Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 27th, '07

[JackSpratts]

"Vista is NOTHING but a DRM platform that also happens to run Windows applications." – JRHelgeson


"Using a bucket full of weasel words does nothing to convince me that Vista isn't screwing the consumer." – Chicapoo


"Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn." – Bill Watkins


"I think ultimately, the studio is going to get the names that they want." – Tom Ferber


"You cannot have zero piracy and if you try to get to zero piracy you will make the experience of consuming music so painful you'll have zero industry." – Chris Anderson


"DRM is like polonium to some people." – John Kennedy





































January 27th, 2007







Movie File-Sharing Booming: Study
Press release

As the movie industry is trying to find the right business model for Internet distribution for its first-run and catalogue content, a new research study shows that American consumers are increasingly viewing the movies they download or rip from DVDs on their PCs.

Among key highlights of the research: * 32 million Americans aged 12+ (18% of the US online population) downloaded a full-length movie at some point in the past — 20 million of these are regulars, having downloaded in the last month. - A majority of movie downloaders (80%) only use peer-to-peer file-sharing sites. The population of regular file-sharing users doubled between 2005 and 2006. - A typical movie downloader from file-sharing sites is 29 years of age and has 16 titles stored on their PC — 63% are male and 37% are female. * The PC is moving from a workhorse to a life-hub and video entertainment center. - 56% watched a DVD on a PC at some point and 29% viewed a DVD on a PC last month. - 25% watched a streaming TV show on their PCs. * Unauthorized downloads of copyrighted movies are not perceived as a serious offense. - Only 40% believe downloading "copyrighted movies off the Internet" is a "very serious offense" — compared to the 78% who believe "taking a DVD from a store without paying" is a very serious offense. As another point of comparison, Americans are much more likely to believe that "parking in a fire lane" is a very serious offense (59%).

"There is a Robin Hood effect — most people perceive celebrities and studios to be rich already and as a result don't think of movie downloading as a big deal," commented Kaan Yigit, Study Director. "The current crop of 'download to own' movie services and the new ones coming into the market will need to offer greater flexibility of use, selection and low prices to convert the current users to their services — otherwise file-sharing will continue to thrive," added Yigit.

This information comes from Digital Life America, a syndicated consumer trend study. Between June and late September 2006, the research covered nationally representative samples of over 2,600 Americans by telephone (1,016) and online (1,600). The results cited in this release are accurate to plus or minus 2.4 percent, 19 times out of 20.

To maintain an unbiased perspective, Solutions Research Group funds its own syndicated research. This is the first of a series of releases from Digital Life America.
http://digital50.com/news/items/PR/2...ing-study.html





Mystery Musician Rescues Peer-To-Peer Campaigner
Simon Aughton

The future of popular peer-to-peer campaign site, pro-p2p, appears to be secure following fresh investment from a mysterious backer from the music industry.

The site's founder, Jon Newton, had been forced to put the anti-DRM site up for sale, after his main sources of revenues gradually withdrew their advertising and financial backing.

However, in addition to his mystery backer, Newton has also secured technical backup and a hosting service that will enable him to relaunch the site within a matter of weeks.

Newton did not reveal details of the rescue package, at the request of his new backer. 'I'll be working with a guy who has sites of his own and the technical know-how and people to back them up,' Newton said. 'This means I'll be able to concentrate on content, and that's fine with me. My new partner is presently up to his eye-balls in work of his own and doesn't want to be named just yet. But there's good reason and I'll let you know who he is in the fairly near future. For now, it's enough to say he's also a musician.'

The site will now be redesigned, with content restructured to make it easier to sell advertising space.

However, the site may struggle to attract fresh advertisers following heavy pressure from the music industry. 'Early in the year, the Big 4 Organized Music gang [Newton's name for the major record companies] turned on LimeWire, one of my advertisers,' Newton said last week. 'LimeWire pulled their booking, and then it was BearShare's turn. Two down, and I was in deep trouble. Again, I had to borrow money to stay online.'
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/102893/m...ampaigner.html





High Court in Italy Says Sharing Copyrighted Content Can be Legal

The High Court in Italy, decreed that even if content is copyrighted it can, nevertheless, be shared - as long as there is no profit being made.

This after hearing a case presented by two students from Torino, who were appealing a conviction for having “duplicated and distributed” copyrighted content (in particular games from the PSX, videos) through sharing via an FTP server from where “they could be downloaded from authorised users with a username and password”.

Apparently, after carefully reviewing copyright laws in Italy the judges decided that sharing copyrighted content is legal.

Now, this is Italy - so things are never simple. In fact the judges did not apply the most recent legislation (of 2004), which instead is much stricter, because the case dates to before the 2004 law that makes sharing of copyright content illegal.

So, where does that leave copyrights and file-sharing in Italy? Well, the debate is still open and more cases in court are required in order to really determine the exact state of play. At least, the High Court has now set a precedent that sharing files where no profit is gained from sharing those files is not a crime.

At the same time one of the students was also not found guilty of having software that could remove encryption from copyrighted material.

So, overall you have a decision of the High Court that would make Italy one of the most liberal countries in terms of allowing file-sharing but on a case where the latest law (which is anyway three years old) has not been applied.

Spaghetti anyone?
http://www.theoryvspractice.com/2007...-can-be-legal/





Labels Deny Italian File-Sharing Victory

Labels still chase the Italian p-2-p dragon
Philip Willan

A court ruling previously hailed as a victory for the free downloading of copyright material from the internet actually leaves Italian law unchanged, claimed a spokesman for the Italian Music Industry Federation (FIMI) on Tuesday.

Earlier this month the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest court, quashed a three month and ten day prison sentence that had been meted out to two students by the Turin Court of Appeal for illegally exchanging copyright-protected files. The Turin Polytechnic students were acquitted of breaking the law because the exchange of files had not been carried out for profit, Italian newspapers reported over the weekend.

The students' alleged offence occurred in 1999 and a number of laws have been passed since, including one that implements the European Union’s 2003 copyright directive, which outlaws using the internet to acquire copyright material for free, the FIMI spokesman pointed out.

"The significance of the ruling was wrongly reported by the mass media," the spokesman said. "They said people who downloaded copyright material would no longer be punished. But that is not correct. Whoever downloads illegally will be punished."

People downloading material illegally would still be subject to fines, the FIMI spokesman said, and if the download involves P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file sharing those responsible could be prosecuted for a criminal offense. "The current law is perfectly satisfactory. There is no need to seek a modification of the law because of this verdict," he said.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=17027





Record Labels Contemplate Unrestricted Digital Music
Victoria Shannon

As even digital music revenue growth falters because of rampant file-sharing by consumers, the major record labels are moving closer to releasing music on the Internet with no copying restrictions — a step they once vowed never to take.

Executives of several technology companies meeting here at Midem, the annual global trade fair for the music industry, said over the weekend that at least one of the four major record companies could move toward the sale of unrestricted digital files in the MP3 format within months.

Most independent record labels already sell tracks digitally compressed in the MP3 format, which can be downloaded, e-mailed or copied to computers, cellphones, portable music players and compact discs without limit.

The independents see providing songs in MP3 partly as a way of generating publicity that could lead to future sales.

For the major recording companies, however, selling in the MP3 format would be a capitulation to the power of the Internet, which has destroyed their control over the worldwide distribution of music.

Until last year, the industry was counting on online purchases of music, led by Apple’s iTunes music store, to make up the difference.

But digital sales in 2006, while 80 percent ahead of the year before, grew slower than in 2005 and did not compensate for the decline in physical sales, according to an industry report released in London last week.

Even so, the move to MP3s is not inevitable, some insiders warn.

Publicly, music company executives say their systems for limiting copies are a way to fairly compensate artists and other copyright holders who contribute to the creation of music.

But privately, there are signs of a new appreciation in the industry for unrestricted copies, which could be sold as singles or through subscription services or made freely available on Internet sites that support advertising.

The EMI Group said last week that it would offer free streaming music on Baidu.com, the leading Web site and search engine in China, where 90 percent of music is pirated. EMI and Baidu also agreed to explore developing advertising-supported music download services. This summer EMI licensed its recording to Qtrax, an ad-supported music distribution service.

Experiments by Yahoo — last year it offered a handful of tracks from Norah Jones, Jessica Simpson, Jesse McCartney and Relient K without any digital restrictions — will continue this year, David Goldberg, vice president and general manager of Yahoo Music, said in an interview at Midem. Two of the major labels, Sony BMG and EMI, agreed to the tests in 2006.

In a handful of European countries, especially in France, consumer frustration has led to government proposals to legislate interoperability.

“There is a groundswell, and I say that on the basis of private conversations,” said Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks, which sells digital music protected against piracy through the Rhapsody subscription service.

“It will happen between next year and five years from now, but it is more likely to be in one to two years,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/23/te...y/23music.html





Washington Tries Its Best To Kill Internet Radio
Medialoper

Remember that election last October? You know, the one that signaled the need for change. Well, apparently that change doesn’t include taking a more enlightened approach to legislation involving new technology. Earlier this month a bipartisan group of Senators lead by Diane Feinstein (D-CA) introduced a bill that would create a variety of new restrictions for both Internet broadcasters and listeners.

Bill S.256, also known as the “Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music Act” (PERFORM), would, among other things, require that Internet broadcasters protect their audio streams with DRM technology. Apparently the RIAA has convinced Feinstein that unencrypted audio streams are contributing to the global piracy problem.

In a world where just about every song ever recorded is available from any number of online sources, it’s hard to believe that a significant number of listeners are sitting around waiting for their favorite song to play on some Internet station so they can record the stream, cut the song out of the stream, tag it, then transfer it to their iPod. No, something tells me that people who don’t want to pay for songs have more efficient ways of stealing music.

It’s unfathomable that lawmakers would spend time attempting to cripple a new industry that is still in its infancy. Worse yet, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this bill. It was introduced last year and ultimately failed. The fact that it’s been reintroduced is a testament to the RIAA’s persistence as a lobbying group.

It’s conceivable that, if passed, the law would eliminate a large number of existing Internet broadcasters. If the cost of investing in proprietary DRM streaming systems doesn’t run broadcasters out of business, the new royalty and licensing fees just might. Keep in mind that Internet broadcasters are already paying the same licensing fees that terrestrial broadcasters pay, as well as additional fees that terrestrial broadcasters don’t pay.

Then there are the issues related to the use of DRM. Since there’s no such thing as an open DRM standard broadcasters will likely pick and choose from the motley assortment of available options. Not only will this create confusion among consumers, but it will likely leave many users out in the cold. Very few DRM schemes are cross-platform, and the ones that are (FairPlay) would likely not be available to Internet broadcasters.

Chances are that many broadcasters would select Microsoft’s DRM system, effectively turning Internet radio into a Windows-only medium (and ironically leaving Zune users out of the loop).

If I didn’t know better I might think that these politicians and lobbyists were actively trying to kill Internet radio. If this bill passes they’ll be off to a good start.

We encourage you to take action by contacting your local lawmaker and sharing your opinions on this matter. Follow the links below for more information:


· EFF Action Center
· Public Knowldge Disappointed With PERFORM ACT
· WFMU: Will The PERFORM Act Kill Online Radio

Article





What Can Money Buy?
Dan Mitchell

SEVERAL news reports, all relying on anonymous sources, have suggested that the Federal Communications Commission will soon announce a settlement with four major radio broadcasters over payola.

The first report came on Jan. 11 in an article by The Hollywood Reporter (found at mediaweek.com). According to that and subsequent reports, including one this week on National Public Radio (npr.org), the companies — Clear Channel Communications, CBS Radio, Entercom and Citadel — will agree to adhere to a code of conduct and to give more airtime to independent music, but they will not admit wrongdoing.

The broadcasters were accused of taking payments from large music labels to play certain songs. Several labels, as well as CBS Radio and Entercom, have settled lawsuits lodged by the former New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, now governor of New York.

Kevin Martin, the chairman of the F.C.C., is to appear before the Senate Commerce Committee on Feb. 1, prompting speculation that he will reveal details of the settlement then. Mr. Martin told Radio and Records magazine on Jan. 17, “the commissioners are trying to decide what is the most appropriate thing for us to do.”

After the reports surfaced, Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, wrote an open letter to Mr. Martin urging the F.C.C. to “instead seek strong binding settlements” with the broadcasters that would “reassure consumers they will have access to small, independent and local labels and artists via the public airwaves”.

The Future of Music Coalition issued a statement asserting that the settlement “must be judged a failure” if it does not include a “credible oversight plan” and “serious penalties.” In a report on its Web site, the coalition said last month that consolidation “has led to fewer choices in radio programming and harmed the listening public and those working in the music and media industries, including DJs, programmers and musicians.”

Local ownership of radio stations has declined nearly a third since 1975, just 15 formats account for three-quarters of all commercial programming and the top 10 station owners draw nearly two-thirds of all listeners, it found.

Free Press, a nonpartisan media-focused advocacy group, called the reported settlement a “slap on the wrist” that “won’t stop payola”.

‘Reviews’ Critics of another kind of payola — paid-for blog posts — were chagrined to learn recently of a new entrant. SponsoredReviews.com, a product of 360 Enterprise, joins the existing services PayPerPost.com, Reviewme.com, and others in brokering payments to bloggers for “reviewing” or mentioning products or services in their posts. SponsoredReviews has not gone live yet, but Tony Hung of the Blog Herald noted that its payment system will differ from others in that bloggers will name their price, to be matched by interested advertisers. “It’s the simple law of reciprocity,” Mr. Hung wrote. When someone “showers you with gold coins, how is that NOT going to affect what you write or how you’ll write it?”

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch noted that SponsoredReviews promotes its ability to get advertisers’ Web pages good placement in search engine results. “So the third-party costs are becoming pretty clear: misled readers, search engine pollution and credibility questions around the entire blogosphere,” he wrote. “All for a few dollars a post.” Defenders of sponsored reviews say that as long as financial arrangements are disclosed, there’s no harm done.

More ‘Reviews’ Booksurge, the self-publishing service recently acquired by Amazon, offers its client authors a review by “New York Times best-selling author, Ellen Tanner Marsh,” Slate noted last week. Ms. Marsh was last on the best-seller list in the early 1980s for bodice-rippers like “Reap the Savage Wind.” In her review of “The Beer Drinker’s Diet,” a self-published work, she wrote it was “motivating and significant.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/te.../27online.html





An Industry that Hates its Customers
John Whiteside

Imagine an industry that was so hostile to its customers that it regularly sued them; that resisted all new technologies for distributing its products, even as their best customers were embracing them; and that lobbies in Washington to try to take away its customers' legal rights to use its products.

Sounds insane, right? I agree; the industry in question is the recording industry, whose trade association seems intent on alienating every music purchases in the United States.

The latest story: the RIAA is challenging the established legal right to "time-shift," to record programming off the air and listen to it later. In other words, what you do every time you use a DVR or VCR.

Under attack right now are satellite radio company XM's combination receivers/MP3 players, which can record what XM is broadcasting so you can listen later.

The labels' basic worry is that one could potentially use XM's devices to record high-quality digital streams from XM stations, split them into individual files, and upload them onto a computer. XM hired Hilary Rosen to defend themselves against her old pals, but the labels continue to attack new technology. They tried to kill the MP3 player in exactly the same way back in '99, and failed. Now they're trying to kill the satellite-connected MP3 player.

It doesn't stop there. Recording industry lobbyists have also been busy attacking our time-shifting right on the Congressional front too. Senator Diane Feinstein's re-introduced PERFORM Act would make digital recording products such as XM's and others yet to come illegal from the get-go, and would even bar legally-licensed online radio stations from streaming in the MP3 format. Luckily, the EFF is all over Feinstein about this, with a special page where you can let your own Senators know exactly how you feel about the PERFORM Act.

The concerns of the industry are not ridiculous; the digitization of music (and video) makes it possible to make near-perfect copies. If, like me, you're old enough to remember the warnings that making cassette tapes was going to destroy music, their reaction is not so surprising; with taping, every copy degraded, and people generally wanted to buy real copies of music they liked. With digital music, that's less of an issue.

But so what? That won't make the technology go away. And so they have a challenge: when music can be distributed electronically, what is the value that a recording label is adding? That's not a rhetorical question; the industry needs to answer it, and the answer will let them make money.

I think that there are answers, but those answers will probably change the entire financial structure of the industry... and there will be some big losers.

And I question whether today's recording labels will be the ones to figure those answers out. They're too busy trying to protect their command-and-control business with lawsuits and legislation to take a realistic look at their future.

When an industry decides to run from the future and crap all over its customers in the process, it's likely that the established players will not do well when the inevitable restructing takes place.
http://blogs.chron.com/bluebayou/200...s_its_cus.html





@ MidemNet

MPAA, RIAA, CEA Execs Clash Over DRM & Hardware Controls
Staci D. Kramer

[By Robert Andrews] This conference on the digital music business got off to a bang here in Cannes this morning when the opening-session discussion broke into a tense and sometimes bitchy disagreement about DRM between representatives from music, movie and electronics industry associations. MPAA executive vice president Fritz Attaway and RIAA chairman Mitch Bainwol immediately set their stall against Consumer Electronics Association president Gary Shapiro. A sample:

Attaway: “Technology should not be expected to respect existing business models, but the people who use technology have a responsibility to respect the rights of intellectual property owners. When one consumes a movie by viewing it, there is some obligation to compensate those involved in making it. It does cost a lot of money to make this product—there is no business model where one invests several million dollars in making a movie and then gives it away for free; that just doesn’t work for movies and it doesn’t work for music, too. Restrictions should not be put on technology, but they should be put on the people who use technology.”

Bainwol: “Technology is not a license to steal and it doesn’t sanitize theft. Technology needs to respect the law. It can challenge business practises [but] there is not an excuse to bypass the rule of law when you build a business model based on theft.”

Shapiro: “Consumers have certain rights to move content around their home. DRM is clearly desired by components of the motion picture and music industries, but consumers have started to revolt against it and you’re beginning to hear it. It’s confusing and resented by consumers. Business models are emerging and major record labels are starting to pick up on this. [If you drop DRM], you’re taking a risk that unethical consumers will spread the content around the world—but that’s a risk you’re going to have to take. ... When the law penalizes so much, something is wrong and has to be changed. When consumers are afraid to do something for a school project because they’ve listened to the RIAA disinformation campaign, something is wrong. Consumers are rejecting DRM [because it’s confusing]. Independents and some major labels soon are going to be saying ‘no DRM on our products.’”

Responding, Attaway said: “We are investing a lot of time and energy with Gary’s members to improve DRM. It needs to be better. We are all for technological innovations that make DRM more acceptable, allowing consumers to do more with their content but to also protect creators.”

The gloves quickly came off between Shapiro, whose association runs a campaign to brief consumers on what he calls the “facts” about copyright, and the two industry reps. Bainwol said the CEA president, because of his pleas to abandon restrictions and liberalize fair use policies, sometimes resembled “a fringe, ideological leader”: “We are in a very, very significant transition,” Bainwol said. “Technology is the basis of our future. We have to be able to monetise product and, every time we try, you want to make it available for free so people can buy devices. Gary stretches the concept of fair use to the point where the notion of ‘fair’ has been eliminated. You have to protect the market value. [Gary] wants to morph fair use into a concept that justifies any consumer behavior to the point where you eliminate the value of property. Kids grow up not understanding that music and movies are intellectual property. You teach disrespect for intellectual property. Gary takes a concept, morphs it, makes us look like we’re evil.”

Shapiro countered: ”I don’t make you look evil - your lawsuits against old people around the country make you look evil. You’re very good at paraphrasing things I never said.”

Attaway: “The CEA has initiated this campaign against DRM which is against a lot of your your own members, who are making great strides in DRM to provide consumers with choices. You’re the one that is trying to stifle innovative technology and we’re trying to use it. Gary is trying to enact laws that limit the use of technology to create new business models.”
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/mid...When:13:47:00Z





Blu-ray DRM Defeated
John Leyden

The copy protection technology used by Blu-ray discs has been cracked by the same hacker who broke the DRM technology of rival HD DVD discs last month. The coder known as muslix64 used much the same plain text attack in both cases. By reading a key held in memory by a player playing a HD DVD disc he was able to decrypt the movie been played and render it as an MPEG 2 file.

The latest Blu-ray hack was performed by muslix64 using a media file provided by Janvitos, through the video resource site Doom9, and applied to a Blu-ray copy of the movie Lord of War. In this case, muslix64 didn't even need access to a Blu-ray player to nobble the DRM protection included on the title.

Both HD DVD and Blu-ray use HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) for playback display authentication and similar implementations of AACS (Advanced Access Content System) for content encryption.

The hack sidesteps, rather than defeats, the AACS encryption used as part of the content protection technology used by both next-generation DVD formats. The approach relies on obtaining a particular movie's unique "key" and can't therefor be trivially replicated to rip content across all titles encoded via a particular format, as tools like DVD Decryptor make easy with standard DVD titles.

muslix64 has however posted a 18KB tool that allows other to try their hand at extracting the keys of other Blu-ray Disc movies

BD+, the second type of content protection on Blu-ray, is yet to fall by crackers but this is something of a moot point today as the technology is yet to be widely applied on discs.

Blu-ray and HD DVD both allow for decryption keys to be updated in reaction to attacks, for example by making it impossible to play high-definition movies via playback software known to be weak or flawed. So muslix64 work has effectively sparked off a car-and-mouse game between hackers and the entertainment industry, where consumers are likely to face compatibility problems while footing the bill for the entertainment industry's insistence on pushing ultimately flawed DRM technology on an unwilling public.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01...ked/print.html





Big Labels Offer Free Music to College Students
Saul Hansell

In one more attempt to counter music piracy, major music labels have agreed to support a service that will offer free music downloads — with some substantial restrictions — to any college student.

The service, from Ruckus Network, will be supported by advertising on its Web site and on the software used to download and play songs. The four major record labels and several independent labels have agreed to license their music to Ruckus at lower rates than they charge other mass market music services on the theory that college students would rather steal songs than pay the $10 to $15 a month that such services normally charge.

Phil Leigh, president of Inside Digital Media, a research firm, said that the move also represented a way for labels to experiment with advertising-supported music, a model that he said might be better for the labels than radio, because they could share in the advertising revenue. Music publishers, which represent the composers, are paid by radio stations, but the labels, which represent performing artists, are not.

Ruckus had originally hoped universities would pay a fee to offer free downloads to their students, thereby reducing the legal risks and some of the network expense associated with the use of illegal file-sharing networks. Only 20 universities agreed.

Last year, however, Ruckus decided to switch to a free, advertising-supported approach, although it still required universities to agree and to install a server on their campus networks.

That increased participation to about 100 schools, with “several hundred thousand” active users, said Michael J. Bebel, chief executive of Ruckus.

The new service, which is available now, does not require a university to participate. Rather, it will be made available to those who have an e-mail address ending in .edu, the top-level domain associated with educational institutions.

Because faculty members and many alumni also use an .edu e-mail address, Mr. Bebel said that the service would ask users if they were students, staff members or alumni. Those who are not students will be asked to pay $8.95 a month for the service.

Ruckus uses Microsoft’s Windows media technology, so songs can be played only on a user’s personal computer. For $4.99 a month, users can buy the right to transfer the songs to portable devices compatible with the Microsoft format, including those made by SanDisk and Creative.

But the music will not play on Microsoft’s Zune player or, more important, on the Apple iPod.

These restrictions have led to at least some protests on campus that the service discriminates against users of iPods and Macintosh computers (also not supported).

Mr. Bebel says that about 60 percent of the students on the campuses offering the Ruckus service had registered for it.

“Even iPod users on campus will use Ruckus because they can find music they like before they buy it from Apple or get it another way,” Mr. Bebel said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/te.../22ruckus.html





Had no idea it was this low…

22% of Windows Installs Non-Genuine
Nate Mook

Microsoft disclosed Monday that over one in five Windows installations were deemed non-genuine through the company's Windows Genuine Advantage program, which requires users to validate their operating system before downloading updates from the company.

Since WGA launched in July 2005, over 512 million users have attempted to validate their copy of Windows, Microsoft said. Of those, the non-genuine rate was 22.3 percent. 56,000 reports have been made by customers of counterfeit software, which grants that user a free replacement copy of Windows.

While high, that number is less than the average software piracy rate around the world, according to the Business Software Alliance. The BSA reports that 35 percent of the world's software is pirated (22 percent in North America specifically), and a Yankee Group study noted that 55 percent of organizations report instances of counterfeit or pirated software.

As it prepares to launch both Windows Vista and Office 2007 to the public next week, Microsoft has kicked off what it calls the "Genuine Fact Files" campaign for educating consumers on the downfall and risks associated with non-genuine software. It hopes to discourage users from downloading illicit software in the process.

Acknowledging that potential customers may be tempted to "try the new products first before they make the decision to buy" through the use of pirated software, Microsoft has posted an online "test drive" of Windows Vista, which joins an existing Web-based preview of Office 2007.

The Vista test drive, which requires Internet Explorer 6 or 7 and runs the operating system in a small Active X based virtual machine, lets visitors explore various new features of the forthcoming operating system, and guides them through common tasks. Meanwhile, a 60-day trial download of Office 2007 is also available.
http://www.betanews.com/article/prin...ine/1169497163





Adobe and it’s P2P Ambitions
Om Malik

Adobe Systems, now the owner of Flash multimedia technology, seems to be getting pretty serious about spreading its tentacles into new product categories – from VoIP to peer-to-peer networking. But it is P2P that is at the heart of San Jose, Calif.-based company’s grand design.

In pursuit of this strategy, the company has acquired amicima, a privately held start-up founded in 2004 to “develop improved Internet protocols for client-server and peer-to-peer networking, and to develop new applications based on these protocols.” After being tipped off by one of our readers, we were able to confirm with our sources that Adobe has bought out this tiny company, which can help Adobe achieve its VoIP and P2P ambitions. An Adobe spokesperson declined to comment.

Amicima’s publicly available product is amiciPhone, a p2p-based VoIP client that combines presence, text messaging and file transfers with voice chat. In addition, Adobe recently announced a partnership with VeriSign, which is now in the CDN business. Together, expect a lot of Flash and P2P going forward, perhaps making it a lot easier to move rich content around the Internet.

Though a pint-sized start-up, amicima carried a hefty intellectual punch. Through LinkedIn, we were able to find that amicima co-founder Mathew Kaufman has been working as Senior Computer Scientist for Adobe since October 2006. His co-founder, Michael Thornburgh, is also said to be at Adobe. Both of them have vast experience in networking and P2P technologies. The two of them worked at Tycho Networks, and later at DSL.net, after that company acquired Tycho.

It is unclear whether Adobe acquired amicima for the technology or for the talent. What is clear is that the company is very serious about making the Flash technology an integral part of the “webization of voice,” as we had previously reported.

Amicima’s acquisition, while seemingly voice-centric, could also be viewed as part of company’s multi-pronged P2P strategy. Adobe recently announced a partnership with VeriSign, owners of the Kontiki grid content distribution platform. In an email earlier this month, VeriSign told us, “[we] will be collaborating with Adobe for delivery of Flash video including movies, TV shows, broadcast media and user interface technologies.”

Later, at the CES Show in Las Vegas, the two companies announced their alliance, though it was lost amidst the noise around new phones and gadgets.
The two companies expect to work together to integrate future versions of next generation media technologies leveraging VeriSign’s Kontiki peer-to-peer technology and Adobe’s award winning Flash Video software.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that Adobe could bundle Kontiki’s command-and-control P2P technology into a forthcoming version of Flash. Given the wide scale adoption of Flash, Adobe-Kontiki will be able to create an Internet-wide peer-to-peer cloud.
Publishers are expected to be able to lower their development, quality assurance, and customer support costs because the combined Flash/VeriSign service reduces the problems of deploying video on-demand applications across multiple platforms and browsers.

In other words, the two companies can make it easy to seed and distribute video content, as long as it is published to the Kontiki platform and uses Flash. The Adobe-VeriSign combo could also help overcome some of the issues surrounding the current torrent-based content distribution systems.

There are fears that a coming balkanization of BitTorrent resulting from increased commercial efforts will thwart it from becoming a widely adopted distribution platform. And more and more ISPs are increasingly blocking torrent-based content. Kontiki, however, monitors the flow of pieces of content around a network, and should be able to avoid that backlash. This is a way for P2P to really — really — go mainstream.

We will be tracking this story pretty closely, rustling up more details from our sources
http://gigaom.com/2007/01/24/adobe-a...p2p-ambitions/





Canada's IsoHunt is Back, Online, As Promised
P2PNet

It has the weight of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), owned and operated by Hollywood studios Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, on its back, and went down, briefly.

"Lawyers from our primary ISP decided to pull our plug without any advance notice," said Gary Fung at the time.

The move was, "No doubt related to our lawsuit brought by the MPAA, but we don't have more information at this time until people responsible comes to work tomorrow. We will be back in operation once we sort out this mess with our current ISP, or we get new hardware ready at our new ISP."

Now once again, "Welcome to isoHunt," it says.

"This site is home to the most comprehensive BitTorrent search engine, with cross-referenced trackers data you can't find anywhere else. Along with integrated XDCC, Fserve and NFO search for files on IRC (currently offline). In short, this is your all-in-one P2P files search engine .........."
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/11103#comments





Turtle

"Turtle is a new tool for facilitating free speech by combining encryption with peer-to-peer (P2P) technology. Turtle users can exchange information deemed ``controversial'' or ``risky'' (for example whistleblowers exposing government or corporate abuse) without being exposed to legal or economic pressure from parties that may want to censor or suppress this information. Such users are likely to be found in countries where the government routinely snoops on citizens' communications. It will also be attractive to people in all countries who value their privacy.

Technically, Turtle is a friend-to-friend (F2F) network - a special type of peer-to-peer network in which all your communication goes only to your friends, and then to their friends, and so on, to the ultimate destination.

The basic idea behind Turtle is to build a P2P overlay on top of pre-existing trust relationships among Turtle users. Each user acts as node in the overlay by running a copy of the Turtle client software. Unlike existing P2P networks, Turtle does not allow arbitrary nodes to connect and exchange information. Instead, each user establishes secure and authenticated channels with a limited number of other nodes controlled by people he or she trusts (friends). In the Turtle overlay, both queries and results move hop by hop; the net result is that information is only exchanged between people that trust each other and is always encrypted. Consequently, a snooper or adversary has no way to determine who is requesting/providing information, and what that information is. Given this design, a Turtle network offers a number of useful security properties, such as confined damage in case of node compromise, and resilience against denial of service attacks (for more details on this see the Documents section)." http://www.turtle4privacy.org/
http://www.dp2p.net/software-technology/turtle





File Sharing with Acritum Femitter HTTP-FTP Server

Acritum Software has released Femitter HTTP-FTP Server 1.0, a handy file sharing application for Windows. The program makes your files and other data available to your friends and colleagues without much trouble.

With the Femitter HTTP-FTP Server v1.0 for Windows, any web browser such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla FireFox enables users to download or upload files to computer via Internet or LAN. Program may be used as web-based Bulletin Board System or as storage for music, video, or photos with capacity only limited by size of hard drive. Files can be transferred via HTTP or FTP protocol. Users may protect access to server by creating user accounts with passwords.
http://www.ecnasiamag.com/article.asp?id=12373





Snakebite
Aug. ‘06

"It's easy to download files with BitTorrent, but sharing your files over BitTorrent is somewhat complicated. You have to generate torrents for each file you want to share, run a tracker, and run a seeder. Most people don't even know what any of that means. It's much more complicated to share files using BitTorrent than with a webserver. To put your files on the web, you just drop them in the correct folder and then webserver does the rest.

Now we have Snakebite, which provides all of the power of BitTorrent with the ease of use of a webserver. Simply install snakebite, launch it, and drop files in the correct folder. They are then shared over BitTorrent with no additional effort. Additionally, snakebite automatically generates a user-customizable page with links to all of your torrents. That way you can just point people to your links page and they can download anything that you have."http://actlab.tv/snakebite_guide.html
http://www.dp2p.net/software-technology/snakebite





The Insanely Great Songs Apple Won't Let You Hear
Paul Collins

"Killer Tune" is just that: It sounds like the Killers, and it is killer. It's one of the most popular iTunes downloads for the band Straightener—but you haven't heard it.

You can't hear it.

The iTunes Music Store has a secret hiding in plain sight: Log out of your home account in the page's upper-right corner, switch the country setting at the bottom of the page to Japan, and you're dropped down a rabbit hole into a wonderland of great Japanese bands that you've never even heard of. And they're nowhere to be found on iTunes U.S. You can listen to 30-second song teasers on the Japanese site, but if you try purchasing "Killer Tune"—or any other tune—from iTunes Japan with your U.S. credit card, you'll get turned away: Your gaijin money's no good there.

Go to iTMS Japan's Terms of Sale, and the very first three words, which berate you in all caps, are:

Japan Sales Only

So, what's going on here?

Music labels have a good reason to lift up the drawbridge: iTunes spans 22 countries, often with somewhat uneven pricing between them, and the specter of cross-border music discounting has already been raised by services such as Russia's much-sued allofmp3.com. But in Japan's case, the blockade becomes downright tragic. If your knowledge of Japanese music barely extends beyond the Boredoms, you're in for a shock at iTMS Japan: There are thousands of Japanese bands that play circles around ours—and they're doing it in English.

