Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 5th, '07

[JackSpratts]

Founded 2002


































"We expected this. And of course we don't think they will succeed." – Tobias Andersson


"If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying." – Kevin Rose


"This is the first round and will not be the last." – Michael Ayers


"It is extraordinary that [the International Chamber of Commerce,] an organization committed to fighting counterfeiting and piracy would steal the intellectual property of another organization." – Glen Gieschen


"I create nothing. I own." – Gordon Gekko


"I can’t help but feel justified in not paying for it anymore." – Kate


"The art of thinking is being lost because people can type in a word and find a source and think that’s the be all end all." – Tom McCarthy


"He is talented. But when God gives someone talent sometimes he takes something away." – Stan Ross


"I can't stand the fact that the Vatican refused a funeral for Welby but they didn't for Pinochet or Franco." – Andrea Rivera


"But it is something: it is lovely, touching and infused with life." – A. O. Scott





































May 5th, 2007







Prosecutor to Press Charges Against Pirate Bay

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall has made it clear that he intends pressing charges against individuals connected with the Pirate Bay following a much-publicized raid on the file-sharing site's servers last year.

Police and prosecutors confiscated the servers along with other computer equipment on May 31st 2006.

Roswall wants to prosecute individuals involved with the Pirate Bay for breaches of copyright law "and for helping others to break copyright law and conspiring to break copyright law".

But Tobias Andersson from the Pirate Bay does not think that the people behing the file-sharing site have much to fear.

"We expected this. And of course we don't think they will succeed.

"I think they feel they have to do it. It would look bad otherwise since they had 20 to 30 police officers involved in the raid," he told The Local.

The raid was followed by a heated debate and a flurry of legal activity. It later emerged the US-based Motion Pictures Association had encouraged Swedish authorities to carry out the swoop.

The Chancellor of Justice, the Justice Ombudsman and the parliamentary Constitutional Committee all received complaints.

"We will most likely be cleared as it is obvious that there is no copyrighted material on the site, there are just links to other places.

"Whatever the outcome, we will continue. If we are outlawed in Sweden we will continue elsewhere. There will be no downtime," said Andersson.

Roswall was given until June 1st by the courts to decide on whether or not to press charges against the individuals behind Pirate Bay.

The prosecutor has indicated that he may need more time before providing the court with a charge sheet. He would not name the people who are likely to face charges or say how many will be prosecuted.

"It's not completely finished yet. There are actually still quite a few people who need to be questioned," Roswall told news agency TT.

The Justice Ombudsman elected in April not to criticize police or prosecutors for their part in the raid. He did however note that a number of companies and private individuals with no connection to the Pirate Bay had been affected by the raid.

The Chancellor of Justice has not yet decided whether or not the innocent victims of the raid should receive compensation.

Sweden's Constitutional Committee is still expected to deal with complaints about the involvement of then Justice Minister Thomas Bodström.
http://www.thelocal.se/7205/20070504/





DVD DRM Row Sparks User Rebellion

Attempts to gag the blogosphere from publishing details of a DVD crack have led to a user revolt.

The row centred on a 'cease and desist' letter sent by the body that oversees the digital rights management technology on high-definition DVDs.

It requested that blogs and websites removed details of a software key that breaks the encryption on HD-DVDs.

The removal of the information from community news website Digg was a step too far for its fans.

As quickly as stories relating to the issue were removed, they were re-submitted in their thousands, in an act described by one user as a "21st Century revolt".

The site collapsed under the weight of the attack at one point.

Angry hacker

The founder of Digg has now decided not to censor the information, telling users: "If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying".

Digg is a community-based news site with an emphasis on technology stories. Unlike traditional websites, editorial control is governed by users, who rank stories themselves.

Its combination of social bookmarking and blogging have made it popular and it now accounts for 1% of the total internet traffic in the US.

The controversy it has become embroiled in centres on a decision by the Advaced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (AACS), the consortium behind the DRM for HD-DVD disks, to gag websites and bloggers that published information about a software key that disables the copyright protection on the discs.

In a letter to a variety of websites and blogs the AACS requested that information relating to the crack be removed.

It said sites were "providing and offering to the public a technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof that is primarily designed, produced, or marketed for the purpose of circumventing the technological protection measures afforded by AACS".

It goes on to say that doing so contravenes the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and therefore "violates the rights of the AACS".

The issue with encryption first emerged at the end of last year when the AACS admitted that a hacker had bypassed security on some HD-DVD titles.

The hacker, known as muslix64, has been able to access the encryption keys which pass between certain discs and the player.

Once those keys have been obtained the disc can be stripped of its encryption enabling the digital content to be played on any machine.

The hacker said he had grown angry when a HD-DVD movie he had bought would not play on his monitor because it did not have the compliant connector demanded by the movie industry.

Since then links to the original crack and information about it has steadily been leaking out on the web.

Some bloggers - including well-known web activist Cory Doctorow - have decide to remove the information in light of the AACS letter.

Others, in defiance of the orders, are openly posting the key on their websites or linking to the website detailing the original crack.

Digg rebellion

Initially, news website Digg decided to remove stories referencing the key.

"Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law," chief executive officer Jay Adelson told readers.

Users, angered by the censorship, were determined to keep the story about the encryption-breaking code in the headlines which prompted a hasty change of heart by the website.

"After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company.

We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be," said founder Kevin Rose.

The debate has put the initial crack and, what some see as the heavy-handed tactics of the licensing authority to combat it, back in the headlines.

It will also spark a fresh debate on how far user-generated content can be censored.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/6615047.stm





New AACS Cracks Cannot be Revoked, Says Hacker
Jeremy Reimer

Only a few days after Corel issued a WinDVD update to close the hole opened by AACS hackers, the folks at the Doom9 forums sent word that they have found yet another way around the copy protection for high definition discs. This time, the method involved the Xbox 360's HD DVD add-on drive to capture the "Volume Unique Keys" as they were being read by the drive itself. Rather than just point out the crack, we're going to take a closer look at how this crack was accomplished, because one of the hackers involved in the crack says that it's more or less unstoppable.

The latest attack vector bypasses the encryption performed by the Device Keys—the same keys that were revoked by the WinDVD update—and the so-called "Host Private Key," which as yet has not been found. This was accomplished by de-soldering the HD DVD drive's firmware chip, reading its contents, and then patching it. Once that was done, the firmware was soldered back onto the drive.

Despite the technical difficulty of performing this hack, it does offer some advantages in the race to beat AACS copy protection. "They cannot revoke this hack," said forum member arnezami, who has been at the center of much of the AACS cracking recently. "No matter how many Private Host Keys they revoke we will still be able to get Volume IDs using patched xbox 360 HD DVD drives."

In addition to being irrevocable, the hack has the potential to make future decryption even easier. "This hack/technique enables us to figure out how the Volume ID is stored on the disc," arnezami explained. "It's very possible we would figure out [...] how the KCD is stored on the disc. Knowing that and being able to teach a PC drive how to read a KCD will open the door for what I called third-generation decryption."

While this type of decryption (reading keys directly off a PC drive by sidestepping part of the encryption process) is still not a reality, it may not be too far off. The main issue is the cost of purchasing standalone high-def players by the hackers, but as prices for these come down, this problem will slowly go away.

Although AACS has proven much more difficult to fully crack than the copy protection on regular DVDs, it is unlikely to remain only partially cracked for very long. The real problem with trying to create an "uncrackable" copy protection is that the media must come with the keys used to decrypt it somewhere on the device and the media itself. Hiding these keys in different places—security by obscurity—merely delays the inevitable. Of course, for the content providers, any delay is still better than no delay at all, so expect the battles between copy protection and hackers to continue.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ys-hacker.html





Congress Threatens Colleges

Politicians try campus quiz on piracy
William Triplett

Congress threatened 20 universities with unspecified repercussions if they fail to provide "acceptable answers" about what they're doing to stop or inhibit students from illegal downloading and file sharing.

"If we do not receive acceptable answers, Congress will be forced to act," said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee.

A bipartisan group of members who serve on either judicial or educational committees in the House joined Smith in sending a letter and a survey on Tuesday to 20 schools identified as having the greatest amount of online piracy. The survey is an exhaustive questionnaire seeking detailed information about each university's antipiracy efforts.

"We are asking these universities to report back to us by May 31," Smith said. "We want to know exactly what they plan to do to stop illegal downloading on their campuses."

"Universities have a moral and legal obligation to ensure students do not use campus computers for illegal downloading," he continued. "These schools do not give away their intellectual property for free, and they should not expect musicians to do so."

Howard Berman (D-Calif.), chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property and a co-signer of the letter, said, "By answering the survey, universities will be required to examine how they address piracy on their campuses."

The letter noted that while five House hearings into the problem have revealed "modest progress" by some campus administrations, they have also yielded "substantial evidence to question the commitment of some institutions to adopt and, more importantly, implement policies that will actually contribute to a reduced incidence of campus digital piracy. The fact that copyright piracy is not unique to college and university campuses is not an excuse for higher education officials to fail to take reasonable steps to eliminate such activity nor to appropriately sanction such conduct when discovered."

Survey questions include the following:

• "Does your institution have an 'acceptable use' policy that includes an unambiguous prohibition against illegal peer-to-peer file trafficking of copyrighted works through the use of campus computer and networking systems?"

• "Please describe, in detail, your institution's formal policy or procedure for processing and responding to notices of infringement received."

• "Beginning with the 2002-03 academic year and for each school year thereafter, please identify the number of student violations of your institution's acceptable use policies that involved illegal downloading, uploading, or file trafficking of copyrighted material. Please also note the number of works whose copyrights were infringed."

Reps for the motion picture and music recording industries welcomed announcement of the letters and surveys that went to Columbia, Pennsylvania, Boston U., UCLA, Purdue, Vanderbilt, Duke, Rochester Institute of Technology, U. of Massachusetts at Boston, Michigan, Ohio U., U. of Nebraska at Lincoln, Tennessee, South Carolina, U. of Massachusetts at Amherst, Michigan State, Howard, N.C. State and U. of Wisconsin at Madison.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR111...goryid=18&cs=1





Protect Harvard from the RIAA

The following op-ed, Protect Harvard from the RIAA, co-written by HLS Professor Charles Nesson '60 and Wendy Seltzer '96, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, was published in The Harvard Crimson on May 1, 2007.

Since its founding, Harvard has been an educational leader. Its 1650 charter broadly conceives its mission to include "the advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences, [and] the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences." From John Harvard’s library through today’s my.harvard.edu, the University has worked to create and spread knowledge, educating citizens within and outside its walls.

Students and faculty use the Internet to gather and share knowledge now more than ever. Law professors at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, for example, have conducted mock trials in the online environment of Second Life; law students have worked with faculty to offer cybercourses to the public at large. Students can collaborate on "wiki" websites, gather research materials from far-flung countries, and create multi-media projects to enhance their learning.

Yet "new deterrence and education initiatives" from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) threaten access to this vibrant resource. The RIAA has already requested that universities serve as conduits for more than 1,200 "pre-litigation letters." Seeking to outsource its enforcement costs, the RIAA asks universities to point fingers at their students, to filter their Internet access, and to pass along notices of claimed copyright infringement.

But these responses distort the University’s educational mission. They impose financial and non-monetary costs, including compromised student privacy, limited access to genuine educational resources, and restricted opportunities for new creative expression.

One can easily understand why the RIAA wants help from universities in facilitating its enforcement actions against students who download copyrighted music without paying for it. It is easier to litigate against change than to change with it. If the RIAA saw a better way to protect its existing business, it would not be threatening our students, forcing our librarians and administrators to be copyright police, and flooding our courts with lawsuits against relatively defenseless families without lawyers or ready means to pay. We can even understand the attraction of using lawsuits to shore up an aging business model rather than engaging with disruptive technologies and the risks that new business models entail.

But mere understanding is no reason for a university to voluntarily assist the RIAA with its threatening and abusive tactics. Instead, we should be assisting our students both by explaining the law and by resisting the subpoenas that the RIAA serves upon us. We should be deploying our clinical legal student training programs to defend our targeted students. We should be lobbying Congress for a roll back of the draconian copyright law that the copyright industry has forced upon us. Intellectual property can be efficient when its boundaries are relatively self-evident.

But when copyright protection starts requiring the cooperation of uninvolved parties, at the cost of both financial and mission harm, those external costs outweigh its benefits. We need not condone infringement to conclude that 19th- and 20th-century copyright law is poorly suited to promote 21st-century knowledge. The old copyright-business models are inefficient ways to give artists incentives in the new digital environment.

Both law and technology will continue to evolve. And as innovators develop new ways of sharing copyrighted material, the University should engage with both creators and the "fair users" who follow and build upon their works. Finding the right balance will be challenging, but projects such as Noank Media, developed by faculty and fellows at the Berkman Center, provides one glimpse into what the future may hold. Just this year, Noank Media became a functioning international corporation with operations in both China and Canada.

With the goal of fostering "limitless legal content flow" through innovative licensing deals, Noank makes shared music look "free" to its listeners while reimbursing the copyright holders directly for downloads of their materials. Noank does this by serving as an aggregator, collecting payment through institutions such as libraries and schools, as well as Internet Service Providers. Forward-thinking copyright holders recognize that this system may offer them more rewards, not less control.

The University’s educational mission is broader than the RIAA’s demands. We don’t have all the answers either, but rather than capitulating to special interests, we should continue to search for fair solutions that represent the University’s mission, its students, and the law in a way that educates students to be leaders of the digital 21st century.
http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2007/05/01_nesson.php





RIAA Drops Another Case In Chicago Against Misidentified Defendant
Ray Beckerman

Once again, this time in BMG v. Thao, the RIAA has dropped a case it brought against a misidentified defendant.

Lee Thao was sued in the Eastern District of Wisconsin by BMG Music and other record labels for allegedly sharing files over the Kazaa network. The RIAA based its case on information that the cable modem used to partake in file sharing was registered to Mr. Thao. However, both the ISP and the RIAA failed to recognize that Mr. Thao was not a subscriber to the ISP at the time of the alleged file-sharing, and therefore did not have possession of the suspect cable modem at that time. Daliah Saper of Saper Law Offices represented Mr. Thao and got the case dismissed after pointing out to the RIAA's attorneys that they had made another blunder in their investigations.

A similar Chicago case, Elektra v. Wilke, was previously dismissed. Mr. Wilke, too, had been represented by Ms. Saper.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...n-chicago.html





Is the RIAA Pulling a Scam on the Music Industry?
DJ ProFusion

The Internet radio game is rigged and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has rigged it in their favor.

There has been an understandable public outcry against the RIAA’s attempts to more than triple the sound recording copyright royalties on Internet radio. (See Save Internet Radio from Corporate Money Grab) One solution proposed by Webcasters is to just not play RIAA-member songs under the assumption that then they don’t have to pay the royalty to the RIAA’s collection body, SoundExchange; Webcasters would then just pay the independent artist the royalty.

This sounds fair and just because it is. However, the RIAA is not about being fair and just. The game is rigged and the RIAA has rigged it in their favor. The strategy of playing only non-RIAA songs won't work though because the RIAA has secured the right to collect royalties on all songs regardless of who controls the copyright. RIAA operates under the assumption that they will collect the royalties for the "sound recording copyright" and that the artists who own their own copyright will go to SoundExchange to collect at a later date.

Look at the information on SoundExchange.com (RIAA created SoundExchange) and see how it works. The RIAA has secured legal authority to administer a compulsory license that covers all recorded music.

"The recent U.S. Copyright Office ruling regarding webcasting designated SoundExchange to collect and distribute to all nonmembers as well as its members. The Librarian of Congress issued his decision with rates and terms to govern the compulsory license for webcasters (Internet-only radio) and simulcastors (retransmissions)." (http://soundexchange.com/faq.html#b4)

"SRCOs (sound recording copyright owners) are subject to a compulsory license for the use of their music...SoundExchange was established to administer the collection and distribution of royalties from such compulsory licenses taken by noninteractive streaming services that use satellite, cable or Internet methods of distribution."
(http://soundexchange.com/faq.html#a4)

SoundExchange (the RIAA) considers any digital performance of a song as falling under their compulsory license. If any artist records a song, SoundExchange has the right to collect royalties for its performance on Internet radio. Artists can offer to download their music for free, but they cannot offer their songs to Internet radio for free. (http://soundexchange.com/faq.html#a7)

So how it works is that SoundExchange collects money through compulsory royalties from Webcasters and holds onto the money. If a label or artist wants their share of the money, they must become a member of SoundExchange and pay a fee to collect their royalties (http://soundexchange.com/faq.html#b6). But, and this is a big "but," you only get royalties if you own the sound recording copyright. If you are signed to a major label, chances are you don’t. Even if you do own the copyright to your own recording of your own song, SoundExchange will collect Internet radio royalties for your song even if you don’t want them to do so.

Go to the SoundExchange site: http://plays.soundexchange.com/... and take a look at the hundreds of indie labels for whom SoundExchange claims they have collected royalties. Enter some of those label names on http://www.riaaradar.com/... and notice how few are actually members of the RIAA. Contact the label and ask if they are a member of RIAA and they almost certainly aren’t and may not even be aware that SoundExchange is collecting royalty fees on their music.

And what exactly is SoundExchange doing with the money they have collected for those hundreds of labels that must have thousands of songs???
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/24/141326/870





Internet Radio Royalty Hike Delayed; Last Chance to Petition Congress
Jacqui Cheng

Internet radio will remain safe and sound, at least through July of this year, on account of a new decision by the US Copyright Royalty Board. Under the CRB's original ruling, Internet radio stations would have had to begin paying retroactive royalties on May 15, thereby knocking many of them offline due to the crippling fees. The new date, July 15, 2007, is two months later than the original deadline set by the CRB and offers some reprieve for Internet radio stations hoping for a miracle (or Congress) to reverse the CRB's decision.

