as amicus curiae. It is indeed unusual for a case at the district court level to receive this level of attention, thus accentuating the importance of the issues at stake.

While Elektra v. Barker would appear to be just a procedural pleading standards case, it is more than that because the RIAA does not actually possess more information to allege, so there is no possibility of curing the problem by repleading. Nor has it asked for leave to replead if defendant's motion is granted.

Since the RIAA uses a single, standard complaint in all of its litigations, the decision could affect huge numbers of litigants. As the CCIA and USIIA persuasively argue, there is almost no scenario under which the court's holding would not have far-reaching consequence to the technology and Internet world, regardless of which way the motion is decided.

And if the RIAA loses and the case is dismissed, it will no doubt appeal. The issues -- including possibly a revisiting of Agee in the context of Internet transmissions -- would then come before the 2nd Circuit, or possibly up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
http://www.hollywoodreporteresq.com/..._id=1003535810





The Corporate Enemies of Filesharers
Enigmax

If they aren't shutting down your favourite torrent site and sending you infringement notices they're filling your network with fakes, sueing you and invading your privacy. So who are the enemies of P2P and what are they doing to ruin your file-sharing experience? If you share files, it's time to meet your nemesis.

The idea here is to give an overview of anti-p2p activity. This is by no means an exhaustive report but the aim is to give a summary of some of the companies developing a new industry - one dedicated to disrupting the activities of file-sharers.

Founded in 2001, Antipiratbyrån (APB) is a Swedish non-governmental anti-piracy group, its members consisting of representatives from dozens of Swedish media companies. APB rose to infamy in March 2005 when the police conducted an anti-piracy raid against Swedish ISP Bahnhof, only to be presented with evidence that APB themselves had hired someone to plant copyright material. APB are well known (and most hated) for their activities in working to put ThePirateBay BitTorrent tracker offline.

Audible Magic tout themselves as a leading provider of content protection and management solutions. Of interest to file-sharers is their 'Copysense' identification technology, which identifies media by matching an electronic 'fingerprint' unique of the particular content, to that of a 'fingerprint' stored in their claimed 5 million-strong registered database. It is being widely reported that Google will be employing Audible Magic's technology to screen videos submitted to YouTube.

Silicon Valley based BayTSP trumpets its ability to identify and track infringing content on the internet and take it down. They do a lot of tracking of content distributed via the BitTorrent protocol and regularly send out copyright infringement notices (link PDF) to users via their ISP, ordering the content to be taken down. BayTSP also claim to be able to track first uploaders of copyright works on the BitTorrent and eDonkey networks via their 'First Source' technology. It is unclear how this system operates but it is believed to be relatively primitive - BayTSP searches for filenames (in torrents or ed2k links) which imply infringing content and then download the content to confirm that is indeed the case. The user's ISP would then be contacted with a takedown demand in the usual way . The quality of the methods used by BayTSP appear suspect in certain situations.

The Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has claimed the scalps of many small torrent sites in the Netherlands. They can be quite aggressive in their war on Piracy. One of the most used tactics is to track down the owner of the site, and send a letter stating that they face several years in prison if they don't stop serving torrents, and expose the users. Up until now, BREIN has not yet taken action to the bigger torrent sites in The Netherlands. Last January, BREIN won a lawsuit, and the Dutch ISP 'KPN' was forced to hand over the name and address of the dutchtorrent.org admin.

The British Phonographic Industry or BPI claims to have pursued hundreds, if not thousands of UK file-sharers accused of uploading copyright material. Previously, BPI General Counsel Geoff Taylor said that the BPI had no desire to drag people through the courts. The number of people who have actually settled with the BPI (i.e paid a 'fine') is unclear. What is clear is that not everyone who receives a complaint from the BPI actually settles and so far, no-one has ever appeared in a UK court to answer such a complaint. It appears that threats from the BPI to P2P’ers have a somewhat empty quality about them.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry or IFPI throws its net wide, targeting users of many networks including BitTorrent, eDonkey, DirectConnect, Gnutella, Limewire and SoulSeek. After carrying out what was claimed to be the largest ever worldwide legal action against filesharers in 2005 - effectively doubling the number of people being sued to over 4,000 - 2006 saw its biggest assault yet, with the IFPI targetting a further 8000 with enforcement actions.

Macrovision, as far as p2p is concerned, is a company trying to keep DVDRips off file-sharing networks. It claims that its anti-piracy solution called Ripguard can recover 97% of all revenue lost due to DVD ripping piracy. In reality Ripguard is easily defeated.

While Macrovision is failing to keep DVDRips off P2P networks, the Dolby subsidiary Cinea is using watermarks to track the source of DVD Screeners uploaded to the internet. The CineFence system from Philips does something similar, except it tracks the source of a camcorded movie back to the theater it was filmed in.

If filling file-sharing networks with unwanted junk is your thing then Media Defender Inc takes some beating. Purchased by ArtistDirect in 2005, they are currently working with labels such as Suretone Records to spam file-sharing networks with partial videos and music in an attempt to generate traffic to their website. Additionally, they were embarrassed recently when their involvement in operating fake MPAA torrents was revealed.

MediaSentry is a company offering similar services to BayTSP. Where BayTSP is used a lot by the likes of the MPAA, MediaSentry is popular with the RIAA. Monitoring file-sharing networks for infringements of their clients media, they identify and trace IP addresses they claim are engaged in such activity. MediaSentry's effectiveness has been called into question, notably in Foundation v. UPC Nederland link.

The MPAA is a well known anti-piracy lobbying organization, that protects the rights of its members, the 'big six' movie studios. February 2006, the MPAA announced lawsuits (PDF) against Torrentspy, Torrentbox and Isohunt, three of the most popular BitTorrent search engines. The MPAA was also involved in the raid on The Pirate Bay this May. They even sent a letter (PDF) to Sweden's State Secretary this March in which they kindly requested that The Pirate Bay be taken down. In 2005 the MPAA successfully shut down Lokitorrent, Btefnet, and Elitetorrents. But the MPAA does not have a clean slate either. They violated the linkware license of the 'Forest Blog' blogging engine.

File-sharers tend to have long memories and even if an anti-piracy company decides to change strategy, it can be difficult to shake off a tarnished image. French anti-piracy group Retspan and its subsidiary PeerFactor became known in 2004 after reports it was giving file-sharers financial incentives to spread fake files, a claim it later denied. Even though Peerfactor tried to 'go straight' in 2006 with a uTorrent deal, it's the original connection with Retspan which prevails in the mind of many sharers. For in 2004 it was Retspan who dared to take on the now-legendary Suprnova, trying to get it shut down by reporting it to the FBI and by sending threats to sites hosting Suprnova mirrors.

The RIAA protects the rights of a large group of record labels and distributors. The RIAA seems to use law suits merely as threats, a way to 'bully' people (dead or alive) into paying their exorbitant fines. Most of their victims do not have the money to fight back. They often offer people a chance to settle for $3000 or $4000, leaving them broke, but avoiding a real case. This trick seems to work well for the RIAA, they easily collect money without having to prove (they have no clue) that the defendant is actually someone who engaged in peer to peer file sharing of copyrighted music without authorization.

Finnish Venture Cup winner ViralG burst onto the scene in 2005 with a claim that it could end 99% of all file-sharing. It uses technology that enables it to exploit poor hashing technology employed by the likes of the moribund Kazaa but appears unable to do a thing about files found on other networks, including the mighty BitTorrent.

ViralG - like many anti-p2p companies - seem to make wild claims about the effectiveness of their systems. Ask anyone who visits a search engine such as mininova and they will tell you: to a greater or lesser extent, the anti-p2p companies have failed. Miserably.

And finally, I wanted to end this article on a lighter note and happily I can do so with the inclusion of the one, the only - Web Sheriff!!, the company that shot to fame via the publication of its copyright complaints made to ThePirateBay, or more accurately, the comedy value of the responses. Well worth a read. White Stripes/Web Sheriff.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-corporat...f-filesharers/





Top 20 Less Known BitTorrent Sites
Ernesto

We all know about mininova, The Pirate Bay and Torrentz, but what few know is that there are a host of less known torrent sites that also have some great, and sometimes rare, content. Here are 20 of these less known torrent sites.

So what is “Less Known”? Well, we used the Alexa ranking as our criteria, all the sites in this list are not in the top 5000 (5000 most visited sites on the Internet). The order of the sites is random, and the list includes some meta search engines as well.

Do you know a relatively unknown public BitTorrent site that should be in this list? Put it in the comments.

01. torrentvalley.com

02. yotoshi.com

03. extratorrent.com

04. bitenova.nl

05. torrentscan.com

06. fenopy.com

07. smaragdtorrent.org

08. torrentat.org

09. fulldls.com

10. worldnova.org

11. spynova.org

12. nova9.org

13. 2torrents.com

14. scrapetorrent.com

15. litebay.org

16. monova.org

17. torrents.to

18. torrentradar.org

19. bitdig.com

20. bittorrentshare.com

http://torrentfreak.com/top-20-less-...torrent-sites/





Music Industry Group Targets Students
Alex Veiga

The recording industry said Wednesday it was amplifying its legal offensive against online piracy on college campuses by sending hundreds of letters warning students they will be sued if they don't accept settlement offers.