It hasn't happened overnight. Japan's long been a music geek's paradise, a Valhalla of reverent remasters of American and British albums that time and fashion have passed by in their native lands. Want a CD release of Rick Wakeman's 1976 LP No Earthly Connection? There's no such thing over here—but there is in Japan, and you can even buy it from the Disk Union chain at a downtown Tokyo store dedicated entirely to prog-rock. Like the British invaders of 40 years ago, the Japanese seem to care more about our music than we ourselves do.

The result? Japan's bands are by turns bracingly experimental and jubilantly retro, a land where our own greatest music returns with an alienated majesty. How else can one describe the King Brothers' "100%," a song that could make the Black Crowes eat Humble Pie? Or Syrup16g's Elvis Costello-esque "I Hate Music"? Or "Johnny Depp" by Triceratops, an amp-crunching reanimation of Physical Graffiti-era Zep? And you'd swear that the Pillows' "Degeneration" was a hidden track on Matthew Sweet's Altered Beast. Other bands, less easily categorized, are no less revelatory: The Miceteeth's "Think About Bird's Pillow Case" conjures up a Japanese troupe stranded in a 1930s British music hall, while NICO Touches the Walls' "泥んこドビー" boils Franz Ferdinand over into a waltz.

Next, there's power pop. If ever a song cried to be played on late and lamented The O.C., it's "4645" by the Radwimps. Like many J-pop songs, "4645" is almost entirely sung in English. After pop diva Yumi Matsutoya started mixing bilingual lyrics in the 1970s, bands perfected the art of seamlessly fusing Japanese verses with English choruses. You can mondegreen their songs in the shower for weeks without even realizing it.

So, what happens when this irresistible rock encounters immoveable corporations? Inevitably, Straightener's "Killer Tune" has shown up in its entirety on YouTube, where the band amuses themselves in an exuberantly goofy lip-sync. With YouTube sporting the clever animated video for the blistering follow-up "Berserker Tune," American fans might get the Straightener they need after all.

Meanwhile, a back door has appeared in the Music Store itself: While iTunes Japan pegs foreign undesirables from their credit card numbers, it can't screen fake Japanese addresses provided by prepaid iTunes Card users. There's a small but ardent underground economy among Americans in dummy addresses and e-mailed scans of Japanese iTunes Cards, picked up by friends in Tokyo convenience stores or openly sold online.

It certainly beats buying CDs. Import shops and Amazon.com lack most Japanese bands, and while Amazon.co.jp maintains a somewhat-English-language version, you may find yourself plunged into hair-raisingly incomprehensible pages while entering credit card information. If, for instance, this audio clip of the math-rock single "Japanistan" by the band Stan sends you running for their album Stan II, you'll find nothing at U.S. Amazon. Buying it from Amazon Japan costs 3,090 yen ($25) with international shipping. And, since Amazon Japan pages often lack audio samples, you have to already know what you're looking for. If you didn't catch that Stan video on NHK while jet-lagged in a Shinjuku hotel, you're out of luck.

iTunes United States maintains its own hamstrung Japanese Music playlist, where a few bands have broken into our realm of 99-cent downloads. Listen to the Rodeo Carburettor's head-rattling "R.B.B. (Rude Boy Bob)," the stuttering art-punk of the Emeralds' "Surfing Baby," and the propulsive stop-time of "Riff Man" by the Zazen Boys—a room-clearing roar of gloriously unhinged vocals—and you start to sense what's maddeningly out of reach across the Pacific.

And there are 20 more countries where iTunes users can lurk among the samples, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Greece, and Australia. They won't let you buy their songs, either. You can find an EP of Scottish sensations the Fratellis at iTunes United States, for instance, but their hit glam singalong "Chelsea Dagger" is in nearly every country except the United States. (Their randy burlesque video for it, naturally, is all over YouTube.)

Even so, window-shopping in the Japan store remains particularly instructive. Why? Because variable pricing—a label demand that Apple loudly and successfully fought off in other countries—has quietly appeared there in the form of 150- and 200-yen songs. Whether "Killer Tune" gets the success it deserves or not, someday we might all be turning Japanese.

==============================

Log on to iTMS for Slate's "jTunes iMix" playlists: one at iTunes Japan of Japan-only songs, including those mentioned in this article (foreign users can sample, but not purchase, them), and this domestic Slate jTunes iMix of songs available for purchase by U.S. users. U.S. iTMS users must log out of their account and switch countries at the bottom of their screen before accessing the Japanese iMix.

Note: Occasionally iTMS Netherlands refuses to allow you to change countries from the bottom of the home page. Simply click any song's "Buy" button, and a prompt asking if you're from abroad will get you to the Country Selection menu.
http://www.slate.com/id/2158151/





iTunes DRM Called Out by France and Germany
Jacqui Cheng

Apple is being challenged once again to open up its DRM by consumer groups in Europe. This time, Germany and France have joined the slowly-growing number of countries who are asking Apple to allow the protected songs purchased from the iTunes Store to be played on other music players besides the iPod. Norwegian Consumer Ombudsman Bjoern Erik Thon told the Associated Press that France's consumer lobby group, UFC-Que Choisir, and Germany's Verbraucherzentrale are now part of the European effort to push Apple into an open DRM system, with more countries considering joining the group.

By now, everyone who owns a digital music player of any sort is painfully aware that buying music from a particular online store locks them into that platform. Apple, the current market leader in both online music and digital music player sales, has been particularly stubborn about allowing its protected AAC files to be played on anything but iPods.

However, the company has been under some fire over the last year due to those restrictions, first with France and then Denmark looking to open up restrictive DRM schemes (including, but not limited to iTunes). Neither of those forced Apple to open up their FairPlay DRM, but last June, Norway ruled that the iTunes-iPod tie-in was unreasonable. Norway's Consumer Ombudsman gave Apple a deadline of June 21, 2006 to come up with a solution, but the deadline then got pushed back to August 1, 2006. Norwegian consumer groups were unimpressed by Apple's response.

Norway has now given Apple a new deadline of September of this year to change its policies, and the pressure on Apple will likely grow in the months leading up to the deadline. "This is important because Germany and France are European giants. Germany, in particular, is a big market for digital music," Thon said to the AP. Who will be next to join the group and how will Apple respond to the growing pressure?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070122-8676.html





Norway Declares Apple's iTunes Illegal
David Ibison in Stockholm, Emiko Terazono in London and Richard Waters in San Francisco

Apple was dealt a blow in Europe on Wednesday when Norway's powerful consumer ombudsman ruled that its iTunes online music store was illegal because it did not allow downloaded songs to be played on rival technology companies' devices.

The decision is the first time any jurisdiction has concluded iTunes breaks its consumer protection laws and could prompt other European countries to review the situation.

The ombudsman has set a deadline of October 1 for the Apple to make its codes available to other technology companies so that it abides by Norwegian law. If it fails to do so, it will be taken to court, fined and eventually closed down.

Apple, whose iTunes dominates the legal download market, has its proprietory system Fairplay. Songs and tunes downloaded through iTunes are designed to work with Apple's MP3 player iPod, but cannot be played on rival devices.

Torgeir Waterhouse, senior adviser to the Norwegian Consumer Council, who originally launched the complaint, told the Financial Times he was in negotiations with pan-European consumer groups to present a unified position on iTunes' legality.

Sweden and Finland have already backed Norway's stance, but have yet to take action, and Mr Waterhouse said the campaign was joined on Wednesday by Germany and France.

"We are satisfied the Federation of German Consumer Organisations and the French UFC Que Choisir are addressing this important issue. It means that iTunes is now being told by more than 100m European consumers to offer them a fair deal," he said.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16793043/





Apple's Jobs Questioned by U.S. Authorities: Reports

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs has been questioned by U.S. investigators about stock options backdating at the company, according to several reports citing unidentified lawyers.

The company behind the popular iPod digital media player is under investigation by federal authorities for its past option-grant practices, according to media reports.

Jobs was questioned by federal investigators in San Francisco last week, according to reports by the San Francisco Chronicle and Bloomberg, citing unidentified legal sources.

Jobs' attorney, Mark Pomerantz, declined to comment on the reports. Apple spokesman Steve Dowling also declined to comment, but repeated prior company statements that "we have voluntarily and proactively provided all details."

Apple has said it has provided the details of its own internal review and independent investigation to the SEC and the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Spokesmen for the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco and the SEC also declined to comment.

Apple said in December it would take an $84 million charge for misdating more than 6,400 options. It said an internal review found two questionable options awarded to Jobs, but found no wrongdoing by current management, including the CEO.

The meeting with authorities was first reported on January 19 by The Recorder, a legal newspaper in San Francisco.

Chris Steskal, the lead attorney in the Justice Department's investigation, left in January to join law firm Fenwick & West LLP as a partner, according to the firm's Web site.

Apple is among the more than 160 companies that are under government investigation or conducting internal probes into past stock options award practices.

Stock options represent the right to buy company shares at a set price. Some companies are accused of backdating grant dates to days when the share price was lower, giving the recipient the opportunity to collect extra profit.

Backdating is not in itself illegal, but needs to be properly accounted for and disclosed.

Apple shares fell $1.09 to close at $85.70 on Nasdaq.

Article





What’s the Coolest Way to Accessorize an iPod? Buy It a Car.
Jim Motavalli

APPLE’S iPod seems to be everywhere. We can attach them to our home stereos and stick them into portable devices to bring them into our bedroom, kitchen and even the bathroom. With cases that clip to a shirt pocket and Velcro holders that wrap around an arm, it is hard to imagine a place where an iPod can’t go.

But the one place that has long been a challenge has been the car. Vehicles built before the iPod revolution have had to make do with FM transmitters and cassette adapter connections, neither attractive solutions. After market companies provide sound systems with iPod and generic MP3 player connectors, but owners often have to rip out or alter their factory systems.

In new vehicles, however, the iPod has found a home. Manufacturers are routinely providing sound systems with auxiliary jacks to hook up MP3 players and, in a nod to the supremacy of the iPod, which Apple says has 75 percent of the market, many manufacturers are also offering dealer-installed kits just for that device.

And digital music in cars is beginning to move beyond the iPod. The latest thing is hard drives, so owners can move their music collections out to their cars and leave their players at home. Of course, the hard drives were the latest thing a few weeks ago, but Ford Motor’s announcement at the Detroit auto show this month that it had teamed with Microsoft on a voice-activated audio system shows how fast the technology is changing. What’s next, an iCar?

“The growth is exponential,” said Christina Ra, a Honda product planner. “When we look at new car models three to five years out, we’re almost leaving a blank space for the audio technology.”

For now, the basic universal music connection is an auxiliary jack, but it has limitations. While the music from the player is easily passed via its headphone jack to the car’s sound system, the player can’t be controlled from the dashboard. Functions such as next song, searching for music and viewing playlists have to be done from the player, a distraction best left for a passenger.

IPod-only connections, made through a cable that is often placed in the glove box, let owners control, and charge, the player right from the car’s sound system. If the car has a display and it’s large enough, like the screen on a navigation system, that can be an easy process, but small displays that let users read the information only in bits and pieces can be more distracting than scrolling through the player itself.

“The most commonly used piece of equipment is the iPod, and from Honda’s point of view it’s the most important to accommodate,” Ms. Ra said.

Honda, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, Lexus and BMW are among the automakers that offer an iPod kit for some of their models. These kits often cost about $200 installed, and some can be retrofitted on older cars. Honda also tackles the distraction problem with its Music Link system, offered as a $200 dealer-installed option on Hondas and Acuras. In addition to charging and controlling an iPod, it offers hands-free music searching through voice commands.

DaimlerChrysler is one of the companies offering a hard-drive-based system. Nick Cappa, a company spokesman, said its MyGIG music system, built around a 20-gigabyte hard drive (which also stores data for the car’s navigation system), had space for about 1,600 songs in about 6 gigabytes of dedicated space. It is offered as an option on the Chrysler Sebring, Jeep Wrangler and Dodge Nitro.

Heather May, manager of engineering communications for DaimlerChrysler, said owners would be able to copy music into the hard drive from CDs or from a portable hard drive through a U.S.B. connection.

It’s unclear if hard-drive systems will spread. Ford, for example, considered them, but has stepped away for now. One reason is that while MP3 players are ready to use as soon as they are plugged into a car, hard drives require work. All that music in iTunes on your home computer has to be transferred into your car. Imagine sitting in the garage for hours copying all your CDs onto your car’s hard drive (it took me eight minutes to load the CD “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” by the group Traffic onto the Lexus LS hard drive) after having already done the same thing on your home PC.

Using a portable hard drive that is connected to your home PC is easier, but you still have to put your collection onto the drive, remove it from the PC and plug it into the car’s U.S.B. connection (if it has one), then copy the music to the car’s hard drive.

Daniel Eran, a technology consultant who runs the tech-oriented RoughlyDrafted.com, said hard-drive systems “couldn’t be easily kept in sync with a user’s home system.”

Mr. Eran said that most automakers “are interested in extending the iPod, not trying to replicate it.” Indeed, Ford said it had not offered a hard-drive system because customers were showing little interest.

“Our customers are saying, ‘Why would I want to have a whole other hard drive in the vehicle if I already have an iPod?” said Nick Twork, a Ford spokesman.

The Microsoft system the two companies announced at the auto show does not have a hard drive. The system, called Sync, will be initially offered on 12 Ford, Mercury and Lincoln models this fall. Kevin Keling, the marketing strategy manager for Ford, said users would be able to plug in and play from many digital players and U.S.B. thumb drives through a U.S.B. connection. The system will also recharge the players, allow users to see a full music display and choose songs using voice commands. The audio system will also read incoming text messages from a connected cellphone.

Honda’s Music Link also offers voice commands, but some owners have had problems with the system. Steve Vigneau of Shelby Township, Mich., said he had Music Link in his Civic and found the system hard to use and slow to operate. The software uses Honda’s text-to-speech technology and needs to be installed on a home computer so it can link with iTunes.

Chris Naughton, a Honda spokesman, said that text-to-speech “has not been as trouble-free as we expected, but many Music Link users are still quite pleased that with a single connection they can get a high-quality audio connection, head unit control and constant charging.”

For older cars with no MP3 connections, audio companies are also working with the iPod. Jaed Arzadon, a spokesman for Pioneer Electronics USA, said the company had been making its stereo units “iPod-capable” for two years.

At Fairfield Auto Radio and Security in Connecticut, Alfonso Chiulli was recently installing a $2,500 stereo, with a subwoofer and a trunk-mounted amplifier, into a 1987 Porsche Carrera. Aside from lighting up in rainbow colors, the Pioneer unit also had an iPod connector.

“Ninety percent of the stereos I sell today have some form of iPod connectivity,” Mr. Chiulli said.

Logan Fox, president of Neo Car Audio Systems of San Diego, which makes a $200 iPod adapter for many cars, said that specialist suppliers sometimes offered the best way to play digital music in a car.

“We try to stay ahead of the trends,” he said. “By the time carmakers put something into the vehicle, it can already be obsolete.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/au...es/21IPOD.html





Cingular Users Not In Coverage Area Are Out Of Luck On The iPhone, Apple Says
Darla Mack

I think this might be my first post regarding the iPhone. (That is the most positive statement that I can make).

Recently, I've been reading different stories regarding this device. Apple's lawyers pulling sites down because now they are all of a sudden concerned about copyright infringement on themes... when developers have been making themes using Apple's icons for years! Lol, I even remember that Nokia fluke on one of the sites where they replicated the iTunes icon. But hey... we don't have to be pushy with "Big Business" here.

My recent finding is just too much for me, or any Cingular customer to bare. Apple now states "No Cingular Service, No iPhone"... excuse me but WHAT??

"Apple signed an exclusive, multiyear deal with AT&T's Cingular Wireless to distribute the handset, and the bottom line is this: No Cingular service in your area, no iPhone."

How fair is that? And what right do they have to even make a statement to that affect? IF I were interested in the iPhone, I couldn't walk into a store and purchase it with service because I'm not in the coverage are? If AT&T/Cingular is behind this... then consumers shouldn't be able to purchase ANY phone if they aren't in the coverage area... right?

"Cell phone users in more than a dozen other states, mostly in rural locations, face the same predicament. Cingular, like most other wireless service providers, allows users to "roam" on other carriers' networks but requires new customers to live in communities the company serves directly.

That means the iPhone will be unavailable in, among other locations, all or large portions of Alaska, Colorado, the Dakotas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, upstate New York, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming."

So, um, does this mean that the iPhone is incapible of roaming?

An Apple spokesman, Tom Neumayr, said the company would have no comment on the lack of availability of the iPhone in communities where Cingular offers no service.

Typical.

...and in the words of Forrest Gump... "Thats all I have to say about that".

Article





Plain Cellphones Can Overachieve, With a Little Help
Larry Magid

IF you have an ordinary cellphone — the type that you got free, or cheaply, when you signed up for service — you might envy those with phones that are also personal digital assistants, like BlackBerrys, Treos, Sidekicks and Windows smartphones.

Those devices, typically costing $200 to $400, let you do more than just make phone calls and take pictures. They are pocket-size computers equipped for many functions, including e-mail, Web browsing and contact management, note taking, financial recordkeeping and a calendar.

But as it turns out, that humble cellphone in your pocket may be able to do all this and more, depending on its built-in features and the available add-on software.

The screen may be a bit smaller than on a palmtop, and you will lack an alphanumeric keyboard, making typing a lot harder — but as anyone who has sent text messages or entered names into their phone’s address book knows, you can peck out letters using the numeric keypad.

Cellphone manufacturers, carriers and independent application providers are now offering lots of programs and services that can be used on a wide number of phones. Not all services work on all phones. Some are carrier-specific, and some work only on certain phones.

Many require that the phone be able to handle programs written in Java (most new ones are). Some services are free; others charge a monthly fee.

There are a variety of ways to get these applications, and you probably already have some. In addition to Bluetooth and a camera, the Nokia 6102i, effectively free after a rebate from Cingular Wireless, comes with software applications including an audio recorder, an alarm clock, a calendar, a to-do list, a note taker, a calculator, a countdown timer and a stopwatch. It also has AOL, Yahoo, ICQ and MSN instant messengers, a text messaging program, an FM radio, e-mail and, of course, an Internet browser.

And all of this is before you download any applications over the wireless network from the Cingular Mall, where you can buy games, ring tones, graphics and other applications.

Sprint’s Samsung M500, available for as little as $9.99 after rebate, has a comparable list of built-in features, along with a dictionary and the ability to store files and play music. Like more expensive hand-helds, it comes with a U.S.B. cable to sync with a PC and a 64-megabyte microSD card (for about $30 you can buy a one-gigabyte card) to store MP3 files that you can play on the phone.

It can even display an analog clock, but the real power of this and many other phones is the applications you can buy and download.

Some of the productivity programs that can be downloaded from Sprint are RandMcNally StreetFinder, MapQuest Mobile, Vindigo City Guide, Zagat restaurant guide and FlyteSource Mobile, which gives real-time flight status. These or similar services are also available on phones from other carriers.

All cellular carriers offer some type of e-mail service, sometimes for an extra fee. But consumers have choices. In addition to the carrier’s services, there are free third-party services you can use, including Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Flurry.

Before using any of these services or downloading any applications, check to see what, if anything, it will cost. Even if the application is free, there may be data or air-time charges from your carrier, and there may be plans that can reduce those charges.

Flurry, a free service that works with several carriers, is both an e-mail application and an R.S.S. (for Really Simple Syndication) news reader, which you can use to subscribe to frequently updated content. You start by visiting www.flurry.com from your PC and entering your cellphone number, carrier name, e-mail address and password, and any R.S.S. feeds you wish to subscribe to. The service then sends a text message to your phone with a link for downloading the program.

The service works with most publicly available e-mail accounts, the company’s chief executive, Sean Byrnes, said. It can also import up to 430 contacts from Outlook, Gmail and any other program or service that can export standard comma separated values, or CSV, files. You can also dial a phone number from that contact list.

Google recently started offering a free cellphone version of its popular Gmail service. If you have signed up for a Gmail account, you can download the application by pointing your cellphone browser to gmail.com/app. You enter your Gmail user name and password, and a few minutes later you are reading your mail. You can also compose and respond to mail and bring up your Gmail contact list.

Yahoo is conducting a public beta test of its free Go 2.0 service, which has numerous applications, including a phone-centric Internet search tool. You tell it where you are (a satellite-based locator will be available later) and it can find nearby restaurants, movie show times, stores and services and display a map to your destination. Because it is a downloaded application (at mobile.yahoo.com), it is faster than using a Web page, but it can also link you to Web pages through your phone’s browser.

Yahoo Go also gives you access to Yahoo e-mail synchronized with your Web account. Mail is searchable, and you can display JPEG graphic files. You can track your stock portfolio, follow sports teams and get weather reports. You can also connect to a Flickr photo account to see or share photos from the road. Yahoo Go works with a limited number of phones from Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, Alltel, Telus and Rogers.

You’re not going to find Microsoft Outlook on a run-of-the-mill cellphone. But with SoonR, a free application (at www.soonr.com) that runs in your cellphone’s browser, you can use your phone to gain access to data from Outlook and other programs running on a PC or Mac.

You can view thumbnails of Word and Excel files, and Windows users can read, respond, compose and send Outlook e-mail. You can make calls from your Outlook contact list and consult and update Outlook’s calendar. The files and programs are not on the phone — you are using the phone for remote access to your home or office computer, and any changes you make on the phone show up on the PC.

You can remotely use most popular PC and Mac desktop search programs and forward files through your computer’s broadband connection. You can even run the Internet phone service Skype on your PC from your cellphone.

Many of today’s phones make use of the satellite-based Global Positioning System, mainly to help responders find you in an emergency, but the technology can also be tapped for location-based services, like turning your phone into a portable navigation device with turn-by-turn maps and audible directions through the phone’s speaker.

I test-drove both the TeleNav service, which works with select phones from most carriers, and Verizon’s VZ Navigator. Both are $10 a month. VZ Navigator can also be bought for $2.99 a day. Both use the phone network to provide directions, maps and points of interest that are updated on an ongoing basis. They have a “points of interest” database with millions of listings. TeleNav also has a “gas by price” feature that taps into an online database of gas station prices to lead you to the cheapest gas in your area.

So instead of lusting over that palmtop or Apple’s highly anticipated iPhone, reach into your pocket and see what that phone of yours has to offer. You might just be carrying around a poor man’s BlackBerry — minus the keyboard.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/te.../25basics.html





Toshiba Eyes Faster Chips to Win in iPhone Era

Japan's Toshiba Corp. said on Wednesday it will match rival Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.'s March launch of the industry's first 2-Gigabyte NAND flash chip by mass-producing a chip with as much storage a month later.

Toshiba, the world's second-largest NAND chip maker after Samsung, is eyeing an expected a surge in demand propelled by Apple Inc.'s music-playing iPhone, analysts said.

The iPhone -- which will come with 4 or 8 gigabytes of NAND -- has fueled hope among flash memory makers, weary of price falls eating away at profit margins, said Mizuho Investors Securities analyst Yuichi Ishida.

"The iPhone is testament that price falls are giving birth to new applications and new NAND demand," Ishida said.

Toshiba, which aims to take a combined 40 percent market share with partner SanDisk Corp. by 2008, will begin by shipping samples of its 2-Gigabyte chips in March, using 56-nanometre process technology, and plans monthly shipments of 300,000 chips from April.

Cutting edge 50- and 56-nanometre microchips have smaller gaps between transistors than 60- or 70-nanometre ones, meaning more power can be packed into less space for lower per chip costs.

Toshiba also expects to begin mass production of 1-Gigabyte NAND chips using 70-nanometre processes by the end of January.

Memory makers have been boosting plant spending in quest of ever smaller circuitry, despite price falls of some 70 percent in 2006.

"Whether NAND is going to be profitable or not in the short term is not the question," said Ishida. "Despite price falls, neither Toshiba or Samsung means to stop capital spending for fear of losing market share."

Article





Intel Says Chips Will Run Faster, Using Less Power
John Markoff


Mark Bohr, an Intel physicist who
led the research, holds a 45-nanometer
wafer using new metal alloys that led the
insulation advance.

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has overhauled the basic building block of the information age, paving the way for a new generation of faster and more energy-efficient processors.

Company researchers said the advance represented the most significant change in the materials used to manufacture silicon chips since Intel pioneered the modern integrated-circuit transistor more than four decades ago.

The microprocessor chips, which Intel plans to begin making in the second half of this year, are designed for computers but they could also have applications in consumer devices. Their combination of processing power and energy efficiency could make it possible, for example, for cellphones to play video at length — a demanding digital task — with less battery drain.

The work by Intel overcomes a potentially crippling technical obstacle that has arisen as a transistor’s tiny switches are made ever smaller: their tendency to leak current as the insulating material gets thinner. The Intel advance uses new metallic alloys in the insulation itself and in adjacent components.

Word of the announcement, which is planned for Monday, touched off a war of dueling statements as I.B.M. rushed to announce that it was on the verge of a similar advance.

I.B.M. executives said their company was planning to introduce a comparable type of transistor in the first quarter of 2008.

Many industry analysts say that Intel retains a six-month to nine-month lead over the rest of the industry, but I.B.M. executives disputed the claim and said the two companies were focused on different markets in the computing industry.

The I.B.M. technology has been developed in partnership with Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s main rival. Modern microprocessor and memory chips are created from an interconnected fabric of hundreds of millions and even billions of the tiny switches that process the ones and zeros that are the foundation of digital computing.

They are made using a manufacturing process that has been constantly improving for more than four decades. Today transistors, for example, are made with systems that can create wires and other features that are finer than the resolving power of a single wavelength of light.

The Intel announcement is new evidence that the chip maker is maintaining the pace of Moore’s Law, the technology axiom that states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years, giving rise to a constant escalation of computing power at lower costs.

“This is evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary, but it will generate a big sigh of relief,” said Vivek Subramanian, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

For several decades there have been repeated warnings about the impending end of the Moore’s Law pace for chip makers. In response the semiconductor industry has repeatedly found its way around fundamental technical obstacles, inventing techniques that at times seem to defy basic laws of physics.

The chip industry measures its progress by manufacturing standards defined by a width of one of the smallest features of a transistor for each generation. Currently much of the industry is building chips in what is known as 90-nanometer technology. At that scale, about 1,000 transistors would fit in the width of a human hair. Intel began making chips at 65 nanometers in 2005, about nine months before its closest competitors.

Now the company is moving on to the next stage of refinement, defined by a minimum feature size of 45 nanometers. Other researchers have recently reported progress on molecular computing technologies that could reduce the scale even further by the end of the decade.

Intel’s imminent advance to 45 nanometers will have a huge impact on the industry, Mr. Subramanian said. “People have been working on it for over a decade, and this is tremendously significant that Intel has made it work,” he said.

Intel’s advance was in part in finding a new insulator composed of an alloy of hafnium, a metallic element that has previously been used in filaments and electrodes and as a neutron absorber in nuclear power plants. They will replace the use of silicon dioxide — essentially the material that window glass is made of, but only several atoms thick.

Intel is also shifting to new metallic alloy materials — it is not identifying them specifically — in transistor components known as gates, which sit directly on top of the insulator. These are ordinarily made from a particular form of silicon called polysilicon.

The new approach to insulation appears at least temporarily to conquer one of the most significant obstacles confronting the semiconductor industry: the tendency of tiny switches to leak electricity as they are reduced in size. The leakage makes chips run hotter and consume more power.

Many executives in the industry say that Intel is still recovering from a strategic wrong turn it made when the company pushed its chips to extremely high clock speeds — the ability of a processor to calculate more quickly. That obsession with speed at any cost left the company behind its competitors in shifting to low-power alternatives.

Now Intel is coming back. Although the chip maker led in the speed race for many years, the company has in recent years shifted its focus to low-power microprocessors that gain speed by breaking up each chip into multiple computing “cores.” In its new 45-nanometer generation, Intel will gain the freedom to seek either higher performance or substantially lower power, while at the same time increasing the number of cores per chip.

“They can adjust the transistor for high performance or low power,” said David Lammers, director of WeSRCH.com, a Web portal for technical professionals.

The Intel development effort has gone on in a vast automated factory in Beaverton, Ore., that the company calls D1D. It features huge open manufacturing rooms that are kept surgically clean to prevent dust from contaminating the silicon wafers that are whisked around the factory by a robotic conveyor system.

The technology effort was led by Mark T. Bohr, a longtime Intel physicist who is director of process architecture and integration. The breakthrough, he said, was in finding a way to deal with the leakage of current. “Up until five years ago, leakage was thought to increase with each generation,” he said.

Several analysts said that the technology advance could give Intel a meaningful advantage over competitors in the race to build ever more powerful microprocessors.

“It’s going to be a nightmare for Intel’s competitors,” said G. Dan Hutcheson, chief executive of VLSI Research. “A lot of Mark Bohr’s counterparts are going to wake up in terror.”

An I.B.M. executive said yesterday that the company had also chosen hafnium as its primary insulator, but that it would not release details of its new process until technical papers are presented at coming conferences.

“It’s the difference between can openers and Ferraris,” said Bernard S. Meyerson, vice president and chief technologist for the systems and technology group at I.B.M. He insisted that industry analysts who have asserted that Intel has a technology lead are not accurate and that I.B.M. had simply chosen to deploy its new process in chips that are part of high-performance systems aimed at the high end of the computer industry.

Intel said it had already manufactured prototype microprocessor chips in the new 45-nanometer process that run on three major operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/te... tner=homepage





Skype Off The Hook

Racketeering charges bought against eBay, Skype, its founders and a cast of related defendants has been thrown out of court according to an Associated Press Report.

U.S. District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, concluded Streamcast had failed to make in a January 18 ruling on a motion for dismissal, according to the report.

The Judge dismissed all claims against Skype, eBay and more than a dozen other defendants.

Streamcast Networks the company behind peer to peer file sharing system Morpheus was seeking "unspecified damages" of more than US$4.1 billion. It also wants a court order to stop eBay selling Skype services, which it claims is based on technology it was cheated out of.

You can read the background here, but basically, Streamcast claims that Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis promised to sell it the FastTrack file sharing technology the two used to help millions of Internet users steal copyright protected
material back in the Kazaa days.

It was the duo's first steps to becoming billionaires. After selling Kazaa when the copyright holders started closing in they launched Skype a peer-to-peer phone system. Ultimately they then sold that business to eBay for US2.6 Billion plus earn-out.

Streamcast claims the FastTrack technology is the peer-to-peer technology used in Skype and that Zennstrom and Friis sold to eBay without giving them the first refusal of refusal as per the agreement.

Streamcast's legal counsel says the case is "far from over" and that either an appeal or a newline of legal action pursuit is the next step.

Zennstrom and Friis contributed a reported US$100 million for a settlement deal between Sharman Networks, the company that acquired Kazaa, and the music industry which had their copyright content stolen as a result of the FastTrack technology.

Zennstrom and Friis didn't develop FastTrack themselves but in fact contracted a team of Estonian developers to do the work.
http://www.voipnews.com.au/content/view/1384/124/





Rising Dead Pool Indicates Web 2.0 Bubble is Popping
Steve Rubel

The Web 2.0 "bubble" - where a thousand ventures can bloom and thrive - is starting to pop. In the last few weeks the number of startups to go belly up or teter on the brink has increased. TechCrunch is my yardstick for all things Web 2.0. Let's take a closer look at some hard data.

In all of Q4 2006 TechCrunch wrote about six companies/products entering what Michael Arrington calls the Dead Pool. These include Audioblogger (October 4), LiveLocker (October 16), Odeo (October 25), Shadows (November 22), Google Answers (November 29) and RawSugar (December 30).

Flash forward to 2007. In just January alone, already we have seven companies and products that have been sacked or are "in the grasp." These include FilmLoop (January 6), Browster (January 7), Insider Pages (January 7), Judy's Book (January 9), Findory (January 14), BitPool (January 19) and Performancing (January 22).

So, does this mean that Web 2.0 is dead? No, but what we have already is a clear winnowing thanks to supply and demand.

Startups are launching by the boatload and getting funded too. Every day I get emails about a dozen of them and I read about another two dozen more. These days it's cheap to start an online venture. Digg launched for $200.

However, with the IPO market closed, almost everyone has two end games - grow through advertising or get acquired by Google, Yahoo, etc. This is creating an environment where there's far more supply than demand. The number of startups launching way outweighs the number of acquisitions. Further, advertisers are timid when it comes to spending on unproven startups. They've been burned before during Web 1.0. So while money is shifting from TV, it's going to larger players.

Web 2.0 is definitely here to stay. The tools overall empower people to do what they have been for thousands of year and that's express themselves. Soon it will invade the enterprise too, as CNN noted earlier this week. However, already in 2007 the shakeout seems to be underway.

Article





Hollywood Shines on Sundance; Independent Film Gets Burned
Manohla Dargis

The big news last January from the Sundance Film Festival was the $10.5 million that Fox Searchlight, a specialty division of 20th Century Fox and part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, paid for the independently produced charmer “Little Miss Sunshine.” One year, numerous 10 Best lists and many millions of dollars later, the Little Independent That Could has become Fox’s best hope for a major Oscar.

As this year’s festival gets under way, the success of “Little Miss Sunshine” marks an impressive victory for Fox, but feels like a Pyrrhic one when it comes to authentically independent cinema. Once upon a time not very long ago, it seemed as if the studios’ specialty divisions might take independent film to another level, like the rich uncle who plucks you out of the weeds and makes you a star. One day you’re working in a video store; the next day you’re Quentin Tarantino.