The original ruling by the CRB caused widespread outrage from Internet broadcasters and listeners alike. The ruling said that every Internet radio station—even nonprofit stations and those that serve the public—must pay heavily-increased royalty fees to royalty collection entity SoundExchange. The rate hike involved a $500 annual fee for each channel owned by a station and a royalty for every song played per connected user at the time of the song's broadcast. The CRB ruled that Internet radio stations would have to pay retroactive fees on the new rates to cover 2006 and 2007, as well.

National Public Radio spearheaded an appeal against the CRB's ruling, arguing that the newly-proposed fees for Internet broadcasters were so high that they would cripple nearly all of the currently-available radio stations on the 'Net. The organization also reasoned that the fee would be impossible for broadcasters to calculate and begged the CRB to reconsider the formulas for calculating its new fee structure.

The CRB rejected the appeal several weeks later and upheld every part of the original ruling, save for how royalties would be calculated. Instead of charging a royalty for each time a song is heard by a listener, the broadcasters would be able to pay fees based on average listening hours through 2008. However, the new formula would still yield fees crippling most 'Net radio stations and force them offline once retroactive fee collection started on May 15.

The new date issued by the CRB gives Internet radio stations two more months before having to pay the retroactive fees for the past year and a half.

One lobby group, SaveNetRadio, pledged to spend the next 45 days "educating Congress" on why 'Net radio should stick around. "We feel strongly that Congress could not possibly have intended a structure whereby Internet radio services pay 60 percent to 300 percent of their revenue in royalties while satellite radio pays 5 to 7 percent and broadcasters pay zero," said the group in a statement. "We urge them to support HR 2060."

HR 2060 is, of course, the Internet Radio Equality Act. It was introduced in April by Representatives Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Don Manzullo (R-IL) and would essentially reverse the CRB's decision, returning Internet radio to its previous, percentage-based fee structure that is similar to that of satellite radio. While Internet radio stations and supporting groups didn't have much time to lobby Congress when the bill was initially introduced, the deadline extension by the CRB could give groups like SaveNetRadio just enough time to, fittingly, save 'Net radio.

If Internet radio stations are important to you, we urge you to contact your Representative and let him or her know that you support the Internet Radio Equality Act.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-congress.html





US Internet Radio Providers Forced to Restrict Streams to US Listeners
Scott M. Fulton

Forced to comply with US federal statutes on providing music to foreign listeners without a license, Pandora and other American streaming Internet radio services began actively enforcing restrictions on streaming to IP addresses outside US boundaries this morning.

As a result, Pandora listeners in Canada and elsewhere began receiving apology notices instead of music, including a description of efforts Pandora and others are making to secure international performance rights - a topic to which countries elsewhere have apparently not assigned a very high priority.

"Delivery of Pandora is based on proper licensing from the people who created the music," wrote Pandora founder Tim Westergren in a message to international listeners. "We have always believed in honoring the guidelines as determined by legislators and regulators, artists and songwriters, and the labels and publishers they work with...Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the US and there is no global licensing organization to enable us to legitimately offer Pandora around the world."

Pandora is not alone, as Canada-based BetaNews reader Hall9000 informed us yesterday in a comment for our story on the performance back-royalty due date postponement. Talk-radio station KFI in Los Angeles, he told us, began posting a notice directed to Canadian listeners yesterday, including a request for a listening license.

"Due to licensing restrictions," the notice reads, "we are not able to allow access to the content you are requesting from outside the United States. We are sorry we can no longer provide access to Canada. If you currently reside in the United States, please select one of the options below to process your request. Please allow up to 60 hours to process your request." Whether KFI - owned by Clear Channel Communications - would respond to that request with an invoice for a fee is unclear.

"I've been listening to a program for years now and now I can't?" wrote Hall9000. "Talk about killing a market and shooting themselves in the foot while it's in their mouth."

As far back as October 2005, the Future of Music Coalition called upon the Senate Commerce Committee to begin consideration of legislation that would amend US copyright law to allow for international licensing - in effect, US stations paying US-based performance rights organizations directly, rather than through international agencies that would then repay those same US-based PROs.

"The lack of a performance right in the US confounds international licensing and royalty distribution mechanisms," the FMC's directors wrote. "As the music industry continues to expand on a global scale, and as the purchase and enjoyment of music is controlled less and less by geographical borders, having copyright laws that align with worldwide standards is more important than ever. Modifying the US Copyright law to include a performance right for sound recordings will bring us into harmony with the rest of the industrialized world."
http://www.betanews.com/article/US_I...ers/1178212096





Home Secretary Bigs up Fingerprint-Activated iPods
Jeesh Maria

Home Secretary John Reid is asking Apple and Sony, and other manufacturers, to join his crime fighting summit.

The summit will look at what manufacturers can do to add "anti-crime" features to their products.

A Blair policy review, released last month, raised the red herring very clever plan of fingerprint-activated MP3 players - we explain why this is silly a great idea here.

Street robberies rose slightly according to the most recent Home Office figures. iPods and expensive mobile phones are often blamed for fuelling this growth.

Reid, interviewed on Sunday AM, said new gadgets mean criminals move on to stealing new types of products. Which they might continue to do whether the Home Office legislates to make fingerprint-activation compulsory on mobile phones or not.

Asked for one peice of advice for young people carrying such devices Reid said: "The one piece of advice I'd offer is to manufacturers to help us in designing in features to reduce crime." Reid even name-checked the iPhone and said young people should, "Not just look at the call tones and the camera quality but ask how it can prevent people stealing and reselling it." Reid used the example of improvements in switching off stolen mobile phones.

A spokesman for the Home Office told Reuters: "We already have a close working relationship with mobile phone manufacturers. John Reid is likely to approach Apple and Sony in the coming weeks to join this summit."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04...ingers_iphone/





New Toys Read Brain Waves
Rachel Konrad

A convincing twin of Darth Vader stalks the beige cubicles of a Silicon Valley office, complete with ominous black mask, cape and light saber.

But this is no chintzy Halloween costume. It's a prototype, years in the making, of a toy that incorporates brain wave-reading technology.

Behind the mask is a sensor that touches the user's forehead and reads the brain's electrical signals, then sends them to a wireless receiver inside the saber, which lights up when the user is concentrating. The player maintains focus by channeling thoughts on any fixed mental image, or thinking specifically about keeping the light sword on. When the mind wanders, the wand goes dark.

Engineers at NeuroSky Inc. have big plans for brain wave-reading toys and video games. They say the simple Darth Vader game -- a relatively crude biofeedback device cloaked in gimmicky garb -- portends the coming of more sophisticated devices that could revolutionize the way people play.

Technology from NeuroSky and other startups could make video games more mentally stimulating and realistic. It could even enable players to control video game characters or avatars in virtual worlds with nothing but their thoughts.

Adding biofeedback to "Tiger Woods PGA Tour," for instance, could mean that only those players who muster Zen-like concentration could nail a put. In the popular action game "Grand Theft Auto," players who become nervous or frightened would have worse aim than those who remain relaxed and focused.

NeuroSky's prototype measures a person's baseline brain-wave activity, including signals that relate to concentration, relaxation and anxiety. The technology ranks performance in each category on a scale of 1 to 100, and the numbers change as a person thinks about relaxing images, focuses intently, or gets kicked, interrupted or otherwise distracted.

The technology is similar to more sensitive, expensive equipment that athletes use to achieve peak performance. Koo Hyoung Lee, a NeuroSky co-founder from South Korea, used biofeedback to improve concentration and relaxation techniques for members of his country's Olympic archery team.

"Most physical games are really mental games," said Lee, also chief technology officer at San Jose-based NeuroSky, a 12-employee company founded in 1999. "You must maintain attention at very high levels to succeed. This technology makes toys and video games more lifelike."

Boosters say toys with even the most basic brain wave-reading technology -- scheduled to debut later this year -- could boost mental focus and help kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism and mood disorders.

But scientific research is scant. Even if the devices work as promised, some question whether people who use biofeedback devices will be able to replicate their relaxed or focused states in real life, when they're not attached to equipment in front of their television or computer.

Elkhonon Goldberg, clinical professor of neurology at New York University, said the toys might catch on in a society obsessed with optimizing performance -- but he was skeptical they'd reduce the severity of major behavioral disorders.

"These techniques are used usually in clinical contexts. The gaming companies are trying to push the envelope," said Goldberg, author of "The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Older." "You can use computers to improve the cognitive abilities, but it's an art."

It's also unclear whether consumers, particularly American kids, want mentally taxing games.

"It's hard to tell whether playing games with biofeedback is more fun -- the company executives say that, but I don't know if I believe them," said Ben Sawyer, director of the Games for Health Project, a division of the Serious Games Initiative. The think tank focuses in part on how to make computer games more educational, not merely pastimes for kids with dexterous thumbs.

The basis of many brain wave-reading games is electroencephalography, or EEG, the measurement of the brain's electrical activity through electrodes placed on the scalp. EEG has been a mainstay of psychiatry for decades.

An EEG headset in a research hospital may have 100 or more electrodes that attach to the scalp with a conductive gel. It could cost tens of thousands of dollars.

But the price and size of EEG hardware is shrinking. NeuroSky's "dry-active" sensors don't require gel, are the size of a thumbnail, and could be put into a headset that retails for as little as $20, said NeuroSky CEO Stanley Yang.

Yang is secretive about his company's product lineup because of a nondisclosure agreement with the manufacturer. But he said an international toy manufacturer plans to unveil an inexpensive gizmo with an embedded NeuroSky biosensor at the Japan Toy Association's trade show in late June. A U.S. version is scheduled to debut at the American International Fall Toy Show in October.

"Whatever we sell, it will work on 100 percent or almost 100 percent of people out there, no matter what the condition, temperature, indoor or outdoors," Yang said. "We aim for wearable technology that everyone can put on and go without failure, as easy as the iPod."

Researchers at NeuroSky and other startups are also building prototypes of toys that use electromyography (EMG), which records twitches and other muscular movements, and electrooculography (EOG), which measures changes in the retina.

While NeuroSky's headset has one electrode, Emotiv Systems Inc. has developed a gel-free headset with 18 sensors. Besides monitoring basic changes in mood and focus, Emotiv's bulkier headset detects brain waves indicating smiles, blinks, laughter, even conscious thoughts and unconscious emotions. Players could kick or punch their video game opponent -- without a joystick or mouse.

"It fulfills the fantasy of telekinesis," said Tan Le, co-founder and president of San Francisco-based Emotiv.

The 30-person company hopes to begin selling a consumer headset next year, but executives would not speculate on price. A prototype hooks up to gaming consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360.

Le, a 29-year-old Australian woman, said the company decided in 2004 to target gamers because they would generate the most revenue -- but eventually Emotive will build equipment for clinical use. The technology could enable paralyzed people to "move" in virtual realty; people with obsessive-compulsive disorders could measure their anxiety levels, then adjust medication accordingly.

The husband-and-wife team behind CyberLearning Technology LLC took the opposite approach. The San Marcos-based startup targets doctors, therapists and parents of adolescents with autism, impulse control problems and other pervasive developmental disorders.

CyberLearning is already selling the SmartBrain Technologies system for the original PlayStation, PS2 and original Xbox, and it will soon work with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The EEG- and EMG-based biofeedback system costs about $600, not including the game console or video games.

Kids who play the race car video game "Gran Turismo" with the SmartBrain system can only reach maximum speed when they're focused. If attention wanes or players become impulsive or anxious, cars slow to a chug.

CyberLearning has sold more than 1,500 systems since early 2005. The company hopes to reach adolescents already being treated for behavior disorders. But co-founder Lindsay Greco said the budding niche is unpredictable.

"Our biggest struggle is to find the target market," said Greco, who has run treatment programs for children with attention difficulties since the 1980s. "We're finding that parents are using this to improve their own recall and focus. We have executives who use it to improve their memory, even their golf."
http://www.courant.com/technology/at...ity-technology





SCO Wanted to Gag Torvalds
Tom Espiner

Unix specialist SCO Group tried to legally silence Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, as part of its long-running legal battle with IBM.

Documents, filed by IBM on Friday, contain a copy of a letter from SCO to IBM's lawyers. In the letter, dated 11 February, 2004, SCO attorney Kevin McBride requested information regarding individuals and organisations SCO had been "told" were being funded by IBM, as SCO was "concerned" about statements regarding its litigation by those people. SCO had accused IBM of copying proprietary Unix intellectual property into Linux.

SCO was in the process of gathering information to request a court order that those people, including Torvalds, refrain from making disparaging public statements about SCO, with regards to the case. SCO also tried to silence Eben Moglen, a Columbia University professor who, until this month, was a director of the Free Software Foundation, and Eric Raymond, a controversial open-source advocate, saying they claimed to be IBM consultants.

"Any agreement to refrain from such public statements should include not just IBM, but also affiliates and consultants that directly or indirectly receive financial support from IBM. This letter lists several persons and entities that, we are told, receive direct or indirect financial support from IBM. We would ask you to confirm if this is true," wrote McBride.

SCO sought to silence Torvalds, who at the time worked for the not-for-profit Open Source Development Labs (OSDL). Torvalds had sided with IBM over what rights IBM had over its code.

In the letter, SCO claimed that IBM was the principal sponsor of OSDL, but offered no evidence in the letter to support that claim. IBM was a member of OSDL at the time. "We are... concerned about the statements about SCO's litigation claims made by Linus Torvalds, who is employed by the Open Source Development Labs OSDL, which is funded principally by IBM," wrote McBride in his letter. "Because of Mr Torvalds' position in the technology world, his comments about SCO's evidence in this case are given particular weight in industry and popular press."

Eric Raymond had called the SCO lawsuit against IBM "a farce". Both Raymond and Moglen had been critical of SCO. Moglen had worked as a developer for IBM from 1979 to 1984 but SCO offered no evidence in the letter to support its claims regarding Raymond and Moglen.

"We are also concerned about the many litigation-related statements made by Eric Raymond, who claims to be a paid IBM consultant, and by Columbia law professor Eben Moglen, who also claims to be an IBM consultant. Mr Raymond and Professor Moglen have been highly critical of SCO's litigation claims. If paid by IBM it is only fair that they, along with Mr Torvalds, be included in the scope of any stipulation or order regarding litigation-related public statements," wrote McBride.

However, IBM lawyers responded to McBride's letter the following day, strongly denying that IBM had caused Torvalds, Raymond or Moglen to make any statements on its behalf. "Contrary to Kevin's suggestion, which is entirely unsupported, IBM is not causing any third party (including those listed in Kevin's letter), through funding or otherwise, to make statements on its behalf about the litigation," wrote Todd M Shaughnessy, an attorney representing IBM.

SCO also sought to silence Groklaw, a website that follows cases involving open-source software.

The SCO vs IBM case has yet to come to trial. SCO is also currently heavily embroiled with Novell, which is disputing SCO's Unix-ownership claims.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/softwar...9275161,00.htm





Top Court Rules for Microsoft in Patent Case

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned on Monday a ruling that Microsoft Corp. should be held liable for patent infringement on copies of the Windows operating system sold overseas.

By a 7-1 vote, the justices rejected arguments by AT&T Inc. that Microsoft software code that infringes on its patents could be deemed a "component" of a computer, making overseas sales of the Windows operating system an infringement under U.S. patent law.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...00689820070430





High Court Puts Limits on Patents
Linda Greenhouse

The Supreme Court, in its most important patent ruling in years, on Monday raised the bar for obtaining patents on new products that combine elements of pre-existing inventions.

If the combination results from nothing more than “ordinary innovation” and “does no more than yield predictable results,” the court said in a unanimous opinion, it is not entitled to the exclusive rights that patent protection conveys. “Were it otherwise,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the opinion, “patents might stifle, rather than promote, the progress of useful arts.”

Because most inventions combine previously known elements, the court’s approach to deciding what sort of combination is so “obvious” as to be ineligible for patent protection will have widespread application. The result will be to make patents harder to obtain and defend.

“Granting patent protection to advances that would occur in the ordinary course without real innovation retards progress,” Justice Kennedy said. He added that such patents were also undesirable because they might deprive earlier innovations of “their value or utility.”

Patent law experts said the ruling created a common sense standard that could have a broad impact.

“Nearly every patent that contains a combination of prior ideas is at risk because the court has dramatically broadened the standard of obviousness,” said Cynthia Kernick, an intellectual property lawyer at Reed Smith in Pittsburgh.

Judges will have more leeway to dismiss patent infringement lawsuits without requiring a jury trial, and patent examiners, who generally grant patent applications unless they find prior references to the same invention, will now feel freer to deny claims, said Matthew Kreeger, an intellectual property lawyer at Morrison and Foerster in San Francisco.

“And we could see thousands of cases asking the Patent Office to re-examine patents it has already granted,” said Mr. Kreeger, who was one of the lawyers who had prepared a brief filed by the Biotechnology Industry Organization in support of the patent. “It doesn’t take a lot of resources to ask for a re-examination.” To be eligible for a patent, an invention must be novel, useful and not “obvious” to a person of “ordinary skill” in the field. The Supreme Court case concerned a fairly typical dispute over whether a combination of old elements in a new way was new or simply “obvious” to any expert.

At issue was an adjustable gas pedal for use on cars and trucks equipped with electronic engine controls. How could the vehicle’s computer tell the pedal’s position? A Canadian company, KSR International, under contract to General Motors, solved the problem by mounting an electronic sensor at the pedal’s fixed pivot point in order to communicate the necessary information.

A rival, Teleflex Inc., demanded royalties, claiming the device infringed its patent on an adjustable gas pedal equipped with an electronic sensor. KSR refused to pay on the ground that Teleflex had combined existing elements in an obvious manner and that its patent was therefore invalid. KSR won in Federal District Court in Detroit, but that decision was overturned in 2005 by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

That court, in Washington, has exclusive jurisdiction over patent appeals. After years of permitting its judgments to stand unreviewed, the Supreme Court has begun to take an active interest in the Federal Circuit’s cases and has overturned several, including a second case the justices decided on Monday in favor of Microsoft in a dispute with AT&T.

In granting judgment for KSR on Monday, in KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc., No. 04-1350, the Supreme Court listed several specific errors and “fundamental misunderstandings” in how the Federal Circuit had analyzed the case. In looking at the Teleflex patent, Justice Kennedy said, the appeals court made the mistake of considering what “a pedal designer writing on a blank slate” would have done to solve the problem of the pedal and the sensor. But the slate was not blank, he continued, and the Teleflex patent was essentially an upgrade of existing technology.