The Recording Industry Association of America said it intended to sue more students and others on campuses in the next three months than it has in the past three years.

The trade group said it would send 400 letters a month to computer users suspected of copyright infringement.

"The theft of music remains unacceptably high and undermines the industry's ability to invest in new music," said Mitch Bainwol, chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America.

"This is especially the case on college campuses," he said.

The letters targeted students at Arizona State University; Marshall University; North Carolina State University; North Dakota State University; Northern Illinois University; Ohio University; Syracuse University; University of Massachusetts, Amherst; University of Nebraska, Lincoln; University of South Florida; University of Southern California; University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and University of Texas, Austin.

The schools were to receive between 20 and 37 letters each, with Ohio University accounting for the most with 50. The association said it would sue individuals who fail to settle or don't respond within a few weeks.

As part of its ongoing copyright crackdown, the association has already sued about 18,000 computer users nationwide since September 2003. The figure includes 1,062 computer users at 130 universities.

The lawsuits are initially filed against "John Doe" defendants, based on their Internet addresses. Many are accused of downloading music over university Internet services.

The recording industry lawyers then work through the courts to learn the name of the defendant. The process can take weeks and result in expensive legal fees for the record labels.

Under the industry's new practice, letters will be sent to university officials, who are being asked to forward them to the person whose Internet address has been tied to unauthorized file-sharing.

Avoiding the cost and time involved in litigation will give those receiving the letters a chance to negotiate a settlement for "substantially less" than previous defendants, association President Cary Sherman said. He declined to provide specifics.

The average settlement in past cases has ranged between $4,000 and $4,500, according to a person familiar with the negotiations who asked to remain anonymous, citing the confidential nature of the agreements.

The association also said it has sent three times more copyright complaints to universities this academic year than it did last year. The complaints ask the schools to take down unauthorized content being shared on their network.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan.../D8NJ003G0.htm





Stop me before I share again

Solution to Stop File Sharing is Simple
Daily Kent Stater editorial board

Last Thursday, the Akron Beacon Journal ran a story that concerned Kent State with the headline "KSU rises to top 20 of music industry." We got excited, too. Our school hit number 17 in the nation.

But the story and the headline weren't referring to positive accomplishments made by the university. No, we were ranked as the 17th biggest college offender of illegally downloading music.

In a recent report by the Recording Industry Association of America, this trade group of the largest music labels compiled 15,000 complaints from the top 25 colleges and universities with student offenders so far this school year, as reported by the Beacon. That's triple the complaints of illegal downloads from last school year.

Kent State received the second highest number of complaints in Ohio with 424, being trumped only by the No. 1 ranked Ohio University, which received 1,287 complaints. A single complaint was an accusation that a student was sharing a single song over the campus Internet network.

At this university, as a means of punishment for illegally downloading a song, students get their Internet blocked, must watch a video on music piracy and take a quiz on the video. The students with large file-sharing offenses often face a lawsuit.

"This is one of the biggest thorns in our sides," Paul Albert, executive director of information services, told the Beacon. "We knew our number was going up quite a bit, but we didn't know we'd broken the top 20."

Ah, yes. Who would have thought a video and quiz wouldn't stop such a heinous crime? What shock that we are one of the biggest offenders!

It's unfair that Kent State does not have an educational system in place that would deter illegal file-sharing in the residence halls before such acts even happen and then expects its students not to download illegally. Albert and his buddies can easily pull the "thorn" out of their sides with the simple solution of education.

The problem is that a lot of students are unaware of what constitutes as piracy or an illegal download or a file share. A slap on the wrist after the crime has happened isn't going to prevent it. Kent State can't expect us to not put that thorn there if we don't know what we are doing.

Maybe Kent State wouldn't have such a big headache if it educated its students about such dangers. Come on, how hard would it be to cram 20 minutes of information into those sometimes worthless orientation classes about the file-sharing problem and how students can recognize if they are breaking the law. Those kinds of steps to remove Kent State from this top 20 list would also give the university more right to punish those who violate the policies. There also should be more information available in the residence halls where most of the violations are taking place.

Not addressing the problem until our school makes an embarrassing top 20 list is unfair to students, not to mention unfair to the recording industry, which is depending on the universities to help stop the problem - especially when a step toward a solution is so simple.

The above editorial is the consensus opinion of the Daily Kent Stater editorial board.
http://media.www.stateronline.com/me...-2741752.shtml





Peer to Peer Information During Disasters
Tim O'Reilly

Clearing out tabs in the browser, I came across an interesting article on lessons that should have been learned from the recent blizzard that left motorists stranded for 20 hours on I-78 in Pennsylvania.

The good news is that the state, with a common-sense plan to capitalize on the communication devices most of us had with us Feb. 14 -- including cell phones, laptop computers and GPS devices -- can either avoid similar problems in the future, or at least minimize them.

...Now it's time for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and the Pennsylvania State Police to capitalize on ways you and I can play a constructive role in fighting terror -- and blizzards -- through communication devices and applications we use daily. To cite only a few examples:

· New York City residents will soon be able to attach a camera-phone picture or video when filing a 911 complaint. Explaining Mayor Michael Bloomberg's decision, an aide referred to YouTube's popularity, saying, "This is the way the world is now working, so it's just time to bring 911 into cyberspace."

· Believe me, lots of us could have provided PennDOT with the "situational awareness" they would have needed via phone pictures. Because the phones now include GPS, officials could have pieced together detailed mile-by mile photo maps -- "mashed up" with Google maps of precisely where the worst conditions were.

· Contra Costa County in California is implementing a technology called GeoCast developed by MITRE, a spin-off of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and commercialized by Square Loop, as part of its best-in-the-nation multi-mode, all-hazard public alerting system. With it, the state police could have sent SMS text messages that only drivers caught in the tie-up would have received, telling what the situation was and asking them to send the aforementioned camera-phone pictures to PennDOT.

· Dash Express, a new GPS system for sale this summer, would have warned authorities automatically. Each unit is Web-enabled, and if several subscribers had all had the same experience of grinding to a halt, the units would have automatically relayed that back to the company's computers. Under ordinary conditions, an algorithm would merge data from the cars with historical information about I-78, and recommend an alternative route. In this case, it could also have let officials know much earlier that traffic was at a standstill.

Believe it or not, we could have formed our own wireless network to share information during the jam! An Illinois activist group, CUWiN, created free, downloadable software allowing instantaneous creation of a self-forming, self-healing community wireless network. That "community" could even be a 50-mile long, four-lane wide one formed involuntarily by thousands of people stuck on I-78.

The point of the article is a really good one. User self service and collective intelligence shouldn't just be limited to consumer applications! This stuff has real utility for government disaster response. Unfortunately, governments tend to be late adopters of new technologies.

Do you have any great stories of the new world of networked data collection and real-time user data in dealing with traffic, weather, or other disasters? Or links to technologies that can be used in "situational awareness"? If so, please let us know.

(We're of course covering this kind of thing in our Where 2.0 Conference.)
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/20...o_peer_in.html





Disk Drive Failures 15 Times What Vendors Say, Study Says
Robert L. Scheier

Customers are replacing disk drives at rates far higher than those suggested by the estimated mean time to failure (MTTF) supplied by drive vendors, according to a study of about 100,000 drives conducted by Carnegie Mellon University.

The study, presented last month at the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies in San Jose, also shows no evidence that Fibre Channel (FC) drives are any more reliable than less expensive but slower performing Serial ATA (SATA) drives.

That surprising comparison of FC and SATA reliability could speed the trend away from FC to SATA drives for applications such as near-line storage and backup, where storage capacity and cost are more important than sheer performance, analysts said.

At the same conference, another study of more than 100,000 drives in data centers run by Google Inc. indicated that temperature seems to have little effect on drive reliability, even as vendors and customers struggle to keep temperature down in their tightly packed data centers. Together, the results show how little information customers have to predict the reliability of disk drives in actual operating conditions and how to choose among various drive types (see also "Hard data ").

Real world vs. data sheets

The Carnegie Mellon study examined large production systems, including high-performance computing sites and Internet services sites running SCSI, FC and SATA drives. The data sheets for those drives listed MTTF between 1 million to 1.5 million hours, which the study said should mean annual failure rates "of at most 0.88%." However, the study showed typical annual replacement rates of between 2% and 4%, "and up to 13% observed on some systems."

Garth Gibson, associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and co-author of the study, was careful to point out that the study didn't necessarily track actual drive failures, but cases in which a customer decided a drive had failed and needed replacement. He also said he has no vendor-specific failure information, and that his goal is not "choosing the best and the worst vendors" but to help them to improve drive design and testing.

He echoed storage vendors and analysts in pointing out that as many as half of the drives returned to vendors actually work fine and may have failed for any reason, such as a harsh environment at the customer site and intensive, random read/write operations that cause premature wear to the mechanical components in the drive.

Several drive vendors declined to be interviewed. "The conditions that surround true drive failures are complicated and require a detailed failure analysis to determine what the failure mechanisms were," said a spokesperson for Seagate Technology in Scotts Valley, Calif., in an e-mail. "It is important to not only understand the kind of drive being used, but the system or environment in which it was placed and its workload."

"Regarding various reliability rate questions, it's difficult to provide generalities," said a spokesperson for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in San Jose, in an e-mail. "We work with each of our customers on an individual basis within their specific environments, and the resulting data is confidential."