Much as the Republicans shifted the political center to the right during the 1990s, the sale of Miramax Films to Disney in the mid-’90s shifted public perception of what constitutes an independent film. It’s old news that once Miramax hit the $100 million mark with “Pulp Fiction,” the company changed focus, growing bigger and bigger until it sized itself out of the Magic Kingdom. Still, it proved that a studio division could make money, win awards, attract talent and excite the audience, which is why Miramax and all it helped wrought is one of the best things to happen to Hollywood since the end of the old studio system.

In the last decade the divisions have released some of the finest movies being put out by the studios. Specialty division films tend to be well-made and directed at thinking adults; they’re prestige pictures and star Helen Mirren. Some are bad, some are brilliant. Few rock the world or the art, and fewer and fewer speak in foreign tongues. But in a studio context of franchises and repurposed television shows, these films are often the designated Saturday night alternatives. Alternatives that are sold, it is worth noting, on television and in big-city newspaper ads costing $100,000 apiece. To put it another way, an ad rate that is about half the take for another Sundance favorite, Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy.”

The two films had their premiere the same day, within a half-hour of each other: “Old Joy” played in a 150-seat house, and “Little Miss Sunshine,” in a packed 1,270-seat theater. People who actually saw “Old Joy,” a low-fi story about two friends on a weekend trip in the Oregon woods, seemed to love it, but, like many Sundance films, it left the festival without a buyer. Four months later it was picked up by the small New York distributor Kino International for what Gary Palmucci, the head of its theatrical sales, called the “low five figures.”

“Old Joy” first opened in Portland, Ore., before moving to Film Forum in New York on Sept. 20. Mr. Palmucci was leery about opening on that date because September marks the start of the most competitive season, when studios and independents alike roll out many of their prestige titles. But this was the time frame Film Forum offered, so Kino bit. “Old Joy” did spectacularly well at Film Forum, bringing in more than $29,000 the first week. It earned more than $21,000 the second week, but by then was competing with new studio-division arrivals, including Miramax’s film “The Queen.”

Mr. Palmucci estimated that by the end of its nearly six-month theatrical run “Old Joy” will have played in almost every major market in the country. Kino can’t afford to buy full-page ads in big-city newspapers but did run a few small ones. It also spent about $40,000 to blow the film up from 16 millimeter to 35 millimeter; $24,000 on 22 prints; $6,500 on 200 trailers; $4,000 on 50,000 postcards and about $3,000 on Web advertisements. Kino also bought posters and radio spots, and hired outside publicists. It has been a heroic effort, but the postcards, the trailers and all the glowing reviews have not been enough to make the film a hit for the distributor. As I write, “Old Joy” has pulled in less than $200,000.

OUR choices now in entertainment are “staggering,” said Eamonn Bowles, the president of Magnolia Pictures, adding “something needs to be extremely compelling to get people motivated to leave the house.”

Magnolia’s parent company, 2929 Entertainment, has decided that if people won’t leave the house, then it will start knocking on their doors. The company has begun releasing films simultaneously in theaters, on DVD and on cable, a strategy called day-and-date. It tested the waters in 2005 with “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” but its splashiest day-and-date release was Steven Soderbergh’s “Bubble” last January.

A story about murder in a small town, “Bubble” was shot in high definition, the first of six such features Mr. Soderbergh plans to make for 2929. Its release was widely deemed a failure (it earned about $150,000 the three weeks it was in theaters), but Mr. Bowles maintains that the film racked up more revenue through day-and-date than it would have with a traditional release.

“Bubble” didn’t rock the world; it didn’t have to. Paradigm shifts happen slowly and the day-and-date model is just one promising survival strategy being tried out by independents. This year Kino will introduce downloads on its Web site. Other distributors meanwhile are joining with Netflix — and its more than 5.7 million subscribers — to widen their reach.

Last year Netflix and the distributor Roadside Attractions combined forces on a tiny film called “The Puffy Chair” (Class of Sundance 2005). Netflix sent E-mail alerts to its subscribers when “The Puffy Chair” was in theaters, where it earned $200,000 after two months. And when the film hit DVD, 100,000 subscribers put it in their Netflix queue. “If those people were buying tickets, it would have made a million dollars,” said Howard Cohen, a co-president of Roadside Attractions.

Last March IFC Films, which is owned by the Cablevision Systems Corporation, inaugurated a day-and-date series called First Take. The idea was blissfully simple: Each month two films would open in theaters, including the IFC’s destination art house in Greenwich Village, and be made simultaneously available as video on demand available to subscribers of major cable companies like Comcast. Among the films released through First Take were such critically well-received titles as Patrice Chéreau’s “Gabrielle” and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Three Times,” voted the best undistributed film in The Village Voice’s 2005 critics poll. Cable subscribers in cities like Fresno, Calif.; Pensacola, Fla.; and Birmingham, Ala., could watch a film by the internationally revered Mr. Hou, whose work has been largely unavailable in this country.

“Every month our number of buys has increased,” said Jonathan Sehring, president of IFC Entertainment. “Right now I think there are 24 million homes out there that are digital-cable homes, and we’re probably, on a monthly basis, 1 percent of them, sometimes more, sometimes as high as 2 percent, sometimes as low as six-tenths of a percent. But that’s anywhere from 60,000 to 150,000 people buying a month. It’s fantastic.” All those cable viewers are watching six to eight IFC movies a month. But, as Mr. Sehring explained, “if you extrapolated it, a lot of movies would be doing a million or two million at the box office.”

Those numbers sound puny, but they are startlingly good in a climate in which even an American independent like “Half Nelson,” another 2006 Sundance favorite and one with a recognizable name (Ryan Gosling), earned only $2.7 million in theaters last year. For filmgoers a series like First Take means they no longer have to wait months for “Gabrielle” to come to their local art house — if they even have one — or wait even longer for the DVD. Instead they can read about “Gabrielle” or a documentary like “Drawing Restraint 9” on the day the film opens in New York and then watch it at home that night. “Gabrielle” certainly looks better on the big screen, but for many Americans this is a moot point because it will never show up at the local multiplex.

“I believe in the idea of the big tail,” Mr. Sehring said, invoking the title of Chris Anderson’s best seller “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.” In a nutshell Mr. Anderson argues that the Internet has allowed companies like Amazon to thrive from selling a little bit of lots of different things. Mr. Anderson cites Netflix as another example, but what works for a DVD rental company with 70,000 titles won’t necessarily work for a distributor like Zeitgeist Films, which releases five to six features a year. Much like the studio divisions, distributors like IFC and Magnolia are owned by companies with diverse holdings and are thus part of two “long tails.” That gives them a strategic advantage over small distributors like Kino and Zeitgeist.

Film critics wax nostalgic about the golden age of art-house cinema, back when Jean-Luc Godard was making news not specialty films. But releasing independent fare has always been a tough racket, and distributors were talking about getting out of the art-house business as far back as the 1960s when there was a perceived glut. To survive, companies are being forced to think outside the theatrical box with downloading and day-and-date, and that isn’t a bad thing. These days, intrepid cinephiles know that some of the best films are playing in one of the hundreds of festivals that have sprung up around the country; they also know some of those same films can be bought online.

In March IFC will release Ken Loach’s origin story about the Irish troubles, “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes last year, through First Take. I could buy that same film online from British Amazon or a video store that sells imported DVDs, but it will be cheaper to watch it at home through my local cable company, and my soda won’t be watery. For right now IFC has found a way to get interesting films to audiences that have long been radically underserved. Video on demand may not be the great savior of independent film, but it bodes well for those who will never go Hollywood and wouldn’t want to even if Harvey Weinstein himself signed the check.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/movies/21darg.html





M dot Strange Finds a Way at Sundance
David Carr

In the daunting hierarchy of the Sundance Film Festival, with its hype machine, big stars and indie royalty, a young movie maker named M dot Strange would seem to have little chance of gaining much attention.

A 27-year-old guy from San Jose, he gave new meaning to the term “studio apartment” by jamming eight computers into his place and producing “We Are the Strange.” The movie has a wide visual vocabulary borrowed from the far reaches of the Web, anime, video games and children’s nursery rhymes. And dolls. Lots of dolls.

But his film received a premiere last Friday night at midnight at the Egyptian Theater, a coveted slot at Sundance, and quite a few members of the audience left midmovie.

But what would have been crushing for another young filmmaker was no big deal for M dot Strange, who arrived at Sundance with a huge audience in tow. During the last two years, he has been posting a video blog on YouTube letting people know how the movie was coming along. And then two months ago, he finally posted a trailer, and almost immediately it was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.

While we were talking at the Kimball Art Center in Park City, he checked the site and showed me that over 648,000 people had already viewed the trailer for a film where he served as writer, director, animator and effects coordinator.

Kevin Donahue, vice president of content at YouTube, said M dot Strange has created an audience in part by talking to it. “The originality of the work is quite high, but he has also built a real rapport with his audience,” said Mr. Donahue. “He has an online film school and a very active community.”

And so what about his big fancy premiere?

“Well, it all felt very foreign to me, watching it in a room with strangers,” M dot Strange said Saturday. “Some YouTube kids came up from Salt Lake, which was cool, and they seemed to really enjoy it.”

Wearing a black stocking cap and sporting a wisp of hair under his lip, M dot Strange, whose actual name is Michael Belmont, looks more like a snowboarder who wandered over from the nearby chairlift than a big deal filmmaker (see for yourself at carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com), but he represents a new paradigm of filmmaking that could have a profound effect on the traditional models of film production, distribution and animation.

The money is not there yet — M dot Strange is doing a brisk business in T-shirts associated with the film — but the Web has proved that if you produce something the consumer wants, a business model might follow.

Another Sundance film, “Strange Culture,” premiered at the Egyptian on Friday, but will get a second premiere today on Second Life, the online virtual community, including a live Q. & A. with the director Lynn Hershman Leeson, and the stars Tilda Swinton and Peter Coyote, among others.

Ms. Hershman Leeson, an established filmmaker and artist, made “Strange Culture” to bring attention to the case of Steve Kurtz, an artist and professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who called 911 when his wife died of heart failure in her sleep.

The medics who responded to the call became suspicious of his art materials — his work centers on germ warfare and genetically modified foods — and called the F.B.I. Agents in Hazmat suits showed up immediately and began impounding his computers, books, his cat and even his wife’s body. Mr. Kurtz was detained as a suspected bioterrorist, eventually accused of mail fraud and is now part of an ongoing federal trial.

Ms. Hershman Leeson, 65, felt that the film needed to get out quickly by all means, and after working with the Stanford Humanities Lab to create a digital archive of her work on Second Life, building a theater there and premiering the film seemed like a natural step. Admission is by invitation only so that demand does not swamp the servers.

“These are important social networks that we could not have had before,” she said over coffee in Park City last week. “By having the film both here at Sundance and on Second Life, we have two streams that we hope will eventually become many. And that’s really exciting.”

In the past, a filmmaker had to throw a Hail Mary pass at a place like Sundance, hope for attention amid the clutter, and then against all odds, get a film picked up for distribution. For every “Little Miss Sunshine,” a breakout Sundance film that has been a critical and commercial success, there are hundreds of films that never found an audience.

But a number of digital commercial initiatives, including The Daily Reel, an online video site (www.thedailyreel.com), allow audiences and filmmakers to meet in new ways. Jamie Patricof, the producer of “Half Nelson” and one of the people behind The Daily Reel, said he wanted to create “a breeding ground for new filmmakers and a place to find them. It’s hard enough navigating a film festival like this one, let along finding the people who are doing great work online.”

Because of the limits of bandwidth and attention span, most of the film content online is short-form, but that will change. M dot Strange, who has a series of 10 films planned, already has members of his active, vocal community around “We are the Strange” weighing in on a proposed ending after he put up 18 minutes of the film. “It’s like a real-time focus group,” he suggested.

There have been talks about traditional distribution, but M dot Strange said he didn’t really care one way or the other. Other than attending his own premiere, he hasn’t been in a movie theater in six months.

“I’m already part of a big campfire,” he said. “We talk to each other all the time about what we are seeing and thinking. It’s a personal experience without anybody in between.”

The playing field between audience and filmmaker is shrinking as well. When M dot Strange blogged about his rather awkward pursuit of buzz at Sundance on Thursday, one of his fans made an animation overnight with a hilarious bee motif in response. M dot Strange laughed and called his colleagues over to look at it on YouTube. “This guy is amazing. He’s faster than I am,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/bu...ia/22carr.html





The World Is Watching. Not Americans.
A. O. Scott

This month the National Society of Film Critics picked its winners for 2006 — one of the last such bodies to do so. (The Iowa and Central Ohio critics would weigh in a few days later.) The announcement of the Society’s awards followed a month of frenzied balloting by various Circles and Associations in New York, Los Angeles and just about every city, state and region in between, an annual festival of critical self-assertion — a protest against irrelevance, perhaps — before the big Oscar show on Feb. 25.

The society’s vote stands out a bit amid all this welter because its top three choices for best picture of the year were all movies in languages other than English. The third-place finisher was Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” which is in Japanese; the runner-up was “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” a Romanian film directed by Cristi Puiu; and the winner, by a narrow margin, was “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Guillermo del Toro’s tale of magic and malevolence in 1940s Spain.

The honors bestowed on those three movies, not only by the National Society of Film Critics, might be taken as evidence that foreign films are flourishing. So might the memory of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which made more than $125 million here in 2001. And the proliferating Web sites and blogs devoted to the robust, often contentious discussions of movies from all over will only confirm the impression, as every imaginable form of cinema from Danish noir to South Korean horror, finds vocal advocates and analysts.

But on these same Web sites you will also find frequent, justified expressions of frustration, even despair, at the state of foreign-film appreciation in the United States. The movies are out there, more numerous and various than ever before, but the audience — and therefore the box-office returns, and the willingness of distributors to risk even relatively small sums on North American distribution rights — seems to be dwindling and scattering. For every movie that manages to solicit a brief flicker of attention, there are dozens that will be seen only at film festivals or on region-free DVD players.

Of course “foreign film” (or, as the academy prefers, “foreign-language film”) is a category so broad as to be nearly meaningless. Mr. Eastwood, notwithstanding the spaghetti westerns and the admiration of the French, is as American as, well, Mel Gibson, who also made a subtitled movie released by a major studio in 2006. (“Letters From Iwo Jima” nonetheless won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film, from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.) And Mr. del Toro, whose current film is the Mexican selection for the foreign-language Oscar, is hardly a stranger to the world of Hollywood franchise and genre moviemaking, having “Hellboy” and “Blade 2” on his résumé along with “Pan’s Labyrinth.”

The boundaries separating national cinemas are more porous than ever. Globalization is not only the blurry subject, for example, of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Babel,” winner of the Golden Globe for best drama, but also the condition of its existence. Released by Paramount Vantage, the newly rebranded specialty division of Paramount Pictures (itself a constantly mutating satrapy of the Viacom empire), “Babel” has both English subtitles (translating dialogue from Spanish, Berber and Japanese) and Anglophone movie stars (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett). The fluency with which Mexican filmmakers like Mr. González Iñárritu, Mr. del Toro and their friend and compatriot Alfonso Cuarón (“Children of Men”) move from place to place and idiom to idiom is impressive in its own right, but it also mirrors the transnational flow of money, which is after all the universal idiom of movie production and consumption.

Few movies made anywhere these days can claim a singular national identity. “The Painted Veil,” adapted by an American director from a British novel, with American, British and Australian actors in the major roles, is nonetheless partly a Chinese movie, and not only because of the picturesque locations. As part of a complicated co-production deal, the government of the People’s Republic of China had approval rights over the final cut of the film.

More often than not, the opening titles of movies from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa reveal the international origins of even the most defiantly local stories. French and German cable television companies, investment funds overseen by national governments or the European Union, philanthropic foundations and even American movie studios — these are some of the entities that routinely throw money into film production around the world.

Anyone fortunate enough to attend a major international film festival in the coming months — Sundance, with its expanded World Cinema programs, is already upon us, to be followed in short order by Rotterdam and Berlin, with Cannes hovering on the horizon in May — will see ample evidence of this cosmopolitanism. Especially for Americans, to step into the festival circuit is to enter a kind of parallel universe, where directors whose names are barely known in the United States are recognized as major artists, and where each day brings news of creative ferment from a different corner of the globe.

It can be hard to keep track of where the action is, or to predict where the next cinematic hot spot will be. As soon as you grow accustomed to anticipating interesting new work from South Korea or Argentina, say, you find your attention pulled in the direction of Thailand or Algeria or Portugal or Romania, and your mental map of the world is crowded with pins. Even the most worldly cinephile will succumb to a moment or two of naïve wonder. Such a big world. So many movies. Who knew?

But then, back home, nobody seems to know — or, more discouragingly, to care. The cosmopolitanism of international filmmaking is matched by the parochialism of American film culture. And this brings me back to “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” the runner-up for the National Society of Film Critics award, a fixture of end-of-the-year 10 Best lists and the winner, by a wide margin, of the first-ever online critics’ poll published on IndieWire.com. This movie, a harrowing but grimly humane two-and-a-half-hour tour of the Romanian health care system, caused a minor sensation at the 2005 Cannes festival, where Mr. Puiu won a second-tier award.

The critics were, if anything, even more taken with it than the jurors. As we watched, in more or less real time, the final agonies of an unremarkable middle-aged alcoholic — the movie’s title is a succinct piece of truth in advertising — we also seemed to be witnessing the birth, or rebirth, of a vibrant national cinema in a place where few of us would have thought to look. The next year this hunch was confirmed by the presence of two films from Romania, “The Way I Spent the End of the World” and “12:08 East of Bucharest,” both of which looked back, one with sentiment, the other with jaundice, at that country’s 1989 revolution.

“The Way I Spent the End of the World” is the official Romanian submission for the Academy Awards — one of 61 films, one per country, contending for five nominations, to be announced on Tuesday — but it does not have a distributor in North America. After traveling from Cannes to the New York Film Festival “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” did make it to a few American theaters last year, thanks to a small, scrappy distributor called Tartan Films, which also plans to distribute “12:08 East of Bucharest.” Which is surely encouraging: an ambitious, challenging movie with limited commercial potential had a chance to find its audience. But it is hard to celebrate when dozens — hundreds — of movies had no such chance. And it is also hard to quiet a nagging question: Where was the audience?

“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” which made all of $80,000 in its brief theatrical run, is far from the only foreign movie to open here to the applause of critics and the silence of the public. I don’t mean the mass public — I have never put much stock in the Utopian fantasy that, if only the multiplex chains would see reason, internationally beloved auteurs like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami would become box-office powerhouses — but rather the aesthetically adventurous, intellectually curious segment of the population that has historically been there for foreign films.

The gap between critical approbation and cultural currency has widened, even as the number and variety of critics has expanded. The arguments — in the virtual salons of the Internet and the actual rooms where movie critics hold their year-end meetings — are perhaps more intense and contentious than ever, but they also seem to take place in a series of echo chambers, sealed off from wider, less specialized conversations.

Is it just me? I’m leery of nostalgia, but it does seem that things were different once. One of the big movie events of 2006 was the release, by the Criterion Collection, of the “Essential Art House” set, a home library of 50 movies distributed over the past half-century by Janus Films, accompanied by a handsome illustrated volume of learned essays and notes. At $850 it was clearly aimed at a market of connoisseurs, a luxury item that could serve equally as an emblem of taste and a resource for viewing.

The Janus box also represents a canon of masterpieces, including many of the films — L’Avventura,” “Jules and Jim,” “The Seventh Seal,” “La Strada” — that helped to make moviegoing in America a serious cultural pursuit as well as a source of entertainment. I’m skeptical of the idea that the great works belong only to the past; it is only the passage of time that consecrates some works as great in the first place. But I do worry about the conditions that would allow the great works of the present to travel into the future with some chance at recognition.

Partly it is a problem of numbers. Every year many more movies are made than can be released, and the ones that do make it into theaters have to compete with one another for a share of the audience. Except for anomalies like Mr. Gibson’s “Apocalypto” and Mr. Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima” — two in one year; what are the odds? — the major studios steer clear of subtitles, except when marketing their blockbusters overseas. And their specialty divisions are, with the notable exception of Sony Pictures Classics, generally more interested in producing medium-budget prestige pictures — in the mold of “The Queen” or “Brokeback Mountain” or, for that matter, “Babel” — than in acquiring more exotic and commercially risky fare.

There are certainly exceptions: early last year Warner Independent released “Duck Season,” a quirky and charming coming-of-age story from Mexico, and “Pan’s Labyrinth” is being distributed (and heavily advertised) by Picturehouse, Warner Indendent’s cousin within the Time Warner corporate family. Movies that have the backing of these companies have a somewhat better chance in the marketplace than those acquired by smaller distributors with less money to spend on ads and less cachet with theater owners.

And the result is that more difficult movies — movies without a directorial pedigree or a well-known international star — are pushed further to the margins, becoming objects of cultish adoration rather than topics of general discussion. If you have seen “Three Times” or “L’Enfant” — to name two other hits of the 2005 Cannes Festival that came and went here in the blink of an eye last year despite choruses of critical praise — then you can perhaps feel the flush of specialness that comes from belonging to an exclusive coterie. All the more if you are familiar with the festival-only titles on some critics’ lists of undistributed movies, like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Syndromes and a Century” or Pedro Costa’s “Colossal Youth.”

But ultimately such snobbery is bad for the soul, and for art. Movies like these, which demand close attention and serious reflection rather than passive absorption, deserve to have a skeptical audience as well as a devoted one, and to be subjects of an argument capable of expanding beyond the narrow circle of specialists. At the moment that doesn’t seem likely. It is certainly true that a limited discussion — or a small-scale release — is better than none. Perhaps the old style of connoisseurship — the idea that the hardy few who sought out movies from faraway places, or who turned the revival houses into shrines of art, were part of a vanguard — has been replaced by something more modest and democratic.

The old film culture was based on hierarchical assumptions about taste and quality that have all but vanished, replaced by niches and networks of fans. You like your Romanian hospital movie, I like my Asian horror, and we have our Web sites and DVD rental queues to keep us happy; everything’s cool. And maybe, in these circumstances, no movie is really foreign. Or maybe every movie is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/movies/21scot.html





After All That Goodness, a Sudden Fall From Grace
Caryn James

Before she set a toe on the red carpet at the Golden Globes last week, Angelina Jolie’s carefully molded image as humanitarian and mom was already showing some cracks. The Internet had been flooded with reports, picked up from European interviews, that she had called her biological daughter “a blob” with less personality than her two adopted kids, and had criticized Madonna’s adoption of a baby boy from Malawi. Women’s Wear Daily reported she was being difficult about designs from St. John, the staid company whose ads she appears in and whose conservatively elegant gown she wore to the Globes.

By the time she reached the end of a haughty, humorless walk down that red carpet on Brad Pitt’s arm, the Good Angelina image had crumbled to dust. In the next days columnists from The Washington Post to LA Weekly attacked her for a television interview with Ryan Seacrest on E! that made it clear she was above such drivel. His red carpet questions were drivel, but that was no reason to sneer the words “Cereal, we made cereal” when asked how the family had spent the morning.

Video of the interview was spread and ridiculed on Web sites like TMZ and YouTube; Mr. Seacrest complained about her on his radio show; the current issue of Us Weekly reported on more behavior fit for a queen in an article headlined “An Angelina Backlash?” There was really no need for the question mark.

Once famous as a tattooed wild woman, Ms. Jolie has soared to the saintly realm and plummeted again in record time. Madonna, her only rival in shape-shifting, has maintained the devoted wife and mother image for more than six years now, despite her recent adventures in adoption. Good Angelina didn’t even last two. That shattered image, a lesson in the limits of spin, is the product of a lethal combination: a public that never bought into the reformed persona and a star who may have bought into it too much.

The backlash had been building all along, and not simply because, while married to Billy Bob Thornton, she wore a vial of his blood around her neck. (No fair blaming the press for her vampirish image.) She adopted her son, Maddox, from Cambodia just before that marriage broke up, and has always seemed sincere about motherhood. But from the minute her name was linked to Mr. Pitt’s, there was plenty of snickering at her claim that they were just friends while filming “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” when he was married to Jennifer Aniston. Only the Jolie-Pitts know the truth; let’s just say the public remains skeptical. Once they became an acknowledged couple, Ms. Jolie assumed a saintly manner, deglamorizing to the point of wearing a bandanna on her head for a “Today” interview while visiting orphans in Africa; did she think viewers wouldn’t spot her cat’s-eye makeup and heavily glossed lips?

Such doubts about the noble Angelina accelerated especially fast over the last month. In the January issue of Vogue, talking about how her relationship with Mr. Pitt developed, she restated that they were “very, very good friends” for a long time, sounding as disingenuous as ever. And she added, “It was clear he was with his best friend,” which on the surface is matter-of-fact, yet manages to desexualize Ms. Aniston. Venom in the guise of kindness?

The new Us Weekly article reports that Ms. Jolie was “a nightmare” during the Vogue photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz; that she pushed through a crowd at the premiere of “God Grew Tired of Us,” a do-gooder documentary about the lost boys of Sudan that Mr. Pitt helped produce; and that she coolly pulled him away from a conversation with Courtney Cox Arquette, Ms. Aniston’s close friend, at the Golden Globes. Even if some of those incidents are exaggerated, the backlash is real. A kitschy painting of Ms. Jolie as the Virgin Mary holding her children and hovering saintlike above a Wal-Mart, a work too banal to be half-good as satire, made a media splash when it was shown at Art Miami 2007.

The backlash isn’t entirely her fault. The press helped it along by playing fast and loose with her quotations, gleefully picking up the Shiloh-is-a-blob comment without context. In the full interview in British Elle, when Ms. Jolie hesitated in describing her newborn daughter, the reporter suggested the word blob. Ms. Jolie foolishly responded: “Yes, a blob! But now she’s starting to have a personality.”

In response to a question about Madonna, she did tell the French magazine Gala that adoptions are illegal in Malawi and, “I prefer to stay on the right side of the law.” You can almost hear her coo her superiority as she says it, and you can almost hear anyone who reads it thinking, “Witch.” But her first response was to say that the happiness of Madonna’s child is all that matters; most second-hand reports made that seem like an afterthought.

Still, at best her own bumbling led her to this state. At worst, blame her self-importance. When she was interviewed on the Globes red carpet for “Access Hollywood,” she was shown an old clip of herself jumping into a swimming pool fully clothed after the 1999 awards, not exactly a tough reminder of her wild past. Yet New Angelina seemed royally unamused. And while she looked ultra-glamorous at the premiere of her latest film, “The Good Shepherd,” the perfectly upswept hair and self-contained demeanor of her recent appearances have also made her seem plastic.

In part she is suffering from a common problem: movie stars who make too few movies and are forced to coast on their fame. In “The Good Shepherd,” as the wife of a buttoned-down C.I.A. agent (Matt Damon), she goes from vibrant young femme fatale to brittle, middle-aged alcoholic. It’s a fine performance but a minor part. Her next film, “A Mighty Heart,” isn’t scheduled to arrive until June. That leading role might help restore her saintly image; she plays Marianne Pearl, whose husband, Daniel, was kidnapped and murdered while reporting in Pakistan.

But as Ms. Jolie’s horrific month has shown, reshaping an image is harder than you might think. Despite the charity work and the bun on her head, the burning question all along has been: Who is that woman in the St. John suit, and what has she done with Angelina Jolie?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/movies/22back.html





Hope You Saved Your Glow Stick
Sam Knight

TO most people in Britain, rave is a memory, and a blurry one at that. For four years at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Britain’s youth took to the fields, forests and warehouses, took Ecstasy, wore some of the silliest outfits ever devised — like cricket hats, white gloves and gas masks — and ushered out Thatcherism in a strobe-lighted haze of electronic music that shook the ground they danced on.

Then Parliament passed the Criminal Justice Act of 1994, which humorlessly characterized rave music as “the emission of a succession of repetitive beats,” and gave police the power to shut raves down. That swiftly put an end to the scene’s drug-induced violence — and to the scene itself.

But if you happen to be in London these days, there are signs that something like rave is stirring again.

“The first time around, rave really seeped into the mainstream,” said Carri Mundane, 26, a designer who was a child during the first rave scene but kept the fliers amassed by her older brother. “The music was in the charts, and everything just became a little bit more psychedelic.”

This time, it’s more insular. And it’s different in other ways, too: some of the music is rock, not electronica, and the scene is no longer as defined by the twin illegalities of drugs and trespassing.

But a collection of young creative types are dressing up and making music that unmistakably refers back to the garishness, the euphoria and the escapism of 15 years ago.

In mid-December, the Klaxons — an indie rock band and the self-appointed leaders of the scene — invited a pack of D.J.’s, artists and other performers to play a final gig of the year under the railway arches of London Bridge.

The location was the site of illegal parties in the early 1990s but, in keeping with the more sanitized character of today’s movement, is now a well-appointed nightclub with a bouncer, sofas to lounge on and $7 beers.

The music didn’t sound like rave. Though tinged with electronica, the Klaxons and two other bands played stripped-back rock, not unlike much of the music that has been in vogue in Britain the last few years. And the dance floor was more of a punkish mosh pit, with lots of shoving revelers, than a blissed-out, synchronized community of dancers.

Still, there were glow sticks — a kind of waving coral reef of neon pinks, yellow and greens — and between acts, young men in leather jackets nudged their way around the dance floor, offering Ecstasy. Teenage fans wore reflective jackets, neon paint, sunglasses, beads and whistles as they hurled themselves back and forth, up and down, suggesting that if this wasn’t rave, then it was certainly a somehow-related cousin.

Like the original, the new rave scene may be a refuge from reality. Although neither incarnation of rave would claim anything as coherent as an ideology, there may be an echo of Margaret Thatcher’s frustrated youth among those experiencing the last days of Tony Blair’s Britain, said Tahita Bulmer, the lead singer of the band New Young Pony Club.

“That spirit of contentment has faded,” she said, with the country vehemently opposed to the way the prime minister has handled the war in Iraq. But it’s when people are unhappy, she added, that “everything goes neon and gets exciting.”

Ms. Mundane, the designer, who wears brightly colored clothing that has made her an arbiter of rave fashion, said, “What I like about rave is the positivity of it, the fact that it is so utopian.”

The rave renaissance may be a reaction to the country’s dour political state or to the tyranny of indie rock. “There’s only so much partying you can do to these shoe-gazing indie bands,” said Jaimie Hodgson, a music journalist, referring to Britain’s emo-heavy music scene.

Many participants say they are nostalgic for a movement they are old enough to at least remember, even if they have not experienced it themselves. Or perhaps they’re just looking for an excuse to dress up and take Ecstasy, otherwise known as MDMA, a drug best known for inducing a touchy-feely, sensation-inducing high.

The new rave scene is a small, tightly connected movement of artists, D.J.’s, bands and partygoers forged in a series of warehouse parties that, beginning in 2003, were organized by a gang of artists called the Wowow Boys, in New Cross, a ragtag neighborhood of students and boarded-up buildings southeast of London Bridge.

As in the 1990s, the gatherings attracted newly formed bands that were eager to create an environment “where the specific aim was to party, “ said Jamie Reynolds, the bass player of the Klaxons.

Hence, the outrageous outfits: At a New Young Pony Club gig, Oisin Butler, a psychology student who said he was starting a band called Aids Baby, sat wearing a purple bow tie, a red cardigan and glasses with Day-Glo frames and no lenses. His jeans were so tight there was no room for his keys. “You can wear anything, as long as it’s odd, or glittery, or neon, or is really disgusting,” he said.

At a popular monthly dance party in Islington, North London, people are encouraged to download smiley masks — a throwback to the original rave scene and an Ecstasy reference — from a Web site. The event started in 2003 with a party in an abandoned public bathroom; this summer 3,000 people in fluorescent attended its Glade Festival.

The dance-music scene has been “snowballing” for the last three years, says the party’s D.J. and promoter, who calls himself Saint Acid. He added that his early events were mainly attended by people in their 30s, wearing old clothes and looking to relive the dance parties of their youth, but now the crowd is “getting younger and younger.”

Mark Archer is half of Altern8, a riotous dance act last seen playing the violin in biological warfare suits in 1991. After 15 years of relative quiet, Mr. Archer, now 38, played at the recent Islington party and is enjoying the unlikely satisfaction of seeing a young band, Trash Fashion, cover one of Altern8’s old tracks.

“If someone had told me 16 years ago that I would still be playing now the same music I was then, and that rock bands would be covering our songs, I would have laughed,” he said. “All of a sudden rave has become cool again. It’s been a bit of a shock.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/fashion/21Rave.html





Turkish Police Arrest Teenage Suspect in Editor’s Killing
Sebnem Arsu

The Turkish police on Saturday arrested a 17-year-old suspect in the killing of a newspaper editor who championed Armenian rights, Turkish authorities said.

The editor, Hrant Dink, 52, a Turk of Armenian descent, was shot Friday afternoon outside the office of his newspaper, Agos. A gunman was recorded by a surveillance camera nearby, and the police appealed to the public for help in identifying him.

On Saturday night, Ogun Samast was captured in Samsun, a Black Sea port, after his father recognized his images from the surveillance video and notified the police in Trabzon, their hometown, said Muammer Guler, Istanbul’s governor, at a news conference just before midnight.

“The suspect was captured in Samsun on a passenger bus destined to Trabzon, together with all the evidence, including his gun and the white beret” seen in the video, Mr. Guler said.

Mr. Samast, an unemployed secondary school graduate who arrived in Istanbul a week ago, admitted killing Mr. Dink, the Samsun police said.