Justice Kennedy said the problem was not necessarily the Federal Circuit’s overall approach, but rather its rigid way of applying a commonly used legal test. The test requires a person challenging a patent as obvious to identify a reason that would have prompted someone to combine two or more previous inventions, such as published articles suggesting such a combination. This has made it difficult to attack a patent as obvious, and has often precluded summary judgment, instead requiring an expensive jury trial.

Justice Kennedy said that this test, in the Federal Circuit’s hands, had led to a “constricted analysis” that paid too much attention to an inventor’s motivation and too little to a simpler inquiry: whether “there existed at the time of invention a known problem for which there was an obvious solution.” The Teleflex patent fit that description, he said.

The federal government, which had sided with KSR, argued that the Federal Circuit’s approach had led to the granting of too many patents to obvious inventions. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry groups, entering the case for Teleflex, argued that innovation would suffer if patents became too hard to defend.

In a sense, the case presented a moving target. While the KSR appeal was pending, the Federal Circuit issued several decisions reflecting openness to challenges to patents as unworthy because of obviousness. “Those decisions, of course, are not before us now,” Justice Kennedy said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/...01bizcourt.php





OLPC Project Clarifies: No Plans for Windows Support
Ken Fisher

Late last week the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project had a media event in Cambridge, and while I couldn't make the event, I did tape a video interview for the BBC on the project. During my preparation I kept coming across these claims that Microsoft and OLPC had partnered to put Windows XP Starter Edition on the OLPC, and according to one report, this was being done to get the XO laptop into US schools. None of this jibed with what I had been hearing from sources, so I decided to look into it further. As it turns out, a number of new outlets, including the AP and Reuters, mischaracterized the situation.

According to Walter Bender, president of Software and Content at OLPC, there is no agreement in place between OLPC and Microsoft to offer XO laptops with any version of Windows. Bender also indicated that Microsoft has not contacted OLPC regarding its $3 software bundling program, nor have any governments requested that the XO be outfitted with Windows. In short, there is no existing collaboration between Microsoft and OLPC aimed at outfitting the XO laptop with Windows.

The XO in Nigerian colors

"We are a free and open-source shop. We have no one from OLPC working with Microsoft on developing a Windows platform for the XO. MS doesn't get any special treatment from OLPC," Bender told Ars.

How did the mix-up come about? Perhaps it is because Microsoft is one of over 1,500 developers accepted to OLPC's developer program, and the company does have access to XO prototypes. Microsoft has said that the company will develop for the XO laptop, but when asked if OLPC was aware of any tests of either XP Starter Edition or Vista Starter Edition on the XO, Bender said that he was not.

Reaction to the news that Microsoft might hop on board the XO was met with both cheers and derision. Open-source advocates worried that this constituted a loss for the project and open-source ideals, but those fears appear to be unfounded now that the relationship between OLPC and Microsoft is clearer.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...s-support.html





I’ll take a dozen

HRD Hopes to Make $10 Laptops a Reality
Akshaya Mukul

Having rejected Nicholas Negroponte's offer of $100 laptops for schoolchildren, HRD ministry's idea to make laptops at $10 is firmly taking shape with two designs already in and public sector undertaking Semiconductor Complex evincing interest to be a part of the project.

So far, the cost of one laptop, after factoring in labour charges, is coming to $47 but the ministry feels the price will come down dramatically considering the fact that the demand would be for one million laptops. "The cost is encouraging and we are hopeful it would come down to $10. We would also look into the possibility of some Indian company manufacturing the parts," an official said.

The two designs with the ministry are from a final year engineering student of Vellore Institute of Technology and a researcher from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Due to reasons of Intellectual Property Rights, being insisted by the two designers, the ministry is not parting with the design except giving out some of the major details.

The laptop would be made on a single board which would make it easy to find fault and rectify it, say sources.

A meeting of industry and academia is to take place in IISc, Bangalore, later this month to go through the two designs and invite more suggestions. Simultaneously, HRD ministry has been told by Semiconductor Complex, a Chandigarh-based PSU, that it would like to be part of the project. HRD ministry wants the company to get involved in the fabrication of laptops.

Six anchor groups set up by the ministry to be in touch with experts in critical areas and remove bottlenecks have been meeting regularly. Institutions like IITs and IISc have been identified as anchor institutions for the project and have been entrusted with the task of research and development of cheap laptops.

Sources say it would be another two years before the laptops become a reality. "We do not want to rush into it. Many issues remain to be resolved like royalty to the designer after the design is patented. Prototyping would also take time. We would even conduct destructive testing and create a proper maintenance network," said one official.

Ministry sources also say that it has received offers from MNCs, but none of them was adhering to the $10 cost tag.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/T...ow/1999849.cms





Movie Studios vs. Consumers in Home Theater

After struggling for decades to increase the technical sophistication of movies in order to make theaters competitive with television, it would seem logical that the studios would eventually be quick to retarget their efforts to sell their movies directly to users as home theater began to emerge.

Studios Hesitant on Home Theater.
However, rather than embracing home theater as a new retail market for their movies--and despite the enthusiastic demand for color TV and stereo radio--studios were wary to jump into direct retail sales of movies.

The studios instead preferred the subscriber model of Time Life’s new HBO, which began in the early 70s as cable systems were set up in New York City. Terrestrial signals were difficult to receive in urban areas with an antenna, so cable TV systems distributed signals over a wire.

The idea of subscribers willing to pay to receive movies over a cable TV line got the studio’s attention. Users weren’t as excited about paid TV channels, but there were no other options for watching movies at home.

The difficulty of maintaining subscribers meant that HBO didn’t begin 24 by 7 broadcasts until the end of 1981, nearly a decade later. Other studio owners created their own pay channels, including Viacom’s Showtime.

More Pay Per View Delivery.
While studios grew to like the idea of selling admission to a “home box office” via cable TV, the prospect of selling individual movies to end users was a more difficult concept. What’s to stop people from watching the same movies repeatedly, without paying for each viewing?

AVCO’s 1972 Cartrivision offered the first video tape system designed for movie rental. Blank black tapes could be used to record, but red movie tapes were for rental only, and could only be rewound by dealers.

To watch a movie twice, users had to pay for a rewinding. The dealers’ rewind system also audited how many times movies had been watched so the studios could charge for each viewing. Studios obviously loved the idea.

Customers hated it, and it went nowhere. Various companies have repeatedly tried to resurrect this scam for the studios, including Circuit City’s self destructing DIVX discs and Microsoft’s exploding Windows Media rentals. Customers continued to hate them. Vendors, studios: notice the pattern.

Sharks with Friggin Lasers.
In 1969, music label and movie studio giant MCA began research into creating an optical disc format that could deliver movies to home users in a form similar to records.

After buying up the struggling Universal Studios in the early 60s, MCA had discovered that the movie business was in decline and everything was moving toward TV.

MCA intended to earn money from its huge catalog of movie rights, which included early Paramount films and all of Universal Studios, by leveraging its contracts with record manufacturers to also produce the new videodiscs.

The Plan to Pimp the Studios
MCA created a new subsidiary called DiscoVision, which it intended to act as a label to other movie studios, distributing their movies on the new discs. MCA had principally been a talent agency and music label, and hoped to use its core competencies to sell other studios’ movies just as it had previously marketed performers.

In the early 70s, MCA teamed up with Philips, which had also started its own efforts in building an optical disk player. Combining Phillip’s technical experience in hardware with MCA’s huge catalog of films suggested a great partnership, but it took nearly an entire decade for the new Laserdisc player to ship.

It was first introduced Atlanta in December of 1978 to near-riot conditions, where buyers scrambled to buy up the few dozen $750 players available, some offering $5000 to get one of the new devices. A second test run of players was offered in Seattle, but Laserdisc wasn’t offered in general release until 1980, and even then supplies of the new device were constrained.

Laserdisc offered the highest quality video that most home users had ever seen; the only common source of TV content up to that point was ariel broadcasts, lower quality video tape, and in urban areas, cable TV.

The Trailblazing Laserdisc.
The Laserdisc format presented a few problems for early adopters however:

•As the first consumer optical disc format, Laserdisc had to work out a few bugs. One was “LaserRot,” where oxygen leaked into the disc and rusted away the reflective layers.

•Since few TVs had video input--there was no existing reason for such a thing--Laserdisc players had to provide an RF signal output for TVs which mimicked the signal received by an antenna. VCRs and early computers had to deliver video to TVs the same way.

•Laserdisc content was hampered by high prices, with movies frequently being ‘priced for rental’ by studios who feared that low cost, high quality movies would kill the remaining business for movie theaters and cable TV subscriptions. ‘Priced for rental’ typically meant that movies cost around $100-150 each.

•Laserdisc was intended to be a read only format, just like vinyl records.

In the mid 70s, Betamax and VHS had emerged as lower quality playback devices using video tape. Both slowly gained in popularity over Laserdisc among consumers because the VCR could also be used to record
TV and play home videos. VCRs weren’t popular with studios however.

The Betamax Case.
While wary of the home theater market, movie studios were even more suspicious of consumers being able to record and duplicate their content.

MCA’s Universal Studios immediately sued Sony in 1976 for offering its video cassette recorder, claiming that it was designed and used primarily to infringe upon the copyright of MCA’s TV programming.

Armed with a VCR, users could steal movies and shows right off TV and watch them several times, even inviting over guests to watch movies without paying the studios extra licensing fees for each showing.

The Betamax Case was argued all the way to the US Supreme Court, which in 1984 handed down a decision that ruled private, non-commercial recording and timeshifting of TV to be fair use, and that manufacturers of such equipment could not be held liable for copyright infringement.

The Door Opens For Home Theater.
After nearly a decade of legal uncertainty and studio opposition, that decision opened the door for rapid growth in VCRs, which eventually proved that there was a real market for selling movies directly to consumers.

It took nearly another decade for that concept to be embraced by studios however. MCA, which had introduced Laserdisc to sell its movie catalog and had opposed VCRs to protect its TV interests, ended up being sold to Matsushita and renamed Universal Studios. It was then sold off to Edgar Bronfman Jr. during his brief reign of incompetence. Bronfman now heads Warner Music.

Leadership of Laserdisc was acquired by Philips, which then worked with Sony to introduce the CD audio format. The same digital sound was later added to Laserdisc, offering a very high quality soundtrack for movies.

Two Other Big Problems for Home Theater
By the early 90s, it appeared that the studios’ panicked fears of home theater users were nearly under control. However, two other critical problems still had to be solved:

•One was a brutal format war between various producers of home theater equipment that wasted huge amounts of resources for manufacturers and left consumers wary of buying obsolete equipment.

•The second involved engineering solutions for the technical problems of presenting movies designed for theaters on home theater equipment.

The next articles track the arc of both issues, which involve as many backstabbing characters, fight scenes, wars, sex, surprise endings, artistic genius, and brilliant engineering as the movies themselves.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM...0B0C830BD.html





Vudu Casts Its Spell on Hollywood
Brad Stone

FOR the last two years, the employees of Vudu Inc. have quietly toiled in a nondescript office in Santa Clara, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley. The only hint of the company’s plans are black-and-white Rat Pack photos that adorn its walls and oversized models of Gollum and R2D2 that watch over its cubicles.

Insiders familiar with Vudu’s hidden magic say that this 41-employee start-up has everything we’ve come to expect from Silicon Valley: a daring business plan, innovative technology and entrepreneurs prone to breathless superlatives when discussing their new offering’s possible impact on the world.

“This is something that is going to alter the landscape,” boasts Tony Miranz, Vudu’s founder, of the product he plans to begin selling this summer. “We are rewriting economics.”

Vudu, if all goes as planned, hopes to turn America’s televisions into limitless multiplexes, providing instant gratification for movie buffs. It has built a small Internet-ready movie box that connects to the television and allows couch potatoes to rent or buy any of the 5,000 films now in Vudu’s growing collection. The box’s biggest asset is raw speed: the company says the films will begin playing immediately after a customer makes a selection.

If Vudu succeeds, it may mean goodbye to laborious computer downloads, sticky-floored movie theaters and cable companies’ much narrower video-on-demand offerings. It may even mean a fond farewell to the DVD itself — the profit engine of the film industry for the last decade. “Other forms of movie distribution are going to look silly and uncompetitive by comparison,” Mr. Miranz asserts.

It is not only Vudu’s disciples who are zealous about the company’s prospects. Every major studio — except, for now, Sony Pictures Entertainment — and 15 smaller ones will make their films available on Vudu. And film executives largely wax adulatory when speaking about Vudu. Jim Rosenthal, president of the New Line Television division of Time Warner, says Vudu addresses “the two major issues that people think are getting in way of the growth of digital distribution: they are getting movies onto the television, and they are doing it in a way that consumers don’t have to sit there for two hours waiting.”

Despite such high praise, Vudu faces hurdles. It is wading into a field dominated by heavyweights whose own aggressive efforts to kindle movie downloading over the Internet have largely failed. There is also little proof that consumers care much about the wide selection or instant availability of movies downloaded from the Web, especially if a movie isn’t cheaper than buying a DVD.

Vudu also needs to persuade regular folks to drag another whirring, electricity-guzzling gizmo into their already-crowded living rooms. “Three hundred dollars for the privilege of paying another 6 or 10 for a movie is a high hurdle,” said Nicholas Donatiello Jr., chief executive of the market research firm Odyssey. “Americans do not want more boxes under their TV if they can avoid it.”

Even with such challenges, however, Hollywood itself says Vudu represents a real breakthrough.

“The first time I ever saw TiVo was an a-ha moment, and this was the same thing,” says Jim Wuthrich, a senior executive with Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Group. “It looks fairly sexy and inviting. This is going to pull people in.”

VUDU is arriving at a time of rapid change in the entertainment and media landscapes. This year, for the first time, a majority of American homes will have a broadband connection to the Web, according to iSuppli, a research firm. That benchmark has reshuffled the cards in the media and entertainment industries.

With versatile data pipes now reaching into most homes, the deep thinkers in Hollywood and Silicon Valley say they believe that television shows and movies — just like e-mail, Web pages, songs and albums — will one day be cheaply and efficiently imported into the home.

The question is when.

For all of their confidence, the new ventures now crowding the digital video launching pad look, if anything, a tad sickly. YouTube, which Google bought last year for $1.65 billion, is an exception: it has attracted millions of users fanatical about watching bite-sized video clips. But services offering longer video content have yet to get much traction.

The Web sites Movielink and CinemaNow have allowed consumers to download feature-length films to their personal computers for the last five years. Few viewers have chosen to, partly because the pinched PC screen is a lousy place to watch movies. Over the last 15 months, similar movie downloading services for the PC have started from such varied sources as Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, Google, BitTorrent and the Starz movie channel of Liberty Media. Bowing to the copyright anxieties of Hollywood, all of these companies encrust their digital media files with cumbersome copyright protection software that often foils computers and frustrates users.

“Consumers want choice and control, but for long-form video like movies on the PC that is not enough,” said Mr. Donatiello at Odyssey. “You have to get the content to the television.”

Steve Jobs, at least, understands that. Apple, which has the most successful movie downloading effort so far on iTunes — offering just 500 films from two major studios — began selling a device called Apple TV last month. Priced at $299, the box wirelessly draws movies, TV shows and music from the computer to the television.

The people at Vudu seem particularly wary of Apple TV: they have bought two to test. But they are betting that movie downloads will ultimately be free from an awkward dependence on the computer, and they think that this could happen sooner than anyone else expects.

“This shift can look very slow in the beginning and very sudden at some moment in the future,” says Alain Rossmann, a Silicon Valley veteran and the chairman of Vudu. “That is the history of technology.”

A graduate of the École Polytechnique, the engineering school in France, Mr. Rossmann worked on the original Macintosh for Apple in the 1980s before starting four Silicon Valley companies over the following 20 years. The last, a software start-up named Phone.com later renamed OpenWave Systems, established a standard for how early cellphones wirelessly connected to the Internet.

Mr. Rossmann left Phone.com in 2001, and three years later one of his former colleagues came to him with an idea. Mr. Miranz, 43, an energetic and persuasive former vice president at OpenWave, started thinking about downloading movies over the Internet after his wife grew frustrated at her inability to find the 1980 miniseries “Marco Polo” at a nearby Blockbuster. Signing up for Netflix and waiting for DVDs to arrive in the mail, he said, “seemed like settling for a meal of worms in the desert.”

Over the summer of 2004, Mr. Miranz and Mr. Rossmann began discussing a digital download service, and soon watched the first generation of downloading stores beat them online. But they agreed that a truly mainstream movie service would need to originate on the television, not the computer. Mr. Miranz said he was also “obsessed with the idea of instantaneousness” — the notion that consumers, sitting in front of the television, could click a button and play a film without delay, as if a disc were in the DVD player.

Mr. Rossmann approached that challenge mathematically. Sending each ordered movie from a central facility over the Web, he reasoned, would become more expensive the more popular such a service became. Instead, he concluded, peer-to-peer networking — the idea of passing files, or pieces of files, between users — was the most economical and efficient solution.

That technology was behind renegade file-trading bazaars like the early manifestations of Napster and Grokster, that were the bane of the entertainment industries. But it also underlies a new wave of legal Internet video services like Joost and Kontiki.

From 2004 to 2006, Mr. Miranz’s and Mr. Rossmann’s newly formed company — which first went by the name Vvond, and later Marquee — filed 42 patent applications sketching the principles of an Internet movie network that would keep consumers where they belonged: rooted to their living-room couch.

The system, according to interviews and those patent applications, will operate like a traditional peer-to-peer service, but without any active participation by users. Vudu boxes that already have a certain movie on their hard drives — say, “The Godfather” — will send pieces of that movie to a nearby box when its owner suddenly gets a taste for the epic Mafia drama.