Ashish Nadkarni, a principal consultant at GlassHouse Technologies Inc., a storage services provider in Framingham, Mass., said he isn't surprised by the comparatively high replacement rates because of the difference between the "clean room" environment in which vendors test and the heat, dust, noise or vibrations in an actual data center.

He also said he has seen overall drive quality falling over time as the result of price competition in the industry. He urged customers to begin tracking disk drive records "and to make a big noise with the vendor" to force them to review their testing processes.

FC vs. SATA

While a general reputation for increased reliability (as well as higher performance) is one of the reasons FC drives cost as much as four times more per gigabyte than SATA, "We had no evidence that SATA drives are less reliable than the SCSI or Fibre Channel drives," said Gibson. "I am not suggesting the drive vendors misrepresented anything," he said, adding that other variables such as workloads or environmental conditions might account for the similar reliability finding.

Analyst Brian Garrett at the Enterprise Storage Group in Milford, Mass., said he's not surprised because "the things that can go wrong with a drive are mechanical -- moving parts, motors, spindles, read-write heads," and these components are usually the same whether they are used in a SCSI or SATA drive. The electronic circuits around the drive and the physical interface are different, but are much less prone to failure.

Vendors do perform higher levels of testing on FC than on SATA drives, he said, but according to the study that extra testing hasn't produced "a measurable difference" in reliability.

Such findings might spur some customers to, for example, buy more SATA drives to provide more backup or more parity drives in a RAID configuration to get the same level of data protection for a lower price. However, Garrett cautioned, SATA continues to be best suited for applications such as backup and archiving of fixed content (such as e-mail or medical imaging) that must be stored for long periods of time but accessed quickly when it is needed. FC will remain the "gold standard" for online applications such as transaction processing, he predicts.

Don't sweat the heat?

The Google study examined replacement rates of more than 100,000 serial and parallel ATA drives deployed in Google's own data centers. Similar to the CMU methodology, a drive was considered to have failed if it was replaced as part of a repair procedure (rather than as being upgraded to a larger drive).

Perhaps the most surprising finding was no strong correlation between higher operating temperatures and higher failure rates. "That doesn't mean there isn't one," said Luiz Barroso, an engineer at Google and co-author of the paper, but it does suggest "that temperature is only one of many factors affecting the disk lifetime."

Garrett said that rapid changes in temperature -- such as when a malfunctioning air conditioner is fixed after a hot weekend and rapidly cools the data center -- can also cause drive failures.

The Google study also found that no single parameter, or combination of parameters, produced by the SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) built into disk drives is actually a good predictor of drive failure.

The bottom line

For customers running anything smaller than the massive data centers operated by Google or a university data center, though, the results might make little difference in their day-to-day operations. For many customers, the price of replacement drives is built into their maintenance contracts, so their expected service life only becomes an issue when the equipment goes off warranty and the customer must decide whether to "try to eke out another year or two" before the drive fails, said Garrett.

The studies won't change how Tom Dugan, director of technical services at Recovery Networks, a Philadelphia-based business continuity services provider, protects his data. "If they told me it was 100,000 hours, I'd still protect it the same way. If they told me if was 5 million hours I'd still protect it the same way. I have to assume every drive could fail."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9012066





RAID Recovery: The Data Knight Kroll Ontrack To The Rescue!
Patrick Schmid, Achim Roos

RAID Data Recovery Is Possible!

What if your hard drive decides to enter the Elysian Fields in this very moment? Sure, you could simply get a new hard drive to substitute for the defective one with a quick run to your favorite hardware store. And with last night's backup you might even reconstruct your installation quickly. But what if you don't have a backup? We have experienced the truth to be more like this: many users don't even have a backup, or it simply is too old and thus useless for recovering any useful files at all. In case of real hard drive damage, only a professional data recovery specialist can help you - say bye-bye to your vacation savings!

Hard drive failure is especially disastrous for smaller companies working with a single server and a single disk, if they do not have a complete and working data backup at hand. The whole situation is even more complicated if the broken hard drive is a member of a RAID array. Neither hard drive failure in RAID 1 nor RAID 5 will result in data loss, since this scenario has been taken care of by the choice of these RAID levels in advance. But the risk of human error increases: self-made data loss occurs if you accidentally substitute the wrong drive in a degraded RAID 5 array (one with a failed hard drive).

But not all hard drives that show failure symptoms are defective. Sometimes, so called "soft errors" can be fixed using data recovery software. But even in this case, you should weigh the risks to see if it makes sense to take care of the problem yourself or get help from professionals. You might not be able to detect a controller failure right away, for example; usually, users assume a problem with the hard drive. Here is our rule of thumb: if you hear clacking sounds in the potentially defective hard drive, or if the computer's S.M.A.R.T. function indicates an error during the boot process, something is wrong for sure.

What can you do once you know that an important hard drive is definitely broken? Or what happens if you pulled the wrong drive out of the slot while you were desperately trying to save your data? First of all: don't panic! You need to act systematically and thoughtfully to be successful, as well as to ensure that you spend as little as possible on recovery - costs can hits four digits easily.

To this end, we met with data recovery specialist Kroll Ontrack to take a look at possible data recovery methods, including RAID recovery.

Precautionary Methods And The Appropriate Reaction To A Data Loss

This first rule is to remain calm - acting rashly might be the greatest danger to your data. The fact that you are unable to access data via Windows Explorer as usual does not necessarily mean that your data is lost for good. Only overwriting bits, physical damage to the drive surface or destruction of the magnetization will cause irreversible loss of data. In most cases, we are dealing with a malfunctioning circuit board or failure of a mechanical component, two cases that still offer a variety of rescue methods.

You can avoid a lot of headache if you setup your system properly, schedule backups and monitor them on a regular basis. The best backup is useless if the user does not notice the error message giving the reason for a failure. Also remember that sometimes disaster recovery simply will not work, so please test run your backups. If necessary, restore them to another hard drive and see if it works as expected.

Here are a few precautions you should take with regard to hardware. If you use multiple drives, you should number the drives as well as the cables and removable frames. Do not rely on the existing numbering of removable fames and their front panels: they might start at 1, while your controller most likely starts at 0. Since assembly of such hardware as well as drive LEDs is always manual work, the whole process is yet another potential source of trouble. A little piece of tape bearing a drive number will help you avoid accidentally removing the wrong drive.

We assume that all hard drives will be handled with care, so they should be installed in suitable drive bays. If you use multiple drives, we recommend removable drive frame solutions, which help reduce vibration transfer onto the computer chassis and even back to individual hard drives. Make sure that your system has sufficient ventilation, so high speed hard drives won't overheat. Also avoid any kind of shock: you should make sure to position your system, so it won't get bumped by your knee, your dog, or your cleaning personnel. Servers belong in separate rooms, far away from any kind of everyday interference.

Make sure to defragment your data on a regular basis as well. Defragmentation will take file fragments that are distributed all over the hard drive and write them sequentially in one piece. This offers two advantages: better performance and easier file recovery in the case of an emergency. If data fragments are scattered all across a defect medium, recovery companies will have a hard time putting them back together. The same applies for RAID setups.

In case of error, verify if the malfunction might be caused by the hard drive controller. Ideally, you can connect all drives to another controller in the same order. If the error keeps showing up, it might not be the controller. Be careful with using more options: if you start a RAID initialization instead of a rebuild, parity data will be created, which most likely leads to overwriting healthy data!

Also be careful with software such as Partition Magic or Drive Magic. These are powerful utilities - powerful enough, in fact, to move data out of your reach. If you rampaged partitioning partition you might be able to help yourself through the use of data recovery software. Data is usually unharmed and can be found and recovered from your drive. Kroll Ontrack offers EasyRecovery, and Norton SystemWorks (System Utilities) provides another possibility. But be careful with those tools if a hardware malfunction seems to be the most likely case: In a worst case scenario they do more harm than good.

Types Of Hard Drive Damage

Damage to a drive's circuit board or defects of the drive heads occur fairly often. In both cases, to access hard drive data, a data recovery specialist will substitute the defective component with a working one. In the best case scenario you regain 100% of your data.

A so called head crash - where a write/read head physically hits the magnetic platter - is much more severe. Simply hitting your drive might cause contact, since the distance between the head and surface of drives is minimal nowadays. It is almost always safe to say that a damaged magnetized surface causes the loss of saved bits. The head might even repeatedly get caught at the area of defect, carrying off more material with each additional contact. This material will be distributed inside the drive, causing scratches or other damage. There is nothing a customer can do in case of an intense head crash, because the head is simply unable to move across the defective area any more.

Overvoltage on write/read heads causing the permanent destruction of data areas or magnetization will also result in irreversible data loss. This means the physical destruction of memory sectors, not the simple deletion of saved bits. Depending on the drive, the data recovery specialist might be able to recover some data. Recovering data from defect Hitachi drives is usually impossible, since the manufacturer does not provide any kind of firmware information. Various other products allow at least reading data from other platters.

Strange but true: even internal imbalances can cause trouble. Irregular data platter rotation due to broken bearings will result in unwanted track changes of which the drive is not aware; the result is sometimes total data hodgepodge. Bearing failure is usually the result of improper handling during transportation of the drive. The data recovery specialist will often be able to recover saved data by balancing the drive (slightly shifting and centrally rearranging the platters).