The police are also looking into possible links between Mr. Samast and the killing of a Catholic priest, Andrea Santaro, last February. The assailant was a 16-year-old who, like the priest and Mr. Samast, was from Trabzon.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan praised the efforts of the security forces Saturday and expressed satisfaction that an arrest had been made before Mr. Dink’s funeral on Tuesday. “We’re going to continue investigations with the same determination,” Mr. Erdogan told the reporters, assuring that the arrest was only the start.

Mr. Guler said at a news conference earlier Saturday that Mr. Samast had visited the Agos office on Friday. He apparently posed as a university student hoping to meet Mr. Dink, whose secretary told the young man he would need an appointment.

The secretary later saw him loitering outside the office before Mr. Dink was attacked, Mr. Guler said.

Kazim Kolcuoglu, head of the Istanbul Bar Association, noting that Mr. Samast and the killer of Mr. Santaro were under 18, said that minors in Turkey are used in slayings because they face lower penalties than an adult convicted of the same crime.

As a 17-year-old, Mr. Samast will be interrogated by a public prosecutor instead of the police, and will be tried at a minors’ court, which will lead to certain reductions on his possible jail term, Mr. Kolcuoglu said.

Mr. Dink’s murder has shocked Turkey. Mr. Erdogan condemned the shooting as a direct attack on Turkey’s stability, and analysts from diverse political backgrounds appeared to agree.

“If the trigger finger aimed at the air of stability and confidence in Turkey, it hit the bull’s eye,” wrote Mehmet Barlas, a columnist for the center-right newspaper Sabah.

Although analysts like Mr. Barlas saw the assassination as a politically motivated attack on Turkey’s progress toward membership in the European Union, others blamed a controversial law under which Mr. Dink had been convicted of insulting the Turkish identity.

Mr. Dink, who angered many in Turkey by challenging the official Turkish version of the 1915 Armenian genocide, was given a six-month, suspended sentence. But in the eyes of many radical nationalists, it made him a target.

Meanwhile, people continued to flock to the Agos office in Istanbul. Chants of “We are all Armenians, we are all Hrants,” filled the air.

“We’re here because we lost one of us,” said a 33-year-old woman. As a teacher, she declined to give her name because it is illegal in Turkey for public workers to make public comments. “I want to see the perpetrators be brought to justice and the plot behind this assassination clarified immediately,” she said.

Agos, the only bilingual Armenian-Turkish newspaper in Turkey, was founded and run by Mr. Dink since 1996.

“We lost the voice that spoke for us, but Turkey lost as much as we did,” said Nadya Ismezoglu, an Armenian woman standing outside the Agos office. “Our pain is indescribable.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/wo...rtner=homepage





Surveillance

Computer Privacy in Distress
Jennifer Granick

My laptop computer was purchased by Stanford, but my whole life is stored on it. I have e-mail dating back several years, my address book with the names of everyone I know, notes and musings for various work and personal projects, financial records, passwords to my blog, my web mail, project and information management data for various organizations I belong to, photos of my niece and nephew and my pets.

In short, my computer is my most private possession. I have other things that are more dear, but no one item could tell you more about me than this machine.

Yet, a rash of recent court decisions says the Constitution may not be enough to protect my laptop from arbitrary, suspicionless and warrantless examination by the police.

At issue is the Fourth Amendment, which protects individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents. As a primary safeguard against arbitrary and capricious searches, property seizures and arrests, the founding fathers required the government to first seek a warrant from a judge or magistrate.

The warrant has to specifically describe the place to be searched and the items to be seized.

Searches and seizures without such a warrant are presumed to be unconstitutional. There are times, of course, when it would be unreasonable, burdensome, ineffective or just plain silly to require police to get a warrant before searching, so courts have carved out many, many exceptions to the warrant requirement. The fundamental thread in these decisions is a subtle and case-specific determination of what is "reasonable" conduct by law enforcement.

Because reasonable minds can differ on reasonable courses of action, the resulting Fourth Amendment law is complicated, sometimes contradictory and very fact-dependent.

Computers pose special Fourth Amendment search problems because they pack so much information in such a small, monolithic physical form. As a result, courts are grappling with how to protect privacy rights during searches of computers.

Three digital search topics in particular are converging in interesting, and foreboding, ways.

First, there are several new cases that suggest that agents can search computers at the border (including international airports) without reasonable suspicion or a warrant, under the routine border search exception to the warrant requirement.

Second, a recent case in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has held that private employees have no reasonable expectation of privacy, and thus no Fourth Amendment rights, in their workplace computers (gulp!).

Third and finally, the 9th Circuit is struggling, and failing, to define ways to judicially supervise police searches of computers to ensure that law enforcement gets the information it needs, while leaving undisturbed any private information on unrelated matters that may be on the same disk drive.

Together the computer search cases can paint a scary picture. But if you read the decisions carefully, there is ample room for courts to follow up with more nuanced opinions that protect computer privacy and allow reasonable government access.

For example, the border search exception allows "routine" searches without reasonable suspicion or a warrant. "Non-routine" searches still require reasonable suspicion. Is the examination of computers at the border a routine or non-routine search? The cases so far don't answer this question head on. Future cases will have to.

The Supreme Court has said that the definition depends on the "dignity and privacy interests" implicated by a search. Thus, strip searches and cavity searches are non-routine, but searches of vehicles and baggage are routine.

Given the sensitivity of information stored on a computer, the way people tend to archive everything, how long a comprehensive search takes and the likelihood of discovering contraband with such a search, courts may well find that computer searches are allowed at the border only based on reasonable suspicion, not as a baseless fishing expedition.

I hope for the best, as I do in United States v. Ziegler, the case that found private employees have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their workplace computers. Defense attorneys have asked for a rehearing, and the court may do better next time.

Ziegler is important, because if employees have no protected privacy rights, then the government can enter a private workplace, without cause, without a warrant, with or without the employer's consent and search employee computers. The business might try to sue, but the employee would not have the right either to challenge the government's actions in court, or to suppress any discovered evidence.

Similarly, defense attorneys in United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing have asked the 9th Circuit for a new hearing, and the court has an opportunity to issue a more careful opinion in that case, which arose from the Balco doping scandal.

The government is investigating whether 10 professional baseball players were illegally taking steroids. In the course of its probe, it obtained multiple warrants for the results of drug tests taken by the players. But it didn't just seize the results for the players under scrutiny -- it grabbed the entire database, with samples from hundreds of other athletes.

Lower courts ordered the government to return the information that was not related to the Balco-linked players, but the government appealed and the 9th Circuit ruled in its favor.

The facts of the case are complicated, but the proper result is clear: In every computer or database search case, information responsive to the warrant is going to be intermingled with information about other matters. Warrants should not only state whether the computers will be removed from the premises, and how the search will be done, but should also establish a way agents will try to segregate private information from the data they are entitled to obtain pursuant to the warrant.

Otherwise, we will find that the government can use a smaller investigation as a stalking horse to obtain information about a vast number of other people.

These Fourth Amendment trends should be closely followed.

Of course, there's a chance that the courts will not recognize the different scope of privacy interests at stake in computer searches, or will not be adept at crafting a rule that gives enough leeway and guidance to law enforcement, while also protecting privacy. At that point, the Constitution may fail us, and we will have to turn to Congress to create rules that are better adapted for the information age.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,...tw=wn_index_18





Internet Subpoena Invalid, Appeals Court Says

Police violated Lower woman's Web privacy in tampering case, according to ruling
Trudi Gilfillian

A Lower Township woman's state constitutional rights to privacy were violated when police used an “invalid subpoena” to obtain her Internet subscriber information, a state appeals court ruled Monday.

The court's decision allowed for the fact that, while federal courts have found Internet subscribers under the Fourth Amendment have no right to privacy with respect to identifying information on file with their Internet service provider, or ISP, they do have a right to privacy under New Jersey's constitution.

The case stems from an August 2004 incident in which Shirley Reid's employer, Jersey Diesel of Lower Township, reported that Reid had likely tampered with the company's computers.

The company learned that changes had been made to a password and shipping address for suppliers, and found the changes were made by someone with an ISP address that was owned by Comcast.

Township police had the Municipal Court administrator issue a subpoena to Comcast to get the name of that subscriber, which led to Reid's arrest Oct. 8, 2004.

Reid is charged with computer-related theft, a second-degree crime punishable by a minimum three-year prison sentence.

Superior Court Judge Carmen Alvarez last year ruled in favor of a defense motion to suppress the evidence obtained via that subpoena, and the appeals panel agreed with that decision, declaring the subpoena invalid.

“Clearly, it was utilized simply as a device to obtain the desired information,” the court wrote. “And while a court clerk may issue a subpoena … the crime under investigation here involved an indictable offense, not within the jurisdiction of the municipal court.”

The court's decision emphasized that the state allows citizens greater privacy protection than the federal government.

“The right to privacy of New Jersey citizens under our state constitution has been expanded to areas not afforded such protection under the Fourth Amendment,” the court wrote.

It continued, “Only New Jersey appears to have recognized a right to what has been called ‘informational privacy.'”

Informational privacy is defined by the state as the ability to control the release of information about oneself.

“Writing on a nearly clean slate, we conclude that defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy in her ISP account information” obtained from Comcast, the court continued.

Calling Reid's interest in anonymity both legitimate and substantial, the ruling noted that by using an anonymous ISP address and a screen name, Reid “manifested an intention to keep her identity publicly anonymous.”

The court added, however, that such information could be obtained through a proper judicial process.

“This is not an onerous burden to place on law enforcement. Just as with telephone or bank records, computers cannot be used with impunity for unlawful purposes. When there is probable cause to believe unlawful use has occurred, law enforcement has the tools to respond,” the court wrote.

“Rather, here the police unlawfully obtained the identity of defendant as the user of an ISP address which did not of itself reveal her identity,” the court wrote. “Because defendant had a right of privacy in the subscriber information obtained by the invalid subpoena, that evidence was properly suppressed by Judge Alvarez.”

Reid's attorney, Joseph Grassi, did not immediately return calls for comment.

Cape May County Prosecutor Robert Taylor said Monday his office has not decided whether it will seek a review of the case by the state Supreme Court.
http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/n...-6994290c.html





Tighter Passport Rules for U.S. Citizens Start Tuesday
Julia Preston

A United States citizen flying home today from a ski jaunt in Canada, a beach break in Mexico or a honeymoon in Jamaica can flash a driver’s license or a birth certificate at airport customs officials and walk on through.

Tomorrow, those documents will no longer work.

Starting then, United States citizens, including children, returning to this country by air from any country in the Western Hemisphere will have to present a passport.

In another change, citizens of Canada and Bermuda traveling to the United States by air will also have to show passports to enter the country. Previously, they too could use driver’s licenses and birth documents.

United States officials, parrying complaints from Canada and Caribbean nations, said the measure was mandated by a 2004 law in which Congress adopted many proposals of the Sept. 11 commission. The purpose is to reduce the types of documents travelers can use to enter the United States, simplifying the job of inspectors looking for fake or invalid ones.

More than 8,000 styles of birth certificates are issued by agencies in the United States, according to Maura Harty, assistant secretary of state for consular affairs. “No inspector could ever possibly master all of those,” Ms. Harty said.

The United States passports now being issued can be read by scanners in airport customs booths and instantly verified in most cases through a federal database.

The new measure applies only to air travelers. Officials in the Department of Homeland Security said they expected to roll out the same restrictions for passengers arriving by land and sea by Jan. 1, 2008.

Until recently, only 27 percent of eligible Americans had passports. The new requirements set off a rush, with a record 12.1 million passports issued last year, Ms. Harty said. Despite that rush, she said, the normal time of six weeks or less to process a new passport has not increased.

Customs will also accept merchant marine cards and Nexus air cards, which are issued to citizens and legal immigrants in the United States and Canada who are frequent travelers and have passed a background check. Active duty military personnel are exempt.

Canadian travelers are most miffed by the change. Randy Williams, president of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada, said confusion about when the new restrictions would go into effect had cost Canada $1.6 billion in lost American tourist dollars since 2005.

Canadian tourism representatives did not object to the passport requirement, Mr. Williams said. But he said publicity from Washington explaining the new measures was insufficient and late. Although the new requirements had been in the works since 2004, the Bush administration announced the start date only two months ago, on Nov. 22.

“All our lives, Canada and the United States have enjoyed freedom of travel across a trusting border,” Mr. Williams said. “Now adding these new costs and bureaucracy to that invisible line will change the psyche. That freedom will become a little more restricted — in some regards, a victory for terrorism.”

In Canada, passport offices have received 21,000 applications a day in recent weeks, and people have waited in line for up to four hours, said Francine Charbonneau, a spokeswoman for the passport agency.

Mexican air travelers have long been required to present passports and visas to enter the United States. Mexican tourism officials said their deeper concern was about Washington’s plans to require passports next year from all returning Americans. In a statement, Mexico said that that “could discourage the movement of tens of millions of visitors who live in the border areas.”

In Bermuda and the Caribbean, many hotels have offered to reimburse fees for new passports, said Peter Odle, president of the Caribbean Hotel Association.

Homeland Security officials said 94 percent of the United States citizens who returned to this country last week by air had documents that met the new requirements. Customs officials said they would have extra staff on duty this week and would not turn away United States citizens.

“The goal is to solicit compliance,” said Kelly Klundt, a customs spokeswoman. “The goal is not to strand people.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/us/22passport.html




Maine Rejects Real ID Act
Declan McCullagh

Maine overwhelmingly rejected federal requirements for national identification cards on Thursday, marking the first formal state opposition to controversial legislation scheduled to go in effect for Americans next year.

Both chambers of the Maine legislature approved a resolution saying the state flatly "refuses" to force its citizens to use driver's licenses that comply with digital ID standards, which were established under the 2005 Real ID Act. It asks the U.S. Congress to repeal the law.

The vote represents a political setback for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Republicans in Washington, D.C., which have argued that nationalized ID cards for all Americans would help in the fight against terrorists.

"I have faith that the Democrats in Congress will hear this from many states and will find a way to repeal or amend this in the coming months," House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat, said in a telephone interview after the vote. "It's not only a huge federal mandate, but it's a huge mandate from the federal government asking us to do something we don't have any interest in doing."

The Real ID Act says that, starting around May 2008, Americans will need a federally approved ID card--a U.S. passport will also qualify--to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments or take advantage of nearly any government service. States will have to conduct checks of their citizens' identification papers, and driver's licenses likely will be reissued to comply with Homeland Security requirements.

In addition, the national ID cards must be "machine-readable," with details left up to Homeland Security, which hasn't yet released final regulations. That could end up being a magnetic strip, an enhanced bar code or radio frequency identification (RFID) chips.

The votes in Maine on the resolution were nonpartisan. It was approved by a 34-to-0 vote in the state Senate and by a 137-to-4 vote in the House of Representatives.

Other states are debating similar measures. Bills pending in Georgia, Massachusetts, Montana and Washington state express varying degrees of opposition to the Real ID Act.

Montana's is one of the strongest. The legislature held a hearing on Wednesday on a bill that says "The state of Montana will not participate in the implementation of the Real ID Act of 2005" and directs the state motor vehicle department "not to implement the provisions."

Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project, said he thinks Maine's vote will "break the logjam, and other states are going to follow." (The American Civil Liberties Union has set up an anti-Real ID Web site called Real Nightmare).

Pingree, Maine's House majority leader, said the Real ID Act would have cost the state $185 million over five years and required every state resident to visit the motor vehicle agency so that several forms of identification--including an original copy of the birth certificate and a Social Security card--would be uploaded into a federal database.

Growing opposition to the law in the states could create a political pickle for the Bush administration. The White House has enthusiastically embraced the Real ID Act, saying it (click for PDF) "facilitates the strengthening by the states of the standards for the security and integrity of drivers' licenses."

But if a sufficient number of states follow Maine's lead, pressure would increase on a Democratic Congress to relax the Real ID rules--or even rescind them entirely.

A key Republican supporter of the Real ID Act said Thursday that the law was just as necessary now as when it was enacted as part of an $82 billion military spending and tsunami relief bill. (Its backers say it follows the recommendations that the 9/11 Commission made in 2004.)

"Real ID is needed to protect the American people from terrorists who use drivers licenses to board planes, get jobs and move around the country as the 9/11 terrorists did," Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said in an e-mailed statement. "It makes sense to have drivers licenses that ensure a person is who they say they are. It makes the country safer and protects the American people from terrorists who would use the most common form of ID as cover."
http://news.com.com/Maine+rejects+Re...3-6153532.html





China's Hu Vows to "Purify" Internet

Chinese Communist Party chief Hu Jintao has vowed to "purify" the Internet, state media reported on Wednesday, describing a top-level meeting that discussed ways to master the country's sprawling, unruly online population.

Hu made the comments as the ruling party's Politburo -- its 24-member leading council -- was studying China's Internet, which claimed 137 million registered users at the end of 2006.

Hu, a strait-laced communist with little sympathy for cultural relaxation, did not directly mention censorship.

But he made it clear that the Communist Party was looking to ensure it keeps control of China's Internet users, often more interested in salacious pictures, bloodthirsty games and political scandal than Marxist lessons.

The party had to "strengthen administration and development of our country's Internet culture", Hu told the meeting on Tuesday, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

"Maintain the initiative in opinion on the Internet and raise the level of guidance online," he said. "We must promote civilized running and use of the Internet and purify the Internet environment."

In 2006, China's Internet users grew by 26 million, or 23.4 percent, year on year, to reach 10.5 percent of the total population, the China Internet Network Information Center said on Tuesday.

The vast majority of those users have no access to overseas Chinese Web sites offering uncensored opinion and news critical of the ruling party. But even in heavily monitored China, news of official misdeeds and dissident opinion has been able to travel through online bulletin boards and blogs.

Hu told officials to intensify control even as they seek to release the Internet's economic potential. "Ensure that one hand grasps development while one hand grasps administration," he said.

Article





Chinese Professor Cracks Fifth Data Encryption Algorithm

SHA-1 added to list of "accomplishments"
Central News Agency

In five years, the U.S. government will cease to use SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm) and convert to a new and more advanced computer data encryption, according to the article "Security Cracked!" from New Scientist . The reason for this change is that 41-years old associate professor Wang Xiaoyun of Beijing's Tsinghua University and Shandong University of Technology has already cracked SHA-1.

According to a Beijing digest, this SHA-1 encryption includes the world's gold standard Message-Digest algorithm 5 (MD5). Before Professor Wang cracked it, the MD5 could only be deciphered by today's fastest supercomputer running codes for more than a million years.

However, professor Wang Xiaoyun, a graduate of Shandong University of Technology's mathematics department, and her research team obtained results by using ordinary personal computers.

In early 2005, Wang and her research team announced that they had succeeded in cracking SHA-1. In addition to the U.S. government, well known companies like Microsoft, Sun, Atmel, and others have also announced that they will no longer be using SHA-1.

Two years ago, Wang convened an international data encryption conference to announce that her team had successfully cracked the four world-class standards of data encryption algorithms of MD5, HAVAL-1 28, MD4 and RIPEMD within 10 years.

A few months later, she then cracked the even more advanced and difficult SHA-1.

According to the article, Hash was Wang's area of research. Hash is the basis of MD5 and SHA-1, the two most extensive data encryption algorithms now used in the world.

These two main algorithms are currently the crucial technology that electronic signatures and many other password securities use throughout the international community. They are widely used in banking, securities, and e-commerce. SHA-1 has been recognized as the cornerstone for modern Internet security.

According to the article, in the early stages of Wang's research, there were other data encryption researchers who tried to crack it. However, none of them succeeded. This is why in 15 years Hash research had become the domain of hopeless research in many scientists' minds.

Wang's method of cracking the encryptions differs from all others. Although encryption analysis usually cannot be done without the use of computers, according to Wang, the computer only assisted in cracking the algorithm. Most of the time, she calculated manually, and manually designed the methods.

Wang said, "Hackers crack passwords with bad intentions. I hope efforts to protect against password theft will benefit [from this]. Password analysts work to evaluate the security of data encryption and to search for even more secure encryption algorithms."

She added, "On the day that I cracked SHA-1, I went out to eat. I was very excited. I knew I was the only person who knew this world-class secret."

Within ten years, Wang cracked the five biggest names in data encryption. Many people would think the life of this scientist must be monotonous. However she said, "That ten years was a very relaxed time for me."

During her work, she bore a daughter and cultivated a balcony full of flowers. The only mathematics related habit in her life is how she remembers the license plates of taxi cabs.
http://en.epochtimes.com/news/7-1-11/50336.html





Vint Cerf: One Quarter of all Computers Part of a Botnet
Nate Anderson

The World Economic Forum takes place this week in Davos, Switzerland, and leaders around the world gather to discuss issues like the Iraq war, global climate change, and globalization—along with the incredible prevalence of botnets.

The BBC's Tim Weber, who was in the audience of an Internet panel featuring Vint Cerf, Michael Dell, John Markoff of the New York Times, and Jon Zittrain of Oxford, came away most impressed by the botnet statistics. Cerf told his listeners that approximately 600 million computers are connected to the Internet, and that 150 million of them might be participants in a botnet—nearly all of them unwilling victims. Weber remarks that "in most cases the owners of these computers have not the slightest idea what their little beige friend in the study is up to."

If Cerf's estimate is accurate, that's one quarter of all machines connected to the Internet. So is the Internet doomed? Well, you're reading this, so no, not yet. But the botnet menace is no phantom, and it has been growing in strength for years. In September 2006, security research firm Arbor Networks announced that it was now seeing botnet-based denial of service attacks capable of generating an astonishing 10-20Gbps of junk data. The company notes that when major attacks of this sort began, ISPs often do exactly what the attacker wants them to do: take the target site offline.

What is it that keeps the "botherders" so fascinated with amassing large flocks like modern-day, digital shepherds? Money. Once millions of "little beige friends" have been compromised with bot software, the creators can then use or rent the network to deliver spam, denial of service attacks, and log passwords and usernames.

All of these uses can be lucrative if you know the right wrong people. Several months ago, Wired published a great story about the extended botnet attack on Blue Security that captures the shadowy nature of the botnet world. Even after weeks of attacks and public tauntings from the spammer behind them, neither the security firm nor its ISPs could fully halt the attacks or identify the person who was launching them. In the end, Blue Security folded.

Botnets have been behind a significant increase in spam in recent months, and some security vendors have warned that these networks are now large enough to pose a potential threat to major government networks (at least those which operate or are connected to the public Internet).

It can be difficult to locate and prosecute botnet operators. Blue Security officials believed that their antagonist was in Russia, but American teenagers have also been involved in the practice, and several have been prosecuted. Two were sentenced last year to 57 and 37 months in jail, respectively—sentences designed to send a message that the government is serious about the issue.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070125-8707.html





Free is bad

PR's 'Pit Bull' Takes on Open Access

Journal publishers lock horns with free-information movement.
Jim Giles

The author of Nail 'Em! Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses is not the kind of figure normally associated with the relatively sedate world of scientific publishing. Besides writing the odd novel, Eric Dezenhall has made a name for himself helping companies and celebrities protect their reputations, working for example with Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron chief now serving a 24-year jail term for fraud.

Although Dezenhall declines to comment on Skilling and his other clients, his firm, Dezenhall Resources, was also reported by Business Week to have used money from oil giant ExxonMobil to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace. "He's the pit bull of public relations," says Kevin McCauley, an editor at the magazine O'Dwyer's PR Report.

Now, Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods.

From e-mails passed to Nature, it seems Dezenhall spoke to employees from Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society at a meeting arranged last July by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). A follow-up message in which Dezenhall suggests a strategy for the publishers provides some insight into the approach they are considering taking.

The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as "Public access equals government censorship". He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review, and "paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles".

Dezenhall also recommended joining forces with groups that may be ideologically opposed to government-mandated projects such as PubMed Central, including organizations that have angered scientists. One suggestion was the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Washington DC, which has used oil-industry money to promote sceptical views on climate change. Dezenhall estimated his fee for the campaign at $300,000–500,000.

In an enthusiastic e-mail sent to colleagues after the meeting, Susan Spilka, Wiley's director of corporate communications, said Dezenhall explained that publishers had acted too defensively on the free-information issue and worried too much about making precise statements. Dezenhall noted that if the other side is on the defensive, it doesn't matter if they can discredit your statements, she added: "Media messaging is not the same as intellectual debate".

Officials at the AAP would not comment to Nature on the details of their work with Dezenhall, or the money involved, but acknowledged that they had met him and subsequently contracted his firm to work on the issue.

"We're like any firm under siege," says Barbara Meredith, a vice-president at the organization. "It's common to hire a PR firm when you're under siege." She says the AAP needs to counter messages from groups such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS), an open-access publisher and prominent advocate of free access to information. PLoS's publicity budget stretches to television advertisements produced by North Woods Advertising of Minneapolis, a firm best known for its role in the unexpected election of former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura to the governorship of Minnesota.

The publishers' link with Dezenhall reflects how seriously they are taking recent developments on access to information. Minutes of a 2006 AAP meeting sent to Nature show that particular attention is being paid to PubMed Central. Since 2005, the NIH has asked all researchers that it funds to send copies of accepted papers to the archive, but only a small percentage actually do. Congress is expected to consider a bill later this year that would make submission compulsory.

Brian Crawford, a senior vice-president at the American Chemical Society and a member of the AAP executive chair, says that Dezenhall's suggestions have been refined and that the publishers have not to his knowledge sought to work with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. On the censorship message, he adds: "When any government or funding agency houses and disseminates for public consumption only the work it itself funds, that constitutes a form of selection and self-promotion of that entity's interests."
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/0701...l/445347a.html





Rivals Voice Complaints About Microsoft’s New System
AP

Rivals of Microsoft renewed their call Friday for European regulators to act against what they say are “illegal practices,” charging that the new Vista operating system is the company’s effort to extend its monopoly to the Internet.

They asked the European Commission to make a decision “as fast as possible” on a complaint they filed last February. It had accused Microsoft of working to keep its existing monopolies and trying to extend its market dominance into other areas, including Web-based computing.

Microsoft had no immediate comment beyond saying that the rivals — represented by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems — were not saying anything new. The company has described the group as a front for I.B.M. and other competitors that have tried to use regulatory complaints to their business advantage.

The group said Microsoft’s XAML markup language — which it said was positioned to replace the current Web page language HTML — was designed “from the ground up to be dependent on Windows.”

“The very same practices the European Commission found to be illegal almost three years ago have now been implemented in Vista,” the group of rivals said.

A spokesman for the group, Thomas Vinje, said Microsoft was seeking to impose its own Windows-dependent standards and displace existing ones.

“The end result will be the continued absence of any real consumer choice, years of waiting for Microsoft to improve — or even debug — its monopoly products, and, of course, high prices,” Mr. Vinje said.

The rival group represents I.B.M., Nokia, Sun Microsystems, RealNetworks and Oracle along with smaller software companies like the Web browser maker Opera Software and two Linux operating system businesses: Red Hat and Linspire.

The complaint that the group filed in February 2006 accused Microsoff of monopoly abuse in sectors not covered by Europe’s 2004 antitrust ruling. That decision found Microsoft had abused its position by bundling media software into its Windows software and squeezing out rival media players.

As a remedy, the European Union ordered Microsoft to share communications code with rivals to make their software work smoothly with Windows. It fined the company last July for dragging its feet over supplying the ”complete and accurate” data required.

Microsoft challenged the regulators’ conclusions and is awaiting a ruling from the Court of First Instance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/te...y/27vista.html





Required Reading

Windows Vista Content Protection - Twenty Questions (and Answers)
Nick White

A conversation has cropped up since the recent publication of a paper scrutinizing how Windows handles digital rights management, especially for HD video (WiR – Dec 23rd ’06). I've since looped back with Dave Marsh, a Lead Program Manager responsible for Windows' handling of video, to learn from him the implications involved and to learn to what extent the paper's assertions are accurate. The following is an article Dave has put together to address the misconceptions in the paper, followed by answers to what we expect will be the most frequent questions in the minds of our customers. Leave us a comment to let us know what you think. -- Nick

Over the holidays, a paper was distributed that raised questions about the content protection features in Windows Vista. The paper draws sharp conclusions about the implications of those features for our customers. As one of the Lead Program Managers for the technologies in question, I would like to share our views on these questions.

Windows Vista includes content protection infrastructure specifically designed to help ensure that protected commercial audiovisual content, such as newly released HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs, can be enjoyed on Windows Vista PCs. In many cases this content has policies associated with its use that must be enforced by playback devices. The policies associated with such content are applicable to all types of devices including Windows Vista PCs, computers running non-Windows operating systems, and standalone consumer electronics devices such as DVD players. If the policies required protections that Windows Vista couldn't support, then the content would not be able to play at all on Windows Vista PCs. Clearly that isn't a good scenario for consumers who are looking to enjoy great next generation content experiences on their PCs.

Associating usage policies with commercial content is not new to Windows Vista, or to the industry. In fact, much of the functionality discussed in the paper has been part of previous versions of Windows, and hasn’t resulted in significant consumer problems – as evidenced by the widespread consumer use of digital media in Windows XP. For example:

· Standard definition DVD playback has required selective use of Macrovision ACP on analog television outputs since it was introduced in the 1990s. DVD playback on and in Windows has always supported this.
· The ability to restrict audio outputs (e.g., S/PDIF) for certain types of content has been available since Windows Millennium Edition (ME) and has been available in all subsequent versions of Windows.
· The Certified Output Protection Protocol (COPP) was released over 2 years ago for Windows XP, and provides applications with the ability to detect output types and enable certain protections on video outputs such as HDCP, CGMS-A, and Macrovision ACP.

It's important to emphasize that while Windows Vista has the necessary infrastructure to support commercial content scenarios, this infrastructure is designed to minimize impact on other types of content and other activities on the same PC. For example, if a user were viewing medical imagery concurrently with playback of video which required image constraint, only the commercial video would be constrained -- not the medical image or other things on the user's desktop. Similarly, if someone was listening to commercial audio content while viewing medical imagery, none of the video protection mechanisms would be activated and the displayed images would again be unaffected.

Contrary to claims made in the paper, the content protection mechanisms do not make Windows Vista PCs less reliable than they would be otherwise -- if anything they will have the opposite effect, for example because they will lead to better driver quality control.

The paper implies that Microsoft decides which protections should be active at any given time. This is not the case. The content protection infrastructure in Windows Vista provides a range of à la carte options that allows applications playing back protected content to properly enable the protections required by the policies established for such content by the content owner or service provider. In this way, the PC functions the same as any other consumer electronics device.

With that introduction, here are the top twenty questions, and answers, that aim to address some of the other points raised in the paper.

Dave Marsh - Lead Program Manager for Video

Twenty Questions and Answers

Do these content protection requirements apply equally to the Consumer Electronics industry supplied player devices such as an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player?

Generally the requirements are equivalent for all devices. For example, an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc always requires HDCP protection for DVI/HDMI outputs regardless of the type of device playing the disc. There are some cases, such as DVD-Video, where PCs have slightly different protection requirements than CE devices, but these differences are mainly historical and as dictated by the licenses associated with the systems providing access to the content (e.g., CSS for DVD).

When are Windows Vista's content protection features actually used?

Windows Vista's content protection mechanisms are only used when required by the policy associated with the content being played. For Windows Vista experiences, if the content does not require a particular protection, then that protection mechanism is not used.

Will the playback quality be reduced on some video output types?

Image quality constraints are only active when required by the policy associated with the content being played, and then only apply to that specific content -- not to any other content on the user's desktop. As a practical matter, image constraint will typically result in content being played at no worse than standard definition television resolution. In the case of HD optical media formats such as HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the constraint requirement is 520K pixels per frame (i.e., roughly 960x540), which is still higher than the native resolution of content distributed in the DVD-Video format. We feel that this is still yields a great user experience, even when using a high definition screen.

Will this affect things like medical imagery applications?

Image constraints only apply to protected content being played and not to the desktop as a whole; therefore, the resolution of other non-protected media, such as medical images, is not affected.

Do things such as HFS (Hardware Functionality Scan) affect the ability of the open-source community to write a driver?

No. HFS uses additional chip characteristics other than those needed to write a driver. HFS requirements should not prevent the disclosure of all the information needed to write drivers.

Will the Windows Vista content protection board robustness recommendations increase the cost of graphics cards and reduce the number of build options?

Everything was moving to be integrated on the one chip anyway and this is independent of content protection recommendations. Given that cost (particularly chip cost) is most heavily influenced by volume, it is actually better to avoid making things optional through the use of external chips. It is a happy side effect that this technology trend also reduces the number of vulnerable tracks on the board.

Will Windows Vista content protection features increase CPU resource consumption?

Yes. However, the use of additional CPU cycles is inevitable, as the PC provides consumers with additional functionality. Windows Vista's content protection features were developed to carefully balance the need to provide robust protection from commercial content while still enabling great new experiences such as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback.

Aren't there already output content protection features in Windows XP?

Yes. Output content protections are not new requirements for commercial content. The CSS content protection system for DVD-video discs requires output protections such as Macrovision ACP and limiting the resolution on component video outputs to standard definition. Windows XP has supported these requirements for some time.

Is content protection something that is tied to High Definition video?

While HD content has some unique content protection requirements, many of the requirements apply to commercial content generally, independent of resolution.

What about S/PDIF audio connections?

Windows Vista does not require S/PDIF to be turned off, but Windows Vista continues to support the ability to turn it off for certain content -- a capability that has been present on the Windows platform for many years. Additionally, in order to support the requirements of some types of content, Windows Vista supports the ability to constrain the quality of the audio component of that content. Similar to image constraint for video, this quality constraint only applies to the audio from content whose policy requires the constraint, not to any other audio being played concurrently on the system. As a practical matter, these audio restrictions are not widely used today.