But to get those movies playing quickly, the Vudu engineers struck upon another notion: using a slice of the digital real estate on each Vudu box to store the beginning portions of each film. They also delved into the science of predictions. When the company determines that a movie is more likely to be rented or purchased — early in its release, for example — it will plant lengthier pieces of that film on unused portions of Vudu boxes in customer homes.

Rajeev Motwani, a computer science professor at Stanford who worked with the Google founders when they were doctoral students, reviewed Vudu’s early plans. “It’s so clever that in hindsight it seems like the obvious thing to do,” he says.

By mid-2005, after raising $21 million from two Valley venture capital firms, Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital, Vudu was ready to begin designing the box itself. Mr. Rossmann said he advised Mr. Miranz to “get some DNA from the company with the closest experience to what we are going through: TiVo.”

TiVo’s set-top boxes have snared a passionate audience over the last decade by offering time-saving utility with a simple user interface. Vudu hired 11 TiVo veterans to help steer product design and manufacture its box. That left Vudu in need of content deals with studios — a challenge that fell to Mr. Miranz, whose ambition and taste for deal-making were suited to Hollywood.

During his first year of regular trips to Los Angeles, Mr. Miranz found the going tough; Mr. Rossmann regularly called from his vacation home in France to express concern over the lack of progress.

But by 2006, Mr. Miranz recalled, the tide had turned Vudu’s way. DVD sales began to stagnate because studios had finally plowed through their entire backlog of movies that could be released on the shiny discs. The success of iTunes was also proving that the digital transition was inevitable and that one powerful player, Apple, could control the market if Hollywood did not find other viable partners. And outlaw services like the pirate Web sites that use BitTorrent technology demonstrated that digital piracy, which had consumed the music business first, now posed a real problem for Hollywood.

The studios were suddenly very ready to talk. Ron Lamprecht, the senior vice president for digital distribution at NBC Universal, which signed the first deal with Vudu in May 2006, said he was enamored by the relative simplicity and intuitive user interface of the company’s box. Universal also liked the system’s security. Vudu’s devices use the same encryption technology inside a cable or satellite box, and Hollywood’s valuable film assets never have to cross the PC screens, where they typically become exposed to the predations of hackers.

“The platform is secure from the moment we provide them content to the moment it shows up in the box,” Mr. Lamprecht said.

With Universal on board, Mr. Miranz signed up Fox, Disney, Warner Brothers and Paramount over the last year. “It’s always nice to see the entire industry getting behind a format,” said Thomas Lesinksi, president of Paramount Pictures Digital Entertainment, noting the industry rift over high-definition DVD technology. “When that happens, it has a much higher chance of success.”

Edward Lichty, who left TiVo last year and is now Vudu’s chief operating officer, says the company is “not expecting to be a mass product out of the gate.” But its peer network can be run so cheaply, he says, that it needs to have only modest success selling its box, which should retail for around $300. (A final price has not yet been set.) The company can also someday add television shows, music and video games to its service.

Vudu executives even consider the possibility that their hardware box might eventually melt away, with its services running as the video-on-demand feature in a satellite box, video game console or a new breed of high-definition televisions.

BUT can the little company with big plans even get that far?

In addition to Apple TV, Vudu has to face off against Microsoft’s gaming console, Xbox 360, which lets users download movies and TV shows. Other technology heavyweights such as Yahoo, Google and Cisco are no doubt also contemplating how to get Internet video onto television. Even Netflix, which built a DVD rental business via mail premised on the idea that movies delivered online were a long way off, is thinking about it. It recently hired a founder of ReplayTV — an early rival to TiVo — inviting speculation that it, too, was working on a movie box for the television.

In an interview, Reed Hastings, a founder of Netflix, said he recently met with Vudu to learn more about the company. He would not discuss details of the meeting other than to say: “It’s an open question whether Vudu makes an impact on the world or not — but either way it is emblematic of the Internet innovation wave beginning to wash over television sets everywhere.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/bu...ey/29vudu.html





Et Voilà, la Vidéo!

So it turns out they have the Internet in France! Who knew?
Dan Saltzstein

Not only that, but there’s some interesting stuff going on in the land where tech is no longer limited to Minitel. DailyMotion, a YouTube-esque video sharing site based out of Paris, is doing solid business –- and, in some ways, is a user-friendlier site than its American counterpart. (Although, is it pro-terrorist?)

On DailyMotion, the maximum file size is 150MB, compared to 100MB for YouTube, and videos max out at 20 minutes, compared to 10 minutes for YouTube. (If you want to get really technical, DailyMotion also uses a different, newer codec to encode the files.)

Meanwhile, parkour, the art form/extreme sport, has exploded, partly due to its ubiquity on sites like YouTube and DailyMotion. If this is the first you are hearing of parkour … well, it’s better seen than described. (If you’ve seen the opening chase sequence in “Casino Royale,” the latest Bond flick, then you’ve seen parkour.)

But one of the most exciting Web-video projects to come out of France of late is the weblog Blogothèque’s Take-Away Shows, which gets big-name bands to busk their way around the streets of Paris. Indie faves the Shins, Arcade Fire and Cold War Kids, as well as French-language artists like Quebec’s Malajube, have all participated –- live, public shows that draw their charm from a combination of spontaneity and back-to-basics enthusiasm. (In the Shins video, in which the band strolls around Montmartre, the lead singer James Mercer asks the band if it can come up with an intro to its song “Gone for Good” that has “that Mexican style” –- presumably because it fits the pseudo-mariachi-band vibe.)

It’s a lovely way to experience your favorite bands, and, somehow, very French.
http://screens.blogs.nytimes.com/200...oila-le-video/





Contributors on YouTube May Share Advertising Revenue
Miguel Helft

Some of the amateur video producers who put clips on YouTube are turning pro.

YouTube, the video-sharing site purchased last year by Google, said on Friday that it would begin placing ads alongside clips from some of its most popular contributors and share revenue from those ads with them.

The program is small for now. Only 20 to 30 video producers, including YouTube celebrities like Lonelygirl15, HappySlip and smosh, have been invited to join.

But the initiative marks a shift in how the No. 1 online video site treats content created by its users.

“In the marketplace, you often hear people talking about user-generated content in a disparaging way,” said Jamie Byrne, head of product marketing at YouTube. “This is content that really has merit and is of equal value to the professional content that is contributed by some of our partners.”

Still, when it comes to paying amateur producers, YouTube is more follower than leader. Other online video services, including Revver and Metacafe, already pay some independent video producers who post content on their sites.

“We do it to provide incentives for great content on our site,” said Allyson Campa, vice president for marketing at Metacafe. In the six months that the program has been up, the company has handed out about $500,000 to its video producers, Ms. Campa said. Twenty-one of them have earned more than $5,000 each, and nine have earned more than $10,000, she added.

Metacafe pays producers $5 for every thousand views of a video clip, but only after the clip has been seen at least 20,000 times.

Revver, which has been inserting video ads at the end of video clips for about 18 months, passes on to content creators half of the revenue generated by those ads.

Despite its much larger audience, it is unclear whether YouTube will end up paying directors larger sums. The company declined to discuss how it would split ad revenue with content creators.

But some of the amateurs stand to earn sums larger than those earned by the more than 1,000 professional video producers and companies that have signed distribution agreements with YouTube. On the page listing the most viewed YouTube partners for the week, a clip from Lonelygirl15 ranked second only to an NBA.com clip on Friday and ahead of clips from other YouTube content partners like CBS or the NHL.

YouTube plans to open the program to more content creators over time. The start of the program has been expected since a YouTube founder, Chad Hurley, said at the World Economic Forum in January that the company would eventually share revenue with some of its most popular amateur content producers.

Suit by English Soccer League

English soccer’s Premier League and the Bourne Company, a music publisher, sued YouTube yesterday for copyright infringement, the second such legal challenge to the popular video site in two months.

The lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in New York charges that YouTube deliberately encourages vast copyright infringement to attract attention and bolster traffic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/05/te...gy/05tube.html





BBC Gets TV On-Demand Service OK

BBC shows such as Doctor Who and EastEnders are to be made available on-demand after the BBC's iPlayer service was given the green light.

The service - which will launch later this year - allows viewers to watch programmes online for seven days after their first TV broadcast.

Episodes can also be downloaded and stored for up to 30 days.

The BBC Trust gave the iPlayer the go-ahead after consultations with members of the public.

About 10,500 individuals and organisations responded to the public value test after the trust gave its provisional approval in January.

'Catch-up' episode

As a result, the trust amended two conditions it had earlier imposed on the BBC's plans.

It had earlier called on the corporation to scale back plans to let downloaded "catch-up" episodes remain on users' hard drives beyond seven days.

Now all episodes of some series will be made available until a week after transmission of the final instalment. But this will only apply to 15% of all content offered by the service.

And the storage window for TV catch-up over the internet has been set at 30 days from the day of download.

The trust also called for revised editorial guidance on the type of series which can be included.

BBC director general Mark Thompson said he was "delighted" with the decision.

But he took issue with a decision that classical music downloads could not feature in the service.

"Our research suggests that classical music audiences would wish to download classical music programmes from the BBC and to listen to them on their terms, free at the point of use," he said.

Deadline

The iPlayer computer application will only be initially available to those with Windows PCs.

But the trust has asked the BBC to ensure that the iPlayer computer application can run on different systems - such as Apple Macs - within "a reasonable time frame".

Earlier this month BBC Future Media boss Ashley Highfield said the corporation was committed to rolling out the iPlayer on Windows PCs first of all, and then cable TV services, Apple Macs, and eventually Freeview boxes.

But the BBC said it could not commit to a two-year deadline to achieve this goal, saying it was up to the third parties concerned.

However, the BBC Trust said it would audit the BBC's progress against this objective every six months to ensure that members of the public not using Windows PCs would not be disadvantaged.

BBC trustee Diane Coyle said: "We are delighted so many people responded to the consultation and thank everyone who participated for their contribution.

"The consultation has demonstrated considerable public support for the on-demand proposals.

"Thanks to the thorough assessment through the public value test, and with the modifications which resulted from the test and the consultation, the trust is satisfied that the BBC's new on-demand services will create significant public value with limited market impact."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...nt/6607083.stm





Serial Magic

Hollywood Counting On Built-In Appeal Of Sequels To Big Hits To Propel Seasonal Box Office
Susan Dunne

Everything old is new again, especially if what's old made pots of money.

That's this summer's mantra in Hollywood. Just about every weekend tent-pole movie is a sequel. There are sequels to action thrillers. Sequels to kids' movies. Sequels to sleeper horror hits. Sequels to goofy comedies.

This summer, more than any other summer in memory, the movieland movers and shakers are taking no chances. "Shrek" and "Shrek 2" were hits, so here comes "Shrek the Third."

"Pirates of the Caribbean" is a monster franchise, so here comes Part 3.

"Bruce Almighty" did well, so here comes "Evan Almighty" starring Steve Carell, who was not the superstar he is now when the first film came out.

"Harry Potter" is a sure blockbuster with a fanatical fan base, so "Order of the Phoenix" is on the way.

And there are more. Many more. There's even a sequel from Kazakhstan.

People in Hollywood are anticipating the biggest summer ever. They keep telling us this. Obviously, they're referring to bucks rather than creativity.

As for the filmgoing public, situations like this are polarizing. There are those who welcome the familiarity and crowd the cineplexes. And there are those who get annoyed at Tinseltown's lack of imagination.

It seems clear what each side must do in the next few months. Sequel lovers, just get yourselves to the theater, and enjoy. Sequel haters, go to the theater, too, to watch the other movies that come out. If you don't help make those movies profitable, you may never see another original premise come out of Hollywood.

For what it's worth, those lower-budget movies make a profit faster than blockbusters because they're so much cheaper to make and market. So get out there, and fight the good fight. What follows is a partial list of films coming to the Hartford area in the next four months. Tent poles almost never budge from their assigned weekends, but dates of the lower-budget films are subject to change. We're guessing at least a fourth of them will get shifted around. Some movies have ratings yet to be announced (TBA).
May 4

Lucky You - Curtis Hanson's gambling film has been rescheduled, again. (Sigh.) Drew Barrymore and Eric Bana star. PG-13.

Spider-Man 3 - Tobey Maguire is back in the arachnid suit in this threequel. The bad guys are Thomas Haden Church and Topher Grace. Sam Raimi directs. PG-13.

May 11

28 Weeks Later - This sequel to the apocalyptic sleeper "28 Days Later" occurs, well, 28 weeks later. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo directs. R.

Blind Dating - James Keach gives his wife, Jane Seymour, a good supporting role in this movie about a young blind guy in love. PG-13.

Delta Farce - C.B. Harding's movie has a funny premise. Three Army reservists are being shipped out to Iraq but are inadvertently dropped in a small town in Mexico. Keep your expectations lowbrow, however: It stars Larry the Cable Guy. PG-13.

The Ex - Jesse Peretz directs this oft-rescheduled story starring Zach Braff as a guy who needs to grow up. PG-13.

Georgia Rule - Lindsay Lohan plays - ahem - an out-of-control alcoholic in Garry Marshall's film about family reconciliation. Felicity Huffman and Jane Fonda play her mother and grandmother. R.

May 18

Shrek the Third - Shrek and gang are back in Fairy Tale Land, doing whatever they must to keep the franchise alive, including recruiting Justin Timberlake. Chris Miller and Raman Hui direct the threequel. PG.

Away From Her - The glorious Julie Christie is brave enough to take on Shrek. She stars in this story about a woman with Alzheimer's, an adaptation of Alice Munro's "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." Actress Sarah Polley makes her feature directing debut. Unrated.

Waitress - This film has gotten a lot of pre-release publicity because of the bizarre slaying of its director, Adrienne Shelly. Keri Russell stars as the title character. PG-13.

May 25

Bug - William Friedkin's rescheduled thriller about a creepy hotel room stars Ashley Judd. R.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End - All the second-installment cast members show up for the threequel, joined by Chow Yun-Fat and Keith Richards. Gore Verbinski directs. PG-13.

June 1

Day Watch - Cutting-edge Kazakh director Timur Bekmambetov pilots this sequel to the thriller "Night Watch," which takes place, presumably, in the daytime. Russian with very lively subtitles. Probably an R.

Gracie - Davis Guggenheim, who directed "An Inconvenient Truth," moves into sorta-kinda fiction with this story, based on events in the childhood of his wife, Elisabeth Shue. It's about girls' equality in sports. Starring Shue, her brother Andrew Shue and Dermot Mulroney. PG-13.

Knocked Up - The award for vulgar title of the summer goes to Judd Apatow's film, about a guy who gets a woman pregnant on a one-night stand. But this is the guy who made "The 40 Year Old Virgin," so maybe there's substance in there after all. Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl star. R.

Mr. Brooks - A Jekyll-Hyde story starring Kevin Costner and William Hurt, pushed back from winter release. Bruce A. Evans directs. R.

Once - A musical from Ireland whose characters have no names. It's about a street performer and an immigrant in love. John Carney directs. R.

Rise: Blood Hunter - Lucy Liu wakes up in a morgue, which doesn't happen to everyone. Sebastian Gutierrez directs. R.

June 8

Hostel: Part II - More slaughter in Slovakia. Eli Roth directs a sequel. Expect an R.

Ocean's Thirteen - Steven Soderbergh, who is actually one of the most innovative thinkers in Hollywood, pays the bills with these silly, star-studded bits of business. This one is a threequel. Expect PG-13.

Surf's Up - Penguin alert! America's new favorite bird makes the scene again, this time in Ash Brannon and Chris Buck's animated mockumentary about a surfing championship. Excellent release strategy, coming out against the too-mature-for-kids "Ocean's Thirteen" and the too-scary-for-kids "Hostel." PG.

June 15

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer - Doug Jones plays the bad guy of the title in Tim Story's sequel. Expect PG-13.

Fido - A comic tale of a killer zombie, delayed from winter release. Andrew Currie directs. PG-13.

Nancy Drew - Andrew Fleming makes a little-chick-flick with cutie pie Emma Roberts in this updating of the Carolyn Keene girl-detective books. This one's about a movie star and a murder. A sequel is already rumored to be in the works, and a potentially endless train of installments could follow. PG.

June 22

DOA: Dead or Alive - Is this thing still hanging around? Corey Yuen's film has been delayed quite often. PG-13.

Evan Almighty - Steve Carell builds an ark in this sequel. Tom Shadyac directs. PG.

La Vie en Rose - Marion Cotillard is already getting Oscar buzz for her portrayal of the legendary Edith Piaf in Olivier Dahan's film biography. Also stars Gérard Depardieu. French with subtitles. PG-13.

A Mighty Heart - An unlikely film for summer, this stars Angelina Jolie as Marianne Pearl, frantically searching Pakistan for her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman). We all know how it ends. Michael Winterbottom directs. Will probably be an R.

June 27

Live Free or Die Hard - Bruce Willis comes to New Hampshire? Probably not. Len Wiseman resuscitates the action franchise, dormant for 12 years, with a fourth installment, about Internet shenanigans. Expect an R.

June 29

Death at a Funeral - This Frank Oz film, delayed from winter, is about a family gathering run amok. R.

Evening - Another unlikely summer film. Lajos Koltai directs this adaptation of Susan Minot's novel about a dying woman reflecting on life. Fantastic cast: Meryl Streep, Claire Danes, Toni Collette, Glenn Close, Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave and Streep's daughter, Mamie Gummer. PG-13.

Golden Door - Emanuele Crialese directs a story about Italian immigration to America. PG-13.

Ratatouille - Brad Bird directs this animated film about a rat who wants to be a gourmet chef, and the restaurant staff who are understandably reluctant to let him in the building. Bird directed "The Incredibles," so if this one is as good, we've got a winner. TBA, probably PG.

You Kill Me - Terrific noir director John Dahl ("The Last Seduction," "Red Rock West") is back with Ben Kingsley playing a hit man and Téa Leoni playing a woman who latches onto him. R.

July 4

License To Wed - Robin Williams is clean-shaven - his code for "time to be funny" - in Ken Kwapis' story about a priest who puts a young couple through a grueling relationship challenge. Mandy Moore and John Krasinski are the hapless couple. TBA.