Logical mistakes make up 40% of Kroll Ontrack's assignments; luckily, they do not require processing in the clean room. Usually, those mistakes are accidental misuse or deletion of files, where the drive itself has no malfunctions. Even if the problem lies within the drive, it might be a simple defective sector and nothing more severe. Every drive has defective sectors: a primary list will carry a list of bad sectors from the factory; the secondary, so called growing list, will be updated in the course of operation if more sectors become useless. This occurs rather often and is normal, but if your hard drive S.M.A.R.T. feature tells you that you better save some data fast, you're in trouble. This often means that the growing list is full and an above-average number of sectors are dying.

Now let's talk about an irreversible defect. Your hard drive will die if fire or another heat source heats it up beyond the Curie temperature of the magnetic material of your drive; this cases the magnetization to be neutralized completely. The Curie temperature depends on the material used in a hard drive; magneto-optical devices use with Curie point principle on purpose (heating via laser), but hard drives do not.

A user who tries to solve issues by himself can make things worse - according to Kroll Ontrack, this is the biggest problem with data recovery. According to statistics, Europeans are worse than Americans in trying to solve problems on their own. Situations also turn bad if, for example, administrators are afraid of their bosses' reactions. Once, someone even sent a floppy drive instead of the defective hard drive - this is a clear indication of pressure placed on the person involved.

Troubleshooting

First, the drive has to be extracted from the computer to let the technician find the problem. There is, of course, no need to do so if you send your drive to Ontrack directly, but it is necessary if you send your computer or laptop to the data recovery specialist. Usually, you will call Ontrack to initiate contact. Ontrack has numerous branch offices worldwide and provides multilingual hotline personnel. Make sure, however, to give detailed information about what exactly happened so they know what they will be dealing with.

A remote recovery might be the most convenient option for customers. In this case, you don't even have to remove the defective drive; Ontrack provides the necessary software for you to install. Then you initiate a connection with Ontrack, enabling them to access your system. Since an "intrusion" of your computer by the data recovery people is unwanted, Kroll Ontrack chose this connection method deliberately. After connection build-up, the data recovery specialist will be able to run a remote diagnostic analysis of your drive and recover data via the Internet, if possible. Since a simple undelete might already work for you, it is worth the shot. On-site data recovery is also an option for Ontrack customers; removing a drive from large memory arrays in SANs or other memory structures is sometimes not an option.

If this doesn't work or your drive can be analyzed as defective acoustically - an experienced data recovery specialist knows what's wrong simply by listening to the sound it makes - you need to send in the drive or the complete RAID array by mail, or personally deliver it to an Ontrack branch office. In a first attempt to recover software, Ontrack connects the patient to a host computer and runs its software "Easy Recovery". This most likely helps with user-made mistakes such as accidentally deleted partitions or formatting. The primary goal is always to read existing data and copy it off the drive completely. Thereafter, the specialist works with data copied to a server.

If this doesn't work either, the circuit board can be exchanged as well. To do so, you need a compatible combination of hardware revision of your electronic board and the installed firmware. Oftentimes, you simply have to proceed by a systematic "trial-and-error" of all possible combinations. It is obvious that the data specialist needs a huge range of parts at hand. Kroll Ontrack tries to store common hard drives of all capacities and interfaces in-house, but essential hardware can also be sent between offices on short notice, since the data recovery specialist also has a list of each and every component needed for a swap.

Priority Of Processing: A Matter Of Good Will And Hard Dollars

At the reception desk, the customer can choose between the following service options. Standard (delivered between 8 am and 11 am) costs approximately $120. Express may be delivered between 8 am and 6:30 pm, but will be charged around $250. Emergency allows you to drop off your drive 24 hours a day, but you will have to pay about $500.

These prices are for diagnostic analysis only, whereupon the customer can decide whether to accept or decline the suggested data recovery. In contrast to the smaller data recovery specialist CBL, Kroll Ontrack generally charges for its analysis. In an after-hours matter of life and death, Ontrack will refer the issue for further processing to another office (e.g. from London to Los Angeles). Ontrack has 29 offices worldwide.

In 2005, Kroll Ontrack processed 50,000 recovery cases. Ontrack was able to complete 40% of incoming orders successfully right away. The remaining 60% had to be taken to the clean room, where 75% of data recoveries were successful.

Initial Step: The Imaging Station

The first thing the specialists try is to save an image of the affected drive onto the local server at the Ontrack office. At the site we visited, Ontrack provides 60 TB of storage capacity. Ideally, specialists will work with the image only, and not with the drive itself. Kroll Ontrack extends its own storage capacities to correspond to increasing capacity drives on the hard drive market. In case of urgency, a hard drive's content will simply be copied to another hard drive instead of the server, which is a bit faster.

Second Step: Emergency Surgery

A hard drive that refuses to cooperate will be sent to the clean room right away. These are Kroll Ontrack workstations set up according to clean room class 100, where a maximum of 100 dust particles are allowed per cubic meter of air. Components will be swapped here: drive electronics or internal components, read/write arms including writing/reading heads; or the spindle motor. In most cases, the specialist is able to access the drive's data again.

Third Step: Data Recovery

Ontrack sends a list of saved data to the customer if it was able to access hard drive data successfully. The customer then can decide which files are important and which are not - the cost for data recovery is estimated according to your selection. Be prepared to invest at least $1,000. RAID systems can reach the five-digit zone rather quickly, since the effort is measured according to the amount of data and grade of destruction. Working on numerous hard drives simply takes a long time.

The Ontrack program Verifile offers an overview of data that can be restored (Use Ontrack® VeriFile Online Data Reports). Since this program works with an Active X control element, you have to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The tool issues an ODR-file (Online Data Report), color-coding data as follows: green - good, yellow - restorable, red - only partly recoverable or not recoverable at all.

Today, the customer usually receives the desired data on a memory stick or DVDs.

Increasing The Level Of Difficulty: RAID Recovery

More and more enthusiast users approach Kroll Ontrack with destroyed RAID arrays. Generally, data recovery from such a RAID array is possible, but keep in mind that the effort increases disproportionately. First of all, data has to be copied from a RAID drive onto a server, and the data set has to be put back together. The distribution of data into smaller blocks across one or more drives makes RAID 0 the worst possible type to recover. Increasing performance doesn't necessarily do your data any good here! If a drive is completely defective, only small files, which ended up on only one of the RAID drives (despite the RAID stripe set), can be recovered (at 64 kB stripe size or smaller). RAID 5 offers parity data, which can be used for recovery as well.

RAID data configuration is almost always proprietary, since all RAID manufacturers set up the internals of their arrays in different ways. However, they do not disclose this information, so recovering from a RAID array failure requires years of experience. Where does one find parity bits of a RAID 5, before or after the payload? Will the arrangement of data and parity stay the same or will it cycle? This knowledge is what you are paying for.

Instead of accessing drives on a controller level, the file system level (most likely NTFS) is used, as logical drives will provide the basis for working on a RAID image. This allows the recovery specialist to put together bits and bytes after a successful recovery using special software. Kroll Ontrack can illustrate data structure visually. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. The recovery of known data formats is an important approach in order to reach towards a complete data recovery. Take a JPEG file for example - will you be able to recognize a picture after recovery? Or will you be able to open Word.exe, which is found on almost every office system? The selected file should be as large as possible, so it was distributed across all drives and you can know for sure that its recovery was successful.

If two drives of a RAID 5 are flawed, but enough data can be saved from the malfunctioning data mediums, Kroll Ontrack is usually able to recover this data. Two dead hard drives in a RAID 5 are more likely to be restored than two single platters, since RAID still provides parity data.

Follow-Up Analysis: Microscopic Approach On How To Find The Actual Problem

After data recovery, there is no reason to use the defective drive anymore, right? So most of the time it makes sense to perform an analysis to determine the cause of the faulty drive. Kroll Ontrack conducts its analysis under the microscope. The drive will be opened in the clean room, where a technician can apply a contrast liquid drop by drop onto the platter so magnetism can be seen under the microscope.

Conclusion: Save Time And Money - Back Up Your Files

If you want to save a lot of time, money and trouble, perform regular backups. Data and malfunction analysis starts at $120 and can go up to $500; the actual data recovery will easily eat up $ 1,000 or more. Knocking on Kroll Ontrack's door with a broken RAID array might cost you as much as several thousand dollars. If you are willing to pay enough, data recovery is even possible on a RAID 5 array with two defective drives.

Even if you take good care of your hardware and do have a master strategy on how to secure it, there is always the chance that something goes wrong. If this happens, remember to remain calm! Overreacting might do more harm to your data than the malfunction itself. Keep your composure and don't start looking for a solution on your own, just because your boss might have a fit. Staying calm and discussing further action with competent people will give you the best results.

If you rely on data that might be lost and are not sure what to do, simply contact a data recovery specialist. Trying to saving a few bucks with a do-it-yourself rescue that goes wrong might cost you more nerves in the long run.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/02/...ery/index.html





Local news

Best Buy Confirms It Has Secret Website
George Gombossy

Under pressure from state investigators, Best Buy is now confirming my reporting that its stores have a secret intranet site that has been used to block some consumers from getting cheaper prices advertised on BestBuy.com.