Will Component (YPbPr) video outputs be disabled by Windows Vista's content protection?

Similar to S/PDIF, Windows Vista does not require component video outputs to be disabled, but rather enables the enforcement of the usage policy set by content owners or service providers, including with respect to output restrictions and image constraint.

Will echo cancellation work less well for premium content?

We believe that Windows Vista provides applications with access to sufficient information to successfully build high quality echo cancellation functionality.

Will it mean that there will no longer be unified graphics drivers?

The Windows Vista content protection requirements for graphics drivers will not lead to movement away from unified drivers. In fact, all graphics drivers shipped with Windows Vista are unified drivers.

Will Windows Vista audio content protection mean that HDMI outputs can't be shown as S/PDIF outputs?

It is better if they show as different codec types, as it allows the difference to be reflected in the UI, thus providing the user help with their configuration and creating a better user experience. The user wants to know the difference between HDMI and S/PDIF, as they are different physical connectors.

What is revocation and where is it used?

Renewal and revocation mechanisms are an important part of providing robust protection for commercial audiovisual content. In the rare event that a revocation is required, Microsoft will work with the affected IHV to ensure that a new driver is made available, ideally in advance of the actual revocation. Revocation only impacts a graphics driver's ability to receive certain commercial audiovisual content; otherwise, the revoked driver will continue to function normally.

Does this complicate the process of writing graphics drivers?

Adding new functionality usually introduces new complexity. In this case, additional complexity is added to the graphics driver, but that complexity comes with the direct consumer benefit of new scenarios such as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback.

Will the 'tilt bit' mechanism cause problems even when the driver is not under attack from a hacker, e.g., when there are voltage spikes?

It is pure speculation to say that things like voltage fluctuations might cause a driver to think it is under attack from a hacker. It is up to a graphics IHV to determine what they regard as an attack. Even if such an event did cause playback to stop, the user could just press 'play' again and carry on watching the movie (after the driver has re-initialized, which takes about a second). Again, it is important to note that this could only occur in the case of watching the highest-grade premium content, such as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. In practice I doubt it would ever actually happen.

Does Windows Vista's use of OMAC-authenticated communication impact graphics driver performance?

The authenticated communication mechanisms used for Protected Video Path in Windows Vista are only actively used while commercial content is playing. This means that while there is a performance impact, it is limited to the scenarios where it is required to provide robust protection for commercial content.

Do content protection requirements mean that graphics chips have to provide hardware acceleration for video decode?

No. The Windows Vista content protection requirements do not require that graphics hardware include hardware acceleration for decode for many years, but such support is highly recommended to improve the user experience for HD content.

Will the video and audio content protection mechanisms affect gaming on the PC?

The Windows Vista content protection features were design for commercial audiovisual content and are typically not used in game applications. A game author would have to specifically request these features for them to impact game performance.
http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/wi...d-answers.aspx


In Response

Posted by jamieplucinski

After e-mailing a request to see this addressed, I didn't think it'd be done so soon. The main outrage came from the fact that Microsoft sold out to the industry that is attacking everyone from pre-teens, the dead, and everything in-between; I refuse to buy anything with DRM or copy protection added, if it means going without new movies/music then I am happy to do so.

I personally haven't brought a movie or music CD in more than 3 years, and since then many high-profile events have occurred that have made me feel good about that decision.

Handing over complete control to the RIAA/MPAA and allowing them to have the final say on what a Windows machine can and cannot do is completely unacceptable. I don't care if an exploit has been found in my drivers, unless it's to do with security in the sense of someone being able to compromise my machine I don't expect to see driver revocation just to satisfy some lawyer.

If you are going to offer the ability to playback movies and music but only on the condition that our machines satisfy the checklist that someone who has never worked in the computing industry has made, then thanks, but no thanks. I'd rather do without DVD-Playback and video/music playback from Microsoft, if Ultimate N was available I'd have asked for it at the end of the Beta. VLC and other open-source offerings that do without all the extra copy-protection that Microsoft add, if we're not going to use it, then why should it be forced upon us?

Do Corporate users have the ability to be exempt from Microsoft updates for "compromised" drivers, will the first playback of premium content result in my system being unable to render 3d images and games because I'm using basic drivers? What if the development cycle for third-party drivers doesn't fit in with Microsoft's revocation schedule? What about the users of DreamScene? Looping Video that's flagged as premium content would cause full-desktop image control into the copy protection system.

So for those out there who are willing to hand over control of their system's drivers to Microsoft and a team of lawyers have fun. But for the rest of us, what choice do we have?


Posted by mind

I think a big question that has not been answered is one of choice. If I were to live in an area where I was not bound by legacy copyright law, would I be able to turn off these features so that I wouldn't have a crippled operating system?

If as a user, I can't even install my own non-signed drivers, this sounds very much like a scheme to keep any non Microsoft-blessed manufacturer from making their own hardware (*cough* antitrust).

End-user choice and responsibility for those choices are hallmarks of the free world. I truly hope the market sees through this deliberate crippleware masquerading as an 'upgrade'.


Posted by prh99

It's still anti-consumer, and is there for one purpose and that's to give Hollywood control, often far beyond what copyright requires. There are people already punching holes in AACS (decrypting content and more recently finding the keys to do so in memory so they don't necessarily have to post those keys in public, making revocation harder) an HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are barely off the ground. Renewable or not this doesn't bode well for AACS. If the keys are exposed it doesn't matter how strong the crypto is.

Schneier's Law: "any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it."

I am disappointed that Microsoft has been so willing to cripple users PCs at Hollywood's request. I can only hope that some of features that got pulled (like WinFS) get released cause right now Vista isn't looking like an attractive upgrade.


Posted by dila813

6-9 months ago I couldn't wait for Vista to arrive.

I got my free upgrade certificate for a laptop and a PC that I just bought.

I will send it in to get the upgrade, but until I am convinced they will never be installed.

I was planning to purchase upgrades for my other 4 computers, now I am not.

Until every possible risk associated with this technology is solved and known I won't install this os. I can't afford to have myself cut off at the knees for this.

A black and white easy to read warrantee where Microsoft will give full replacement value for hardware and software that is caused to fail or degrade plus the cost of business disruption would be the only thing that would even make me reconsider.

If anything, the post above makes me feel like an idiot for installing XP in the first place and choosing to buy a PC last year.

Microsoft has done something for someone else's benefit, why don't you have them pay for my PC then? I bought the computer, the software, etc... They have no right to mess with it!

When I buy something, it is mine mine mine mine! I don't want someone going in and violating what I own. This is trespassing and sabotage! If I buy a graphics card, I expect full performance 100% of the time or I demand a refund. I don't care if my graphics card is 6 years old, it better play or else I expect a full refund!

If they don't want to sell their stinking filth on DVD, then don't, that's their choice, but what gives them the right to mess with my PC?

They should have to give us a rebate on every purchase of either MS Software or other software that may be impacted by their scheme. They are decreasing the value of our investments in computers and other software.


Posted by chickenboo

This essay has essentially CONFIRMED every horrible charge leveled at Vista by Gutmann. Using a bucket full of weasel words does nothing to convince me that Vista isn't screwing the consumer--or worse, the media/medical professional--for the sake of. . . of what? At the end of the day, the most infuriating thing about this crippleware is that it was done with such a blatant disregard for the consumer without a moment's hesitation. In what universe is it appropriate to give a content producer the power to turn off a user's hardware? How can you have no moral qualms with this?


Posted by JRHelgeson
Vista is DRM

Vista is NOTHING but a DRM platform that also happens to run Windows applications.

I am currently running Vista Ultimate on my laptop, a closed system with an integrated nvidia video card running Microsoft Certified drivers... I cannot play videos that *I* have created of screen recordings at full screen, I have to play them back in a window. Running full screen in Windows Media Player causes the playback to simply pause. I also cannot play videos that I have created from scratch and integrated into newly created powerpoint 2007 slides. When playing back on my laptop screen, the video plays fine, but when feeding the signal to the projector screen through the analog video output, the video plays for 1 second then pauses for 1/4 second repeatedly.

This is not protected content.

Sure, it isn't *supposed* to be applying DRM "features" to *MY* content, but it is.

This is horseshit, horseshit, horseshit! And for any of those who don't know what I'm talking about, its the shit that comes from a horse.

You cannot build restrictions into every device, every driver and expect it not to have unintended consequences in everyday usage.

Vista is completely defective by design.

http://slashdot.org/articles/07/01/21/0042202.shtml





My MythTV Install Experience
Gianfranco Berardi

I have long wanted to make a MythTV box instead of paying a monthly fee for something like TiVo. I figured that if I made my own machine, I would be in control of my time shifting. I wouldn’t have to worry about some media company telling me what I can do, nor would I pay a monthly fee for the “privilege”. Also, the Broadcast Flag is apparently very hard to kill, and the media companies seem intent on getting it out there. I wanted to build my own digital video recorder sooner rather than later.

That said, I did not find the MythTV installation experience to be very smooth at all. I did not realize before starting this project that MythTV only recently hit v0.20 and is still very rough around the edges. I had done quite a bit of research, learning what hardware worked well and what problems people encountered. Somehow I manage to avoid finding all of the complaints and show-stopper problems people have encountered until after I had already purchased the hardware and made the decision to make this machine.

As I write this, I am watching live TV while recording another channel. Also, in about 10 minutes, the first recording will end, and another recording session on yet another channel is scheduled. Earlier this afternoon, my girlfriend wanted to watch two shows that were airing at the same time, so it was the perfect first test. That test failed, but I wasn’t home when it happened. I don’t know if there was an actual problem with the system or if there was a problem with the user interface. I think the database or the capture cards crashed. Either way, I wasn’t happy.

But let me start from the beginning:

The Initial Hardware Purchase

I made the decision to put together this machine at the beginning of December. In order to get everything ready in time for Christmas, I didn’t want to order the parts online and risk something going wrong in shipping. I went to Fry’s to purchase everything. My goals with this machine:

· I wanted to be able to watch TV while recording something at the same time.
· I wanted it to be quiet.
· I wanted it to look like it belongs in the living room.

Of course, none of my preferred hardware was available, but I was mainly concerned with the capture cards. I picked out a small Antec case, a miniATX Abit motherboard with onboard sound and video (including integrated TV-Out), an AMD64-X2 processor that was energy efficient, and 2GB of DDR2 memory. From what I had read, I had way too much processing power and memory for my needs, but I figure that this machine might be able to do more in the future.

As I said, I couldn’t find my preferred capture cards. I wanted to find a Hauppauge PVR-500, which is one PCI card that has two inputs. I read that there are some slight problems with it, especially compared to the PVR-150, but they seemed to have workarounds or fixes. It seems that miniATX motherboards do not have more than two PCI slots, and so freeing up one slot would mean that air flow through the case would be unhindered as well as allowing upgrades to the machine in the future. Maybe I might want to get another capture card, or I might get a sound card if I find that the onboard audio isn’t sufficient.

Well, I couldn’t find anything by Hauppauge. The next thing I thought I could get was the ATI TV-Wonder card, which is not to be mistaken for the ATI All-in-Wonder card. The former is actually usable in GNU/Linux; the latter isn’t. I found the HD version of the TV-Wonder, but I was not sure if I could use it with standard cable. In the end, I settled for the Avermedia AverTV Go 007 FM. There were two of these cards, and both were discounted. I think I had read about it and knew that it was slightly tricky to get working, but it was doable.

I bought a 300GB Seagate SATA hard drive and a Samsung DVD writer. I bought the SATA drive because I wanted it to be quick, and I bought the Samsung because I had read that it was a quiet drive.

In the end, the total price came out to almost $900, which is $400 more than I expected a MythTV box to cost. Yeesh!

The First Problem

I put everything together on Christmas Eve, only to find that the capture cards wouldn’t fit in the PCI slots! At first I thought that it was a manufacturing defect of the PCI cards, but a few days later I found that the problem was with the motherboard. Apparently someone decided to put some tall capacitors right next to the PCI slots, and the capture cards have something sticking down. By the laws of physics, they can’t fit in the same space at the same time, so I had to bring back the motherboard and get a new one. Having already purchased a processor and memory, I needed to find a motherboard that was compatible. I managed to get an MSI miniATX board that allowed me to install the CPU, the memory, and the PCI cards. It didn’t have integrated TV-Out, but I didn’t really have a choice unless I wanted to order something online and wait for it.

More Hardware

When I was ready to start installing the software, I realized that I didn’t have a way to connect the machine to my television. I also didn’t have a cable splitter, so I couldn’t use both tuner cards either. After doing some more research, I found that I could get an external converter to connect VGA output to A/V inputs. I bought the converter, the cable splitter, and some high-quality cables.

The Software: First Attempt

My first choice was to try using Knoppmyth. It is basically a MythTV installation based off of the Knoppix distribution. I read that it is very easy to install MythTV with it, so I obtained the latest version, R5E50, and burned a CD.

I want to point out that the The Pamphlet of KnoppMyth never mentions how to select and create the four partitions it suggests. I kept getting strange errors about a drive being read-only, and I just assumed it was a problem with Knoppix/Knoppmyth not handling SATA correctly. No, it turns out that it is a problem of not letting me easily see what it was I was supposed to do. When you select Partition, you should also press SPACE to select the drive. If you don’t select the drive in this way, you will basically run cfdisk without any arguments, which gives the same error message. Of course, the UI should do a better job than highlight the entire line. It should highlight the spot that lets me see that I should put an asterisk in the ASCII box. Better yet, since I only had one drive anyway, it should automatically put one in there for me so that just hitting Enter should do the right thing. Interestingly, the boot-loader installation works by defaulting to one of the choices, so why not the do the same in the partition option? It took me over 40 minutes before I realized why I was having this issue.

Now that that headache is out of the way, I had to go through the install process multiple times. First, apparently because I was installing with the computer connected to the television, it wouldn’t start the X server correctly and I had nothing but a blank screen at startup. Then I had a strange problem of the drive being mounted by the installer and then preventing the installer from doing its job:

Error: Formatting of /dev/sda1 failed. Some messages
from mkfs.ext3: mke2fs 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006)
/dev/sda1 is mounted; will not make a filesystem here!

I got the above error at two different points in the installation process, and I found that it seems to happen after it is done copying files. At one point I decided to start over from scratch, making sure to read all of the directions carefully, and I finally got the nice message:

KnoppMyth was successfully installed to hd.

w00t! All it seemed to take was knowing that I had to press the spacebar at certain points.

So, the pamphlet says “Once complete, reboot the system.” Ok, but do I take the CD out? It seemed to make sense, but it would be nice if it was clearer on this point. Maybe it still needed the CD for further work? I had to hit the spacebar, so maybe it would make sense for it to need the CD again. I took my chances with removing the CD.

After staring at a blank screen for a few minutes, I decided that I needed to get a spare monitor in my living room. I knew there was a reason not to get rid of it yet. Of course, I still get disturbing error messages:

Mounting local filesystem .. mount: you must specify the filesystem type
FAILED

That FAILED part is in bright red, by the way.

And I still get a blank screen. Soooo….start over? Sure!

Except I still get a blank screen once the install is finished and I’ve rebooted. Well, there is a non-blinking white cursor at the top left, and the computer doesn’t seem to take any input from the keyboard except CTRL+ALT+DEL. I think that the X server was somehow running, but I wasn’t able to see anything. Hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL seems to let the installation actually shutdown correctly.

Knowing that something is working doesn’t make me feel better that the entire system isn’t working. Somehow, I only now found out that Knoppmyth is apparently not as easy as it is made out to be. I find a few articles about people experience problems with MySQL not starting correctly and incorrect default pathnames during setup. I also don’t know why the X server didn’t startup correctly. Knoppmyth is still a young project, and I look forward to using it in the future, but it just wasn’t going to work for me without a lot of manual effort. Effort defeated the purpose of using Knoppmyth in the first place, and so I decided to try something else.

The Software: Second Attempt

After reading about the success people had with Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu, I decided to use Ubuntu. It is based on Debian, which is what I use on my desktop, so I could feel comfortable installing and maintaining the machine. I found an AMD64 version of the Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 install CD image, burned a copy, and set to work installing. I was amazed that it installed a complete desktop system within what seemed like minutes. It seemed like all of my hardware was detected, but I found that the nForce 410 chipset is not getting detected. I couldn’t get the onboard audio working, but it may have to do with the fact that the drivers are not available for the kernel version I have. Luckily, I had a spare USB audio device laying around. This Turtlebeach device would not install on a Windows 98 system sometime last year, but Ubuntu automatically detected it. It just worked!

Installing the packages for MythTV was actually fairly straightforward. Unfortunately, I ran into more trouble.

Even More Hardware

It turned out that the two Avermedia cards didn’t act the same. One of them worked fine, although I couldn’t seem to get audio working. I read that someone had to redirect /dev/dsp to another dsp device, so I wasn’t too worried. The other card, however, would not get detected correctly. lspci -v can tell me that it comes from Avermedia, but it sees it as an unknown device. I even tried using it in a different PCI slot and with the good card removed from the machine, but nothing seemed to work. Another frustrating thing? It turns out that the Avermedia cards weren’t hardware encoders. So I went to Microcenter and bought a Hauppauge PVR-150. I replaced the bad card, installed the ivtv drivers and firmware, and I was able to get video on both devices. While the PVR-150 worked great, the Avermedia card was still silent and video stuttered. I bought a second PVR-150, replaced the remaining Avermedia card, and now I am testing everything.

Those two cards cost about $100 each. Sorry, Wallet.

What’s Next?

The PVR-150 came with a remote control which is supposed to be easy to setup with the MythTV box. Right now, I have to use a keyboard to control the Myth frontend, and the keyboard does not reach all lthe way to the couch. The remote will make things more convenient.

I also want to try to install some Myth plugins. MythWeather, MythDVD, MythNews, and MythGame should be fairly self-explanatory. MythWeb would allow me to manage the recording schedule from a remote web browser.

General Issues

While I was trying to get the non-hardware encoder cards working, it was terribly unstable. The backend crashes, the MySQL database crashes, and the frontend crashes, and way too often to be usable. Sometimes the capture cards seem to get corrupted, requiring a reboot. It needs to be more stable to stay in the living room.

Now

I just finished recording two shows while I watched live TV. The well-supported hardware encoders really ease the load on my machine. Both shows seem to have recorded just fine, and I didn’t notice much more than a short stutter when it started recording the second show in the background. I am watching one of the recordings, and I am pleasantly surprised to find that it doesn’t have any strange video or audio problems. And it just automatically skipped a commercial break for me! Sweet!

If I were to do this project all over again, I would probably have saved some money by getting a cheaper processor. From what I understand, 1GHz might have been good enough, although I could probably spend only a few more dollars to get at least 2GHz. I may not have needed more than 512MB or 1GB of memory, so there could be some significant savings right there. I also would have bought a better motherboard that didn’t use an unsupported nForce chipset, and I would have bought the hardware encoder capture cards in the first place.

Hopefully this information will be helpful to someone who is looking to install MythTV. Basically, unless you have well-supported hardware, you will likely run into installation problems that remind me of what GNU/Linux installation was like years ago. Knoppmyth may work out of the box with the right motherboard and capture cards, but it may be easier to just install a different distro and install MythTV on top of it.
http://gbgames.com/blog/?page_id=553

[JackSpratts]

In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real
Matt Richtel

The XXX industry has gotten too graphic, even for its own tastes.

Pornography has long helped drive the adoption of new technology, from the printing press to the videocassette. Now pornographic movie studios are staying ahead of the curve by releasing high-definition DVDs.

They have discovered that the technology is sometimes not so sexy. The high-definition format is accentuating imperfections in the actors — from a little extra cellulite on a leg to wrinkles around the eyes.

Hollywood is dealing with similar problems, but they are more pronounced for pornographers, who rely on close-ups and who, because of their quick adoption of the new format, are facing the issue more immediately than mainstream entertainment companies.

Producers are taking steps to hide the imperfections. Some shots are lit differently, while some actors simply are not shot at certain angles, or are getting cosmetic surgery, or seeking expert grooming.

“The biggest problem is razor burn,” said Stormy Daniels, an actress, writer and director.

Ms. Daniels is also a skeptic. “I’m not 100 percent sure why anyone would want to see their porn in HD,” she said.

The technology’s advocates counter that high definition, by making things clearer and crisper, lets viewers feel as close to the action as possible.

“It puts you in the room,” said the director known as Robby D., whose films include “Sexual Freak.”

The pornographers’ progress with HD may also be somewhat slowed by Sony, one of the main backers of the Blu-ray high-definition disc format. Sony said last week that, in keeping with a longstanding policy, it would not mass-produce pornographic videos on behalf of the movie makers.

The decision has forced pornographers to use the competing HD-DVD format or, in some cases, to find companies other than Sony that can manufacture copies of Blu-ray movies.

The movie makers assert that it is shortsighted of Sony to snub them, given how pornography helps technologies spread.

“When you’re introducing a new format, it would seem like the adult guys can help,” said Steven Hirsch, co-chief executive officer of Vivid Entertainment Group, a big player in the industry. Mr. Hirsch added that high definition, regardless of format, “is the future.”

Despite the challenges, pornographers — who distributed some 7,000 new movies on DVD last year and sold discs worth $3.6 billion in the United States — are rapidly moving to high-definition.

One major company, Digital Playground, plans to release its first four HD-DVD titles this month, and plans four new ones each month. In March, Vivid plans to release “Debbie Does Dallas ... Again,” its first feature for both HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

Vivid, like Digital Playground, has been shooting with high-definition cameras for two years to build up a catalog of high-definition movies. Both studios have released the movies in standard definition but plan to make the high-definition versions available as compatible disc players and televisions become more popular.

The studios said their experience using the technology gives them an advantage in understanding how to cope with the mixed blessing of hypercrisp images. Their techniques include using postproduction tools that let them digitally soften the actors’ skin tone.

“It takes away the blemishes and the pits and harshness and makes it look like they have baby skin,” said the director known as Joone, who made “Pirates,” one of the industry’s top-selling videos. It will be available this month in high-definition.

Joone does not use a last name, but he does use a number of techniques to keep his films blemish-free. They include giving out lifestyle tips.

“I tell the girls to work out more, cut down on the carbs, hit the treadmill,” he said.

Within the industry, the issue seems to have created a difference in perspective that cuts roughly along gender lines. Some male actors have begun using makeup to mitigate wrinkles or facial flaws, but generally they, and the male directors, are less worried about high-definition’s glare and more enamored of the technology.

Ms. Daniels said that attitude was just so typical of men.

“Men are all about outdoing each other, being up with the times, being cool, having the latest technology,” she said. “They’re willing to sacrifice our vanity and imperfections to beat each other” to high-definition, she said.

Other female actors say they generally like working with high-definition — except for the cosmetic-surgery part.

Jesse Jane, one of the industry’s biggest stars, plans to go under the knife next month to deal with one side effect of high-definition. The images are so clear that Ms. Jane’s breast implants, from an operation six years ago, can be seen bulging oddly on screen.

“I’m having my breasts redone because of HD,” she said.

The stretch marks on Ms. Jane from seven years ago when she gave birth to her son are also more apparent. But she deals with those blemishes in a simpler way: by liberal use of tanning spray.

Still, Ms. Jane likes the technology, as does her close friend Kirsten Price, 25, who appeared in “Manhunters” and “Just Like That.”

“HD is great because people want to see how people really look,” Ms. Price said. “People just want to see what’s real.”

Ms. Price is allowing them to do so, mostly. She had laser treatments to diminish tiny purple veins on her thighs that weren’t visible to viewers before.

“You can see things you cannot see with the naked eye. You see skin blemishes; you see cottage cheese,” said Robbie D. “But some cellulite is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s kind of sexy.”

The technology makes the experience more intimate, he said. “People look to adult movies for personal contact, and yet they’re still not getting it. HD lets them see a little bit more of the girl.”

That’s not necessarily good, said Savanna Samson, an actress who last December directed her first movie, “Any Way You Want Me.” During a scene in which she played a desperate housewife, she ran into a problem: the high-definition camera revealed she had a tiny ill-placed pimple.

“We kept stopping and trying to hide it. We put on makeup and powder, but there was no way,” Ms. Samson said. Finally, they tried another approach: “We just changed positions,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/bu...ia/22porn.html





Seagate CEO: I Help People "Watch Porn"
From Nov.

You think tech execs are boring? Check out a freewheeling interview with Seagate's Bill Watkins, who might be Silicon Valley's most outspoken CEO.
Jeffrey M. O'Brien

Sitting at the arm of a tech CEO during a corporate dinner is rarely as interesting as you might imagine. Usually, the CEO stays on message throughout the meal as a PR flak hovers, smiles, nods and prods the conversation along. Just keep the drinks coming, guys.

Not so with Bill Watkins, the mercurial, salty-mouthed Texan who runs the $15 billion hard-drive king Seagate Technology. At a San Francisco dinner on Tuesday evening, he was candid about his company's ultimate mission: "Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."

Watkins is like that renegade uncle you heard so much about as a kid - the one that your parents were always afraid would be a bad influence. An adventure racer and sports junkie, Watkins spends $1.8 million of his company's money every year on Eco Seagate, flying 200 employees to New Zealand every year to do a modified triathlon.

It's a controversial approach to team-building - popular with participants and otherwise widely criticized as a waste of money. But it's consistent with Watkins' style. He does - and says - what he thinks is right.

At San Francisco's Town Hall restaurant Tuesday night, Watkins was game to discuss just about anything. We did go off-the-record once - a wise choice by him - but all else was fair game. Here's a peek at some of the ground we covered.

Seagate (Charts): "The biggest issues in our business are security, DRM (How can we unlock the content?), form factor and power. How can we make a low-power solution? These are the problems." As for upcoming products, "We'll have a terabyte drive out by the summer. It'll probably be about $700, but you know how it works. People will be able to get it for less."

Dell (Charts): "The 90s were all about the enterprise, and that's why Dell did so well. Now, it's all about the consumer, and that's why Dell is having problems. They don't understand the consumer. They want a competitor to the iPod and what do they do? They go with Creative."

'This business is about the consumer'

Apple (Charts): "Apple figured out a long time ago that this business is about the consumer, and the world finally caught up to them. Most companies have a technology and go looking for a problem to solve. Steve Jobs looked at what was happening - people were loading music onto their computers and wanted to take it with them - and he built a product to solve that problem."

Watkins, who has an understandable Apple-envy (after all, what is an iPod but a hard-drive with a sleek-but-simple operating system and nifty packaging?) also discussed the importance of building Seagate's brand. The company plans to introduce a number of consumer-oriented storage products at the tech trade show CES - think high-capacity drives that will be plug-and-play with any computer, so you don't have to carry a laptop - and is readying an ad campaign created by Apple's agency, TBWA Chiat/Day.

Mistakes & Management: "Let me tell you a great story. I had these guys go into Scientific Atlanta (Charts) trying to sell one of our drives for their boxes. Scientific Atlanta said 'They run too hot. We don't need that capacity and it needs to be cooler.' But our guys kept pushing our new product and talking about fans to cool them, so we lost the business. They didn't understand that with cable boxes, people don't want fans, because they don't want to hear that in their bedroom. And speed doesn't matter. So, eventually, I went in and won the business back, but it taught me a lesson. I need to teach my people how to talk to the customer better - and to listen."

The Blue-Ray/HD-DVD war: "Let them fight it out. They can have it. As far as I'm concerned, it's really a battle of electronic storage versus hardware."

'Come on guys, get over it'

The media: "People worry that newspapers are going out of business. So what? It's the content that's important. No one gives a s**t about the delivery mechanism. Think about mail. You had the pony express, truck delivery, airmail, email. You don't care how it gets to you. I read more now than I ever did, but I get it off my PC. I don't need to go down to the end of the driveway and pick up the newspaper. It's the content that's most important."

Sarbanes Oxley: "CEOs who whine about Sarbanes Oxley don't belong in their jobs. Come on guys, get over it."

The private equity boom: Seagate went private in 2000 - in a $2 billion buyout led by Silver Lake Partners - only to go public again in 2002, giving Watkins insight into the current privatization wave. "It's all about investors getting short-sighted. They've lost their patience. There's nothing these private equity firms do that Fidelity couldn't do. If you're Fidelity, and you own $40 million of my business, and you want a meeting to discuss how my business could be run more efficiently, I'll take the meeting. I'll listen. But that's not the way things work. When you go private, the only thing you think about is going public again."

The 2006 NCAA championship football game: A University of Texas alum, Watkins says going to school in Austin is a life sentence. He still can't get enough of his beloved Longhorns - and he was damned if he was going to miss the championship game. "I was at CES, in Vegas. I was supposed to take some meetings, but I said no. I went up to my room, ordered a pizza and watched one of the greatest college football games ever."

UT's 2003 loss in the NCAA basketball Final Four match to my alma mater, Syracuse University: "I lost so much money on that game."
'Never ask board members what they think'

The M&A boom: The Valley is no longer "about building a company and a culture. It's about making money for the top guys. If you look back to Intel (Charts) and Fairchild, they set out to build a company that would become massively large. Google (Charts) was another good example. They waited a long time. They wanted to build a big company. People don't think like that now." That includes, Watkins continues, YouTube. "YouTube is like eBay. The founders didn't know what they were doing. The consumers just took hold of it."

The HP pretexting scandal: When I ask if anyone really cared about this story outside of the media, Watkins shakes his head. "Wall Street certainly didn't. I saw it and thought, it's good to know there's a board of directors more dysfunctional than mine."

The secret to managing a board of directors: "You never ask board members what they think. You tell them what you're going to do."
http://money.cnn.com/2006/11/30/maga...tune/index.htm





Why ISPs Can Breathe Easier After a Porno Decision
Eric J. Sinrod

Internet service providers naturally are concerned about circumstances under which they potentially could be held liable for content posted by users. But after a recent decision by a Texas federal judge, ISPs can breathe a collective sigh of relief.

The judge dismissed an ISP as a defendant in the case of Doe v. Bates (PDF), even though the offending conduct at issue was alleged to be in violation of criminal law.

In that case, the plaintiffs alleged that the ISP knowingly hosted illegal child pornography on a particular e-group. An e-group is an Internet-based forum where users can engage in discussions and share files and the like. The e-group at issue was just one of a multitude of e-groups registered with this ISP.

While the individual defendant, by the name of Bates, had been imprisoned for his involvement as the moderator of the subject e-group, the plaintiffs claimed that the ISP had liability under a variety of legal theories, including negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, invasion of privacy and civil conspiracy. The plaintiffs also asserted that the offending Internet content violated criminal law against child pornography.
The legislative history, as summarized by the judge, supported immunity for ISPs precisely so that they could act with freedom in regulating "obscenity."

In turn, the ISP filed a motion to be dismissed from the case. The ISP argued that it was entitled to immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), with respect to content provided by another. The federal judge presiding over the case in Texas agreed. This is important, as it appears to be the first instance in which a court has confirmed that Section 230 ISP immunity applies in a private civil lawsuit, even when that suit is based on alleged criminal acts.

Specifically, the judge held that an intentional violation of criminal law is not an exception to the civil immunity provided to ISPs under the CDA. In analyzing the legislative history to Section 230, the judge found that Congress was clear in immunizing ISPs.

Indeed, according to the judge, "while the facts of a child pornography case such as this one may be highly offensive, Congress has decided that the parties to be punished and deterred are not the Internet service providers but rather those who created and posted the illegal material...such as the moderator of the...e-group."

The legislative history, as summarized by the judge, supported immunity for ISPs precisely so that they could act with freedom in regulating "obscenity." With such immunity, they can react and seek to limit improper content without fear that their regulating conduct could open them up to liability for grappling with the content in more than a passive role.

Thus, according to the judge, "Congress decided not to allow private litigants to bring civil claims based on their own beliefs that a service provider's actions violated the criminal laws."

This represents a major win for ISPs. Now they can argue that not only does Section 230 afford immunity for third-party content in the usual civil case but that immunity even extends to civil cases in which the underlying content also violates criminal laws.

Of course, this is just one decision by one federal judge, and it is not binding on other federal trial judges. It certainly is not binding on appellate courts that may consider the issue. But it still can be looked at by other courts for persuasive influence.
http://news.com.com/Why+ISPs+can+bre...3-6152830.html





Sharon Stone: Bad Movie Specialist
AP

At least someone was happy Sharon Stone reprised her notorious femme-fatale role with "Basic Instinct 2."

The box-office bomb received seven nominations Monday for the Razzie Awards that mock the bottom of Hollywood's barrel, among them worst picture and worst actress of the year.

Also receiving seven nominations was the Wayans brothers comedy "Little Man," about a thief posing as a baby, including worst picture and director for Keenen Ivory Wayans.

Shawn and Marlon Wayans shared a worst-actor nomination, while sisters Hilary and Haylie Duff shared a worst-actress nomination for "Material Girls."

"We stuck the siblings together to allow room for more dreck," said Razzies founder John Wilson.

The other worst-picture nominees were the fantasies "BloodRayne" and "Lady in the Water" and the thriller "The Wicker Man."

Winners will be announced Feb. 24, the day before the Academy Awards.

Joining Stone and the Duffs in the worst-actress category were Lindsay Lohan for "Just My Luck," Kristanna Loken for "BloodRayne" and Jessica Simpson for "Employee of the Month."

Stone previously won a Razzie as worst-actress for 1994's "The Specialist" and "Intersection."

"She's what we call a Razzie repeat offender. Perhaps even a recidivist," Wilson said.