Transformers - Dueling alien races want to control Earth in this movie that isn't quite a sequel or a remake, just kind of a ... whatever. Michael Bay directs. PG-13.

July 13

1408 - Mikael Håfström, whose Hollywood momentum got derailed with "Derailed," tries again with John Cusack in this adaptation of a Stephen King novel, about a writer who checks into a notoriously haunted hotel room in order to debunk the ghost myths. Also starring Samuel L. Jackson and Mary McCormack. TBA.

Eagle vs. Shark - Taika Cohen tells the story of two geeks who find love. And they must really find it: It's rated R.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - New adults in the fifth installment are played by Helena Bonham Carter (Beatrice LeStrange) and Imelda Staunton (Dolores Umbridge). David Yates directs. Since Lord Voldemort is in this one, expect a PG-13.

My Best Friend - French superstar Daniel Auteuil stars as a jerk who must find one person who considers him a friend. Patrice Leconte directs. PG-13.

Strangers - Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler are terrorized at their vacation home. Bryan Bertino directs. TBA.

July 20

Goya's Ghosts - Another unlikely summer entry has Oscar veteran Milos Forman teaming with Luis Buñuel's old screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière to tell a story about the Spanish Inquisition. Priest Javier Bardem is pitted against alleged heretic Natalie Portman, a model for the painter Francisco Goya, who is played by Stellan Skarsgård. Randy Quaid plays the King of Spain. R.

Hairspray - John Travolta is in drag in this film version of the theatrical musical inspired by John Waters' 1988 film. But the really big story is the girl who plays Tracy Turnblad, Nikki Blonsky, whose only acting experience was in high school plays in Great Neck, Long Island. You go, Nikki! Also starring Queen Latifah, Michelle Pfeiffer, Amanda Bynes, Christopher Walken, Allison Janney and Zac Efron. Adam Shankman directs. PG.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry - Kevin James and Adam Sandler pretend to be gay lovers to qualify for their fire department's domestic-partner benefits. Also starring Dan Aykroyd, Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames and, apparently to create some tension, lovely Jessica Biel. Remake of the 2004 Australian comedy "Strange Bedfellows." TBA.

July 27

I Know Who Killed Me - Chris Sivertson directs Lindsay Lohan in this thriller about a woman who escapes from her abductor. TBA.

No Reservations - Patricia Clarkson stars, with Catherine Zeta-Jones, in a remake of the German film "Mostly Martha," about a loveless chef who becomes the guardian of her niece (Abigail Breslin of "Little Miss Sunshine"). Aaron Eckhart gets the hunk role in Scott Hicks' film. PG.

The Simpsons Movie - D'Oh! Get yellow fever with TV's favorite family, gone big-screen for the first time. They're being very secretive about the plot, but who cares about the plot? It's the Simpsons! David Silverman directs. TBA.

Skinwalkers - Jim Isaac directs a horror film about a 12-year-old boy and werewolves. Rated R, so 12-year-old boys can't actually see it without permission.

Aug. 1

El Cantante - What J.Lo wants, J.Lo gets: A release date all to herself. Leon Ichaso co-writes and directs this fact-based story about the king of salsa, Hector Lavoe. Stars Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony and "Sopranos" alum (Furio Giunta) Federico Castelluccio. R.

Aug. 3

The Bourne Ultimatum - Matt Damon runs around again, buff and confused. Paul Greengrass gets back to escapism after "United 93" with this threequel. Probably a PG-13.

Arctic Tale - This could be titled "March of the Penguins II: Beyond the Penguins." Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson's documentary is about a walrus and a polar bear wandering around, living their lives. Narrated by Queen Latifah, with music by Cat Stevens, Ben Harper, Aimee Mann and the Shins. TBA.

Charlie Bartlett - Delayed from winter, this is the story of a boy therapist. Jon Poll directs. R.

Hot Rod - Kids, don't try this at home. Or in Idaho, either. Akiva Schaffer directs a story about a kid who wants to impress his stepfather by jumping over the Snake River on his moped, as Evel Knievel did. Stars Will Arnett, Isla Fisher and Sissy Spacek. TBA.

Resurrecting the Champ - Josh Hartnett plays a sportswriter who finds a long-lost boxing legend (Samuel Jackson) alive but not very well. Rod Lurie directs. PG-13.

Underdog - A dog named Shoeshine develops superpowers in Frederic Du Chau's filmization of the sweet old cartoon. PG.

Aug. 8

Daddy Day Camp - Fred Savage of "The Wonder Years" is all grown up now and directing sequels to bad films, this one "Daddy Day Care." Cuba Gooding Jr. stars. PG.

Aug. 10

2 Days In Paris - Writer-director-producer-star Julie Delpy ("Before Sunrise," "Before Sunset") does her usual Julie Delpy thing, wandering around a big city chatting with her paramour. This time it's not Ethan Hawke, but Adam Goldberg. TBA.

Becoming Jane - Anne Hathaway portrays Jane Austen as a young woman, and Julie Walters and James Cromwell are her parents. Julian Jarrold directs. PG.

Bratz: The Movie - The super popular fashion dolls marketed as a more female-empowering alternative to Barbie - despite their slutty wardrobes - come to the movies. Paula Abdul and a cast of otherwise unknowns are directed by Sean McNamara. TBA, but considering the target audience, probably PG.

Rocket Science - Jeffrey Blitz directs a story with a touching premise: A stutterer joins the school debating team to conquer his dysfluency and win the girl of his dreams. R.

Rush Hour 3 - Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker reunite in this threequel, set in Paris among Chinese triads. Brett Ratner directs, again. Probably PG-13.

Stardust - A man promises his beloved he will capture a fallen star. Why? We are not told. We're just supposed to be swept up in the romance of Matthew Vaughn's "Princess Bride"-ish fantasy, starring Charlie Cox and Claire Danes. PG-13.

Aug. 17

Fanboys - Kyle Newman blatantly kisses George Lucas' bum with this story about four guys who travel cross-country to watch "Phantom Menace" at Skywalker Ranch. Carrie Fisher and William Shatner are among the cast. TBA.

The Invasion - Yet another version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" stars Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig and is directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel. TBA.

Penelope - Mark Palansky directs Christina Ricci and Reese Witherspoon in a fantasy about a woman breaking free of a family curse. PG.

Super Bad - Call it "Beerfest, Denied." Two guys want to throw an alcohol-fueled party. They are not allowed to. This proves traumatic. Greg Mottola directs. R.

Wedding Daze - Jason Biggs stars in this story of sudden engagement, retitled from "The Pleasure of Your Company" and delayed from last winter. Michael Ian Black directs. R.

Aug. 24

The Comebacks - Tom Brady (not the quarterback) directs an underdog sports story about a college football team, pushed back from the winter. TBA.

Good Luck Chuck - Comedian Dane Cook plays a guy whose exes all get married to the guys who were their immediate next boyfriends. So he turns it into a business. Mark Helfrich directs. TBA.

The Last Legion - Thomas Sangster stars as a future head of the Roman empire. This film was pushed back from winter, and wisely, too, considering "300" paved the way for other ancient war adventures. Doug Lefler directs. PG-13.

Aug. 31

Halloween - The time-honored horror franchise chugs right along into a ninth incarnation, a remake of the first. Rob Zombie directs a film whose plot needs no explanation. TBA.
http://www.ctnow.com/movies/hce-summ...,7101157.story





"Disturbia" Leads Weak Box Office for 3rd Weekend

The teen thriller "Disturbia" led the North American box office for a third weekend, as another slew of lowly new releases tried to get a toehold before next Friday's release of "Spider-Man 3," the first big film of the lucrative summer moviegoing season.

"Disturbia," a low-budget homage to Alfred Hitchcock's nosy-neighbor thriller "Rear Window," sold $9.1 million worth of tickets in the three days beginning Friday, distributor Paramount Pictures said on Sunday. It's the lowest tally for a No. 1 movie since "The Covenant" earned $8.9 million in the second weekend of September 2006.

The teen ghost drama "The Invisible" opened at No. 2 this weekend with just $7.6 million, while the Nicolas Cage action movie "Next" debuted at No. 3 with $7.2 million. Both were roughly in line with modest expectations.

Also new were the action movie "The Condemned" at No. 9 with $4.0 million, and the comedy "Kickin' It Old Skool" at No. 11 with $2.8 million.

The situation should be considerably different next weekend, when Sony Corp. opens "Spider-Man 3." The previous film in the superhero franchise earned $88 million during its first weekend in 2004.

"Disturbia," starring Shia LaBeouf, has earned $52.2 million after three weekends, and gives Viacom Inc.-owned Paramount a five-weekend run at No. 1. This feat was last achieved in November/December 2004 with the Walt Disney Co. pair of "The Incredibles" and "National Treasure." Paramount kicked off its run with the comedy "Blades of Glory," which slipped two places to No. 5 with $5.2 million, and has earned $108.1 million to date.

"The Invisible" stars Justin Chatwin as a seemingly dead teen stuck in a ghostly limbo. The Disney release was directed by David Goyer, the filmmaker behind the "Blade" franchise.

In "Next," Cage plays a Las Vegas magician who tries to stop a terrorist plot, aided by his ability to see two minutes into the future. The Paramount Pictures release was directed by Lee Tamahori of "Die Another Day" fame. "Next" is the latest film in a hugely variable career for Cage. The Oscar winner was last in theaters with the surprise hit "Ghost Rider," which opened to $45.4 million in February.

"Condemned," released by Lionsgate, stars wrestling hero Steve Austin as a death row convict who must fight for his freedom in a reality TV style competition. Lionsgate is a unit of Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.. "Old Skool," from closely held Yari Film Group, stars Jamie Kennedy as a 12-year-old boy in the body of a grown man after emerging from a two-decade coma.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...19541420070429





The Little Projectors That Pack a Punch
Anne Eisenberg

CONFERENCE rooms usually have digital projectors that presenters can use to show off PowerPoint slides and other visuals stored on their laptops. But road warriors selling goods or giving talks at impromptu sites can’t count on this amenity for their presentations. They have to lug along their own projectors, just in case.

That’s less of a chore these days, because the size of projectors has dropped over the last four years, while image quality has risen. Now there is a choice of compact, portable projectors in the under-4-pounds category and are lighter than some city telephone directories.

These small, business-style projectors aren’t made to show off rich color in darkened rooms, the way that home movie-theater projectors are. Instead, most have optics designed to favor brightness over color so that they can cast crisp images of spreadsheets even when fluorescent lights are on.

The NEC Corporation offers a good example of these lightweight projectors: the NP60, widely available since January ($1,299 at ProjectorCentral.com). The NP60 has a bulb that puts out 3,000 lumens, enough light to throw a sharp, 100-inch diagonal image onto a screen or wall even when lights are aglow in a conference room.

The projector weighs only 3.5 pounds; its large display can easily be seen in rooms holding 40 or even more people. The arc bulb that produces the light lasts about 2,000 hours; a replacement costs $329. The projector includes a sensor that automatically squares the images, as well as one that focuses the lens.

For presentations in smaller sites — when the audience, say, is two or three people in a cubicle — another new type of projector works well. These compact devices, called pocket projectors, use L.E.D.’s, or light-emitting diodes, rather than the arc lamps of larger portable projectors. The L.E.D. projectors put out far less raw light and create smaller images than their arc-lamp counterparts. But if no conference room is available and you need to make your sales presentation in a small borrowed office or hotel lobby, these projectors will do the trick — provided that there is a nearby wall where you can cast the images.

Samsung offers one of these projectors, the Pocket Imager SP-P310MEMX, ($749), introduced in January. It weighs 1.5 pounds. The power cord attaches to an AC adapter, which adds 1.25 pounds; a battery that is sold separately ($149) lasts for 2.5 hours and weighs less than a pound. The Samsung projector casts 50 lumens, a small amount of light but enough to work effectively at short ranges. For example, it creates a clear 35-inch diagonal image at a distance of four feet. Its L.E.D.’s are far more efficient than incandescent bulbs and have a lifetime of about 10,000 hours.

Portables like the Samsung and NEC models may be purchased initially for use on the job. But they have other applications, too. When the workweek is done, some people take them home and attach them to game machines, or plug them into a DVD player to watch movies. The cost of the projectors will probably have to drop a bit, though, before they become popular consumer items.

To see how well the projectors worked, a friend and I tried them out, with both PowerPoint shows and movies. First we experimented with PowerPoint, hooking up the Samsung Pocket Imager to a laptop. This was quick and easy to do. The Pocket Imager, however, comes with a native, or built-in, resolution of 800 by 600 pixels, called S.V.G.A., shown in an aspect ratio or display of 4:3. But the laptop I used with the Pocket Imager has a wider aspect ratio, 16:9, and has a resolution of 1,366 by 768.

I was concerned that the projector and the laptop did not have a one-for-one match in resolution. In some equipment, this disparity can create problems like chopping off part of the image. But Chris Chinnock, the president of Insight Media, a market research firm in Norwalk, Conn., that specializes in the display industry, said that pixel-to-pixel matches between laptop and projector were not mandatory, because proper software on the projector could handle many differences in input.

“The projector has to take inputs of all formats and display them on its panel, which has only one resolution,” he said. “A good projector can do this within limits.”

In this case, when I plugged the projector into the laptop, the projector recognized the laptop video input and automatically scaled down to S.V.G.A. The display was clear, easy to read and far preferable to having three people in a huddle around a laptop trying to decipher the same PowerPoint slides.

I also plugged the Pocket Imager into my DVD player to watch the movie “Infamous.” The images were sharp, and, when I turned the lights down, the color was intense. No fan whirred in the projector during the movie; although L.E.D.’s throw off some heat, the amount is far less than that of arc lights, so no cooling fan is needed.

Because of this quieter background, I thought that the small speakers built into the laptop would be adequate for listening to the movie soundtrack. They were, and I could follow the dialogue. But the sound would have been much improved by connecting the system to external speakers. The image was so compelling, though, that I had to force myself to turn off the show after 20 minutes and get back to work.

We also tried out the NEC projector. It is easy to set up, and within moments it cast a huge image of both the PowerPoint show and then the movie on my living-room wall. I was ready to invite the neighbors over and serve popcorn.

Although the portable projectors now on the market are already small, they will be shrinking even more, Mr. Chinnock said. On the horizon, he said, are 100-lumen L.E.D. projectors that put out 40-inch images that stand up to daylight. And even smaller, finger-tip-sized projectors will be arriving that can be used with cellphones and P.D.A.’s, he said.

“You’ll be taking your presentation on a U.S.B. thumb drive and doing your slide shows from a cellphone,” he said. “There are going to be many ways to make the projector less tethered to a notebook.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/bu...y/29novel.html





Hard Drive Changes: Long Block Data Standard Gets Green Light

But not all vendors are on board yet
Brian Fonseca

Paving the way for hard-disk drive makers to take advantage of higher areal density -- something that can boost capacity without sacrificing disk reliability -- the International Disk Drive, Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA) announced it has finalized the definition of the Long Block Data (LBD) sector standard.

The LBD sector specification will replace the 30-year-old standard of 512 bytes per sector with a new one, which allows 4,096 bytes per sector on disk surfaces. By moving to the larger block size, the amount of error correction code (ECC) is expected to drop, resulting in data that is easier to read and more accurate, said Joel Weiss, president of the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based IDEMA.

Saving space on the hard drive surface enables more storage density and better data integrity, including more efficient data transfers. In fact, Weiss said that the IDEMA working group discovered that data integrity could be enhanced by as much as 10 times by moving to a 4,096-byte block size.

He also said that this should be a boon for storage vendors looking to accelerate their design, construction and rollout of speedier and more reliable hard drives.

While storage users wouldn't discern any prominent changes in day-to-day management of their storage devices and products, Weiss said that the larger block size would boost defragging speed as well as the I/O speed of hard drives.

The goal of the IDEMA is to get drive vendors and software industry leaders to embrace the larger physical block sizes on disk. Microsoft Corp. has already enabled its Windows Vista operating system to be fully compatible with the LBD standard.

Weiss acknowledged that systems and storage vendors such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and others will go through a "transition phase" of integrating the new high-performance drives with operating systems and other compatible software, including databases.

Seagate Technology LLC and Western Digital Corp. have already agreed to align data on their drive drives to 512-byte sectors that can be placed together in eight-block chunks to equal 4,096 bytes. They also said they will provide software to enable their drives to be used at either 512-byte or 4,096-byte sizes.

However, Weiss noted that Hitachi Global Storage Technologies isn't as eager to comply. The company has announced that it will support 512 bytes or 4,096 bytes -- but not both -- when it comes to that point in hard drive development.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9018507





Overheard

I don’t think you can equate piracy with car theft or any other physical brand of stealing. After all, my copying your music or video doesn’t mean I am taking anything away from you.

If anyone could clone any car they wanted for free, don’t you think there’d be a lot of that going on?

I do make a living as an animator and filmmaker. I’d be thrilled if everyone started passing my work around on the internet! Truly creative people just want their work to be seen by the most people. Making money is secondary.

I don’t think you can call most of what we see in popular media “art” in any way so it irritates me when people go on about the rights of the “artist”. Shows like American Idol illustrate the fact that the music business is MUCH more about BUSINESS that MUSIC. And the business people are mad that they can’t make bank by exploiting teen trends anymore. Boo hoo.

I can’t help but feel justified in not paying for it anymore.
Kate





Trembling Spector, Shrunken Shadow of Former Genius
Jill Serjeant

Pale, gaunt, his hands trembling, Phil Spector sits silently in a Los Angeles courtroom, a shrunken shadow of the man who revolutionized pop music 40 years ago.

On trial for the murder of a woman he barely knew, Spector stares ahead, sometimes shaking his blond page-boy mop in despair, as the eccentricities once associated with musical genius become the prosecution backdrop to a heinous crime.

With a three-month trial ahead of him, and the possibility of life imprisonment if convicted, Spector, 67, looks barely able to stay the course.

"He looks terrible. I am very concerned about his appearance. He is shaking a lot. He may be a very sick man," said Stan Ross, the co-founder of Hollywood's famed Gold Star Recording Studios where Spector created his innovative 1960s "Wall of Sound" technique.