Company spokesman Justin Barber, who in early February denied the existence of the internal website that could be accessed only by employees, says his company is "cooperating fully" with the state attorney general's investigation.

Barber insists that the company never intended to mislead customers.

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ordered the investigation into Best Buy's practices on Feb. 9 after my column disclosed the website and showed how employees at two Connecticut stores used it to deny customers a $150 discount on a computer advertised on BestBuy.com.

Blumenthal said Wednesday that Best Buy has also confirmed to his office the existence of the intranet site, but has so far failed to give clear answers about its purpose and use.

"Their responses seem to raise as many questions as they answer," Blumenthal said in an interview. "Their answers are less than crystal clear."

Based on what his office has learned, Blumenthal said, it appears the consumer has the burden of informing Best Buy sales people of the cheaper price listed on its Internet site, which he said "is troubling."

What is more troubling to me, and to some Best Buy customers, is that even when one informs a salesperson of the Internet price, customers have been shown the intranet site, which looks identical to the Internet site, but does not always show the lowest price.

Blumenthal said that because of the fuzzy responses from Best Buy, he has yet to figure out the real motivation behind the intranet site and whether sales people are encouraged to use it to cheat customers.

Although Best Buy also refused to talk with me on specifics of the intranet site or its use, it insisted that its policy is to give customers the best price.

"Our intention is to provide the best price to our customers which is why we have a price-match policy in place," the company said in a written statement to me. "As prices and offers may vary between retail and online, our stores will certainly match BestBuy.com pricing as long as it qualifies under the terms and conditions of the price match policy."

"As a company, everything we do revolves around our customers' needs and desires. It is never our intent to mislead them as their loyalty is incredibly important to us," the statement said.

Then they threw in this interesting line: "Although we have an intra-store web site in place to support store operations (including products and pricing), we are reminding our employees how to access the external BestBuy.com web site to ensure customers are receiving the best possible product price."

That last sentence seems to indicate that Best Buy, which is supposed to be staffed by tech-savvy employees, is putting the blame on memory lapses: that employees have somehow forgotten how to access BestBuy.com from the store.

Having been to many Best Buy stores where some helpful employees showed me how they access the intranet and Internet, I can assure Best Buy officials that the re-education process will probably not be lengthy.

After making sure the computer is turned on, employees should click twice on the Yahoo Internet icon and then type in BestBuy.com.

This is not the first time the giant electronic retailer has gotten into trouble misleading customers. The firm, based in Minneapolis, operates more than 1,100 electronic retail stores in the U.S., Canada and China. It has more than 125,000 full-time employees.

Attorneys general in New Jersey and Ohio have accused Best Buy of deceptive sales practices, repackaging used merchandise and selling it as new, and failing to pay rebates and refunds. It paid $135,000 in New Jersey three years ago to settle that state's suit, which was based on hundreds of consumer complaints. The Ohio case is ongoing.
http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc...-utility-local





CompUSA Closing More Than 50% of Stores

CompUSA, the computer and gadget retailer owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, said on Tuesday it would close more than half of its U.S. retail locations over the next two to three months to focus on top performing locations.

CompUSA said in a statement it would close 126 of its stores and would receive a $440 million cash capital infusion, but it was not specific as to the source of the cash. The company also said it would cut costs and restructure.

The company operates 225 stores, which its Web site says are located in the United States and Puerto Rico.

"Based on changing conditions in the consumer retail electronics markets, the company identified the need to close and sell stores with low performance or nonstrategic, old store layouts and locations faced with market saturation," Roman Ross, chief executive officer of CompUSA, said in the statement.

"The process began last week with the closing of four CompUSA stores and over the next 60-90 days, the company will close a total of 126 stores in the United States to focus on initiative that enhance its top performing locations ."

On Monday, CompUSA said it would close two stores in California, one in Texas and one in Illinois. CompUSA said it was trying to streamline operations and bolster margins at top-performing stores.

Last September, an official from Slim's conglomerate Grupo Carso told Reuters that Slim, the third-richest man in the world, was considering selling the loss-making business.

Intense gross margin pressure, especially in the flat panel television category, has plagued others in this sector, contributing to Circuit City Stores Inc.'s announcement earlier this month that it was closing 70 stores.

CompUSA competes with Best Buy and Circuit City.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2099058,00.asp





Wal-Mart Buys 35% of China Retail Chain
David Barboza

Wal-Mart Stores said Tuesday that it had acquired a 35 percent stake in one of China's biggest retailers in a bid to expand its presence in this country's fast-growing retail market.

After months of speculation about a deal, Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, said it had agreed to buy the stake in Bounteous, a Taiwan-owned group that operates more than 100 retail outlets in 34 cities in China under the name Trust-Mart.

The two retail giants will operate separately here, but eventually, Wal- Mart is expected to take full control of the company that operates all of Trust- Mart's stores.

The move is consistent with Wal- Mart's push into international markets. With growth slowing at its U.S. outlets and its stock price slumping, Wal-Mart is moving aggressively to capture market share in developing countries like Brazil, India and China.

China has the world's fastest-growing major economy and no dominant national retail chain, even though the country has a growing middle class that may now number close to 50 million.

Wal-Mart declined to say how much it paid, but people close to the deal said Wal-Mart had agreed to pay about $1 billion to assume managerial control of the Chinese retailer.

Wal-Mart already operates 73 stores with more than 37,000 employees in China. But it faces stiff competition here from large Chinese retailers as well as European retail giants like Carrefour, Metro and Tesco.

Trust-Mart, which will continue to operate under its own name, has more than 31,000 employees in China working in large hypermarket stores that sell everything from groceries and clothing to home appliances.

Should Wal-Mart succeed in obtaining full control of Trust-Mart, it would be in striking distance to become the China's No.1 foreign retailer, a title currently held by its French rival Carrefour, which operates about 90 super stores here.

"This is an important step in bringing additional scale to our China retail business," Michael Duke, the vice chairman of Wal-Mart, said in a statement.

Nonetheless, Wal-Mart's China profits are unlikely to have a significant impact on the company's earnings over the next few years.

Despite the company's massive sourcing operation in China, Wal- Mart's retail operations in the country accounted for only a tiny fraction of its global sales, which were more than $344 billion last year.

In 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available, Wal-Mart posted sales of about $1.3 billion in China, trailing Trust-Mart, which had revenues of $1.7 billion, according to the China Chain Store & Franchise Association.

Wal-Mart officials declined to confirm that figure, saying the company does not break out China sales numbers.

Trust-Mart's network of outlets gives Wal-Mart a national presence that can compete head-to-head with Carrefour, which had China sales of $2.3 billion in 2005.

Wal-Mart officials said the deal allows them to appoint one of its executives as the chief operating officer of Trust-Mart.

"The two teams from each company will work together starting today to find ways to cooperate," said Jonathan Dong, a spokesman for Wal-Mart in Shenzhen, China.

Analysts say that Wal-Mart, which first entered the Chinese market in 1996, is trying to create a broader platform as part of its expansion in China, which could mean many more acquisitions.

"From Wal-Mart's perspective it's a foot in the door," says George Svinos, head of Asia Pacific retail at KPMG's office in Australia. "You can clearly see why Wal-Mart is looking to invest in a country that by 2015 could have the largest economy in the world."

China also offers Wal-Mart a chance to get its international strategy back on track, after the company stumbled in South Korea and Germany before selling its operations in those countries last year.

But China's size and enormous growth potential does not guarantee success. The market is fragmented and highly competitive. Shelf prices are extremely low, and poor infrastructure outside the major cities make transport logistics a nightmare.

Wal-Mart will need to face down increasingly sophisticated Chinese retail conglomerates such as China Resources, Shanghai Brilliance Group and Lianhua supermarkets on their home turf. Home Depot and Best Buy are opening branches in China, and dozens of other American and European retailers are also planning to move in.

Wal-Mart said that the deal to acquire the Bounteous stake had already been approved by the Chinese government, which has recently made it easier for foreign retailers to set up operations here.

But Wal-Mart and its foreign rivals will still need to cope with a fast- evolving and sometimes unpredictable marketplace. One factor they will contend with is the presence of China's state-controlled unions, which are pushing their way into foreign-owned companies and retail operations.

Last year, Wal-Mart agreed to allow unions to be set up in nearly all of its stores in China. And while unions in China are controlled by the state-run union federation and often lack bite, some believe they are gradually gaining clout and may soon begin bargaining for higher wages and better compensation packages — especially at foreign companies.

The imbalance between Wal-Mart's relatively fledgling retail operations and its huge procurement operation is striking. The company sourced more than $9 billion worth of goods here for stores operating outside of China. Building a retailing platform of comparable strength will require huge additional investments.

"This is just one percent of what they need to do," Svinos at KPMG said of their stake in Trust-Mart. "They need to create a critical mass and build a credible presence in the Chinese market."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...ss/walmart.php





Thai Government Paves Way for Seizure of the Broadcaster ITV
Thomas Fuller and Wayne Arnold

Thailand is poised to take over a television station once controlled by Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister ousted in a coup in September, ending a long-running dispute between the broadcaster and the government appointed by the military but leaving an uncertain future for the only private station in the country.