"Basic Instinct 2" also had a nomination for worst screen couple for Stone's "lopsided breasts." Also nominated were co-star David Thewlis for worst supporting actor and the movie's director, Michael Caton-Jones.

Along with the Wayans, "Little Man" co-star Rob Schneider had a worst-actor nomination. The other nominees were Tim Allen for "The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause," "The Shaggy Dog" and "Zoom"; Nicolas Cage for "The Wicker Man"; and Larry the Cable Guy for "Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector."

The Razzies added a new category, worst excuse for family entertainment. The nominees were "Deck the Halls," "Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties," "RV," "The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause" and "The Shaggy Dog."

The big surprise for Wilson was that all-time Razzies champ Sylvester Stallone's "Rocky Balboa" was not nominated. Stallone, who has 30 Razzie nominations and 10 wins, surprised many skeptics by delivering a sequel that was well received by audiences and earned better-than-expected reviews.

"At the first of the year, you could not have convinced me it wasn't going to be a Razzie contender," Wilson said. "I would like to publicly say that Stallone has made a good movie."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1029182





‘Idol’ Judge Says She’s Healthy and Sober
Edward Wyatt

Paula Abdul, the “American Idol” judge whose strange behavior in recent televised interviews has been the subject of widespread speculation, said Saturday that she was healthy and sober and had not been under the influence of drugs while working to promote the show.

At least three videos of Ms. Abdul have surfaced online in recent weeks showing her slurring words in interviews, giving nonsensical answers to questions and swaying in her seat. In one interview she appeared to fall asleep, keeping her eyes closed for about five seconds. Most of those taped segments, which had been posted on video-sharing sites like YouTube, have been removed from the Internet in recent days.

In an interview after a panel discussion with television journalists in Pasadena, Calif., on Saturday, Ms. Abdul said she had not been impaired during the interviews, on the show or at any time during her work promoting “American Idol,” Fox’s hit reality show.

“I’ve never been drunk,” she said. “I’m not under the influence of anything.” Referring to her tenure as a judge on “American Idol,” she added, “The first five years no one said anything about how I behaved or how I talked.”

Gossip about Ms. Abdul’s behavior started last year, when she seemed to make nonsensical comments on the show about some contestants. In one March broadcast, when asked about one contestant’s elimination, she said, “Simon says because one of them ate pizza and the other one ate salad.”

On the same show she also tangled her words when she tried to explain a strange proverb about a moth and a melon, prompting Randy Jackson, another “Idol” judge, to wonder aloud what she had been drinking.

On Saturday Ms. Abdul and Simon Cowell, the third “Idol” judge, said that incident started when Mr. Cowell whispered a made-up proverb about a moth and a melon in her ear just before the cameras turned to her. Confusion ensued.

This month an interview with a Seattle television station went awry when Ms. Abdul seemed to be answering questions different from those being asked. She said the problem was twofold: first, she was tired after doing three hours of interviews with stations across the country to promote the show; and second, during the Seattle interview, the audio feed into her earpiece was coming from two separate television stations. She said she believed the audio glitch was being addressed while she was off camera; instead the camera was on.

“That was a mistake I had nothing to do with,” Ms. Abdul said Saturday. “I didn’t know I had two studios in my ear. I wish it were a better story, but that’s it.”

She said it is her nature to make fun of situations that cause her stress, like appearing on live television. “I’m doing my job and having fun,” she said. “Although I might not take myself seriously, there are young girls watching me, and I know I’m a role model. I’ve been a teacher, and the fact that some of them would look up to me and want to be the next choreographer or the next singer, I would not violate that trust.”

During the session with television reporters Mr. Cowell also responded to complaints that his recent comments to contestants on the show have seemed cruel, focusing on their appearance more than on their singing ability. Last week on the show’s two-night season premiere, he mocked one contestant’s appearance, comparing him to a jungle creature, and made fun of another’s heft. One contestant Mr. Cowell mocked appeared to be mentally impaired; Mr. Cowell said Saturday that he had not been aware that the young man was a former Special Olympian.

Mr. Cowell said that he understood why his remarks were criticized but that he felt it would be wrong to censor himself.

“I take your point, which is, It’s a singing competition, and why should I call someone, I think it was a ‘bush baby,’ ” he said. “The appeal of this show is that we’ve never tried to censor this show. And there are times, trust me, when I watch it back and I just think, ‘God, I wish I hadn’t said that, and why do they put it in the show?’ But it’s something we all sign up for, good things and bad things. I feel more comfortable being on a show where we are prepared to show the warts as well as the good things.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/ar...ic/22paul.html





'Healthy Models' Initiative Precedes NYC's Fashion Week
Samantha Critchell

The American fashion industry says it wants its models to be healthy, not anorexic, not bulimic and not chain-smokers. And to help models achieve that, the Council of Fashion Designers of America on Friday released a list of recommendations as part of a new health initiative.

The panel that formulated the guidelines included CFDA President Diane von Furstenberg, nutritionist Joy Bauer, modeling agent Louis Chaban, fitness trainer David Kirsch and Dr. Susan Ice, vice president and medical director of Philadelphia's Renfrew Center, which is dedicated to eating disorders.

The guidelines were issued three weeks before designers start showcasing their fall collections during New York's Fashion Week, which starts Feb. 2.

The guidelines, which are only suggestions and not binding for the industry, include the following:

· Keep models from 16 off the runway and don't allow models under 18 to work at fittings or photo shoots past midnight.
· Educate those in the industry to identify the early warning signs of eating disorders.
· Require models identified as having an eating disorder to receive professional help and only allow those models to continue with approval from that professional.
· Develop workshops on the causes and effects of eating disorders, and raise awareness of the effects of smoking and tobacco-related disease.
· During fashion shows, provide healthy meals and snacks, while prohibiting smoking and alcohol.

What's missing from these voluntary guidelines -- aside from a means of enforcement -- is any mention of the Body Mass Index. In September, Madrid Fashion Week banned models with a body mass index of less than 18. The standard accepted by the World Health Organization is that anyone with an index under 18.5 is underweight.

Italian government officials also got involved in this too-skinny model debate, apparently prompted in part by Spain's move and by the death in November of Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston, who weighed 88 pounds when she died. In a December deal with the Italian fashion industry, designers agreed not to hire models younger than 16, and to require all models to submit medical proof that they do not suffer from eating disorders.

"The CFDA Health Initiative is about awareness and education, not policing. Therefore, the committee is not recommending that models get a doctor's physical examination to assess their health or body-mass index to be permitted to work," according to a statement from the CFDA. "Eating disorders are emotional disorders that have psychological, behavioral, social, and physical manifestations, of which body weight is only one."

Steven Kolb, executive director for the CFDA, told The Associated Press that the designers' understanding of the issue as explained to them by health specialists is that BMI is only one factor in a long list of criteria to identify eating disorders.

"A lot of the girls who work the runway are genetically thin. You go backstage and you see a lot of girls eating a lot of food and they're not gaining weight," Kolb said.
http://newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1028463





More Borat Suits Target Release Tactics
Leslie Simmons

Sacha Baron Cohen topped off his best actor acceptance speech at the Golden Globes with a thank-you to "every American who has not sued me."

The joke wasn't too far from the truth.

While Cohen's movie "Borat" has racked up accolades and $240 million in international boxoffice, two additional complaints filed quietly over the holidays have added to the three pending cases targeting the film and its distributor, 20th Century Fox.

In the recent cases, filed Dec. 22 in Alabama State Court and Dec. 26 in Los Angeles Superior Court, both plaintiffs allege they were depicted unfairly by "Borat's" producers. In Alabama, Kathie Martin, owner of the etiquette school featured in the film, claims she was subjected to sexist and anti-Semetic comments by Cohen, and says she signed the consent form with the understanding the etiquette class was being filmed for a Belarus Television documentary. Only after the filming, through research by her husband, did she learn she had been fooled.

The latest Los Angeles case was filed by a rodeo spectator identified only as John Doe 3, who attended a Salem, Va., event where Borat sang the Kazakh national anthem to the tune of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

The suit claims Cohen was invited to sing under the belief that he was a Kazakh reporter. The scene featuring the plaintiff allegedly portrays him falsely as "uneducated, racist, sexist and bigoted."

The latest complaints join pending suits in California, New York and South Carolina.

The legal barrage began Nov. 9 with a filing by fraternity members depicted making racist and sexist comments in the film who claim producers served them alcohol and lied about where the film would be shown before asking that they sign releases.

In December, Judge Joseph Biderman denied the fraternity plaintiffs' request for a preliminary injunction requiring Fox to delete or alter scenes in the film pending the outcome of the litigation. In response to Biderman's ruling, Fox announced March 9 as the release date for an unedited "Borat" DVD, which will include deleted and extended scenes.

The fraternity plaintiffs' attorney, Olivier Taillieu of Beverly Hills' Zuber & Taillieu, argued at the hearing that the tactics used by producers to obtain signed releases justified allowing the court to consider parol evidence of other alleged promises.

The studio's attorney, Louis Petrich of Leopold Petrich & Smith, argued the plaintiffs were not given alcohol before signing and did not suffer any diminished capacity, as alleged, when agreeing to participate.

Biderman found that Taillieu failed to meet the high standard for a preliminary injunction, but he made no finding as to the merits of the overall case. A status conference is set for Feb. 27.

Most experts agree the law is on the studio's side because a merger clause in the releases incorporates any other promises into the written agreement.

"If one accepts the legal concept of 'merger,' then it doesn't matter what promises the filmmakers made to the frat brothers," columnist Julie Hilden wrote.

But no court has fully evaluated evidence of the producers' conduct, and case law is thin on what constitutes a level of behavior offensive enough to void a signed release. Further, Fox risks encouraging more litigation if it chooses to settle the current matters. The footage on the DVD release could draw the ire of other plaintiffs.

But so far, Fox has not been damaged by the cases. In early December, the Romainian villagers who filed suit in New York were told by a U.S. District Court judge to re-file their case because the allegations were not specific. Though an amended complaint should have been filed by Dec. 18, court records show nothing has been submitted.
http://www.hollywoodreporteresq.com/..._id=1003537323





Anatomy of an Insult: ABC Is Stung by an Actor’s Anti-Gay Slurs
Edward Wyatt

Executives at ABC and its parent, Disney, are mulling the future of the actor Isaiah Washington, a star of the hit series “Grey’s Anatomy,” after Mr. Washington last week publicly used an anti-gay slur for the second time in roughly three months, a Disney executive said Friday.

The situation has potentially great implications for ABC, which is reaping millions of dollars in advertising revenues from a show that, in its third season, is among the highest rated on television.

The executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because company officials were instructed not to go beyond a prepared statement, said that Mr. Washington’s behavior could be considered grounds for dismissal under Disney’s corporate antidiscrimination policy.

ABC and Touchstone, Disney’s television studio, called Mr. Washington’s behavior “unacceptable” in a statement issued on Thursday, three days after Mr. Washington’s most recent remark, which occurred in the backstage press room at the Golden Globes ceremony last week.

Mr. Washington later apologized for the remark and said that he was seeking help for “issues I obviously need to examine within my own soul.” But the damage might be done for Mr. Washington, 43, who portrays Dr. Preston Burke on “Grey’s Anatomy,” which this season has attracted an audience of more than 18 million viewers each week, according to Nielsen Media Research. On Thursday, the first broadcast since the show won for best dramatic television series at the Golden Globes, the audience numbered nearly 22 million, according to ABC.

Mr. Washington first got into trouble for using the same slur during an off-camera dispute on the set of the show in October. The remark was aimed at T. R. Knight, who portrays Dr. George O’Malley on the series and who had not previously talked publicly about his sexuality. It followed a brief fight between Mr. Washington and a third actor on the show, Patrick Dempsey. After that incident became public, Mr. Washington apologized, and Mr. Knight publicly acknowledged that he was gay. The October fight has continued to be the subject of gossip around the show, and after the Golden Globe victory for “Grey’s Anatomy,” the show’s actors and creator gathered backstage to answer reporters’ questions. One asked about the fight and the remark.

Mr. Washington moved to the microphone and denied that he ever used the slur to describe Mr. Knight, at the same time repeating the word. Fellow cast members who were with Mr. Washington appeared shaken, quickly going from jubilant to solemn. After the awards show another “Grey’s” actor, Katherine Heigl, publicly repudiated Mr. Washington’s remarks.

Mr. Knight appeared on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” on Wednesday and disputed Mr. Washington’s denial of using the slur in October.

As discussion of the incidents grew, Mr. Washington remained silent until after ABC issued a statement chastising him.

“We have a longstanding policy to create and maintain respectful workplaces for all our employees,” the ABC statement said. “We dealt with the original situation in October, and thought the issue resolved. Therefore, we are greatly dismayed that Mr. Washington chose to use such inappropriate language at the Golden Globes, language that he himself deemed ‘unfortunate’ in his previous public apology. We take this situation very seriously. His actions are unacceptable and are being addressed.”

An ABC spokeswoman declined to comment on how the issue was addressed in October and what steps were being considered now.

After ABC issued its statement, Mr. Washington again apologized, after first firing his publicist. He expressed his regret to Mr. Knight, colleagues, fans “and especially the lesbian and gay community for using a word that is unacceptable in any context or circumstance.”

The statement appeared to acknowledge that Mr. Washington had used the slur before, despite his most recent denial. “By repeating the word Monday night, I marred what should have been a perfect night for everyone who works on ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ ” the statement said. “I can neither defend nor explain my behavior. I can also no longer deny to myself that there are issues I obviously need to examine within my own soul, and I’ve asked for help.

“I know the power of words, especially those that demean,” the statement continued. “I realize that by using one filled with disrespect I have hurt more than T. R. and my colleagues. With one word, I’ve hurt everyone who has struggled for the respect so many of us take for granted. I welcome the chance to meet with leaders of the gay and lesbian community to apologize in person and to talk about what I can do to heal the wounds I’ve opened.”

Mr. Washington added: “T. R.’s courage throughout this entire episode speaks to his tremendous character. I hold his talent, and T. R. as a person, in high esteem. I know a mere apology will not end this, and I intend to let my future actions prove my sincerity.”

Neil G. Giuliano, the president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, told CNN on Friday that he expected to travel to Los Angeles this week to meet with ABC executives and Mr. Washington.

Kelly Mullens, Mr. Washington’s new publicist, declined to comment on Mr. Washington’s plans for a meeting or his expected future with the show.

“Grey’s Anatomy” ranks fifth overall among prime-time shows. It ranks second overall among viewers ages 18 to 49, the demographic group for which networks charge the highest advertising premium.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/ar...on/22grey.html





Fair Housing, Free Speech and Choosy Roommates
Adam Liptak

Gene Kavenoki wanted to rent out a spare bedroom in his West Hollywood apartment and he had a few requirements.

“I am not looking for freaks, geeks, prostitutes (male or female), druggies, pet cobras, drama, black Muslims or mortgage brokers,” he wrote on Roommates.com.

Other users of the Web site were more adamant about their desires. “Must be a black gay male!” one said. “Please no flakes, deadbeats or white trash!” another said.

And some were a little creepy. A 57-year-old man said he was offering “free rent for the right woman” in exchange for “quiet companionship in an intimate place.” He preferred, he wrote, “a Hispanic female roommate so she can make me fluent in Spanish or an Asian female roommate just because I love Asian females.”

Those postings are part of a lawsuit by a fair housing group against Roommates.com, a matching service that does pretty much what its name suggests. The suit says the site violated fair housing laws, which forbid publishing real estate ads that indicate preferences based on race, religion or sex.

Fair housing is important, but so is free speech and so is the right to choose who is puttering around in your living room. Congress has taken two stabs at striking the right legal balance, but what it has created is a tangle of contradictions.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 says, in what everyone calls the Mrs. Murphy exception, that discrimination is acceptable by the owner of a residence who lives there and rents to no more than three other people or families. (Mrs. Murphy was an apocryphal bigot with a boardinghouse.)

But another part of the same law takes back part of the Mrs. Murphy exception. It says it is illegal to say or publish anything about the discrimination it just made legal. It applies to people placing ads and to businesses that publish them.

Forbidding speech about lawful conduct makes no sense and is at odds with the First Amendment. But some legal scholars, notably Robert G. Schwemm of the law school at the University of Kentucky, have defended the current approach.

Minority readers who see ads containing discriminatory language may suffer emotional distress, Professor Schwemm has written. That is undoubtedly true, but the distress caused by actual and legally sanctioned face-to-face discrimination is surely worse.

To compound matters, Congress created a second kind of mischief in 1996 when it enacted the Communications Decency Act. Almost in passing, that law made online companies immune from lawsuits over information they transmit but do not create.

The effect of the law is to treat online classified advertisements differently from printed ones. If this newspaper published Mr. Kavenoki’s ad in the paper, it would violate the Fair Housing Act. If it published the same ad on its Web site, it would face no liability. The same is true, as the fair housing group has conceded, of Roommates.com, at least so long as it merely acted as a passive transmitter of Mr. Kavenoki’s speech. The group’s suit now focuses on a questionnaire on the site.

In a sense, the Mrs. Murphy exception is both too narrow (it applies only to owners) and too broad (it applies not only to roommates but also to standard-issue tenants).

But a revised version of the exception still makes sense. In choosing a real roommate — somebody who shares your bathroom and kitchen — you should be allowed to have and disclose whatever idiosyncratic ideas you have about your living arrangements, even discriminatory ones.

Roommate ads are more like personal dating ads, where discrimination is rampant and accepted, as opposed to real estate ads, where discrimination is properly forbidden.

And the distinction made in the 1996 law, which was meant to nurture a nascent Internet, is causing problems, too. Why should hard-copy and virtual publishers of the same advertising be treated differently? And why should either one be conscripted into the government’s efforts to combat speech it disfavors? If the underlying speech is unlawful, attack the speaker.

There were some odd moments at the appellate argument in the case in Pasadena last month. Judge Alex Kozinski, who is often both libertarian and contrarian, mused that users seeking only gay men could be missing out. Some women, he said, should be allowed to make a pitch.

“I may not be a gay man,” Judge Kozinski suggested such a woman might say, “but I have a lot of things in common with gay men. I’m very tidy. I have a great sense of decoration. Whatever.”

As for Mr. Kavenoki, he is a graduate student in linguistics who first heard about the lawsuit from me recently. “I had no idea my little humorous attempt to find a stable roommate in West Hollywood three years ago had achieved such objectionable notoriety,” he said in an e-mail message. He said he hoped not to be portrayed as “the Slobodan Milosevic of Roommates.com.”

“Evidently some people interpreted my ad as discriminating against blacks,” Mr. Kavenoki said. “I was doing no such thing. I was discriminating against people who don’t share my slightly warped sense of humor.”
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/us/22bar.html





Changes in Mellencamp Country
Alan Light

“People say I sold out,” John Mellencamp said, explaining his decision to license a song for a Chevrolet commercial. “No, I got sold out. Sometime during the ’90s record companies made the decision that us guys who had been around for a long time and had sold millions of records and were household names just weren’t as interesting as girls in stretch dresses.”

Mr. Mellencamp, whose 21st album, “Freedom’s Road,” arrives in stores tomorrow, had long expressed objections to the use of pop songs in advertising. But he said a turning point for him came last year, after he heard “Highway Companion,” the latest album by his contemporary Tom Petty. He liked it and thought the single “Saving Grace” would be a hit, but then never heard the song on the radio or saw it on the video channels. Fearing a similar fate for his own music, Mr. Mellencamp said he decided to accept Chevrolet’s offer to use “Our Country,” which he had been performing live for a few years and appears on the new album, as the theme for its Silverado truck.

“The bottom line is, I’m a songwriter, and I want people to hear my songs,” he said. “I’m not saying it’s right. I’m not suggesting it for anybody else. This is just what I did this time to reinvent myself and stay in business. Sometimes I get sad about it really. I still don’t think that people should sell their songs for advertising.”

Mr. Mellencamp has caught flak from some of his fans, and the Silverado spot, which has been in heavy rotation on sports broadcasts since it was first shown during last fall’s World Series, has spawned some controversy. The ad mixes images of the Statue of Liberty and Rosa Parks with footage from Hurricane Katrina and the Vietnam War. A columnist at Slate.com called the commercial’s blend of patriotism and tragedy, in service of selling a product, “exploitative” and “wrong.”

Chain-smoking through an interview in a sprawling suite at the Carlyle Hotel (he and his wife, the model Elaine Irwin, were upgraded because “the commode in our first room was broken”), Mr. Mellencamp maintained that the ad’s downbeat tone was his own decision. “Part of the deal I made was: O.K., I’ll do this, but I’m in charge. Make it look like a John Mellencamp video. I don’t want to see ‘Our Country’ as rah-rah flag waving. Let’s show the flood, let’s show the war, let’s show the whole thing. The fact that they rolled a truck out at the end made no difference to me.”

Bill Ludwig, chief creative officer of Chevrolet’s ad agency, Campbell-Ewald, said in a statement that he hoped the campaign would evoke “the bruises and scars that have shaped our nation."

One question now is what impact a commercial that has been running for months can have on sales of a new album. Some executives at Universal Republic, Mr. Mellencamp’s label, are concerned that the exposure peaked too soon, and that the audience has already tired of the song. Mr. Mellencamp admits that the situation has put radio programmers “in a position they’ve never been in before,” adding that he never anticipated that the ad would be played so frequently. “They sure pounded it,” he said with a chuckle. “I had no idea.”

“Our Country” illustrates one side of “Freedom’s Road,” with its swing-for-the-fences themes exemplified by titles like “The Americans.” The album’s most striking songs, though, display a more intimate depiction of the small-town life that Mr. Mellencamp, 55 and a lifelong Indiana resident, knows so well. The acoustic “Rural Route” is an account of a crystal meth-fueled murder in which the victim’s body was found at the edge of his parents’ property.

“About halfway through the record I didn’t really know what it was supposed to be about,” Mr. Mellencamp said. “I had so many political songs akin to ‘Masters of War,’ that kind of stuff. But then I recorded a song called ‘Ghost Towns Along the Highway,’ and I said that’s what this record is about.

“That’s a very personal song because it’s not really about a physical place, but about the decisions that we’ve made and the path that we’ve chosen. Corporate America has absolutely changed everything. Bloomington, where I live, has a beautiful square, there’s some restaurants, but everyone wants to go shopping someplace else. So when everything becomes the Mc-Whatever, then you lose what I always enjoyed about living where I live.”

Joan Baez, who sings on a song titled “Jim Crow,” said she had long admired the subtlety of Mr. Mellencamp’s work. “When people try to write protest songs, they get so trite and overstated,” she said in a telephone interview. “This song was completely fresh. I never heard anything like it.”

One thing Mr. Mellencamp never questioned was the sound he wanted for this album. “What I know and what I love is garage music,” he said, citing ’60s bands like the Byrds, Count Five and the Youngbloods as inspirations. “Whenever we’re messing around, that’s what the guys in the band all play.” For his previous album, “Trouble No More” (2003), he said: “I had gone so far down this folk thing, recording with Appalachian instruments. I wanted to go back to what we know how to do.”

“Freedom’s Road” was recorded over many months and many grueling sessions, in Mr. Mellencamp’s rehearsal space, literally a garage. “At the time I was totally unaware we were making a record,” he said. “But then I thought: We’re never going to be able to beat these versions. It sounds as if they just walked in and played. And for a sound like that, you’ve got to go through hell to get it.”

Though Mr. Mellencamp opted to avoid a more overtly politicized album, he couldn’t resist including “Rodeo Clown,” a harsh attack on President Bush and the Iraq war, with lines about “blood on the hands of the rich politicians” and “blood on the hands of an arrogant nation.” The song isn’t listed on the packaging and appears several minutes after the album’s last track.

“When I wrote that song two years ago,” Mr. Mellencamp said, “the truth was nowhere in sight. But as the climate changed, now that song feels right on target.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/ar...ic/22mell.html





Top 20 Concert Tours
AP

The Top 20 Concert Tours ranks artists by average box office gross per city and includes the average ticket price for shows in North America. The previous week's ranking is in parentheses. The list is based on data provided to the trade publication Pollstar by concert promoters and venue managers.

1. (1) Barbra Streisand; $6,059,662; $302.27.

2. (2) The Rolling Stones; $3,464,077; $108.16.

3. (5) Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band; $1,125,775; $60.39.

4. (3) The Who; $959,577; $97.25.

5. (4) Aerosmith / Motley Crue; $918,675; $65.48.

6. (6) Dixie Chicks; $798,542; $66.05.

7. (7) Guns N' Roses; $482.177; $59.89.

8. (8) Bob Dylan; $472,216; $58.66.

9. (9) Andre Rieu; $458,331; $53.93.

10. (10) Def Leppard / Journey; $454,462; $57.95.

11. (11) Trans-Siberian Orchestra; $376,687; $39.46.

12. (12) Blue Man Group; $346,234; $52.54.

13. (14) The Cheetah Girls; $309,604; $35.19.

14. (13) Brad Paisley; $307,255; $45.60.

15. (15) Larry The Cable Guy; $273,394; $44.66.

16. (17) Panic! At The Disco; $197,565; $28.46.

17. (19) The Killers; $187,580; $32.02.

18. (20) Barenaked Ladies; $182,097; $45.93.

19. (22) Pet Shop Boys; $161,376; $57.55.

20. (23) Music As A Weapon Tour / Disturbed; $159,866; $32.21.
http://newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1028800





Move Over Silicon Valley, Here Come European Start-Ups
John Markoff

A technology and media conference being held here this week provided ample evidence that Silicon Valley’s dominance of Internet-style technology innovation is waning.

The gathering, Digital Life Design, has become a showcase for a range of European entrepreneurs who have taken the start-up culture pioneered in Silicon Valley as a template and are successfully transplanting it here.

The star of this year’s event was Niklas Zennstrom, the Swedish co-founder of the file-sharing system Kazaa and the Internet telephony company Skype, which was sold to eBay for $2.6 billion in 2005. Mr. Zennstrom last week took the wraps off a previously secretive start-up, Joost, that intends to provide a peer-to-peer approach to distributing video online.

“We’re trying to take the good things about television and the good things about the Internet and put them together,” he said.

Like many participants here, Mr. Zennstrom voiced the opinion that Internet-based commerce would accelerate in its disruptive effect on traditional businesses. Skype, for example, now says that it carries 4.4 percent of all worldwide long-distance calling.

“We now have a pretty decent Internet infrastructure,” Mr. Zennstrom said, noting in the future that it would give rise to “many, many more disruptive industries.”

The invitation-only conference, which ended Tuesday, attracted 1,000 old- and new-media publishers this year, mixed in with Internet software and service start-ups and a smattering of American dot-com executives. It serves in part as an intelligence-gathering event for its sponsor, Hubert Burda, a German publisher trying to move his more than 250 magazines into the Internet era.

Several organizers noted that Silicon Valley’s original success as an innovation center was largely because of business and social networks developed over several decades in a community of venture capitalists and technologists.

Now, they said, with the Internet supplementing and replacing traditional face-to-face social networks, Silicon Valley might be losing its competitive advantage.

“The epicenter was Silicon Valley, but that has created a wave of innovation that has now reached the entire world,” said Yossi Vardi, an Israeli entrepreneur and investor who financed his son’s development of ICQ, an early Internet chat program later sold to America Online.

Internet start-ups in Europe received a significant boost last month with the initial public offering of Open BC/Xing, a German Web site that is a competitor of the American site LinkedIn for social networking among businesses.

One of the best examples of the diffusion of Internet-style business creation is Tariq Krim, chief executive of Netvibes. His Paris-based company was a pioneer in the design of a Web service that allows users to personalize their start page, shifting the control away from the traditional Internet portal companies.

Netvibes, which received a $15.5 million investment from the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel Partners last year, now reports 10 million users. The company was an early practitioner of the so-called Web 2.0 approach, which is based on a system of hooking together Internet services provided by competing companies.

After growing up in Paris, Mr. Krim received practical business schooling in Silicon Valley, first as an intern at Sun Microsystems and then, in the late 1990s, as a reporter for a French business magazine based there.

In founding Netvibes in 2005, he said, he was inspired by the simplicity of Apple’s Macintosh and was trying to offer that same ease of use to Internet users.

“Our digital life is fragmented into a wide number of services,” he said.

Being based in Paris can sometimes be disorienting, he said, noting that when Netvibes began operating two years ago many people assumed that it was in Silicon Valley.

The company was able to use online collaboration among its users to rapidly translate the service into 80 languages, even though the firm had just four employees initially.

Netvibes recently opened a San Francisco office, and Mr. Krim acknowledged that he was fond of the Silicon Valley culture in which everyone seems to live and breathe computing and technology.

“I miss the fact you can start an interesting company just by talking to someone you meet while you are doing your laundry,” he said.

Still, he says that while there are major cultural differences in the way start-up entrepreneurs are viewed in Europe — failure is not viewed as a badge of honor, the way it is in Silicon Valley — a native community is beginning to emerge.

He noted that an early investor in Netvibes was Martin Varsavsky, the Madrid-based investor who recently founded FON, a wireless-networking service based on subsidizing the cost of Wi-Fi modems and building communities of users around the world who freely share wireless access points.

Mr. Varsavsky argues that the new European start-ups are generally more sophisticated than their American competitors.

European Web video sites like Vpod and Sevenload are technically more advanced than YouTube, he said. Sevenload combines the features of Flickr, which allows sharing of still photos, and YouTube, the video sharing site.

Other European start-up companies whose executives attended the conference included Rebtel and Truphone, which are offering low-cost Internet calls to cellphone users. Another European start-up, JaJa, is also pursuing the market.

“We have built Wi-Fi infrastructure at home and in the office and we are still using our cellphones,” said Alexander Straub, a German entrepreneur based in London who founded Truphone last year. He said the roaming charges levied by cellular companies were not sustainable. “It’s pure robbery,” he said.

A number of participants at the conference contended that with the quick spread of ideas in an Internet age, Silicon Valley companies no longer have a first-mover advantage.

Gerald Haag, a former Amazon executive who is a founder of Dropshop, a Munich-based start-up for auction sellers, cited a case in which an idea from Silicon Valley was introduced in Europe. Two weeks later, he said, “there was a German version.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/te.../24munich.html





Are DMCA Abuses a Temporary or Permanent Problem?
Bennett Haselton

"On January 16, a man named Guntram Graef who invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to ask YouTube to remove a video of giant penises attacking his wife's avatar/character in the virtual community "Second Life", retracted the claim and stated that he now believes the video was not a copyright violation. (He had sent similar notices to BoingBoing and the Sydney Morning Herald just for posting screen shots of the video.) His statements in a C-Net interview suggest that he didn't mean to alienate the anti-censorship community and was probably angry over what he saw as a sexually explicit attack on his wife. But the event sparked renewed debate over the DMCA and what constitutes abuse of it. I sympathize with Graef and I admire him for admitting an error, but I still think the incident shows why the DMCA is a bad law."

The DMCA is known mainly for its two most controversial provisions: the ban on technology to circumvent copyright restrictions, and the procedures by which ISPs must respond to "take down" notices if a third party claims that one of the ISP's users is violating their copyright. The first of these, I am opposed to in principle; the second, I am not opposed to in principle but I think is too easy to abuse in practice -- because I think incidents like the Graef case and my own limited court experience in related areas has suggested that the protections against DMCA-type abuses are very weak.

First, I'm against the anti-circumvention provision in principle because I agree with the position espoused by the EFF that computer code is protected under the First Amendment, even if some uses of that computer code may be illegal. After all, at one point a U.S. court even ruled that a manual for carrying out murders as a hit man was protected speech! That ruling was overturned on appeal, and the case was settled out of court before a final decision was ever reached, but still -- given that a handbook for killing people was considered free speech by at least one court, it's a bit of a stretch to think that a DVD-copying program should be given less protection. Just because X is illegal does not mean that tools or instructions for doing X should also be illegal.

With regard to the second provision, I'm not against requiring ISPs to take down infringing material on receipt of a notice from the copyright holder. But in practice there are two avenues for abuse here: (a) the party sending the take down notice can make statements that are not technically false, but which have the effect of persuading the ISP to take the material down, or (b) the party sending the take down notice can simply lie -- because the truth is that in too many cases, false statements made "under penalty of perjury" are not prosecuted, or even noticed, by the courts.

The EFF has already done a good job documenting abuses under the DMCA, and I'm not going to repeat all of that here. My argument is that these are not just temporary problems with a relatively new law, but rather that the abuses are the result of realities that won't change any time soon: ISPs being too busy to look closely at every complaint, and courts being too busy to go after everyone who violates court rules to get what they want. And thus it does no good to say that the DMCA would be fine if only enforcement actually got done properly instead of the ham-handed way it's been carried out so far, because that's not going to happen.

As I said, I think that if you have a bona fide case against a party, there's nothing wrong with taking action against them that would otherwise be considered a violation of their privacy and other rights. I've never sent a DMCA take down notice myself, but I've been involved in court cases in which I asked the judge to sign an order requiring a third party to turn over information about someone that was pertinent to the case. I don't consider that an abuse of the system, if the information you're after is relevant.