"I don't like seeing him in this predicament. I don't think he can handle three months," Ross, who has known Spector for 50 years, told Reuters.

Celebrated by the music industry as one of the greatest artists of all time for producing classics such as The Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" and The Beatles' "Let It Be" album, the reclusive Spector remains an enigma to the general public.

Spector, who told British reporter Mick Brown in 2002 that he had a bipolar personality and was manic depressive, denies shooting dead B-movie actress Lana Clarkson, 40, in the hall of his mock castle in February 2003.

"Spector looks pretty frail, but on the other hand he looks pretty weird," said Stan Goldman, criminal law professor at Loyola Law School.

"He looks like someone who's walked out of Penny Lane. He is wearing these 3-inch Cuban heels, the long overcoat jackets with the very brightly colored shirt. He looks like someone the Beatles might have talked to in the 1970s," said Goldman.

Spector's lawyers plan to use his frailty to bolster their argument that he did not pull the trigger on the gun that killed Clarkson.

Lawyer Linda Kenney Baden told jurors last week that Spector's shaking hands were a side effect of medication he takes, and noted that he was only 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighed a mere 130 pounds (59 kg).

The trial, which resumes on Monday, is a far cry from the heady 1960s when Ross recalls a serious but insecure Spector at the start of his career in Gold Star Recording Studios.

"They say genius runs strangely. He was a methodical person who had a fixation on creating sounds that he wanted and I, as the technician, was able to come up with those sounds.

"It was revolutionary because he used a big orchestra with rock and roll guitars. He used not just one piano player but three, not two guitars but four. That was what made his sound different -- it was big," Ross said.

Ross last saw Spector about two years before his arrest, at the annual parties Spector threw for friends in Los Angeles.

"He is not a sinister person. He does not have murder in his heart. He loved everybody he worked with. They were the only friends and family he knew.

"He is talented. But when God gives someone talent sometimes he takes something away," Ross said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...96148420070429





The RFID Guardian: a Firewall for Your Tags
Nate Anderson

Here, there, and everywhere

Don't carry RFID? You might be surprised; the short-range ID technology is currently found in everything from US passports to swipeless credit cards to public transit passes to World Cup tickets to car keys to the building access pass for your office building. A few of the digerati even elect to have RFID implants from VeriChip slipped beneath their skin in order to use them as cashless payment systems.

Much of the information on these chips can be read without exotic equipment, assuming an attacker can get within several feet with a concealed RFID reader. Unfortunately, most tags give users no control over when they respond to queries, and they offer no notification, which means that sensitive data could be at risk in public places.

The solution, for those concerned about such things, has so far been low-tech: smashing the chip with a hammer appears to be the preferred method for passports, but it is technically illegal and could lead to unpleasantness at customs.

A new tool from a graduate student at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam offers the first real-time cloak of protection to users concerned about security, and no hammer blows are required. The RFID Guardian is essentially a firewall that can prevent or allow RFID queries, and can do so on a per-tag basis. Melanie Rieback, the Guardian's designer, describes it as a portable, battery-powered device for personal RFID privacy—but even if you aren't concerned about men in dark sunglasses snatching your passport data, the selective jamming tech in this diminutive device is fascinating stuff.

I had a chance to sit down with Rieback during her recent trip to the United States, and she explained how the device works, what's coming in version 3.0, and why she has no plans to profit from the technology.

"I'm definitely not anti-RFID," she explains. "I think there's a lot of great things you can do with it, but I just think that like any other technology, they need to take security and privacy into consideration."

Here's how the RFID Guardian gives that power to the people.

And I need this... why?

RFID got its start as an antitheft tool that soon became important for inventory management. Using RFID chips, it was suddenly simple for shippers to know how many pallets were in a trailer, and retailers could see how many razors were on a store shelf without keeping employees all night to do inventory. RFID received a massive boost when Wal-Mart required RFID tags to be used by all of its suppliers.

Because such commercial deployments emphasize cost over security, most tags still have no access controls, so grabbing a tag's information is relatively simple. Some specialized tags do employ basic cryptography, but this is not always robust. When researchers looked into the encryption found in the ExxonMobil SpeedPass, for instance, the algorithm turned out to use a 40-bit key and was cracked easily by a brute force attack. Tags with stronger cryptography tend to be prohibitively expensive, and thus are not often used.

As the tags showed up in increasingly sensitive applications, security became more of a concern—at least to researchers and privacy advocates. Rieback was one of those people. As a graduate student searching for a Ph.D. dissertation topic, she spent eight months reading computer science research papers and discovered that the number of published works on RFID security could be counted on both hands. "It became painfully obvious that there was a deficiency in the area of RFID, and there is so much work to be done," she says.

So Rieback turned herself into one of the foremost academic authorities on RFID security and went on to develop the first RFID virus as a proof of concept. That got the industry's attention. As Rieback tactfully puts it, there was a "mixed reaction" that even included some personal attacks. But other companies approached her team for consulting assistance within days of publishing the paper.

After doing her part to publicize these security shortcomings of many RFID implementations, Rieback moved on to the RFID Guardian project, which would give people a measure of control over their tags. It became her Ph.D. project, and when she finalizes the next version in the next eight months or so, she should earn her doctorate. Even when that happens, though, she has no plans to drop the project. "I think this is important enough that we should finish it," she says. "We should get it out there."

Eventual plans call for the Guardian to be incorporated into cell phones and PDAs, but the current model is a pocket-sized device that runs on its own battery and provides a circular 1m field of control over RFID tags, jamming any tags that the user does not want read. It sounds simple, but the technology behind it is surprisingly complex—complex enough that the current model uses what Rieback refers to as a "beast" of a CPU, an Intel XScale PXA270. Here's what all that power is for.

Guts and bolts

The Guardian has four basic components: an RFID reader, a radio transceiver, an XScale processor with flash memory, and a power source. Rieback has implemented two common RFID protocols in software (ISO 15693 and 14443), both of which operate at 13.56MHz. Passive tags using these protocols can be read from up to one meter away; higher-frequency tags and those with an active power source extend much further.

The Guardian polls all the tags in its vicinity, along with all queries that might come from other RFID readers. Whenever the Guardian detects a query, it looks up the requested tag's ID number in its internal Access Control List (ACL). The Guardian currently has no external interface for adjusting the ACL in the field, but it does have an RS-232 port for a connection to a PC, which can then be used to update the ACL.

Entries in the ACL can tell the Guardian to prohibit access to a specific tag, or to allow it, or to allow it only to specific readers. The Guardian needs to do this lookup quickly, since it must make a decision about whether or not to jam the tag's response within 320.9µs—the amount of time between the RFID reader's request and the beginning of the tag's transmission back to the reader.

Actually, the Guardian has even less time than this, since 23µs are needed to wake up the software thread that monitors the receiver and another 5µs are needed to to fire up the transmitter before sending a jamming signal. That leaves only 292.9µs for the Guardian to decide about jamming.

This is where the "beast" of a processor comes in handy. In tests, the 520MHz XScale processor looked up a tag's ID number in the ACL in far less time than this, even when the ACL contained hundreds of entries and the sort algorithm was unoptimized.

If the tag in question in supposed to be blocked, the Guardian then jams the tag's response. RFID tags use an anti-collision protocol (called "Slotted Aloha" in this case) so that their responses do not overlap with those from other tags in the area. The system recognized by the Guardian uses 16 timing slots to transmit responses; the tag chooses a slot after running a XOR function on the reader's anticollision mask and the tag's own ID number. The Guardian does the same calculation in order to know which time slot needs to be jammed.

When the time slot comes up, the Guardian generates a relatively massive burst of noise in the two sideband channels used by each tag for data transfer. This is easy to do, since most tags are inductively-powered and are therefore weak; the battery-powered Guardian simply swamps their response with noise. The anticollision system goes on to vary the time slot over the next few query rounds, hoping to find a clear channel to the tag—but the Guardian blocks them each time until the reader simply gives up.

Blocking only the time slots belonging to a specific tag can reveal the presence of that tag to a canny attacker, though, so the Guardian also creates a few collisions when the requested tag isn't actually firing. As Rieback puts it, this "throws in some chaff with the wheat."

Because all of this activity must take place in real-time, the Guardian uses the open-source e-Cos Real-Time Operating System to handle low-level tasks for the Guardian. The software that runs on top of the OS consists of device drivers for the RFID hardware, protocol stacks for various RFID flavors, and data storage libraries. The complete code is 12,694 lines long; for those who want to see it in operation, the project web site contains high- and low-resolution videos that illustrate how the jamming system works.

Of "kill queries" and DOS attacks

The Guardian provides real-time protection of RFID tags, limiting access only to trusted readers; it can also keep all tags blocked until the user switches it off. But there are a few things it can't do.

One of the most important limitations of the Guardian stems from the way it works. The device can't block queries, only responses. This normally is no big deal, but some RFID tags can respond to special "kill queries" that can permanently disable a tag. The Guardian cannot jam these queries.

The most likely active attack against a device like the Guardian would be a denial-of-service attack that attempts to overload some part of the device—likely its limited radio bandwidth or flash memory capacity. Simple tweaks to the code prevent the Guardian from locking up in most of these situations, though, and attacks against the radio bandwidth would also confuse the tags, which depend on precisely-timed signals.

So despite its limitations, the device looks like a powerful new privacy tool. But will the technology be used by black-hat hackers, especially since the libraries and protocol stacks will be open-sourced? "Of course," says Rieback, but notes that if she doesn't build such a device, others will. The hardware in question isn't even particularly complicated; she just happens to have put it together first.

"There aren't that many privacy-enhancing technologies out there for RFID right now," she says. The Guardian provides one of the first, but it also sends an important message to industry: these tags are not as secure as you think. Tag jamming and spoofing, both of which the Guardian does, are possible with off-the-shelf components. Security needs to be taken more seriously.

Guardians of the future

Version 3.0 of the device is already being drawn up in Rieback's Amsterdam lab. High on the list of priorities for the new design is a more modular design where the analog electronics would be contained on plug-in baby boards that could be easily removed and altered. That's because the v2.0 Guardian had everything soldered to a single board; when Rieback had a problem with impedance matching, "it was a pain in the butt to try and fix it."

The new version also features an upgraded interface that allows that Guardian to be controlled using Bluetooth and a custom Java applet designed to run on cell phones and PDAs.

Once the design is complete, the board will be professionally produced and then offered—at cost—to the public.

Getting the tech incorporated into cell phones and PDAs would be the next step, though Rieback notes that this would require the design and production of a custom chip, and that she has neither the time or facilities to do that at the moment. "We're taking it one step at a time," she says.

But for a grad student, she's already taken quite a few important steps and produced the only functioning RFID tag protection system. The project has now swollen to include 15 people, three of them full-time employees. Future versions of the Guardian will include more protocols and different frequency ranges, but the basic tech is already in place and working—putting it ahead of most similar projects.

So put away the hammers; if you're worried about the privacy implications of insecure RFID implementations, you'll soon be able to take back a measure of control.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/cult...guardian.ars/1





aXXo Torrents Exploited by Malware Peddlers
enigmax

When someone becomes a success by earning the admiration of their peers, there will always be the ‘hangers on’ who want to share the spoils of success. For aXXo, the most popular DVD ripper on BitTorrent, it’s about people using his name to further their own, sinister aim: to install malware on as many file-sharers machines as possible.

With an estimated one million people downloading aXXo rips every month, aXXo is very popular with BitTorrent fans all over the world. But as is so often the case, fame comes at a price and it’s almost inevitable that people will jump onto the back of other’s success and use it for their own aims.

Back in January, the MPAA were caught uploading fake torrents labeled up as proper aXXo releases with the goal to collect IP-addresses.

The last few months we have seen a new player enter the ‘give aXXo a bad name’ market, and pirates who have experienced the scenario detailed below will be only too aware of how unpleasant it is;

1. Download a .torrent file you think is a proper one from aXXo
2. Discover the movie is in not in the correct .avi format but a .rar archive
3. .rar file is passworded and the password can be found by installing software called BitGrabber.
4. Installing the software does not provide a password but instead installs malware.

According to an administrator on the BitComet forums, BitGrabber is the same software as BitRoll, which we reported on back in 2006. Instances of the swizzor aka lop malware can come from installing BitGrabber. Anyone whose PC is infected should follow these removal instructions.

Genuine aXXo releases are tracked by a well known tracker, and generally look like this;

1. Most aXXo releases are just under 700mb but no more than 900mb
2. All releases are labeled with these conventions:
name of movie[year]DvDrip[Eng]-aXXo.avi
name of movie[year]DvDrip.AC3[Eng]-aXXo.avi
3. The release will include two other files;
IMPORTANT.Read carefully before you enjoy this movie.txt
movienamehere-aXXo.nfo

Confirmed aXXo torrents can be found here and here, and it’s always helpful to read the user comments on the site where you downloaded the .torrent. Please be aware that most aXXo torrents are copyrighted, downloading these files is not allowed in some countries.

Maybe the_dwarfer could update the aXXo Prayer to include lines about fakes and malware.
http://torrentfreak.com/axxo-torrent...ware-peddlers/





NY Teen Hacks AOL, Infects Systems

District Attorney's office charges 17-year-old boy with computer tampering, computer trespass, and criminal possession of computer material
Juan Carlos Perez

A New York teenager broke into AOL networks and databases containing customer information and infected servers with a malicious program to transfer confidential data to his computer, AOL and the Manhattan District Attorney's Office allege.

In a complaint filed in Criminal Court of the City of New York, the DA's office alleges that between December 24, 2006 and April 7, 2007, 17-year old Mike Nieves committed offenses like computer tampering, computer trespass, and criminal possession of computer material.

Among his alleged exploits:

* Accessing systems containing customer billing records, addresses, and credit card information

* Infecting machines at an AOL customer support call center in New Delhi, India, with a program to funnel information back to his PC

* Logging in without permission into 49 AIM instant message accounts of AOL customer support employees

* Attempting to break into an AOL customer support system containing sensitive customer information

* Engaging in a phishing attack against AOL staffers through which he gained access to more than 60 accounts from AOL employees and subcontractors

Nieves faces four felony charges and one misdemeanor charge. He was arraigned on Monday and remains detained, a DA's office spokesman said. His next court date is Friday for a procedural hearing to determine the next step in the case, the spokesman said. Nieves' attorney didn't immediately return a call seeking comment.

The alleged acts cost AOL more than $500,000. It's not clear whether customer data was stolen. AOL declined to comment. The DA's office spokesman said the investigation into Nieves' alleged acts continues. "It's too early to tell exactly what [data] he compromised or not," he said.

The complaint states that Nieves admitted to investigators that he committed the alleged acts because AOL took away his accounts. "I accessed their internal accounts and their network and used it to try to get my accounts back," the defendant is quoted as saying in the complaint. He also admitted to posting photos of his exploits in a photo Web site, according to the complaint.

One doesn't have to be a computer genius to carry out the alleged acts thanks to the free availability of multiple hacking tools, said Mark Rasch, managing director of technology at FTI Consulting. "Even a disgruntled kid working alone can throw a virtual tantrum and cause a significant amount of damage to a large technology corporation," Rasch said. "Welcome to the new world."

If the defendant was honest about his motivation in his reported confession, it's safe to assume that he wasn't interested in stealing data for financial gain, Rasch said. Still, it'll be interesting to find out what steps AOL is taking if customer data was in fact compromised, he said.

There aren't enough facts available to judge whether AOL could have done more to prevent the alleged intrusion. "We'll learn more as the case goes on," he said. "AOL has had pretty good security over the years."

Authorities arrested Nieves after AOL provided them with information from an internal investigation into the alleged acts. AIM subscriber information and IP address data involved in the acts led AOL to Nieves, whose address and phone number AOL had on file, according to the complaint.

The New York Post reported Thursday that Nieves lives in Staten Island and quoted his mother as saying that he is a special education student with behavioral problems. An anonymous source told the Post that Nieves has caused AOL problems for years.

A source close to the investigation told IDG News Service that Nieves is allegedly part of a "loosely coupled" group of hackers who have targeted AOL and other companies in recent years, but that Nieves focused specifically on hacking into AOL.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/...hackaol_1.html





Sealand Prefers Hacker to The Pirate Bay
Ernesto

The micronation Sealand is offering asylum to Gary McKinnon, a British hacker who’s facing extradition to the United States. Prince Michael Bates of Sealand apparently prefers hackers to pirates. Earlier this year he refused to sell its micronation to the Pirate Bay because this would upset his friends in Hollywood.

Prince Bates said about the Pirate Bay’s activities: “It’s theft of proprietary rights, it doesn’t suit us at all. In fact, I’ve written a book and Hollywood is making a movie out of it, so it would go right against the grain to go into the filesharing thing.”

Apparently hacking is not a problem for the Prince of Sealand, and Gary McKinnon is welcome to come in even though the United States is accusing him of perpetrating the “biggest military computer hack of all time.” This extraordinary news was made public earlier this week on the Infosec security conference where Mckinnon was one of the members of a ‘hackers panel’.

It is absurd of course, especially because Sealand’s webhosting company HavenCo has no no regulations concerning copyright, while malicious hacking is explicitly prohibited. Perhaps they’re just trying to get some more publicity?

In other news, The Pirate bay is finalizing it’s search for their very own Pirate island, and we will hear more about this in the next weeks. It’s not going to be Sealand, but who wants that pile of rust and concrete anyway?
http://torrentfreak.com/sealand-pref...he-pirate-bay/





The Internet Sure Loves its Outlaws

Despite the MPAA and the Swedish police, the Pirate Bay's file-sharing ways are popular.
David Sarno

THEY may not wield battle-axes or wear horned helmets like their Viking forebears, but today's Swedish pirates are still wreaking some pretty heavy-duty havoc.

The Pirate Bay file-sharing collective, one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading, is only the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright — or pro-piracy — movement that is striking terror in the heart of an industry that seems ever less capable of stopping it.