The government said Tuesday that it would terminate the license of iTV if the broadcaster did not pay a $2.8 billion fine by next Tuesday — a sum that iTV, which has a market value of $34 million, said would be "impossible" to pay. ITV is not related to the British broadcaster of the same name.

The decision is a setback for Temasek Holdings of Singapore, which last year led a group of investors in a takeover of Shin Corp., the company that controls iTV, from Thaksin's family. The government's effective nationalization of the station, which represents about 1 percent of the market value of Shin's assets, should have little financial impact on Temasek. Temasek is not liable for the fine and does not face the prospect of paying severance for iTV's employees, who will not be laid off.

The Thai government is investigating several aspects of the January 2006 deal between Thaksin and Temasek — most significantly the alleged use of illegal nominees in the sale — but analysts said that the iTV case was distinct from the other investigations.

"This is a separate issue," said Korn Chatikavanij, a former banker and deputy secretary general of the Democrat Party, which has been vocal in criticizing Thaksin's deal with Temasek.

"They owe the government," Korn said referring to iTV. "The courts have all ruled in favor of the fact that the penalty has to be paid."

The government's case against iTV dates to 2002, well before Temasek's deal with Thaksin. Set up in the 1990s, iTV was given a 30-year broadcast concession on the condition that it mainly broadcast news. With Thaksin as prime minister, iTV was offered a lower annual concession fee and was allowed to increase its entertainment content at the expense of news.

But last May, a Thai court rescinded these benefits and ordered iTV to return to its mostly news format and pay 2.2 billion baht, or $67.4 million, in back fees, 15 percent interest, and a 97.8 billion baht fine.

Richard Moe, a telecommunications analyst at Macquarie Securities in Bangkok, said the government was taking over the company because it wanted to preserve jobs at the station.

In making the announcement Tuesday, Pridiyathorn Devakula, the Thai finance minister, said that "no employee will lose his job, and all the programs will be continued."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...nology/itv.php





Roo Buys Wurld Media for $10M
Liz Gannes

Roo Group announced today it will acquire Wurld Media, maker of various content distribution platforms including Peer Impact, for up to $10 million in cash and stock.

Peer Impact had gained fame when it snared NBC Universal in November 2005, the first major studio to make its content available from a legitimate peer-to-peer provider. Despite what appears to be minimal traffic, the company has since signed 20th Century Fox, WB, Univeral, Sony, Warner, EMI, Fox Musix, Fox for Movies, Atari, and Activision, among others.

Peer Impact, which is Windows and Internet Explorer-only, uses a referral revenue share to pay users and peers, analogous to Revver, but in most cases with studio content rather than user-generated. The company splits 10 percent of a file’s purchase price between peers who share it and members who recommend it.

I wrote about Peer Impact and other rev-share efforts about a year ago in a story for Red Herring (reg req). Some of you with a long memory may recall Saratoga Springs, NY-based Wurld Media had previously been involved in adware before it launched Peer Impact.

The acquisition price is not hefty, but it’s an exit for eight-year-old Wurld, with $1.5 million up front, $6.5 million upon completion of the deal, and $2 million based on performance. The company is said to have some significant IP in the P2P space.

Roo customer News Corp recently took a 10 percent stake in the company. Roo had also bought MyVideoDaily for $350,000 plus stock about a month ago.

Roo shares are trading down $0.20 at $4.20.
http://newteevee.com/2007/02/27/roo-...media-for-10m/





DreamWorks Posts Fourth-Quarter Loss on Box Office Flop
AP

DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc., the studio behind animated movies such as "Shrek" and "Madagascar," said Tuesday that it swung to a fourth-quarter loss on costs to write off "Flushed Away," which performed poorly at the box office.

The company posted a loss of $21.3 million, or 20 cents per share, compared with year-ago earnings of $63.2 million, or 61 cents per share, which included a tax benefit and strong performance from the studio's "Madagascar" DVD, which was initially released into the home video market in the 2005 quarter.

DreamWorks said the recent quarter was strapped with a charge of 80 cents per share related to the partial write-off of film costs for "Flushed Away." Chief Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg said the film failed to meet financial expectations.

Revenue grew 18 percent to $204.3 million from $172.9 million in the prior-year period, with about half of sales driven by the release of "Over the Hedge" into the home video market. However, costs associated with sales — including the write-off — more than doubled at the same time to $219.9 million, offsetting revenue growth.

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial forecast a loss of 42 cents per share on sales of $159 million.
http://www.venturacountystar.com/vcs...382831,00.html





Viacom Reports Higher 4Q Profits as Addition of DreamWorks Boosts Movie Business
AP

MTV owner Viacom Inc. reported a sharply higher fourth-quarter profit Thursday compared with a year ago as its movie business swung to a profit.

Viacom, which also owns BET, VH1 and several other cable channels, earned $480.8 million, or 69 cents per share, in the October-December period versus $129.5 million, or 17 cents per share, in the same period a year ago.

The results were boosted by the addition of the DreamWorks movie studio, and the year-ago figures were also affected by an accounting adjustment following Viacom's split-off from CBS Corp.

On a comparable basis, Viacom's operating income increased 28 percent to $855.6 million from $669.6 million a year earlier, driven largely by improved results at its movie business, which earned $86.3 million in the quarter versus a loss in the year-ago period of $39.6 million.

Viacom's cable networks business, which makes up the lion's share of its operations, reported a 6 percent gain in profits to $809.9 million from $761.7 million a year ago.

Overall company revenues rose 32 percent to $3.59 billion from $2.72 billion as it added the DreamWorks studio to its movie operations, which include the Paramount film studio.

Viacom also said it would take about $70 million in charges in 2007 as it restructures its MTV division, largely in severance charges, with about $50 million being recorded in the first quarter of this year.

Viacom split up from CBS Corp. at the beginning of 2006 and became a separate company.
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/mark...tent=D8NJCTV84





EchoStar Communications 4Q Profit Rises
AP

EchoStar Communications Corp. said Thursday its fourth-quarter profit rose 15 percent on new subscriber additions.

Earnings climbed to $152.6 million, or 35 cents per basic share, from $132.6 million, or 30 cents per basic share, during the same period a year ago.

Quarterly revenue increased 17 percent to $2.58 billion from $2.20 billion.

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial were looking for a profit of 32 cents per share on sales of $2.54 billion.

DISH Network added about 350,000 new subscribers during the quarter, giving the company 13.1 million subscribers as of Dec. 31. The total is an increase of about 1.1 million subscribers when compared with the prior-year period.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070301/earns...ions.html?.v=3





Dell Profit, Revenue Fall Short of Reduced Estimates
Connie Guglielmo

Dell Inc., the world's second-largest personal-computer maker, posted fourth-quarter profit and sales that trailed analysts' reduced estimates after the company lost customers to rivals over the holidays.

Net income was $673 million, or 30 cents a share, Round Rock, Texas-based Dell said today in a statement. Sales totaled $14.4 billion, falling short of a $14.9 billion average projection in a Bloomberg survey.

The results underscore why founder Michael Dell returned as chief executive officer in January. His company, which counts on PCs for more than half of revenue, lost the market lead after Hewlett-Packard Co. cut prices. To shore up profit, Dell held back on holiday promotions, enabling Hewlett-Packard to lure buyers with low-cost notebook computers.

``HP's become a lot more aggressive on price,'' said Bill Fearnley Jr., an analyst with FTN Midwest Securities Corp. in Boston. Fearnley, who spoke before the results, rates the shares ``neutral'' and doesn't own them. ``The good news is that Michael's back. He's making bold moves.''

Results released today are preliminary because of an ongoing accounting investigation. Dell reported profit of $1.01 billion on sales of $15.2 billion in the same quarter a year earlier. The company has said it may need to restate previous results.

Dell, which stopped providing financial forecasts in May 2006, had already announced in January that profit and sales for the quarter missed analysts' estimates. The warning led analysts to reduce their profit estimates to 30 cents from 33 cents for the three months ended Feb. 2, according to a Bloomberg survey.

`Grow Into It'

Dell's shares, down 21 percent in the past 12 months, dropped 41 cents to $22.60 in extended trading after the report. They had risen 16 cents to $23.01 at 4 p.m. in Nasdaq Stock Market trading.

Price cuts aimed at winning back market share have weighed on profit margins, and Dell's sales growth has fallen to its lowest level in more than four years.

Two days after ousting Kevin Rollins as CEO on Jan. 31, Dell told employees they needed to cut costs to help regain the price advantage that allowed the company to win the PC market lead more than three years ago.

``We need to grow into what we have, hold cost and eliminate marginal activities,'' wrote Dell, who turned 42 last week. ``There is no luxury of time. The competitors are fierce.''

As part of a shakeup of operations and management called Dell 2.0, at least five top executives have left since December. In February, Dell hired Motorola Inc. phone chief Ron Garriques to oversee a newly created consumer unit and tapped former Solectron Corp. CEO Michael Cannon to run operations including manufacturing, in a bid to reduce product costs.

PC Woes

Dell is also cooperating with probes into its accounting by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department. The company said in September the investigations indicate possible errors in its accounting for so-called accruals or reserves, or estimates of future obligations.

Lackluster products and poor customer service at Dell alienated the U.S. consumers whose purchases of notebook computers have fueled PC market growth for the past two years. The company spent $150 million in the last year to improve service, and said in November it cut the time U.S. customers waited on support hotlines to three minutes from nine minutes.