I realize this may separate me from some fellow privacy advocates, and some of the things I've done may make them uncomfortable. In one case, I had invited a girl to a charity luncheon where the tickets were $100 apiece, and when she showed up she had "forgotten her checkbook" and needed to borrow the money... Now, don't get ahead of me... Later, in what will not come as a huge spoiler to my fellow male Seattle residents, she apparently decided that, being a non-overweight, non-single-Mom, non-sexually-repressed girl in a city full of rich single guys, she was under no obligation to pay me back, and said, "Go ahead and sue me". Anyone who knows about my sideline taking spammers to court would tell you, it is not a terrifically smart move to say to me, "Go ahead and sue me". So, since I was going to be at the courthouse for an upcoming case against a spammer, I figured, why not, and filled out a Small Claims form with the defendant's address listed as "to be determined", since all I had was her cell phone number. Then I asked the judge to sign an order asking T-Mobile to give me the rest of her information so I could serve the papers on her. The judge signed it, I mailed it off to T-Mobile, and three weeks later T-Mobile sent me a letter containing her address, where I had the papers served. Most people don't know it's possible to do this just in a case where someone owes you $100 and all you have is a phone number, but that's just because a lawyer would never bother with such a small case, and most non-lawyers don't know the option exists -- and of course, it also depends on the judge, who may or may not sign the order.

(In that vein, people always ask me, is that sort of thing really worth the time? In this case, since I was going to be at the courthouse anyway, the extra time to write the motion, get it signed, and mail it off, was less than 30 minutes. But I was mainly curious about whether or not it could be done, and how much privacy protection there really is under the law, and knowing that was worth more to me than the $100 anyway.)

So I don't think it's unethical to request such information if you have a genuine case against a party. But while I don't think that what I did constitutes abuse of the system, I think it clearly shows how the system could be abused. Nobody checked my ID when I filed the case or asked the judge to sign the subpoena; I could have been anybody, and I could have disappeared once I had the information. (I had T-Mobile mail it to my address, but I could have just as easily had them mail it to the court, and then gone down and asked to look at the court file.) DMCA opponents should be aware that even without the DMCA, privacy protections are not as great as most people probably think they are.

As a result, I'm especially nervous about laws that enable abuse based on copyright assertions, because almost all of the legal threats we've ever received at Peacefire were based on what I considered to be bogus "copyright" claims. In 1997 we published a program that you could run on any computer with CYBERsitter blocking software installed, and it would decrypt the file that stored CYBERsitter's "secret" blocked-site list, and print it out in plain text. The CEO of CYBERsitter claimed that we were "violating every intellectual property law ever written" and sent threatening notices to our ISP demanding that they remove the program. I argued that every byte of the decryption program was our original work, so it didn't violate their copyright. In fact, it didn't even enable violations of their copyright, because it didn't make it any easier for someone to distribute illegal copies of their program, and I also said the decryption program served a worthwhile purpose by allowing customers or potential customers to see what the program really blocked. (Although to me, the enabling issue and the "worthwhile purpose" issue were secondary to the primary point, that original works of computer code should be protected by the First Amendment.) Fortunately our ISP stood their ground, but if the DMCA had existed back then, CYBERsitter could have invoked it, and possibly the extra pressure might have caused our ISP to back down. (Blocked-site-decryption programs were originally exempt from the DMCA as a result of the decision of the Copyright Office, but that exemption was revoked in 2006 because nobody had written a new decryption program in three years.)

So that was an example of how a company could intimidate an ISP into taking down material, without technically lying about the situation, but tacking on the words "copyright violation" and hoping the ISP would capitulate. What about cases where the sender of a DMCA take down notice just lies?

The Dutch activist group Bits Of Freedom conducted an experiment in 2004, in which they signed up with 10 different ISPs and posted a copy of a work that was clearly labeled with a notice that the author had died 100 years ago and the copyright had expired. Then they sent fake "complaints" to all 10 ISPs from an anonymous Hotmail address. 7 of the 10 ISPs removed the content immediately, and one even replied to give the personal details of the account holder, without being asked to do so. So completely fictitious complaints do apparently work. The DMCA does more protection than that because it requires the complainer to make a copyright claim "under penalty of perjury". But how much assurance does that really provide?

No one has yet tried to get our site shut down with a copyright claim or other accusation that was simply made up out of whole cloth. But my experiences in other areas have left me without much confidence in statements that are made "under penalty of perjury". The times I've been to court against spammers, I usually get to watch a few other Small Claims cases being tried. Probably at least once every time that I've been there, it's come to light that some party in a case said something that they almost certainly knew was not true, and I've never seen a judge do anything about it -- and court employees who have been there much longer have said they've never seen it happen either. (Judges are far more likely to get upset about people speaking out of turn. It's OK to lie, as long as you do it while the judge isn't talking!) It's true that Small Claims court is for resolving small matters, but lying under oath in Small Claims court is still a felony, punishable at least in theory by up to 10 years in jail. (And in any case, lawyers have told me that even in higher-level courtrooms, most false statements don't get anyone in big trouble. High-profile cases like Martha Stewart are the exception.) I don't think that everyone who lies under oath should go to the big house for 10 years. But I have no faith in the DMCA just because it requires accusatory statements to be made "under penalty of perjury", when judges usually let false statements under oath go completely unnoticed.

I doubt that a lawyer would risk their career and even their freedom to make up a completely fraudulent DMCA claim against us, such as claiming a page on our site was a ripoff of something originally produced by their client. But I don't think it's out of the realm if possibility that a lawyer would claim that, for example, a parody of one of their logos that appeared on our site, was a "copyright violation" -- even though the company would almost certainly be advised by their lawyer that such parodies are protected speech, which means their statement would constitute perjury, but it would probably never be punished.

The low point of my own confidence in the enforcement of anti-perjury laws, came when I sued a spammer who appeared in court and claimed that he had absolutely no knowledge of the spam being sent, and had never accepted any orders for spamming of any kind, while the judge, who appeared to hate anti-spam cases even more than most judges did, kept haranguing me for suing a clearly "innocent" person. I then played a recording of a conversation that I had with the spammer over the phone, pretending to be an interested customer (with a disclaimer played at the beginning of the call saying that it could be recorded, in order to make the taping legal), in which he said, among other things:

"I mean, we have all their information to back up any email we send them. If we have their ISP information, we can prove that they've given it out, because you can't get someone's ISP unless they've given it to somebody." [sic -- he meant "get someone's e-mail address", although the statement is still wrong]

"Do you already have your creatives and everything? So I've just got to upload what you have and just blast it out?" [note: "creatives" are copies of ads that sent out for you by advertisers and spammers]

"It's a United-States-based company but they pump everything through China and then it comes back to the United States."

The judge appeared very flustered at that point and started accusing me of "entrapment" (which was backwards -- I'd never heard of the spammer until he spammed me first, and then I called him afterwards, just to get evidence that he was in the spamming business in case he showed up in court and denied it). Since she claimed it was entrapment, I still lost and the spammer walked out home-free, without the judge ever even commenting on the questionable veracity of the statements he had made at the beginning. And that is all the protection that exists in the real world against people making false statements "under penalty of perjury".

The point is that when reading the wording of a proposed law, there's a temptation to think that the scenario described is exactly how the law will play out when it's enforced (see the "Alice, Bob and Charlie" scenario in the Wikipedia entry on the relevant section of the DMCA), and that anyone who deviates from the rules will be punished. But my narrow experience in court, in an area unrelated to the DMCA, taught me some things that several lawyers, with sad smiles, have confirmed to be true throughout the law: (a) judges will do what they want; (b) even if judges do sincerely want to follow the law, they're unlikely to agree on what it says; and (c) courts don't have the will or the time to chase down every person who violates the rules.

Don't judge a law by what it says will happen. Judge it by how it will play out if more than half of the steps in the process get screwed up. Guntram Graef apparently wasn't even trying to do anything dishonest when he got a video removed from YouTube on the basis of copyright claims that turned out not to be valid. Imagine how much abuse is possible when you're gaming the system on purpose.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/24/146229





Getting what you pay for

SecondLife: Revolutionary Virtual Market or Ponzi Scheme?
Randolph Harrison

In 2005 I began working as a venture consultant for some entrepreneurs and investors trying to develop a fairly ambitious “real-money-trading” (RMT) business idea. My work resulted in my collection of a large amount of RMT market data for most of the popular massively multiplayer games and virtual worlds. Although the new venture was never pursued due to my analysis of the true RMT market, one game caught our particular interest: SecondLife, operated by Linden Research Inc. (privately held, San Francisco CA).

Unlike the makers of nearly all other online games, the operators of SecondLife not only allow and encourage the exchange of game currency for real money, but they actually facilitate it. As early as 2005 I began noticing a rumbling in interest-focused blogs about the exploding market that was SecondLife. Touted as a pioneering future Metaverse on the industry’s most informed blog, TerraNova, an array of journalists, academics, and company executives have claimed that SecondLife boasts an economy complete with in-game banks, multiple currency exchanges, a floating currency exchange rate, and a burgeoning in-game commerce and business base.
The Virtual Economy

Although many people were introduced to the idea that commerce and trade within virtual reality worlds could represent real world money profits by BusinessWeek’s cover story on infamous SecondLife resident and self described “Land Baroness”, Anshe Chung, industry followers had long realized the potential of RMT. Shanda Entertainment (SNDA), operator of the most popular and successful games in Asia, for example, had committed to a strategy of harvesting RMT profits long before Linden Research set up shop. Nonetheless, financial publications such as The Economist and The Financial Times began catching on, running articles about RMT – often citing SecondLife as the phenomenon’s leading model. One Financial Times article, referencing a university professor who makes his career by studying “virtual economies”, suggested the size of the total RMT market was $1bn USD in 2005, and would grow to over $7bn USD by 2009.

And SecondLife was at the forefront of where money was being made. Or, so one would rationally conclude from the buzz. When BenchMark Capital backs a company like Linden Research, it’s safe to assume otherwise smart investors are expecting huge potential market payoffs.

The idea of SecondLife’s economy is simple. It’s just like a real world economy, except it takes place entirely within the company operated game servers. Customers from around the world connect with a sort of super-browser, which renders complex graphics, video, stereo music and other useful utilities not unlike a web browser. But the difference is that SecondLife is a virtual world. More like a Hollywood representation of the web than today’s mundane reality. Customers take on avatars which represent their presence in the virtual world.

As these avatars interact, commerce is conducted. One starts SecondLife with some fairly mundane clothing, for example. Upon entered the world, a new customer is immediately assaulted with a variety of clothes, jewelry, shoes, hair styles; and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. But nothing is free, not even in virtual reality. New customers are allocated a few “Lindens” or L$ (SLL being the standard trade abbreviation). Most new customers quickly blow through these starter L$ as they dress up their avatars.

New L$ are distributed to customers as they pump real money into the virtual world. Nearly all customers utilize the game’s built-in “buy money” feature, which allows them to charge their credit card or PayPal account “micropayments”. Micropayments are a popular, proven business model first established in the mobile-phone market. All SecondLife does is extend this concept to a virtual reality game world.

Multiply all these micropayments among Linden’s claim of millions of customers, tens of thousands of which are online at any given time, and SecondLife supposedly represents a very real economy generating hundreds of thousands of real dollars of commerce, daily. Linden self reports an astonishing L$314,101,463 were earned in December 2006. That’s $1,163,338 USD of value by Linden’s average “exchange rate” of SLL/USD. But more about exchange rates later.
What are People Buying?

Reading BusinessWeek, or studying Linden’s or various other SecondLife blogs, it appears that the largest business of SecondLife is land speculation. Anshe’s claim to have earned over $1m USD from SecondLife is primarily related to her virtual land brokering business.

Another important source of SecondLife commerce is people “playing dress up” with their avatars. Buying clothes, earrings, new faces, or other more private body parts represents a great deal of the readily visible commerce outside of virtual real estate brokers.

Of course, anyone lingering in the world of SecondLife for more than a passing glance quickly discovers the real engine to the SecondLife economy: sex and gambling. A healthy share of micropayments are pumped into the system as customers engage in pulling the virtual slot lever or patronize one of the myriad virtual sex workers.
But it’s Still an Economy, Right?

As opportunists and capitalists, we’re not particularly bothered by indications that SecondLife generates most of its economic “wealth” through a rampant virtual real estate bubble which makes San Francisco, Marina District condo look like a bargain. Nor are we particularly bothered that the virtual playground provides a safe harbor for what is effectively the phone-sex industry reinvented. And internet gambling, despite the US Federal Government’s recent protestations to the contrary, is inevitable. So why not profit off of it? And how better, than in a utopian Ayn Rand open market capitalistic metaverse?

Of course, it’s not all that simple. And what’s true of the real world turns out to be true of the virtual world: if it sounds too good to be true…
The Test

In order to participate in a legitimate economy, there are a few basic prerequisites. SecondLife has the appearance of a virtual “securities and exchange commission”, virtual banks, virtual currency exchanges, and even virtual venture capitalists and REITS.

In July of 2006 we took a look at two in-game banks which allowed SecondLife residents to deposit their L$, and earn interest on the balance. These are private banks, run by other players, not by the game company itself. I discovered that the interest rates being paid by these banks, when calculate by interest-rate-parity against the USD, were mispriced allowing for a whopping 2,786.32% return arbitrage opportunity. Over some months we sunk the better part of $10,000 USD into SecondLife, borrowing from banks, lending to banks, and entering into various types of virtual financial arrangements with virtual businesses.

The first problem we encountered was one of counterparty risk. Put simply, you can seldom trust those with whom you’re doing business in SecondLife. Even supposedly well established, well regarded business citizens are prone to defaulting on any obligations which prove inconvenient. Whole banks will disappear over night, along with your L$ balance. Private businesses will simply refuse to make good on financial contracts. And individuals, pretty much all of whose real world identities are carefully guarded anonymous secrets, sometimes even will openly default, without recourse.

Justifications for default and non performance are usually wrapped in pseudo-libertarian internet political rants, or SecondLife political hyperbole. The simple fact is, if you arbitrage a bank for over 2,000% return because they don’t understand financial engineering, don’t expect to be able to collect come payment time.

But, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to make L$. In fact, we were able to make quite a few L$ in a very short period of time, despite disingenuous counterparties.

Enter the second problem, the L$ exchange markets are effectively rigged. At any given time over the past year or so, the SLL/USD exchange rate has hovered between about 250 and 300. That is, for every L$300 you earned, you could expect to get $1 USD. Now recall, there are supposedly hundreds of thousands of real dollars being spent daily; over L$250,000,000. Between Linden's official exchange market and the private exchanges, all appearances suggest a large volume of L$ daily exchange trade.

The catch is, however, these headline rates only apply to small amounts. For small time buyers and sellers of L$ -- be they virtual Johns paying up for sexy avatar escorts, or small time digital jewelry makers cashing out a couple hundred real dollars – this works well. Most of these people will use Linden’s official LindeX exchange, anyway. LindeX is actually not a virtual currency exchange market so much as it is an open auction, anyway. This means LindeX is not particularly useful for big trades.

The private exchanges, however, are owned by the businesses which sit at the top of the SecondLife economic pyramid. The “Virtual Land Baroness” owns the largest such exchange. So it is not surprising that our attempts to trade our L$ for $ USD were met with confiscatory market reflectivity. Or, put simply, every time we attempted to transact more than a couple hundred dollars, the SLL/USD rate would spike to levels approaching or even greater than 500. Example: mid July 2006 SLL/USD was 293.0/279.2 bid/ask on the primary open exchange. Our attempts to trade L$650,000 resulted in settlement bids of 350-450. Interestingly, these trades tended to net returns of right around 4%, which was the prevailing dollar deposit rate.
The Ponzi Scheme Epiphany

As we scratched our heads trying to figure out if there weren’t a more clever way of disguising our trades, or perhaps creating our own in-game banks and exchanges in order to arbitrage the other direction, it suddenly dawned upon me.

This game was just a pyramid scheme.

SecondLife is not a dramatic taste of our future, in which markets are virtual, currency is free from government control, taxes are non-existent, and normal people can become real millionaires simply by clicking their mouse a few times.

SecondLife isn’t even a simple virtual economy, with legitimate buying and selling, and opportunity for those who would compete.

No, SecondLife is a classic pyramid scheme. Or, more of an Amway-like pyramid: partially legitimate, partially ponzi. Sure, there are plenty of legitimate SecondLife customers who just like to go there to get their kicks, spend a couple dollars, and be on their way.

But, the buzz isn’t that Joe Sixpack can sit at his computer and gamble a little before bed with a smashingly attractive avatar. The buzz is that Anshe and others are making real millions. And a short visit to the world of SecondLife will reveal the frighteningly large portion of residents who “know someone who makes his or her living” doing something in SecondLife. Just the other night I had an interesting conversation with someone claiming to be a single mom of three, who spends her days turning virtual tricks and arranging for E-Bay payments through SecondLife L$. She didn’t seem to have any idea why her mysterious benefactor would pay her a commission to simply arrange PayPal transfers. More cynically intelligent readers will immediately recognize these transactions for what they are.

Again, the fact that tax evasion, organized crime and money laundering exist in the virtual world doesn’t distress me all that much; these things exist in the real world, and have for a pretty long time. The distressing part is what this single mom said later; the same thing one will hear over and over from SecondLife residents: she was just doing the cybersex and E-Bay stuff to fund her virtual jewelry store. She was a jewelry designer, and had already opened a little shop in a virtual mall. And, to her amazement, she’d already made over L$50,000 after only a month (about $185 USD). I didn’t bother to point out that she hadn’t counted her expenses for renting her virtual shop or accounted for taxes, let alone the fact that she was earning less than 1/100th of what she could get just flipping burgers in the real world.
SadLife

And that’s the story of SecondLife. Like the paid promotion infomercials that run on CNBC, sadly SecondLife is a giant magnet for the desperate, uninformed, easily victimized. Its promises of wealth readily ensnare those who can least afford to lose their money or lives to such scam in exactly the same way that real estate investor seminars convince divorcees with low FICO scores to buy houses sight unseen with no money down.

Even some corporations have dedicated marketing budgets to creating a presence in SecondLife. While few will shed a tear for the frivolousness of these companies’ spending, such adds a false legitimacy to SecondLife. Interestingly, no legitimate, real world corporation has earned net profit from SecondLife activities.

That’s because there are but a very tiny handful that profit off of the SecondLife economy. A handful of casino owners, large scale virtual land flippers, and brothel owners are responsible for nearly all of the real money extracted from the game. And they continue to attract new recruits to the bottom of the pyramid.

After all, Anshe Chung herself started out as a virtual whore, so you too can become a SecondLife millionaire, right?
http://randolfe.typepad.com/randolfe...life_revo.html





Microsoft Profit Falls
Daisuke Wakabayashi

Microsoft Corp.'s quarterly net profit <MSFT.O> beat Wall Street expectations on Thursday, driven by sales of database software and its Xbox 360 game console, and the company raised its full-year profit target.

Shares of the world's largest software maker rose more than 2 percent in after-hours trade to $31.16, within 30 cents of its year high touched earlier this month.

Microsoft posted a 28 percent drop in quarterly earnings as it deferred more than $1 billion in net income related to the consumer launch of its Windows Vista operating system and Office 2007 software due next week.

Those businesses account for most of the company's earnings, and investors expect the new products to drive sales and earnings in the coming quarters.

"Microsoft had another good quarter. A lot of the new products like Xbox 360 and SQL Server contributed to strong revenue growth this quarter. More importantly, Microsoft slightly raised its revenue guidance for fiscal year 2007 and also boosted their guidance for operating income as well," Morningstar analyst Toan Tran said.

Net profit in its fiscal second quarter ended December 31 totaled $2.63 billion, or 26 cents per diluted share, compared with $3.65 billion, or 34 cents per diluted share, a year ago. Second-quarter sales rose 6 percent to $12.54 billion.

Analysts, on average, had expected Microsoft to report earnings per share of 23 cents on sales of $12.09 billion in the quarter, according to Reuters Estimates.

"There doesn't seem to be any real hiccups here. Right now it looks pretty solid across the board," said Charles Di Bona, analyst at Bernstein Research.

The Redmond, Washington-based company said it deferred $1.64 billion in revenue and accompanying profit to the March-ending quarter from the past quarter due to the way it accounts for upgrade coupons for those products.

Looking ahead to this quarter, Microsoft forecast diluted earnings per share of 45 cents to 46 cents on revenue ranging from $13.7 billion to $14 billion. Analysts polled by Reuters Estimates, on average, expect earnings of 46 cents per share on sales of $14 billion for the March quarter.

For the full year, Microsoft lifted its earnings outlook range to $1.45 to $1.47 per share from an earlier range of $1.43 to $1.46 per share. The company narrowed its full-year revenue estimate range to between $50.2 billion and $50.7 billion from between $50.0 billion and $50.9 billion.

Analysts, on average, expect full-year earnings of $1.45 per share on sales of $50.48 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.

In the past quarter, Microsoft delivered strong Xbox 360 sales. The company said this month it had shipped 10.4 million units of the game console since its November 2005 launch, exceeding a target to ship 10 million by the end of 2006.

The large installed base of Xbox 360 consoles helped to drive sales of Microsoft Studio's own "Gears of War" game.

Microsoft's server business continued to grow at a rapid clip. Earnings at the server and tools division, which accounts for more than 20 percent of Microsoft sales, got a boost from steady demand for its SQL Server database software.

Shares of Microsoft have risen 12 percent since the start of its second quarter. Prior to the earnings announcement, the stock closed down 64 cents at $30.45 in Thursday Nasdaq trade.

"The stock from a technician's standpoint looks very good as it moves up very steadily on good volume," said Jim Hardesty, chief investment officer at Hardesty Capital Management, which owns Microsoft shares.

Article





Cingular Profit Surges; Lifts AT&T Shares
Sinead Carew

Cingular Wireless, the mobile service provider with the largest U.S. customer base, said on Wednesday its fourth-quarter profit nearly quadrupled as customer growth trumped Wall Street estimates.

The news sent parent AT&T Inc.'s <T.N> shares up 3.8 percent to $36.70, their highest level in almost five years, on the New York Stock Exchange.

Analysts said Cingular likely took market share from Sprint Nextel Corp. <S.N>, the No. 3 mobile phone service provider.

"It's impressive they were able to deliver on the profit side despite growing much faster than expected," said Roe Equity Research analyst Kevin Roe.

Cingular said profit rose to $782 million from $204 million a year ago. Service revenue rose 13 percent to $8.8 billion.

Executives said during an analyst call that service revenue would grow in the low double-digit percentage range in 2007.

Cingular added 2.4 million net new customers in the fourth quarter, beating the average estimate of 1.62 million from 10 analysts contacted by Reuters. It ended the quarter with 61 million subscribers.

Chief Financial Officer Pete Ritcher attributed the strong customer growth partly to holiday shopping trends and said Cingular's revenue was boosted by data services like texting.

The company - being rebranded as AT&T, which took full control of Cingular by buying BellSouth Corp. last month - said this would be the last quarter it reports separately from its parent. AT&T is scheduled to report its results on Thursday.

Prepaid Still Worries Some

In January, Apple Inc. <AAPL.O> said it would market the hotly anticipated iPhone, which combines wireless services with iPod-like entertainment, on Cingular's network as part of a multi-year exclusive deal.

Some analysts see that helping to boost Cingular's appeal in the high-end wireless market.

Others were still concerned Cingular's future profit would be hurt by a high dependence on less profitable customers who pay for calls in advance. Prepaid customers accounted for 746,00 of its direct customer additions.

"I thought the net adds were certainly strong but there was a lot of prepaid ... the mix of subscriber additions is a little worrisome," said Stifel Nicolaus analyst Chris King.

CFO Ritcher argued that going after the prepaid market did not hurt growth in postpaid customers, who pay monthly bills.

Cingular likely took market share from prepaid providers such as Virgin Mobile USA, a venture of Sprint and Richard Branson's Virgin <VA.UL> that targets the fast growing youth segment, Ritcher said. As postpaid growth nears saturation, young customers and prepaid are key to growth, he said.

"I'm sure we took significant market share in the prepaid area," Ritcher said in a phone interview. "We think we're very well positioned in those parts of the market that are going to grow higher than average."

Cingular's profit and revenue has trailed that of the next biggest rival, Verizon Wireless, owned by Verizon Communications Inc. <VZ.N> and Vodafone Group Plc. <VOD.L>.

Its fourth-quarter margin for operating income before depreciation and amortization was 34.4 percent, below King's expectation of 36.4 percent.

Ritcher said Cingular hoped to have the best operating profit margins in the industry next year, forecasting margins above 40 percent for 2008.

King said the 2008 industry-leading margin target would be difficult to meet as the operating margin for Verizon Wireless had already hit 45 percent in the third quarter of 2006.

Ritcher forecast 2007 margins in the high 30 percent range in 2007. Cingular had earlier aimed to lead the industry on all metrics by the end of 2007.

Cingular average revenue per user rose to $49.29 from a $48.86 a year ago and its churn, or customer cancellation rate fell to 1.8 percent from 2.1 percent a year ago.

(Additional reporting by Kenneth Li)
Article





Nokia Net Up 19%, Topping Estimates

Nokia, the maker of mobile phones, said yesterday that fourth-quarter profit rose 19 percent, beating analysts’ estimates, as a push into emerging markets drove handset sales to a record.

Net income rose to 1.27 billion euros ($1.65 billion), or 32 cents a share, from 1.07 billion euros, or 25 cents, in the period a year earlier. Revenue rose 13 percent, to 11.7 billion euros from 10.3 billion euros.

Analysts expected Nokia to earn 1.11 billion euros.

“It has been a fantastic year in volumes,” Nokia’s chief financial officer, Richard A. Simonson, said in an interview. “We are in the emerging markets and we can make a sustainable profit.”

Nokia, which is based in Espoo, Finland, shipped a record 106 million units in the quarter, up 26 percent from a year earlier and 19 percent from the third quarter. Nokia said its fourth-quarter market share was unchanged from 36 percent in the third quarter and up from 34 percent a year earlier, led by gains in all regions except North America.

Unit sales jumped 54 percent in China and 60 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, which includes India. Handset sales in Europe rose 11 percent and fell 39 percent in North America.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/26/te...y/26nokia.html





When cold-fusion won’t do

Battery Breakthrough?

A Texas company says it can make a new ultracapacitor power system to replace the electrochemical batteries in everything from cars to laptops.
Tyler Hamilton

A secretive Texas startup developing what some are calling a "game changing" energy-storage technology broke its silence this week. It announced that it has reached two production milestones and is on track to ship systems this year for use in electric vehicles.

EEStor's ambitious goal, according to patent documents, is to "replace the electrochemical battery" in almost every application, from hybrid-electric and pure-electric vehicles to laptop computers to utility-scale electricity storage.

The company boldly claims that its system, a kind of battery-ultracapacitor hybrid based on barium-titanate powders, will dramatically outperform the best lithium-ion batteries on the market in terms of energy density, price, charge time, and safety. Pound for pound, it will also pack 10 times the punch of lead-acid batteries at half the cost and without the need for toxic materials or chemicals, according to the company.

The implications are enormous and, for many, unbelievable. Such a breakthrough has the potential to radically transform a transportation sector already flirting with an electric renaissance, improve the performance of intermittent energy sources such as wind and sun, and increase the efficiency and stability of power grids--all while fulfilling an oil-addicted America's quest for energy security.

The breakthrough could also pose a threat to next-generation lithium-ion makers such as Watertown, MA-based A123Systems, which is working on a plug-in hybrid storage system for General Motors, and Reno, NV-based Altair Nanotechnologies, a supplier to all-electric vehicle maker Phoenix Motorcars.

"I get a little skeptical when somebody thinks they've got a silver bullet for every application, because that's just not consistent with reality," says Andrew Burke, an expert on energy systems for transportation at University of California at Davis.

That said, Burke hopes to be proved wrong. "If [the] technology turns out to be better than I think, that doesn't make me sad: it makes me happy."

Richard Weir, EEStor's cofounder and chief executive, says he would prefer to keep a low profile and let the results of his company's innovation speak for themselves. "We're well on our way to doing everything we said," Weir told Technology Review in a rare interview. He has also worked as an electrical engineer at computing giant IBM and at Michigan-based automotive-systems leader TRW.

Much like capacitors, ultracapacitors store energy in an electrical field between two closely spaced conductors, or plates. When voltage is applied, an electric charge builds up on each plate.

Ultracapacitors have many advantages over traditional electrochemical batteries. Unlike batteries, "ultracaps" can completely absorb and release a charge at high rates and in a virtually endless cycle with little degradation.

Where they're weak, however, is with energy storage. Compared with lithium-ion batteries, high-end ultracapacitors on the market today store 25 times less energy per pound.

This is why ultracapacitors, with their ability to release quick jolts of electricity and to absorb this energy just as fast, are ideal today as a complement to batteries or fuel cells in electric-drive vehicles. The power burst that ultracaps provide can assist with stop-start acceleration, and the energy is more efficiently recaptured through regenerative braking--an area in which ultracap maker Maxwell Technologies has seen significant results.

On the other hand, EEStor's system--called an Electrical Energy Storage Unit, or EESU--is based on an ultracapacitor architecture that appears to escape the traditional limitations of such devices. The company has developed a ceramic ultracapacitor with a barium-titanate dielectric, or insulator, that can achieve an exceptionally high specific energy--that is, the amount of energy in a given unit of mass.

For example, the company's system claims a specific energy of about 280 watt hours per kilogram, compared with around 120 watt hours per kilogram for lithium-ion and 32 watt hours per kilogram for lead-acid gel batteries. This leads to new possibilities for electric vehicles and other applications, including for the military.

"It's really tuned to the electronics we attach to it," explains Weir. "We can go all the way down from pacemakers to locomotives and direct-energy weapons."

The trick is to modify the composition of the barium-titanate powders to allow for a thousandfold increase in ultracapacitor voltage--in the range of 1,200 to 3,500 volts, and possibly much higher.

EEStor claims that, using an automated production line and existing power electronics, it will initially build a 15-kilowatt-hour energy-storage system for a small electric car weighing less than 100 pounds, and with a 200-mile driving range. The vehicle, the company says, will be able to recharge in less than 10 minutes.

The company announced this week that this year it plans to begin shipping such a product to Toronto-based ZENN Motor, a maker of low-speed electric vehicles that has an exclusive license to use the EESU for small- and medium-size electric vehicles.

By some estimates, it would only require $9 worth of electricity for an EESU-powered vehicle to travel 500 miles, versus $60 worth of gasoline for a combustion-engine car.

"My understanding is that the leap from powder to product isn't the big leap," says Ian Clifford, CEO of ZENN, which is also an early investor in EEStor. "We're the first application, and that's thrilling for us. We took the initial risk because we believed in what they are doing. And energy storage is the game changer."

The key challenge, however, is to ensure that the barium-titanate powders can be made on a production line without compromising purity and stability. "Purification gives you better production stability, gives you better permittivity, and gives you the high voltages you're looking for," says Weir. "We've now got the chemicals certified and purified to the point we're looking for." (Better permittivity of the insulator improves the amount of charge that can be stored without letting the current leak across the two plates.)

EEStor announced this week that the first automated production line for its powder has performed as required and that permittivity will meet or exceed expectations. It also said that it achieved 99.9994 percent purity for its barium-nitrate powder, a crucial ingredient in the dialectric. San Antonia-based Southwest Research Institute independently confirmed the results.

In a traditional ultracap, that permittivity is given a rating of 20 to 30, while EEStor's claim is 18,500 or more--a phenomenal number by most accounts. "This is a very big step for us," says Weir. "This puts me well onto the road of meeting high-volume production."

Jim Miller, vice president of advanced transportation technologies at Maxwell Technologies and an ultracap expert who spent 18 years doing engineering work at Ford Motor, isn't so convinced.

"We're skeptical, number one, because of leakage," says Miller, explaining that high-voltage ultracaps have a tendency to self-discharge quickly. "Meaning, if you leave it parked overnight it will discharge, and you'll have to charge it back up in the morning."

He also doesn't believe that the ceramic structure--brittle by nature--will be able to handle thermal stresses that are bound to cause microfractures and, ultimately, failure. Finally, EEStor claims that its system works to specification in temperatures as low as -20 °C, revised from a previous claim of -40 °C.

"Temperature of -20 degrees C is not good enough for automotive," says Miller. "You need -40 degrees." By comparison, Altair and A123Systems claim that their lithium-ion cells can operate at -30 °C.

Burke, meanwhile, says that there's a big difference between making powder in a controlled environment and making defect-free devices in a large quantity that can survive underneath the hood of a car.

"I have no doubt you can develop that kind of [ceramic] material, and the mechanism that gives you the energy storage is clear, but the first question is whether it's truly applicable to vehicle applications," Burke says, pointing out that the technology seems more appropriate for utility-scale storage and military "ray guns," for which high voltage is an advantage.

Safety is another concern. What happens if a vehicle packed with a 3,500-volt energy system crashes?

Weir says the voltage will be stepped down with a bi-directional converter, and the whole system will be secured in a grounded metal box. It won't have a problem getting an Underwriters Laboratories safety certification, he adds. "If you drive a stake through it, we have ways of fusing this thing where all the energy is sitting there but it won't arc … It will be the safest battery the world has ever seen."

Regarding concerns about temperature, leakage, and ceramic brittleness, Weir did not reply to an e-mail asking him how EEStor overcomes such issues.

Nonetheless, the company has some solid backing. Its board has attracted Morton Topfer, former vice chairman of Dell and mentor to Michael Dell.

The company is also backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture-capital powerhouse that has an impressive track record: it made early and highly successful bets on Google, Amazon.com, and Sun Microsystems, among others. Whether EEStor can translate that success to the energy sector remains to be seen.

"I'm surprised that Kleiner has put money into it," says Miller.