When the Pirate Bay's Stockholm headquarters were raided last May and their servers seized, the Motion Picture Assn. of America thought it had scored a major victory. "Swedish Authorities Sink Pirate Bay," trumpeted its news release. (As has since been pointed out, this is a mixed metaphor.) But the rejoicing didn't last long. The site was back online three days later, and worse yet for Hollywood, the raid and several mass protests afterward generated so much sympathy for the pro-file sharing cause that both candidates for prime minister announced publicly that they did not think young file-sharers should be treated as criminals.

Sweden's state-registered Pirate Party also benefited from the raid's fallout. Its membership has now grown to almost 9,000, closing in on the nation's Green Party (9,550), which holds 19 seats in Parliament.

But the renegades back at the Pirate Bay don't care for politics. They are, after all, pirates. The group's website is a database of 500,000 copied movies, TV shows, songs, games and software titles. Instead of pointing you directly to a downloadable song or movie — like Napster used to — the Pirate Bay provides a kind of digital treasure map. The map, called a torrent file, points your computer toward all the little fragments of the booty that are hidden around the Internet. Feed the torrent file to your downloading software, wait a couple of hours, and ta-da! You now have a shiny new copy of "The Bourne Supremacy."

Also, you have become a criminal.

Well, join the club. The Pirate Bay alone claims more than 5 million active users. According to Internet traffic ranker Alexa.com, it's the 292nd most popular site in the world. (Netflix is 382; the U.S. Postal Service is 385; Wal-Mart is 391.) Some estimates say that file sharing accounts for 80% of the Internet traffic generated by home users. Last year, the MPAA released the results of a study it had commissioned to gauge the effects of illegal copying. In 2005, the report said, the worldwide motion picture industry lost more than $7 billion as a result of Internet piracy.

This number was widely quoted as evidence of piracy's economic harm.

Even Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa jumped in. "It's not just Hollywood that is affected," he said in December. "It's not the big stars. It is the people behind the scenes and small mom-and-pop video stores and hometown theaters."

(The MPAA used remarkably similar language in a statement for this article: "It's not just Hollywood that feels the impact; piracy hurts Mom and Pop video stores, hometown theatres … everyone involved in making and distributing movies.")

However, critics have been skeptical. As Timothy B. Lee, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, points out, the report was just a summary, not the study itself, meaning neither its results nor its methodology can be independently verified.

Lee is not surprised by the MPAA's decision to keep the details of the study away from public scrutiny. "What they're interested in is having a big number for the headlines," he said.

Could be. But if so, who can blame them? For a decade, the industry has shut down one file-sharing service after another, each bigger, faster and harder to dismantle than the last.

"The technology will always be one step ahead," said Peter Sunde, the Pirate Bay's head software designer. The Pirate Bay "is not going to be needed in a couple of years — there will be better systems. Everything is going to evolve. It's just getting easier and easier to connect."

Sunde also spoke about the Pirate Bay's upcoming project to design its own next generation file-sharing technology, one of its goals being to make every transaction completely untraceable. The project will be open source, meaning programmers from all over the world will be able to contribute.

The Pirate Bay has built its reputation on taunting big entertainment and scoffing at copyright law. One of its claims to fame is its online gallery of legal threats, each of which is appended with a less-than-polite riposte from the pirates. One reply to DreamWorks' legal team read, "It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are … morons, and that you should go" — etc.

But the Pirate Bay does have a more adult side. Its guiding principle is that the current copyright system is outmoded. "The culture is growing from using file sharing," Sunde said. "A basic human feeling is the need for new ideas and new concepts. We need to be influenced."

Nor are the pirates so base as to be against paying artists for their work. In fact, the group's next venture is a music sharing site called Playble.com, where users will have the option of paying whatever monthly subscription fee they can afford. Every time a user downloads a song, the artist gets a portion of his fee. Sunde says he approached a major record company — he wouldn't say which — about a partnership. An executive did not take kindly to the offer, and, according to Sunde, accused the Pirate Bay of perpetrating a disturbingly Viking-like act on the executive's livelihood and family. Hint: He didn't say "pillage."
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...,1261622.story





Rich Brown

Higgidy-piggidy,
AACS LA
Lawyers wrote letters
To censor the Net.

Then they discovered that,
Counterproductively,
They had ensured it would
Never forget.





Social Networking Leaves Confines of the Computer
Brad Stone and Matt Richtel

While Walter Zai was in South Africa watching the wild animals recently, people around the world were watching him.

Mr. Zai, a 37-year-old Swiss engineer, used his mobile phone to send out constant updates and images from his safari for an online audience.

“You feel like you are instantly broadcasting your own life and experiences to your friends at home, and to anyone in the world who wants to join,” said Mr. Zai, who used a new online service called Kyte to create his digital diary.

The social networking phenomenon is leaving the confines of the personal computer. Powerful new mobile devices are allowing people to send round-the-clock updates about their vacations, their moods or their latest haircut.

New online services, with names like Twitter, Radar and Jaiku, hope people will use their ever-present gadget to share (or, inevitably, to overshare) the details of their lives in the same way they have become accustomed to doing on Web sites like MySpace.

Unlike the older networking sites, which are still largely used on PCs, these new phone-oriented services are bringing the burgeoning culture of exhibitionism to more exotic and more personal locations. They are also contributing to the general barrage of white noise and information overload — something that even some participants say they feel ambivalent about.

But such services have the same addictive appeal for young people as BlackBerrys do for busy professionals, said Howard Hartenbaum, a partner at the venture capital firm Draper Richards, which is an investor in Kyte.

“Kids want to be connected to their friends at all times,” Mr. Hartenbaum said. “They can’t do that when you turn off the computer.”

Central to the technology of Kyte and similar services is the marriage of mobile phones and the Web. Users download Kyte software for their phones at www.kyte.tv and can send their photos and videos — however grainy — from the phone to their online Kyte “channel.”

Viewers can tune into the programming on their own phones or on the Kyte site, or they can have the channel show up on their own Web site or social network page. In some cases the video stream can be watched live. Those who are watching the same channel can swap messages with each other and with the channel’s creator, even if he or she is silently stalking wild animals.

Daniel Graf, Kyte’s 32-year-old co-founder, sees each of the world’s hundreds of millions of camera-phone owners as a potential television broadcaster.

“To run a television network used to require expensive cameras, a satellite connection and studios,” Mr. Graf said. “But the production costs have gone down to zero. Now you can share your life over a mobile phone, and someone is always connected, watching.”

Mr. Graf said he was considering several approaches to making money from the service. They include charging companies that want to contribute promotional programming, or advertisements in or alongside the most popular channels. He said he would share that revenue with the channels’ creators. “Whatever works in traditional TV works here,” he said.

Another company proving the potency of the sharing impulse is Twitter (www.twitter.com), which is also based in San Francisco and has lately captured the enthusiasm of bloggers and tech insiders. Twitter, spun off this month from a company called Obvious, lets people broadcast short text messages from their phones and computers to those of friends and strangers.

Mobile phone companies in the United States have long tried to get users to send text messages, but with limited success, especially in comparison to the ubiquity of text messaging in Europe and Asia.

But for many Twitter users, text messages have become a form of self-expression and public performance. They are flinging messages that would seem to be of slight interest to anyone: notifications that they are online, or listening to music, or going shopping, or even performing activities of a historically more discreet nature.

“About to head out to the gym. Sweet!” wrote Chris Messina, a 26-year-old San Francisco resident, in a recent Twitter post visible to his group of friends on the service. And a few hours later: “Wow, totally rocking out to Led Zeppelin.”

Twitter’s fans include some high-profile technology pundits and even John Edwards, the former senator who uses it to inform followers of his whereabouts on the campaign trail.

Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, said high-speed social networking can become a moneymaker.

“I believe it can be profitable,” Mr. Dorsey said. But it is not entirely clear how, and how soon, he added. Twitter, which says it has several hundred thousand users, could ultimately consider displaying advertisements, or charging frequent users, especially those who send out promotional messages. Social networking sites like Facebook are largely supported by advertising.

Mr. Dorsey said that whatever business model the company decided to employ, it would not be effective until more people got on board.

“We have a few business models in mind right now. But they’re not interesting until we have a massive number of users,” he said. “We are entirely focused on growth right now.”

The mobile phone companies themselves are trying to get into the mobile networking game. Chief among them is Helio, a year-old mobile phone carrier aimed at young people. The company, a joint venture of Earthlink and SK Telecom of South Korea and based in Los Angeles, is making social networking a central part of its business and is betting it will be fundamental to attracting new subscribers.

Helio has an exclusive deal to offer MySpace features on its phones, which tend to be slicker and more multimedia-focused than those from more mainstream cellphone companies. At the end of 2006 (the last time Helio publicized its subscriber figures), 70 percent of its 70,000 members used MySpace, said Michael Grossi, senior vice president of strategy and business development at Helio.

Social networking “is at the core of the company strategy,” Mr. Grossi said.

To further capitalize on the trend, Helio plans to introduce a handset by the summer that has a fold-out standard keyboard for easier typing and socializing.

Tiny Pictures, a San Francisco start-up company, is taking a slightly different approach. Its service, Radar (www.radar.net), is similar to Kyte in that users send their camera-phone photos to the Web or to the phones of other Radar members. But users share their pictures only with friends they have invited to view them.

John Poisson, chief executive of Tiny Pictures, said the service was explicitly intended to be private because mobile social networking works best and will be most lucrative if users know the people they are sharing with. “Exhibitionism will exist as long as there is voyeurism,” he said. “But we are in the business of helping people stay in touch with the people who are close to them.”

Of course, there is such a thing as being too in touch. Mr. Zai was disconcerted by the instant feedback to his safari photos that popped up on his phone.

“Getting all kinds of communication in such a remote place is a bit confusing,” he said. “I kept responding, ‘I don’t really have the time to talk to you now. I have to make photos of these elephants.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/te.../30social.html





Got Roomfuls of Stuff? Now Sites Will Help Keep Track of It
Bob Tedeschi

PACK rats, shopaholic showoffs and avid collectors take note: the Internet will give you a place to track your stuff for free. One condition: you have to keep your wallet open.

At least three companies have emerged in recent months with the aim of helping people catalog and value their possessions and post them online.

The obvious question is, how many people would be bothered to catalog all their stuff, online or off? The answer, surprisingly enough, is millions. Whether there are enough of them to make a long-term business out of it, though, is anyone’s guess.

Executives say the plan is to attract millions of people, then find retailers who want to sell them more items to go along with their possessions, which users would presumably add to the site — and so on. (Wisely, perhaps, these services charge users nothing to type in endless lists of items, and they have designed the sites to protect the privacy of their users.)

None of these businesses make money yet, but Zebo, with more than six million users, has a big head start against competitors.

“The others have a challenge ahead of them,” said Randy Giusto, an analyst with IDC, a technology consultancy. “Zebo has been able to tap into the community feel that MySpace and others have evolved.” An offshoot of an online advertising technology company in San Francisco called Zedo, Zebo has so far appealed mainly to a younger crowd that uses its personal belongings as a social lubricant of sorts. Users post personal pages, à la MySpace, featuring lists of important items they own or want to own, and links to friends’ Zebo pages. Unlike MyThings and iTaggit, which use technology or site experts to help users determine the value of their items, Zebo’s users estimate their own net worth.

Take Kim E, a 29-year-old who recently posted a page on the site. She lists 11 items on her page worth a total that she estimated at $22,133.44, including her $21,000 Nissan, and one item on her wish list: a $900 Canon XTi digital camera. She also listed four friends, including one, Maria, who posted a comment on her page. (“Heyy kim ... u hav a lot of stuff.”)

•

Roy de Souza, the chief executive of both Zebo and Zedo, said the site, which ended its testing phase in September, is focused on helping users shop together rather than helping individuals manage items they own, as its competitors do.

“The concept is that people will list things they own, discuss them with friends and help others decide what to buy,” he said.

So far, Mr. de Souza said, the site has not earned a profit, mainly because it has not yet built systems to capitalize on its users’ consumerism. Zebo will in the coming months include more ways for retailers to, say, pitch cameras to Kim E and others who advertise their wish lists on the site.

“Right now, the site has some Google ads I need to get rid of,” Mr. de Souza said. “Eventually, it’ll all be about selling products.”

In the quest to persuade people to post items they own, MyThings has a different solution, according to Martha Danly, the company’s chief marketing officer. In addition to allowing people to record items manually, the company is lobbying online retailers to automatically log purchases on MyThings, with the permission of members.

Ms. Danly said retailers and manufacturers who register purchases with MyThings on behalf of its customers will earn the right to advertise related items to those customers whenever they visit their MyThings pages. The site retrieves warranty information and product specifications when someone logs in an item, saving that information on their MyThings page.

The company, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., only recently began approaching American retailers and manufacturers, but MyThings has for the last several months used a similar approach with its British Web site. Among others, Tesco Direct, the online unit of the big British retailer, participated in the program. Ms. Danly said the rate at which Tesco’s customers registered their purchases with MyThings “was amazing. That’s going to be our primary way of acquiring new customers here.”

Ms. Danly said this approach can spare users the need to record serial numbers and purchase records. “It’s essentially a digital shoe box of the things you’re buying, which is important if you have a warranty claim or it’s stolen,” she said.

Like its competitors, MyThings allows people to post lists of possessions privately, with only user names associated with their collections. The company passes on user names only to retailers who log purchases into the site.

MyThings is an outgrowth of an online service called Trace.com, introduced in late 2004 as a way to help people track down lost or stolen valuables, like fine art and antiques, or looted Nazi-era art. That site, which still operates, is working with law enforcement officials to build a central database of stolen goods so that auction houses, pawn shops and other businesses may determine the legitimate ownership of items they sell, and report stolen property.

•

Items registered with MyThings, Ms. Danly said, are automatically registered with Trace.com, so if users lose those goods, pawnbrokers or others can alert the owners and law enforcement agents.

Accel Partners, which backed Facebook among others, and Carmel Ventures, a venture capital firm specializing in software companies, pumped $8 million into MyThings a year ago. Earning back that money will take time; Ms. Danly said the company will begin running ads this summer, at the earliest.

ITaggit, which is based in Austin, Tex., already lists ads on its Web site, which began publicly in February. David Altounian, the company’s chief executive, declined to comment on sales, but said: “We’re happy with where we’ve gotten.”

“This is tough though,” Mr. Altounian added. “There are people who post books and movies and want to share it with others and post it on MySpace. And then there are those who own higher-end stuff who are looking to track the dollar values and preserve their investments.”

In a sense, Mr. Altounian’s constituencies bridge those of Zebo and MyThings. Satisfying both groups “is a really big challenge,” he said, and involves embracing the evangelism of those who will post their iTaggit CD collections on their MySpace pages, while also serving more serious collectors with sophisticated cataloging and tools.

The good news in serving both is that they ultimately merge. “We find that people that are serious enough about collecting music,” Mr. Altounian said, “tend to become collectors in other areas.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/te...gy/30ecom.html





Mobile Mother Eases Foreign Student "Culture Shock"
Kate Kelland

Foreigners studying in Britain but struggling with the culture shock of seeing students kissing and drinking in public are being offered an electronic lifeline.

A mobile phone game called "C-Shock" and devised by a Indian academic aims to help overseas students overcome cultural differences experienced by thousands of foreigners who come to study in British universities.

The game's creator, Nipan Maniar, who came to Britain from India, said he hoped the game would act as an "e-mother" for new arrivals.

"I came here as a student back in 2000. It was my first trip out of my country, the first time I had left my family," Maniar said. "There was no-one I knew, I was in an alien world where people react differently and the whole culture is different."

"One of the first things I saw was a couple kissing in public -- I had never seen anything like this live before. The whole thing was a complete shock. It would have made my life so much easier if I had been introduced to these things in India through some kind of game."

"C-Shock" follows an international student arriving in Britain for the first time. The aim of the game is to reduce the character's "culture shock" rating from a default of 100 to zero by performing a series of tasks involving culture shock-inducing incidents and images.

The game's opening scenario is a student's first day at university. The student is shown a map of the campus and given tasks to find specific locations.

Clicking on images along the way warns the student what to expect in terms of culture shock -- for example students drinking alcohol or engaging in public displays of affection.

"The whole culture of students here is to enjoy life," said Maniar, who is now an academic at the University of Portsmouth in southern England, where he developed "C-Shock" with fellow researcher Dr Emily Bennett.

"The three main characteristics as far as I can see are drink, roaming around the world, and sex. But for me as an Indian those are the last things I would think of. For me the focus is education, degree, job..."

"C-Shock" is in the final stages of development and should be available from the University of Portsmouth website later this year. Maniar is also looking for a commercial backer.
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifes...39262220070430





Iran to Filter 'Immoral' Mobile Messages

Iran's Telecommunications Ministry will start filtering "immoral" video and audio messages sent via mobile phones, state television reported on Saturday.

The Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, a body set up after Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, has instructed the ministry to buy the equipment needed to prevent any misuse of Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), it said.

MMS allows users to send multimedia messages that include images, video and audio.

" ... in order to prevent possible misuse of MMS, immoral actions and social problems, the Telecommunications Ministry will filter immoral MMS," the television said.

It did not give details of the techniques it would use to filter such messages, when it would start or how it would define "immoral" messages.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...83913820070428





PC World Editor Quits Over Apple Story
Kim Zetter

Colleagues at my former outlet, PC World magazine, have told me that Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken quit abruptly today because the company's new CEO, Colin Crawford, tried to kill a story about Apple and Steve Jobs.

The piece, a whimsical article titled "Ten Things We Hate About Apple," was still in draft form when Crawford killed it. McCracken said no way and walked after Crawford refused to compromise. Apparently Crawford also told editors that product reviews in the magazine were too critical of vendors, especially ones who advertise in the magazine, and that they had to start being nicer to advertisers.

Crawford was former CEO of MacWorld and only started at PC World about a month ago. According to the PC World source, when Crawford was working for the Mac magazine, Steve Jobs would call him up any time he had a problem with a story the magazine was running about Apple.

"Everybody is so proud of Harry but we're devastated that he's gone," said the source. "This is no way to run a magazine. But unfortunately, this looks like an indication of what we've got in store (from the new boss)."