That hasn't been enough to counter gains made by Hewlett- Packard CEO Mark Hurd. Hewlett-Packard led the PC market for the second straight quarter during the 2006 holiday shopping season for a 24 percent jump in shipments, according to researcher IDC.

Dell's shipments fell 8.4 percent in the calendar fourth quarter, according to Framingham, Massachusetts-based IDC. Orders in the U.S., which accounts for more than 50 percent of Dell's sales, fell almost 17 percent.

``When the problems become so bad and so public, like they've become at Dell, we think that time is certainly going to be one of the key components here,'' Fearnley said. ``It's not going to snap back in a quarter.''
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...kmQ&refer=home





Authors Find Their Voice, and Audience, in Podcasts
Andrew Adam Newman

Scott Sigler writes science-fiction horror novels, the kind one fan called “steel-tipped boot on your throat, speed-metal fiction.” Mr. Sigler has written four such books, though not many people have actually read them.

How many have listened to them, though, is a different story.

Several times a week Mr. Sigler, 37, steps into a walk-in closet in his San Francisco home. He reads into a microphone that connects to his computer via a sound mixer. Hanging shirts envelop him, masking ambient sound.

After being snubbed by publishers for years, Mr. Sigler began recording his first book, “EarthCore,” in 2005. He offered it as a podcast in 22 episodes (roughly 45 minutes each) that he posted online and sent free to subscribers for downloading. Before long, Mr. Sigler had 5,000 listeners; by the time he finished releasing his second novel, “Ancestor,” last January, he had 30,000, as he does for “The Rookie,” which is playing now.

With initial printings of novelists’ first books running as low as 2,000 copies, Mr. Sigler has a substantial audience, enough finally to attract a small Canadian publisher, Dragon Moon Press, which published “EarthCore” in 2005 and will release “Ancestor” on April 1.

Mr. Sigler also recently signed with a New York agent, Byrd Leavell of the Waxman Agency, who expects to park his latest, “Infection,” with a major publisher.

Others have turned to the Internet to build their audience, including Cory Doctorow, who offered the text of “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” as a free download in 2003. But Mr. Sigler is among the vanguard of authors stapling their literary aspirations to the iPod.

“A lot of no-name authors like me are getting massive grass-roots exposure, and some of us are going to percolate to the top and get on the best-seller list,” Mr. Sigler said.

The business is brewing at Podiobooks.com, the Web site founded in late 2005 with just 15 titles, including books by Tee Morris and Mark Jeffrey, who began offering podcasts about the same time as Mr. Sigler.

The site was founded by Evo Terra, who wrote the book on podcasting, literally; he was co-author of “Podcasting for Dummies.” Today the Web site has about 100 titles, many science fiction and fantasy.

“Most of the science-fiction authors are more tech savvy than romance authors,” Mr. Terra said. Podiobooks features primarily unpublished writers, and has rejected books only because of “hate speech,” Mr. Terra said. The site also includes guidelines on recording a book.

“Compared to audiobooks these authors break every rule in the business, including using sound effects,” Mr. Terra said. The podcast books also use music and a full cast more liberally than traditional audiobooks. Still, what Podiobooks’ offerings might lack in polish, they tend to make up for in brash enthusiasm.

Mr. Terra plans to add some fee books by more established authors, and for now covers costs through suggested donations of $9.99 per title (some give more, as much as $50), with Podiobooks taking 25 percent and passing the rest to its authors.

“There was one that I really enjoyed, and I think I gave them 20 bucks,” said Martha Cox, a subscriber who listens during her 45-minute commute to Austin, Tex. Most titles are “very entertaining, and it doesn’t put me off that publishing companies have decided not to publish them,” she said. “There’s certainly substandard work available, but there is in bookstores too.”

Mr. Jeffrey founded three Internet companies, selling the latest one in 2004, the same year he completed his Harry Potter-esque fantasy novel, “The Pocket and the Pendant.” In early 2005 he released it as a podcast.

“I’m just completely impatient with the publishing world,” he said. “Even if a publisher said yes tomorrow, it would be a full year before the book was in the marketplace. Coming from the Internet, that was just insane to me.”

Along with drawing about 20,000 listeners, Mr. Jeffrey self-published it through the print-on-demand company Lulu.com. (Unlike traditional vanity presses, Lulu doesn’t require writers to pay for a large printing up front, but prints copies as they sell.)

Did Mr. Jeffrey think there was a taint to giving away an audio version of his book?

“I come from the Internet,” he said. “Doing it yourself is the culture. And I thought, ‘I’ll do the first book this way and build an audience and hopefully make money on the back end.’ ”

Mr. Jeffrey said that he is evaluating three Hollywood offers for “The Pocket and the Pendant,” the big screen, and that his suitors include companies with publishing arms offering book deals.

“It’s a much more attractive package to the publisher if you have a built-in audience,” said Mr. Leavell, the agent, who along with Mr. Sigler represents others who have built Internet followings, including Tucker Max, who detailed his drunken exploits on his Web site before publishing the best seller “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.”

Gwen Gedes, publisher of Dragon Moon Press, which published Mr. Sigler’s first and forthcoming book, said that about half of her roughly 70 authors are available on podcasts. The possibility that listeners might not buy books after hearing them free does not faze Ms. Gedes, who said the exposure alone is invaluable.

She has been approaching unsigned podcasters with book deals. “It’s kind of a role reversal to knock on an author’s door, to write a query letter asking, ‘Can I be your publisher?’ ” she said.

One author she courted was J. C. Hutchins, a 32-year-old former newspaper reporter from Deerfield Beach, Fla. When Mr. Hutchins completed his first novel in a planned trilogy, “7th Son,” in 2005, he sent the book to agents, since major publishing houses will not consider unrepresented writers. “I got about 35 rejections from agents,” Mr. Hutchins said. “Most hard-core writers would probably scoff at the mere 35 rejections and say: ‘Wait till you get a hundred. It builds character.’ ”

Instead of waiting Mr. Hutchins plunked down $50 for a microphone and $50 for a mixer and started producing podcasts on GarageBand, the sound-mixing software. He put the book’s first episode, the prologue, on Podiobooks in early 2005.

And he waited.

“You can see the statistic of how many listeners are downloading the book, and for the prologue there were literally three people, and two of them were my girlfriend and myself.” But Mr. Hutchins’s audience grew steadily, and there are now 20,000 people listening to his current feed, the trilogy’s second book “7th Son: Deceit.”

While Mr. Hutchins said that he appreciated Ms. Gedes’s interest in the book, he is looking for an agent anew in the hope of attracting a bigger publisher.

Attracting an Internet audience has been validating, but it all comes down to “the dad test,” Mr. Hutchins said. “My Dad isn’t technically savvy, and he isn’t online. When he hears Amazon, he thinks of the jungle. It would be nice for my Dad to be able to be able to walk into a Barnes & Noble and see at least one copy of my book.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/books/01podb.html





Egyptian Blogger Appeals Prison Sentence
Nadia Abou El-Magd

Lawyers filed an appeal Monday on behalf of a blogger who was sentenced to four years in prison for insulting Islam and Egypt's president.

Abdel Kareem Nabil, a former law student at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, used his blog to advocate secularism and criticize conservative Muslims.

He accused Al-Azhar, Egypt's foremost Islamic institute, of encouraging extremism, calling it "the university of terrorism."

One of Nabil's lawyers, Rawda Ahmed, said an appeal was filed Monday and a court hearing was set for March 12.

Thursday's conviction has brought a flood of condemnations from international and Egyptian human rights groups, as well as from fellow bloggers. Washington also has said it was concerned about the verdict and sentence.

But the Egyptian government has defended the court's decision.

"No one, no matter who he might be, has the right to interfere with Egyptian legal matters or comments on Egypt's decisions," Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said in a statement on Friday.

Judge Ayman al-Akazi sentenced Nabil, 22, to three years in prison for insulting Islam and inciting sectarian strife and gave him a fourth year for insulting President Hosni Mubarak.

Nabil, who describes himself as a secular Muslim, did not react as the verdict was read. His family, devout Muslims, did not attend any of the trial sessions.

Egypt, a top U.S. ally in the Mideast, arrested a number of bloggers last year, most for connections to a political movement whose goal is democratic reform. All but Nabil were released, a sign of how sensitive this country is to religious criticism.

Nabil's frequent attacks on Al-Azhar led the university to expel him in March, then push prosecutors to bring him to trial.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...022700065.html





Federal Court Reaffirms Immunity of Bloggers from Suits Brought Against Commenters

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides that "[no] provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider," and that "[n]o cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section." A recent decision of the First Circuit has reaffirmed the broad protection this statute provides to bloggers and message board administrators.

In Universal Communication Systems v. Lycos, a company who had allegedly been victimized by defamatory statements on a message board regarding the value of its stock sued Lycos, which operated the board. The message board allowed users to post comments with minimal moderation, and no one from Lycos was responsible for the allegedly defamatory statements.

Examining the impact of Sec. 230 on this case, the court noted that "Congress intended that, within broad limits, message board operators would not be held responsible for the postings made by others on that board," adding that allowing bloggers and message board operators to be sued for the statements of commenters on their sites would have an "obvious chilling effect" on speech. Accordingly, the court dismissed the complaint against Lycos.
http://www.acsblog.org/economic-regu...ommenters.html





AP: We Ignored Paris Hilton

• Associated Press tried blackout on Paris Hilton news
• Not much "news," but no AP clients asked what was up, either
• Reaction was mostly positive

So you may have heard: Paris Hilton was ticketed the other day for driving with a suspended license.

Not huge news, even by celebrity-gossip standards. Here at The Associated Press, we put out an initial item of some 300 words. But it actually meant more to us than that.

It meant the end of our experimental blackout on news about Paris Hilton.

It was only meant to be a weeklong ban -- not the boldest of journalistic initiatives, and one, we realized, that might seem hypocritical once it ended. And it wasn't based on a view of what the public should be focusing on -- the war in Iraq, for example, or the upcoming election of the next leader of the free world, as opposed to the doings of a partygoing celebrity heiress/reality TV star most famous for a grainy sex video.

No, editors just wanted to see what would happen if we didn't cover this media phenomenon, this creature of the Internet gossip age, for a full week. After that, we'd take it day by day. Would anyone care? Would anyone notice? And would that tell us something interesting?

It turned out that people noticed plenty -- but not in the way that might have been expected. None of the thousands of media outlets that depend on AP called in asking for a Paris Hilton story. No one felt a newsworthy event had been ignored. (To be fair, nothing too out-of-the-ordinary happened in the Hilton universe.)

The reaction was to the idea of the ban, not the effects of it. There was some internal hand-wringing. Some felt we were tinkering dangerously with the news. Whom, they asked, would we ban next? Others loved the idea. "I vote we do the same for North Korea," one AP writer said facetiously.

The experiment began on February 19. A few days before, the AP had written from Austria about Hilton's appearance at the Vienna Opera ball, just ahead of her 26th birthday. We didn't cover her weekend birthday bash in Las Vegas.

During "blackout week," the AP didn't mention Hilton's second birthday party at a Beverly Hills restaurant, at which a drunken friend reportedly was ejected by security after insulting Paula Abdul and Courtney Love. And editors asked our Puerto Rico bureau not to write about her visit there to hawk her fragrance. However, her name did slip into copy unintentionally three times, as background: in stories about Britney Spears, Nicole Richie, and even in the lead of a story about Democrats in Las Vegas.

Then Hilton was arrested on February 27 for driving with a suspended license -- an offense that could conceivably lead to jail time because she may have violated conditions of a previous sentence. By that time, our blackout was over anyway, so reporting the development was an easy call. (On the flip side, we never got to see what repercussions there would have been if we hadn't.)

Also by then, an internal AP memo about the ban had found its way to the outside world. The New York Observer quoted it on Wednesday, and the Gawker.com gossip site linked to it. Howard Stern was heard mentioning the ban on his radio show, and calls came in from various news outlets asking us about it. On Editor and Publisher magazine's Web site, a reader wrote: "This is INCREDIBLE, finally a news organization that can see through this evil woman." And another: "You guys are my heroes!"

We felt a little sheepish that the ban was over, and braced ourselves for the comments that would come when people realized it wasn't permanent.

We also learned that Lloyd Grove, former columnist for the New York Daily News, had attempted a much longer Paris Hilton blackout. He began it a year into his "Lowdown" column and stuck to it, he says, for two years until the column was discontinued last October -- except for a blind item (no names) about Hilton crashing a pre-Oscar party.

So was Grove attempting to raise the level of discourse in our society by focusing on truly newsworthy subjects?

Well, not really. "The blackout was a really heartfelt attempt on my part," he says, "to get publicity for myself."

A trait that Hilton, it must be said, has turned into an art. Grove thinks the so-called "celebutante" achieved her unique brand of fame because she boasts an irresistible set of traits: wealth, a big name, beauty with a "downmarket" appeal, and a tendency to seem ... oversexed. "This is what mainstream society celebrates," he says. "She is, in the worst sense, the best expression of the maxim that no bad deed goes unrewarded in our pop culture."

One measure of Hilton's fame: She was No. 5 last year on the Yahoo Buzz Index, a list of overall top searches on the Web site (her ever-so-brief buddy Spears is a perennial No. 1).

Another is that US Weekly has at least a mention or a photo in just about every issue. "People now come to expect to see pictures of her," says Caroline Schaefer, deputy editor of the celebrity magazine. "They're intrigued by her unshakable self-esteem. People are fascinated by that."

Jeff Jarvis, who teaches journalism at the City University of New York, decries the "one-size-fits-all disease" afflicting media outlets, who feel that "everybody's covering it, so we must, too." Even The New York Times, he noted, had substantial coverage of a hearing concerning where Anna Nicole Smith -- perhaps the one person who rivaled Hilton in terms of fame for fame's sake -- would be buried.

"That disease leads to the Paris Hilton virus spreading through the news industry," says Jarvis, who puts out the BuzzMachine blog.

So what have we learned from the ban? "It's hard to tell what this really changes, since we didn't have to make any hard decisions," says Jesse Washington, AP's entertainment editor. "So we'll continue to use our news judgment on each item, individually."

Which means that for the immediate future, if not always, we'll still have Paris.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/0....ap/index.html





Harry Potter Passes a Test
Lawrence Van Gelder

Harry Potter did the full monty in the West End, and the critics liked what they saw.

In other words, Daniel Radcliffe, best known for his film portrayals of the boy wizard Harry Potter, received enthusiastic reviews when he opened at the Gielgud Theater in London on Tuesday in a revival of the 1973 Peter Shaffer psychological thriller, "Equus," in which he plays a tortured teenager, a role that requires him to appear in the nude, Reuters reported.

Excitement surrounding the West End stage debut of Mr. Radcliffe, 17, helped sell $3.9 million worth of tickets before the opening and attracted a galaxy of stars to the first night, including Bob Geldof, Helena Bonham Carter and Christian Slater.

The play's co-star is Richard Griffiths (Harry's nasty uncle in the films), as the psychiatrist who plumbs the teenager's obsession with horses. "No flash in the magic pan," was The Guardian's assessment of Mr. Radcliffe's performance.

The Daily Telegraph said, "Brilliant Radcliffe throws off Harry Potter's cloak."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/theater/01equus.html





That Tune in Your Head Could Be Your Toothbrush
Warren Buckleitner

Put a rock band in your mouth, along with a dab of toothpaste, with Tooth Tunes, a $10 musical toothbrush from Tiger Electronics, a division of Hasbro. The theory is that two minutes of brushing is needed to give teeth a proper cleaning. So the brush is really a kind of timer.

The feeling is a bit eerie. The sound is transferred through the brush tip, into the teeth, and right into the inner ear, so you feel the music. Because volume is related to pressure, you can turn up the volume by applying steady pressure to your teeth. Unfortunately, you can also hear better when not brushing, which children can soon learn.

The brushes, first released last fall, are being sold nationwide this month in stores or at www.toothtunes.com. They feature 17 artists, including the Black Eyed Peas, Hilary Duff, Kiss and others. There is even one that plays “Y.M.C.A.,” so theoretically you can have the Village People in your head.

The switch is slime-proof, and batteries are included, providing power for up to six months. When they run out, you throw the brush away — and, Hasbro hopes, buy a new tune. Now you can tell your child to “keep brushing until Queen has finished, honey.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/te...ref=technology





Spicy programs

$10 Wok Keeps TV Station on Air
Oamaru Mail

Why pay $20,000 for a commercial link to run your television station when a $10 kitchen wok from the Warehouse is just as effective?

This is exactly how North Otago's newest television station 45 South is transmitting its signal from its studio to the top of Cape Wanbrow, in a bid to keep costs down.

45 South volunteer Ken Jones designed the wok transmitter in his spare time last year when he wanted to provide wireless broadband to his Ardgowan home.

"A group of us wanted to connect our computers to each other and then we worked out a way to get of getting the signal between two points," he said.

He discovered satellite dishes were between $100 to $400 retail and that smaller dishes, the same size as a wok, were $80.

Mr Jones thought he could do better.

Along with friend Murray Bobbette they worked out mathematical equations to prove the curved metal face of a wok would have the same effect as a small satellite dish.

"We have spent a lot of time getting it right -- the first time we installed one we had it up a pole with the handle still on the end of the wok," he said.

"We had it connected to the woolshed and initially you couldn't get a signal the width of the paddock and now it can reach up to 20km."

When the television station 45 South (UHF channel 41) started up in September last year, Mr Jones thought the same technique could be applied.

"The $20,000 for a commercial link was just money we didn't have, so we bought several woks from The Warehouse instead which was convenient and cheap," he said.

Pre-recorded clips at the studio are fed through a computer and beamed to Cape Wanbrow where they are relayed off to television sets around North Otago.

The classic case of Kiwi ingenuity has made its way onto the internet and the technique has been posted by an American website, Mr Jones said.

"People wanted to know all the details about how to make their own, so it is now all publicly documented," he said.

One of the issues they had to deal with was making the pole that the wok sits on high enough to clear the Kingsgate Brydone Hotel.

They needed a clear path from the station to the hill, so the only way was up, building the pole more than eight metres high.

Mr Jones said one wok was providing Oamaru with the signal at present and there was no need to provide another wok for some time.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/search/sto...5E83027AF10110


















Until next week,

- js.



















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