He added that everyone at the magazine was upset by the news. "There's supposed to be a party with the MacWorld people going on right now, but no one's going," he said.

The source didn't know the specifics of what was in the story Crawford wanted to kill but said it was nothing new. "It was supposed to be light fare, just really innocuous stuff. The same kinds of things people have said about Apple before -- things that teased Steve Jobs," he said.

I reached McCracken on his cell who, from the sound of the background noise, seemed to be leaving the MacWorld party as we talked.

[Full Disclosure: Harry's my former boss at PC World and someone I greatly respect. He's a top-notch writer and one of the smartest editors I've worked with.]

He didn't want to discuss the details of why he resigned but said he quit "because of some fundamental disagreements with Colin." He emphasized that he wasn't fired or forced out and holds no ill feelings toward the company.

"I've worked at IDG (parent company of PC World and MacWorld) for 16 years. It's been unbelievably good to me, and I have ten-thousand great memories so I'm not leaving an unhappy person."

He said he actually resigned yesterday, but workers found out only about an hour ago. When asked what he'll do now he said, "I'm going to blog and freelance at least for a while. I'll probably write for PC World by the way. I want to make clear that I'm a huge admirer of what PC World does and I'm not leaving hoping that PC World will collapse with out me. I'm sure it won't collapse without me."

PC World's loss is a gain for other publications. Wordsmithing, by the way, runs in McCracken's family. His sister is novelist Elizabeth McCracken.
http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/...ld_editor.html





Obama Requests Creative Commons for Presidential Debates
ScuttleMonkey

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama recently submitted a letter to the DNC asking for the Presidential debates to be licensed under the Creative Commons. This move would give everyone the freedom to share, recut, and edit the debates as they wish.

"I am a strong believer in the importance of copyright, especially in a digital age. But there is no reason that this particular class of content needs the protection. We have incentive enough to debate. The networks have incentive enough to broadcast those debates. Rather than restricting the product of those debates, we should instead make sure that our democracy and citizens have the chance to benefit from them in all the ways that technology makes possible."
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.../05/04/1137226





All the President’s Press
Frank Rich



SOMEHOW it’s hard to imagine David Halberstam yukking it up with Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz and two discarded “American Idol” contestants at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Before there was a Woodward and Bernstein, there was Halberstam, still not yet 30 in the early 1960s, calling those in power to account for lying about our “progress” in Vietnam. He did so even though J.F.K. told the publisher of The Times, “I wish like hell that you’d get Halberstam out of there.” He did so despite public ridicule from the dean of that era’s Georgetown punditocracy, the now forgotten columnist (and Vietnam War cheerleader) Joseph Alsop.

It was Alsop’s spirit, not Halberstam’s, that could be seen in C-Span’s live broadcast of the correspondents’ dinner last Saturday, two days before Halberstam’s death in a car crash in California. This fete is a crystallization of the press’s failures in the post-9/11 era: it illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows. Such is literally the case at the annual dinner, where journalists serve as a supporting cast, but it has been figuratively true year-round. The press has enabled stunts from the manufactured threat of imminent “mushroom clouds” to “Saving Private Lynch” to “Mission Accomplished,” whose fourth anniversary arrives on Tuesday. For all the recrimination, self-flagellation and reforms that followed these journalistic failures, it’s far from clear that the entire profession yet understands why it has lost the public’s faith.

That state of denial was center stage at the correspondents’ dinner last year, when the invited entertainer, Stephen Colbert, “fell flat,” as The Washington Post summed up the local consensus. To the astonishment of those in attendance, a funny thing happened outside the Beltway the morning after: the video of Mr. Colbert’s performance became a national sensation. (Last week it was still No. 2 among audiobook downloads on iTunes.) Washington wisdom had it that Mr. Colbert bombed because he was rude to the president. His real sin was to be rude to the capital press corps, whom he caricatured as stenographers. Though most of the Washington audience failed to find the joke funny, Americans elsewhere, having paid a heavy price for the press’s failure to challenge White House propaganda about Iraq, laughed until it hurt.

You’d think that l’affaire Colbert would have led to a little circumspection, but last Saturday’s dinner was another humiliation. And not just because this year’s entertainer, an apolitical nightclub has-been (Rich Little), was a ludicrously tone-deaf flop. More appalling — and symptomatic of the larger sycophancy — was the press’s insidious role in President Bush’s star turn at the event.

It’s the practice on these occasions that the president do his own comic shtick, but this year Mr. Bush made a grand show of abstaining, saying that the killings at Virginia Tech precluded his being a “funny guy.” Any civilian watching on TV could formulate the question left hanging by this pronouncement: Why did the killings in Iraq not preclude his being a “funny guy” at other press banquets we’ve watched on C-Span? At the equivalent Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association gala three years ago, the president contributed an elaborate (and tasteless) comic sketch about his failed search for Saddam’s W.M.D.

But the revelers in the ballroom last Saturday could not raise that discrepancy and challenge Mr. Bush’s hypocrisy; they could only clap. And so they served as captive dress extras in a propaganda stunt, lending their credibility to the president’s sanctimonious exploitation of the Virginia Tech tragedy for his own political self-aggrandizement on national television. Meanwhile the war was kept as tightly under wraps as the troops’ coffins.

By coincidence, this year’s dinner occurred just before a Congressional hearing filled in some new blanks in the still incomplete story of a more egregious White House propaganda extravaganza: the Pat Tillman hoax. As it turns out, the correspondents’ dinner played an embarrassing cameo role in it, too.

What the hearing underscored was the likelihood that the White House also knew very early on what the Army knew and covered up: the football star’s supposed death in battle in Afghanistan, vividly described in a Pentagon press release awarding him a Silver Star, was a complete fabrication, told to the world (and Tillman’s parents) even though top officers already suspected he had died by friendly fire. The White House apparently decided to join the Pentagon in maintaining that lie so that it could be milked for P.R. purposes on two television shows, the correspondents’ dinner on May 1, 2004, and a memorial service for Tillman two days later.

The timeline of events in the week or so leading up to that dinner is startling. Tillman was killed on April 22, 2004. By the next day top officers knew he had not been killed by enemy fire. On April 29, a top special operations commander sent a memo to John Abizaid, among other generals, suggesting that the White House be warned off making specific public claims about how Tillman died. Simultaneously, according to an e-mail that surfaced last week, a White House speechwriter contacted the Pentagon to gather information about Tillman for use at the correspondents’ dinner.

When President Bush spoke at the dinner at week’s end, he followed his jokes with a eulogy about Tillman’s sacrifice. But he kept the circumstances of Tillman’s death vague, no doubt because the White House did indeed get the message that the Pentagon’s press release about Tillman’s losing his life in battle was fiction. Yet it would be four more weeks before Pat Tillman’s own family was let in on the truth.

To see why the administration wanted to keep the myth going, just look at other events happening in the week before that correspondents’ dinner. On April 28, 2004, CBS broadcast the first photographs from Abu Ghraib; on April 29 a poll on The Times’s front page found the president’s approval rating on the war was plummeting; on April 30 Ted Koppel challenged the administration’s efforts to keep the war dead hidden by reading the names of the fallen on “Nightline.” Tillman could be useful to help drown out all this bad news, and to an extent he was. The Washington press corps that applauded the president at the correspondents’ dinner is the same press corps that was slow to recognize the importance of Abu Ghraib that weekend and, as documented by a new study, “When the Press Fails” (University of Chicago Press), even slower to label the crimes as torture.

In his PBS report last week about the journalism breakdown before the war, Bill Moyers said that “the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush administration to go to war on false pretenses.” That’s not universally true; a number of news organizations have owned up to their disasters and tried to learn from them. Yet old habits die hard: for too long the full weight of the scandal in the Gonzales Justice Department eluded some of the Washington media pack, just as Abu Ghraib and the C.I.A. leak case did.

After last weekend’s correspondents’ dinner, The Times decided to end its participation in such events. But even were the dinner to vanish altogether, it remains but a yearly televised snapshot of the overall syndrome. The current White House, weakened as it is, can still establish story lines as fake as “Mission Accomplished” and get a free pass.

To pick just one overarching example: much of the press still takes it as a given that Iraq has a functioning government that might meet political benchmarks (oil law, de-Baathification reform, etc., etc.) that would facilitate an American withdrawal. In reality, the Maliki “government” can’t meet any benchmarks, even if they were enforced, because that government exists only as a fictional White House talking point. As Gen. Barry McCaffrey said last week, this government doesn’t fully control a single province. Its Parliament, now approaching a scheduled summer recess, has passed no major legislation in months. Iraq’s sole recent democratic achievement is to ban the release of civilian casualty figures, lest they challenge White House happy talk about “progress” in Iraq.

It’s our country’s bitter fortune that while David Halberstam is gone, too many Joe Alsops still hold sway. Take the current dean of the Washington press corps, David Broder, who is leading the charge in ridiculing Harry Reid for saying the obvious — that “this war is lost” (as it is militarily, unless we stay in perpetuity and draft many more troops). In February, Mr. Broder handed down another gem of Beltway conventional wisdom, suggesting that “at the very moment the House of Representatives is repudiating his policy in Iraq, President Bush is poised for a political comeback.”

Some may recall that Stephen Colbert offered the same prediction in his monologue at the correspondents’ dinner a year ago. “I don’t believe this is a low point in this presidency,” he said. “I believe it is just a lull before a comeback.” But the fake pundit, unlike the real one, recognized that this was a joke.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/04/29...29rich.html?hp





Heard the One About the Comedian the Vatican Branded a Terrorist?
Tom Kington

• Church says antics could turn people to violence
• Row highlights divisions in Italian society

Italy now knows the answer to the joke "How many comedians does it take to infuriate the Vatican?" The answer is one, and his name is Andrea Rivera, although according to the Holy See he is not a comedian at all but a "terrorist", who could yet encourage Italians to take up arms against the church.

A day after the former street busker poked fun at the Pope with a series of May Day jokes in front of 400,000 mostly young people, the Vatican indicated it was deeply unamused in a strongly worded article in its daily newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano. Accusing the comic of taking advantage of an "easily excitable crowd", the article warned that it considered his antics a dangerous affront.

"It's terrorism to stoke blind and irrational rage against someone who always speaks in the name of love, love for life and love for man," it wrote of Pope Benedict.

Rivera's jokes seem rather prosaic by comparison. During the show, broadcast live on state television, he trained his wit on the Vatican's stance on evolution and euthanasia. "The Pope says he doesn't believe in evolution. I agree, in fact the church has never evolved," he said. He launched into a routine about the church's denial of a funeral to Piergiorgio Welby, a muscular dystrophy sufferer who decided to have his respirator switched off in December.

"I can't stand the fact that the Vatican refused a funeral for Welby but they didn't for Pinochet or Franco," he quipped.

The unusual Vatican retort highlights acute sensitivities in Italy to issues of freedom of speech, religious tolerance and domestic terrorism. Both sides in the argument have their supporters. Paola Binetti, a senator from Romano Prodi's centre-left governing coalition, called Rivera's routine "dangerous" and "incredibly serious", while trade union organisers of the May Day concert also distanced themselves from the comedian.

Jumping to his defence, Nobel-winning playwright Dario Fo said it was "Stalinist" to "brand anyone who speaks the truth as a terrorist". One of Italy's most popular comedians also sided with Rivera. "We need to be worrying about the people who show up with a machine gun, not a guitar," said Rosario Fiorello, who has previously been scolded by the Vatican for imitating Pope Benedict's tennis-playing assistant Father Georg Genswein. Rivera himself appeared to backtrack, claiming he was a good Catholic and had not meant to offend Pope Benedict, while Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi also tried to calm the waters, claiming the incident was "no tragedy".

But the episode comes at a time when home-grown Italian terrorism has returned to the front pages. Archbisop Angelo Bagnasco, head of the Italian bishop's conference, received a bullet in the post last week accompanied by a five-sided star, the logo of the Red Brigade which killed and kidnapped people in 1970s Italy and has recently shown signs of stirring back to life.

"Death to Bagnasco" graffiti also appeared after the archbishop seemed to suggest a draft Italian law awarding rights to unmarried and gay couples could ultimately lead to the acceptance of incest and paedophilia. He now gives mass at his cathedral in Genoa with police guards.

"Right now slogans supporting terrorism are appearing at demonstrations and messages are appearing on the internet from Red Brigade members in prison, an offensive which seeks fertile ground in anti-clerical hate," stated the editorial in L'Osservatore Romano.

As the final Senate vote on the civil unions bill nears, the Vatican does not appear to want to give up its resistance to what it sees as creeping godlessness. With Mexico voting to legalise abortion, the Vatican's attention could now be more strongly focused on Italy. "Italy is not Spain," Italian Bishop Domenico Padovano told La Stampa. "If we give way on gay unions here, it will be a worrying message for the rest of the Catholic world."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/stor...072168,00.html





After Virginia Tech, Testing Limits of Movie Violence
Michael Cieply

If the horror at Virginia Tech has changed the chemistry of America’s popular culture, those who count box-office receipts at Lionsgate would be among the first to know.

The independent studio, a clearinghouse for some of the entertainment industry’s most graphically violent fare, still plans to release on June 8 its “Hostel: Part II,” about the torture killing of college students.

The movie will open as other studios are turning toward comedies like “Knocked Up,” capers like “Ocean’s 13,” or fantasy adventures like “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.”

Given its subject matter and the marketing campaign that has already come with it — posters featuring a woman’s severed head and other grisly images are now scattered on the Web — the Lionsgate film is emerging as a test of continued audience enthusiasm for such onscreen brutality, which some commentators have connected with the Blacksburg gunman Seung-Hui Cho’s video and its possible echoes of the Korean revenge film “Old Boy.”

“What might have been traditionally acceptable exploitation in one period can be seen as stupendously bad taste in another,” said Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, which examines the links among entertainment, commerce and society.

Eight years ago, in one such case, the Columbine High School killings fed a political storm around the marketing of violent entertainment to the young, and led to stricter policing of sales practices in the movie and video-game industries.

“You can’t win on this one,” said Peter Dekom, a longtime entertainment lawyer and author, with Peter Sealey, of “Not on My Watch: Hollywood vs. the Future.”

Mr. Dekom predicted that fallout from the killings would hurt the film’s performance. But the damage would only grow deeper, he suggested, if Lionsgate delayed the film, allowing the Internet buzz to tag it as being troubled.

Written and directed by Eli Roth, with Quentin Tarantino as an executive producer, “Hostel: Part II” follows an immensely lucrative predecessor, which cost only about $5 million to make, and took in more than $80 million worldwide when Lionsgate released it last year in partnership with Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Screen Gems division. (Sony, whose executives declined to comment, also has a stake in the new film.)

The original film told the story of three young travelers who are lured by gorgeous women into captivity and deadly torture; the new picture follows three young women studying abroad who fall into much the same trap. Along with the three hits in its “Saw” series, the film cemented Lionsgate’s reputation as a nonpareil distributor of so-called torture porn and helped to feed a surge in violent horror movies from virtually every major studio in recent years.

(Lionsgate is not solely devoted to gore; it has also released the family-oriented Tyler Perry movies and “Crash,” which won the best picture Oscar for 2005. On Friday, the studio will open Sarah Polley’s “Away From Her,” based on a short story by Alice Munro about an aging couple dealing with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.)

Peter Wilkes, a Lionsgate spokesman, confirmed that his company plans to proceed with a June release for “Hostel: Part II,” but declined to discuss whether it planned to adjust the movie or its marketing campaign.

In recent weeks, the Motion Picture Association of America, which reviews advertising materials for films that seek a rating, approved the severed head poster, with a proviso that it not be displayed in multiplex theaters, where children might be exposed to it, according to a person involved with the process.

Lionsgate has circulated additional images, including one of a dead or dying woman suspended upside down with fluid dripping from her nose. “Hostel: Part II” has not yet been rated, but like its predecessor, will probably receive an R rating.

Even before the events in Blacksburg, the heavy run of violent films had gained attention from the government — a Federal Trade Commission report this month found that studios were still selling R-rated fare to adolescents over the Internet, among other things — just as the genre was beginning to show signs of audience fatigue.

Pictures like “Dead Silence” from Universal, “The Hills Have Eyes 2” from Fox Atomic, “Grindhouse” from the Weinstein Company, and “The Reaping” from Warner Brothers Pictures were box-office disappointments. And Sony’s “Vacancy,” which opened on April 20 even as images of the Virginia killings continued to fill television screens, has pulled in just $14 million in its first 9 days.

“You might have seen a little effect” from Blacksburg in audience behavior a week ago, said Roy Lee, a film producer whose projects include a proposed remake of “Old Boy” for Universal.

Mr. Lee said that film, initially intended as a project for Justin Lin, the director of “Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” had fallen out of active development long before Mr. Cho’s video and commentator chatter about supposed influences.

Mr. Lee said that the killings have seriously shaken the prospects for his “Battle Royale,” based on the Japanese novel in which ninth graders imprisoned on an island are forced to kill one another. (Lionsgate’s “The Condemned,” with a similar island face-off premise involving adults, opened this weekend to $4 million.) New Line Cinema has been working since last year for film rights to the game but has yet to sign a deal, according to Mr. Lee.

But he said that he was glad the movie had not started production before the Blacksburg killings. “We would have been slaughtered by the press,” he said.

Asked if he would still be willing to proceed with a “Battle Royale” movie, Mr. Lee said yes, though “we might be a little more sensitive to some of the issues.” A spokeswoman for New Line said she had “no news” about progress on the rights deal.

The trade paper Variety reported last week that two films based on campus violence — the documentary “The Killer Within,” about a planned killing spree at Swarthmore College in the 1950s, and the drama “Dark Matter,” about a dangerously disaffected Asian student — are still looking for distributors.

Yet Dr. Kaplan of the Lear Center, a former film executive for Disney, noted that popular culture has a way of riding out even the most shattering of events.

Dr. Kaplan added that he was hard-pressed to think of any event that had suddenly, and irrevocably, changed audience responsiveness. “Famously, 9/11 was supposed to be the end of irony,” he said. “If anything, irony has blossomed.”
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/01/arts/horror.php