Weir maintains that his company will meet all of its claims, and then some. "We're not trying to hype this. This is the first time we've ever talked about it. And we will continue to meet all of the production requirements."
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/18086/





Scientists Unveil Most Dense Memory Circuit Ever Made
AFP

The most dense computer memory circuit ever fabricated -- capable of storing around 2,000 words in a unit the size of a white blood cell -- was unveiled by scientists in California.

The team of experts at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) who developed the 160-kilobit memory cell say it has a bit density of 100 gigabits per square centimeter, a new record.

The cell is capable of storing a file the size of the United States' Declaration of Independence with room left over, Caltech said in a statement.

But the chances of the unit being used in a laptop any time soon is remote, said Caltech chemistry professor James Heath, who led the research.

"It's the sort of device that Intel would contemplate making in the year 2020," Heath said. "But at the moment, it furthers our goal of learning how to manufacture functional electronic circuitry at molecular dimensions."

Whether the 2020 date is viable depends on the validity of Moore's law, which states that the complexity of an integrated circuit typically will double every year, he said.

However, manufacturers currently can see no clear way of extending the miniaturization beyond the year 2013, the Caltech-UCLA team writes in an article that will appear in the journal Nature on Thursday.

"Whether it's possible to get this new memory circuit into a laptop, I don't know," said Heath. "But we have time."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070124...e_070124194553





Vista to Give HD Photo Format More Exposure
Stephen Shankland

Microsoft is looking to supplant the ubiquitous JPEG with an image format of its own--and it's hoping the debut of Windows Vista will help do the job.

In 2006, Microsoft began promoting its own image standard, formerly called Windows Media Photo but renamed HD Photo in November. The company makes no bones about its ambitions: "Our ultimate goal is that it does become the de facto standard people are using for digital photos," said Josh Weisberg, Microsoft's director of digital imaging evangelism.

"HD" doesn't actually stand for "high definition," but it's supposed to connote the better image quality that comes with HD TV. Rico Malvar, a Microsoft Research director who helped develop the format, said that compared with JPEG, HD Photo preserves more subtle details, offers richer colors and takes up half the storage space at the same image quality.

It is tough to get new image formats to catch on, much less to replace prevailing standards, but Microsoft has two strong forces on its side.

First, Microsoft built HD Photo support into Windows Vista, consumer versions of which go on sale Tuesday. That means camera manufacturers increasingly will be able to count on HD Photo support when customers upload their images to a computer, and software such as Web browsers will be able to display and save HD Photo images.

"Clearly, the goal there is to help make it pervasive. If you can use it in Windows, a large percentage of the user base already has access to it," Weisberg said.

Second, Adobe Systems, the most influential image-editing software maker by virtue of its Photoshop products, is helping support HD Photo, said Kevin Connor, Adobe's senior director of product management. Though the "timing didn't work out" to build HD Photo support into Adobe's upcoming CS3 version of Photoshop, Adobe is working with Microsoft on a plug-in with the goal that both Windows and Mac OS X Photoshop users will be able to open and save HD Photo files.

"What's good about HD Photo is that it was designed specifically for digital photography, with a good understanding of how digital photography usage is evolving," Connor said. "It will certainly take time for HD Photo to be as broadly accessible as JPEG--if it ever is quite that broad--but there can be reasons even today why a consumer might prefer to use HD Photo."

'Massive' challenge
Better image format technology doesn't necessarily ensure success. JPEG 2000, like JPEG named after the Joint Photographic Experts Group that produced it, offered better compression quality than JPEG but was a dud. Likewise, the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format fixed issues with GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), but it hasn't replaced it.

Camera makers have reason to be cautious before they build support into their products.

"JPEG is an industry standard with a variety of quality levels within its architecture," said Sally Smith Clemens, a product manager at Olympus Imaging America. "A replacement format would have to offer very broad support from many developers of both hardware and software to be practical or considered."

A further complication is that the enthusiasts dissatisfied with JPEG and most likely to appreciate HD Photo already are embracing an alternative: the raw image formats that provide detailed, unprocessed data straight off the camera's image sensor. Adobe is trying to standardize the chaotic profusion of raw formats through its Digital Negative (DNG) format.

But probably the biggest obstacle is JPEG's momentum. Even if Microsoft gets HD Photo to catch on, supplanting JPEG is another challenge altogether.

"Replacing JPEG is a massive, massive undertaking, as JPEG really works well for people. JPEG is an open standard that is supported everywhere, on every device and every browser and every workflow," Connor said.

But Eddie Tapp, author of several books on digital-image editing, believes ordinary photographers could be interested in HD Photo. Even the point-and-shoot crowd values image quality, especially when it comes to revisiting older photos, he said.

"The day will come when somebody says, 'That picture you did at Mount Whatever--I want a big copy of that,'" Tapp said. "People look back at images they've done and think, 'I wish I had a higher-resolution camera or better file.'"

Microsoft already has sunk more than six years into developing HD Photo and recognizes it has years of work still to come. "The adoption is going to take some time," Weisberg said.

Winning allies
Microsoft is also trying hard to court business partners for the format. It dropped the "Windows Media Photo" moniker not just because HD Photo is more descriptive, but also because of partners' objections

"Manufacturers of a product that might compete with something to do with Windows...didn't like putting something branded 'Windows' into some of their products," he said. "We don't really care too much for the potential backlash in the industry: 'Here goes Microsoft again with another Windows thing they want us to use.'"

Microsoft also lowered licensing barriers to try to speed adoption. "As you can tell from the license terms, this is not something where we said, 'Let's make billions of dollars off this,'" Weisberg said. The only licensing obligation is to maintain HD Photo image compatibility.

Open-source software also can support HD Photo, Weisberg said, even though Microsoft holds patents for the technology. HD Photo technology is covered by the Open Specification Promise, an agreement under which Microsoft pledges not to assert its patent rights.

"We know we don't live in a world where things don't travel outside our ecosystem. We wanted to make sure anybody who wants to consume or create HD Photo has the ability to do that without any real encumbrance," Weisberg said.

Microsoft has won some support outside the software realm, too. "There are several manufacturers that have begun shipping or who are close to shipping HD Photo-enabled silicon (chips), but that will take time," Weisberg said, a step that's necessary for built-in camera support.

But the format is still a Microsoft standard, not an industry standard governed by a neutral consortium to represent others' interests. That can be a problem--for example, Apple has said it would like Adobe's DNG better if it were an industry standard.

Weisberg, though loquacious on many HD Photo subjects, is conspicuously quiet on the matter of standardization, saying only, "It's something we're always looking at."

HD Photo sales pitch

How exactly is HD Photo better than JPEG? Malvar and Weisberg have a multitude of arguments:

• For each pixel, HD Photo stores at least 16 bits of data for each color, compared with 8 bits with JPEG. That means subtle tonal variations in shadowy or bright areas can be preserved, even through the editing and printing process. And for the cutting-edge crowd, it can store 32 bits per color, useful for combining multiple photos into a "high dynamic range" image that spans the darkest darks to the brightest brights.

• HD Photo's compression algorithm produces images that have twice the quality as JPEG at the same file size or the same quality at half the file size. The algorithm uses simple instructions that can be relatively easily built into cameras' image-processing chips.

• HD Photo builds in smaller "thumbnail" images for quick viewing of files at small sizes. In contrast, a computer operating system must generate JPEG thumbnails.

• The encoding algorithm, set to its highest standard, is "lossless," meaning that it preserves all the image data with no loss of quality. JPEG is "lossy." And although JPEG 2000 has a lossless feature, it requires a separate algorithm and therefore, in the case of camera chips, more circuitry.

• HD Photo uses Microsoft's scRGB color space, which spans a much wider gamut of possible colors than the universally supported but widely derided sRGB scheme. "HD Photo adds support for a higher range of colors, which is becoming more important," Connor said.

And although cameras and computers typically describe colors in RGB terms--varying amounts of red, green and blue--HD Photo also can use CMYK that uses cyan, magenta, yellow and black. That's useful for sending images to printers, which often use CMYK inks.

• The algorithm can decode only a selected portion of the HD Photo image that needs to be displayed, rather than the entire image, which reduces memory requirements and speeds up performance. It can also be encoded chunk by chunk without having to store the entire image in memory.

• HD Photos can be easily rotated in 90-degree increments. JPEG images must be decoded and re-encoded, degrading quality slightly with each change.

• HD Photo images can be gargantuan--262 million pixels on an edge, or 68.6 terapixels total, as long as the compressed image doesn't exceed 32GB in size.

Microsoft knows it will need a strong pitch to spread HD Photo beyond Windows and into the entire digital photo world.

"The camera manufacturers will think, 'If I produce an image, will the neighborhood drugstore print it? Otherwise I'll keep JPEG,'" Malvar said. "We would like such a transition to happen, but we are realistic that it may take some time until the whole ecosystem is in place."
http://news.com.com/Vista+to+give+HD...3-6153730.html





Wal-Mart Eyes Microsoft for Web Build-Out
Martin LaMonica

Retail giant Wal-Mart Stores is contracting with Microsoft and Novell--Microsoft's preferred Linux partner--to build out the company's Web operations, according to a Wal-Mart executive.

On Tuesday, Microsoft and Novell are expected to announce that Wal-Mart is the latest customer to purchase both Microsoft software and support certificates for Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

In an interview arranged by both companies, Wal-Mart's senior vice president and chief technology officer, Nancy Stewart, provided some details on the project involving Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Novell.

Stewart said Wal-Mart is in the midst of expanding its Web presence globally. The partnership between Microsoft and Novell, announced last November, provides "a fine support structure" for the project, she said.

Wal-Mart, currently a Red Hat Linux customer, intends to use Windows Server and Suse Linux Enterprise Server in the expansion, she said.

"That's our direction. That's where we're going, but if we hit a roadblock and we can't go forward, it's up to Microsoft and Novell to figure out what to do about it," she said.

With the partnership, Microsoft is seeking to make Novell its preferred Linux provider and to have both companies' products work well together. Microsoft offers coupons for Suse Enterprise Linux support services as well as legal indemnification for customers who use both Microsoft and Novell's Linux, which is open-source.

Wal-Mart, a global retailing giant with $315 billion in annual revenue, is already a Microsoft customer, and Stewart said the multiyear relationship has been "outstanding."

She said the intellectual property protections in the Novell deal give Wal-Mart more confidence in using Linux more broadly.

Questions over intellectual property are a "huge problem," Stewart said. The company now uses Linux in the data center of its current Web presence but had some trepidation with the idea of expanding it a much larger operation.

"To think about using it pervasively, we were very concerned about it," she said. The larger Web operation would have "significantly higher legal exposure."
http://news.com.com/Wal-Mart+eyes+Mi...3-6152247.html





Don't Fall Victim to the 'Free Wi-Fi' Scam
Preston Gralla

The next time you're at an airport looking for a wireless hot spot, and you see one called "Free Wi-Fi" or a similar name, beware -- you may end up being victimized by the latest hot-spot scam hitting airports across the country.

You could end up being the target of a "man in the middle" attack, in which a hacker is able to steal the information you send over the Internet, including usernames and passwords. And you could also have your files and identity stolen, end up with a spyware-infested PC and have your PC turned into a spam-spewing zombie. The attack could even leave your laptop open to hackers every time you turn it on, by allowing anyone to connect to it without your knowledge.

If you're a Windows Vista user, you're especially susceptible to this attack because of the difficulty in identifying it when using Vista. In this article, you'll learn how the attack works and how to keep yourself safe from it if you use Windows XP or Vista.

How the attack works

First, let's take a look at how the attack works. You go to an airport or other hot spot and fire up your PC, hoping to find a free hot spot. You see one that calls itself "Free Wi-Fi" or a similar name. You connect. Bingo -- you've been had!

The problem is that it's not really a hot spot. Instead, it's an ad hoc, peer-to-peer network, possibly set up as a trap by someone with a laptop nearby. You can use the Internet, because the attacker has set up his PC to let you browse the Internet via his connection. But because you're using his connection, all your traffic goes through his PC, so he can see everything you do online, including all the usernames and passwords you enter for financial and other Web sites.

In addition, because you've directly connected to the attack PC on a peer-to-peer basis, if you've set up your PC to allow file sharing, the attacker can have complete run of your PC, stealing files and data and planting malware on it.

You can't actually see any of this happening, so you'd be none the wiser. The hacker steals what he wants to or plants malware, such as zombie software, then leaves, and you have no way of tracking him down.

All that is bad enough, but it might not be the end of the attack. Depending on how you've connected to that ad hoc network, the next time you turn on your PC, it may automatically broadcast the new "Free Wi-Fi" network ID to the world, and anyone nearby can connect to it in ad hoc peer-to-peer mode without your knowledge -- and can do damage if you've allowed file sharing.

While some of these ad hoc networks advertising themselves as available for connection may be attributable to Windows behavior that the PC's user is unaware of, wireless ad hoc attacks may be more common that you think. Security company Authentium Inc. has found dozens of ad hoc networks in Atlanta's airport, New York's LaGuardia, the West Palm Beach, Fla., airport and Chicago's O'Hare. Internet users have reported finding them at LAX airport in Los Angeles.

Authentium did an in-depth survey of the ad hoc networks found at O'Hare, visiting on three different occasions. It found more than 20 ad hoc networks each time, with 80% of them advertising free Wi-Fi access. The company also found that many of the networks were displaying fake or misleading MAC addresses, a clear sign that they were bent on mischief.

"You connect to one of these networks at your own peril," says Corey O'Donnell, vice president of marketing at Authentium. "And you would have no way of tracking down how you were attacked, because you would have thought you were at an ordinary hot spot connection. Enterprises are also at risk, because if someone uses a corporate laptop to connect to one of these networks and gets infected, when he plugs back in to the enterprise network, the whole network is put at risk."

How to protect yourself in Windows XP

Protecting yourself against these kinds of attacks is quite easy: Never connect to an ad hoc network unless someone you know has set one up and specifically asks you to connect. So no matter where you are, if you see an ad hoc network, don't connect, no matter the name of the network.

Be aware that someone can name an ad hoc network anything they want, so they can even duplicate the name of a legitimate network. For example, if you're at an airport, and the name of the airport's free hot spot is AirNet, someone can set up an ad hoc network with that exact same name. You'd see two networks called AirNet, one being the legitimate one and the other being the scam ad hoc network.

In Windows XP, it's easy to differentiate between an ad hoc network and a normal Wi-Fi network (Microsoft calls connecting to a hot spot or access point being in "infrastructure mode"). In Windows XP, in order to connect to a wireless network, you click the wireless network icon in the system tray, and the "Choose a wireless network" connection screen appears. You'll see a list of all nearby wireless networks.

As you can see in the nearby figure, each network includes a name and a description. Look at the description. If it's an ad hoc network, it will be called a "computer-to-computer" network; normal wireless networks are simply called wireless networks. In the figure, the "Free Airport WiFi" network is an ad hoc network. You should stay away from it

Windows XP displays the details of every nearby wireless network, including whether it's an ad hoc network. In this screen, the Free Airport WiFi network is an ad hoc network.

There are other steps you can take to make sure you don't accidentally connect to an ad hoc network created by a scamster. For example, you can make sure that XP never connects to an ad hoc network. To do it:

1. Click the wireless icon in the System Tray.
2. Click "Change advanced settings."
3. Select the Wireless Networks tab.
4. Click "Advanced."
5. On the screen that appears (pictured in the nearby figure), select "Access point (infrastructure) networks only."
6. Click Close, and keep clicking OK until the dialog boxes disappear.

Note: If a wireless icon isn't displayed in your System Tray, you can get to your wireless connection by clicking on Start, going to Settings, then Control Panel and then Network Connections. Then double-click on the wireless connection icon to bring up the panel that displays the "Change advanced settings" link. An alternate path on some systems might be Start --> Control Panel --> Network and Internet Connections --> Network Connections, then double-click on the wireless network connection icon.

This screen lets you tell your PC never to connect to ad hoc networks.

When you're at the "Advanced" screen, you should also make sure the box next to "Automatically connect to non-preferred networks" is not checked. If that box is checked, your PC will connect to any nearby wireless network, without alerting you, which is a serious security risk.
It's also a good idea when you're on the Wireless Networks tab to look at all the wireless networks listed in the Preferred networks area (shown in the nearby figure). These are networks that at one time or another you've connected to. Highlight any that you are not absolutely sure are secure, then click Remove. That way, your PC won't attempt to connect to them.

Remove any unfamiliar networks from the Preferred networks list.

There's more you should do as well. You should also configure your remaining preferred networks so that you don't connect to them automatically. Why do that? Let's say your home network uses the default name it shipped with --- for example, Linksys for a Linksys network. A scamster can create an ad hoc network called Linksys, and then anyone nearby who has Linksys listed as a preferred network will automatically connect to that ad hoc network.

So in the Preferred networks area, highlight each network, select Properties, then click the connection tab, shown in the nearby figure. Uncheck the box next to "Connect when this network is within range" and keep clicking OK until the dialog boxes close.

Make sure to tell your PC not to make any automatic connections to wireless networks.
Keeping safe in Windows Vista

Microsoft spent a considerable amount of effort making Windows Vista more secure than Windows XP, but when it comes to wireless networking, you're more at risk in Windows Vista from an ad hoc attack than you were in Windows XP. That's because in Windows Vista, it's not as easy to distinguish an ad hoc network from a normal Wi-Fi network as it is in Windows XP. However, once you know the trick, it's easy to do.

In Windows Vista, you connect to a wireless network by first clicking the network icon in the System Tray, then selecting "Connect or disconnect." The "Connect to a Network" screen shows up, with a list of nearby wireless networks. You see the name of each and whether the network is encrypted or not; to get more details about any, hover your mouse over it, as shown in the nearby figure. But those details don't include whether the network is a true hot spot or an ad hoc network.

Before you connect to a new wireless network, the only way to tell the difference between an ad hoc network and one in infrastructure mode is to look at the network icon next to it on the "Connect to a Network" screen. As you can see in the nearby figure, the icon for a normal Wi-Fi network is one computer, while the icon for an ad hoc network instead is several computers. That's it; there's no other way to distinguish between the two.

The only way to distinguish between ad hoc and normal wireless hot spots is to look at the network icon on this screen. An ad hoc network's icon is made up of several PCs; a normal network is made up of one PC.

Here's another oddity: If you right-click the list of available networks, on the menu that appears, some of them have a Properties menu item and others don't. Only those networks that you've previously visited and saved to your network list will have the Properties menu item. If you choose Properties, select the Connection tab and look next to Network Type, you'll see whether it's an ad hoc network or an access point (a normal hot spot).

But if you haven't yet connected to the network (or if you have connected previously but haven't saved it), it won't have the Properties menu item. So you can't use that method of distinguishing between ad hoc and normal Wi-Fi networks when you're looking for a hot spot on the road.

Other steps you can take

There are other steps you can take to keep yourself safe, including turning off file sharing and running your company's VPN when at a hot spot. You can also pay to use a VPN such as HotSpotVPN. For details and many other tips for keeping yourself safe, see "How to protect yourself at wireless hot spots".

In addition, Authentium is working with financial institutions to create a product called VirtualATM, which will help protect you when you connect to a financial institution. It's expected to be released later this year
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...axono myId=16





Net Security

Interview with Bill Cheswick
Federico Biancuzzi

Many people have seen Internet maps on walls and in various publications over the years. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed Bill Cheswick, who started the Internet Mapping Project that grew into software to map corporate and government networks. They discussed firewalling, logging, NIDS and IPS, how to fight DDoS, and the future of BGP and DNS.

Could you introduce yourself?

Bill Cheswick: I am known for my work in Internet Security, starting with work on early firewalls and honeypots at Bell Labs in the late 80s. I coined the word "proxy" in its current usage in a paper I published in 1990. I co-authored the first full book on Internet security in 1994 with Steve Bellovin. This sold very well and arrived in time to train the first generation of network managers.

In the late 1990s Hal Burch and I did some seminal research on IP traceback, and then started the Internet Mapping Project. This grew into software to map corporate and government networks. We were two of seven people who co-founded Lumeta, a spin-off from Bell Labs, to commercialize these capabilities. You have probably seen our Internet maps on walls and in various publications over the years. I have served as Chief Scientist at Lumeta from Sept 2000 to Sept 2006.

I am an internationally-known speaker on computers, the Internet, and security.

You wrote a famous book entitled "Firewalls and Internet Security", so I'd like to ask you a couple of technical suggestions on firewalls. What type of policy do you prefer for filtered TCP ports? Returning a RST or dropping packets silently?

Bill Cheswick: I prefer the silent drops: it makes an attacker wait for a timeout, and you can't use spoofed packets to point RSTs elsewhere. Returning an RST reveals information that really doesn't need to be disclosed.

I don't think choosing one way or the other is a big deal, however.

I was thinking of the fact that if you drop TCP packets for a particular port or range or ports, an attacker could spoof your IP. In fact he would be able to send SYN packets to the victim, who will send SYN+ACK to your IP, but since your firewall will drop those packets instead of returning RST, the attacker will be able to send his ACK storm undisturbed...

Bill Cheswick: It's true, but that trick will also work with any unassigned or idle IP addresses, and there are many.

In any case, these bounced packets don't offer any amplification, so it isn't clear why they would bother. Also, I understand that with the botnets so common, a lot of attackers don't bother spoofing packets.

What type of logging would you suggest for a firewall filtering an Internet connection? If the aim of a firewall is to block undesired packets, why should we log them?

Bill Cheswick: Back in the early 90s I used to log all the probes, and often send out emails warning the owners of probing machines that they might be compromised. Over time this became as pointless as counting bugs on a windshield, and I stopped.

The information is not entirely useless, and the firewall can become a small packet telescope. Most of the information revealed is statistical: worm infection rates, etc. But you can imagine combining information about firewall probes with other information about an attack on a company that could yield some additional information about the attack.

Disk space is cheap, and these logs aren't needed for very long, nor do they typically require being backed up. I like to put such logs into a large, cheap drop-safe, and make sure that if the safe fills up, the firewall still functions.

You didn't mention NIDS when talking about analyzing data and discovering threats. What is your opinion about the core idea and current technology of Network Intrusion Detection Systems?

Bill Cheswick: It makes a lot of sense to watch your own network and interconnections to keep an eye on what's going on. The problem is that there is such volume and variety of data and protocols (a strength of the Internet) that it is really hard for a human to understand his network traffic, unless it is highly constrained. (In other words, "we only allow web traffic on this subnet...")

Not only is it hard to really monitor what's going on, subtle, slow stealth attacks and probes over, say, a period of months, are almost impossible to separate from the hue and cry of momentary traffic. Most people don't try, but that's where the real pros can eat your lunch.

NIDS are an ongoing attempt to watch the network. They all try to watch the net, summarize traffic, report anomalies, etc. They all have problems with false negatives and false positives. False positives quickly become a monotonous drumbeat, and tend to quash interest in the tool and its results. When a salesman tells you about a NIDS, or you read a paper about some new NIDS technology, always find out the details of false positive rates, and what they miss.

Another problem is the NIDS themselves may be subverted. We have seen buffer overflow attacks on the monitoring host, packets that were intended to subvert the eavesdropping software! This can turn your NIDS against you.

Deep down, network monitors have what Matt Blaze calls the "eavesdropper's dilemma." Is the eavesdropping software seeing the same data, and interpreting it the same way, as the destination hosts? This is a hard problem: perhaps packets don't make it all the way to the destination, or the end operating system can interpret overlapping data in two ways. The eavesdropper has to understand this, and state-of-the-art implementations actually understand the local network topology and actively probe endpoints to determine their operating system and version. It seems to me that this particular arms race will end badly.

This same problem exists for law enforcement and military, only on a much grander scale. They need to extract specific, small bits of data from vast torrents of data.

What do you think about reactive firewalls, also knows as IPS (Intrusion Prevention Systems)?

Bill Cheswick: Reactive security is an idea that keeps popping up. It seems logical. Why not send out a virus to cure a virus, for example? How about having an attacked host somehow stifle the attacker, or tell a firewall to block the noxious packets.

These are very tricky things to do, and the danger is always that an attacker can make you DOS yourself or someone else. As an attacker, I can make you shut down connections by making them appear to misbehave. This is often easier than launching the original attack that the reactive system was designed to suppress. (By the way, this happens a lot in biological immune systems as well. There are a number of diseases that trigger dangerous or fatal immune system responses.)

So I am skeptical about these systems. They may work out, but I want to keep an eye on the actual user experiences with these.

What is the state of research in network security? What attract funds? What is considered a promising technology?

Bill Cheswick: A lot of the easy stuff has been done, and even beaten to death commercially. I have been intrigued by new work in a few areas.
There is a lot of activity on virtual machines of various sorts, like VMware and Xen, for example. I think these have a lot of potential, especially with better hardware support. VMs are a nice sandbox for necessary but dangerous client software, like browsers and mail readers. They can be used to improve testing of operating systems, which I would like to see more of.

Google for "strider honey monkeys". This is a nice paper about a proactive project at Microsoft research to go find browser exploits on evil sites. It has found a number of day-zero and other exploits, which they fed into the developers and legal department. I understand this work has been turned over to production. A nice job.

I was excited by the SANE paper at Usenix from some crackerjack folk at Stanford. It is a rethinking of intranet design, completely replacing the end-to-end principle with centralized control. This is bad for research and new Internet technologies, but it may be exactly what a military network needs, and maybe useful for corporate deployment. There are open questions, but it is quite promising.

I am not that well connected with current funding streams to be able to answer that question well.

How will the Internet change with the increasing resources that common people have access to? For example, a blind spoofing attack could become more feasible with broadband access to the internet, and there are some countries where you can easily and cheaply get a 100Mbps connection. Same thing for DDoS via botnets, if each host got a 100Mbps...

Bill Cheswick: This has already happened some time ago. Parts of the Far East have efficient home wiring, and computers there are often used in staging attacks because they have high bandwidth. This has become such a problem that some people just drop all email from China, since it can be a major source of spam connections, and many people don't know anyone there.

Spoofing of attacks continue, but I am told that the spoofing rates are down. For DDoS, why spoof when there are tens of thousands of source addresses?

For almost all users, the computer and the network have far more potential than the average user employs almost all of the time. Common computers have cycle times six times greater than the million dollar Cray we had at Bell Labs in the early 90s. The Cray still wins in some performance areas, but in many it does not. What does an average user do with this compute power? Powerpoint and word processing don't need nearly this much power. Some multimedia and many games do use this power.

So miscreants use the computer and the network connections of average users for their own uses, being careful not to bother the owner. That's why viruses these days don't tend to do nasty things like erase hard drives, though they certainly could if they wished.

These compromised machines are very useful for making money, through spam delivery, phishing sites, DDoS extortion attacks, etc. The incentives are strong, and I expect this misuse to continue. I hope the population of susceptible machines will decline as Vista gets deployed and the early kinks get ironed out.

The big change in the Internet is going to be greatly increased multimedia delivery. An hour television show at 720p is about 5GB. People are going to want to share these with friends, and providers are grappling with new delivery mechanisms, perhaps permanently replacing broadcast TV.

What is the more promising path to fight DDoS?

Bill Cheswick: I have no definitive answer for this. I can imagine a world of robust, worm-free software. Engineering, experience, and the right economic motives can bring this about. But any public server can be abused by the public. Are the flood of queries to CNN the result of breaking news, or a focused DDoS attack? Even if it is breaking news, I could imagine that the news might be created explicitly to flood the site. How would we know?

I see no theoretical possibility of doing anything more than mitigating attacks, and ultimately throwing large amounts of computing and network capacity at the problem, which is what all the most popular targets do.

Do you think that we could use some mapping software to fight these types of attacks, just like weather people study the movement and shape of tornados with satellites?

Bill Cheswick: I don't think it's likely to be useful, because the source of DDoS attacks are widespread and generally not hidden. It doesn't help me if I know the location of 10,000 attacking hosts: I can't possibly track them down (using traceback, traffic analysis, or whatever) and shut them all down. These days I am told that the attackers often don't even bother to spoof the attacking addresses.

If there is a particular attacking stream of interest, then, yes, this technology may be helpful, combined with others. I mentioned traffic analysis: this is one area where I conjecture that the spooks may be well ahead of the public literature.

There are certainly researchers examining packet traceback, flood suppression, etc., using these tools, including my data.

It seems that Net Neutrality is under fire in the US. What is your opinion from a security standpoint? Could we see some security improvements if carriers had the right to filter the traffic on their networks?

Bill Cheswick: Short answer: some carriers do filter some traffic, and that sometimes is a benefit to their customers. As the Chinese would tell you if free to do so, it is actually quite hard to suppress all the unwanted traffic, given world-class encryption and a massive traffic flow in which to hide.

;login: The USENIX Magazine published an article [PDF] titled "Worm Propagation Strategies in an IPv6 Internet" that you co-authored. It seems that IPv6 could help us in fighting worms thanks to its huge address space. What type of other indirect security advantages could IPv6 provide?

Bill Cheswick: That paper points out that it doesn't help us that much. IPv6 is a good idea, but it shouldn't be sold as a palliative for worms.

The job of hunting for hosts on a network also has legitimate motivations. Corporate auditors are keen to find and track their assets. I think they are going to have to talk to the routers more. Hopefully the worms will be excluded from these conversations.

At present, I don't see much economic pressure for corporations to switch their intranets to IPv6. There is a lot of work involved, and I don't see the benefits.

The Internet runs on two fragile technologies: BGP connections among routers, and a bunch of root DNS servers deployed around the planet. How much longer do you think this setup could still be effective?

Bill Cheswick: For quite a while, actually, though there are obvious, well-known weaknesses with both systems. The DNS root servers appear to be 13 hosts, but are actually many more. They have been under varying, continual, low-level attacks for many years, a process that tends to toughen the defenses and make them quite robust. A few years ago there was a strong attack on the root servers, taking 9 of the 13 down at some point.

The heterogeneity of the root server management was part of the underlying robustness. For example, Paul Vixie's servers (F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) had many hosts hiding behind that single IP address. I understand they did not go down. In this case, the statelessness of the UDP protocol underlying the DNS system was a strength. (It is a weakness in other ways, allowing a variety of attacks, including some new ones recently.)

There are other root servers, of course. Anyone can run one, it is just a question of getting people to use it. I understand that China is proceeding with root servers of their own. DNSSEC is a way to get the right DNS answer, but its deployment has had problems for at least 10 years.

BGP is certainly another network issue. Where should my routers forward packets to? BGP distributes this information throughout the Internet. There are two problems here: 1) is the distribution working correctly, and 2) are the other players sending the correct information in the first place. This is usually an easy problem between an ISP and their customer. The customer is only allowed to announce certain routes, and the ISP filters these announcements to enforce the restriction. It is easy on a short list of announcements.

But at the peering point with other ISPs, this becomes hard, because there are hundreds of thousands of routes, and it isn't clear which is which. Should I forward packets for Estonia to router A or router B? We are far removed from the places where these answers are known.

There are proposals to grab ahold of all this information using cryptographic signatures. SBGP is one on-going proposal, but there are lots of problems with it, and lots of routers to change. (We identify almost 200,000 routers a day worldwide in the Internet mapping project.)

And BGP announcements are misused. Evil nets will pop up for a little while, emit bad packets, and then unannounce themselves, confounding the job of tracking them down. Other attacks can divert packets from the proper destinations. There have been many cases of this, both accidental and intentional.

For all these problems, and others in the past, I have been impressed with the response of the network community. These problems, and others like security weaknesses, security exploits, etc., usually get dealt with in a few days. For example, the SYN packet DOS attacks in 1996 quickly brought together ad hoc teams of experts, and within a week, patches with new mitigations were appearing from the vendors. You can take the Internet down, but probably not for very long.
http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/429





From the guy who said YouTube would flop

BitTorrent is DOOMED!
P2PNet

The self-acclaimed guru of IPTV, Mark Cuban claims P2P and, more specifically, BitTorrent, is doomed. Apparently, “conflicting clients”, lack of knowledge, limited Internet plans, and “bandwidth premiums” are going to be jointly responsible.

Here’s Cuban’s argument: he believes from the business standpoint, BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer technologies are great. They save massive amounts of bandwidth and help efficiently distribute large media files, possibly even speeding up transfers. We agree with everything up ’til here.

But now he goes on to say although content creators can profit from BitTorrent, users are getting screwed. Why? Here are his reasons.

# Conflicting Clients
# End Users don’t understand how P2P works
# The P2P model of seeding is a HUGE problem for those […] with bandwidth constraints or per bit or per minute costs
# There is a misconception that there is bandwidth savings for the end user

On conflicting clients he says, “When multiple clients are installed on a PC, not only does that create confusion among users, its a ‘last installed, first in charge’ approach. That approach and lack of respect for other clients will lead to user configuration problems.”

Okay, Number One, if you’re referring to file associations, ie, the most recently installed app is associated with the file type, then this “problem” is not limited to BitTorrent clients. Everything from graphic editors (Photoshop, Gimp) to music management applications (iTunes, WinAmp) do this.

Secondly, if this causes confusion among users, then how do millions of people manage to get their music into iTunes and sync it to their iPods without accidentally having their mp3s added to the Windows Media Player library? This “lack of respect” isn’t so much about BitTorrent client developers trying to steal users from their competitors, as it is about how operating systems function today.

Onto Point Two. “End Users dont understand how P2P works, and once they do, they get concerned about giving up bandwidth.”

I hear BitTorrent transfers make up about one third of all traffic on the Internet these days. It seems likely that end users do, in fact, understand how P2P works. And unless their other online activities are hindered by BitTorrent or P2P, I don’t see users really having a problem with the uploads.

Most don’t even bother uploading once their file has been download, and since the majority of users download torrents from public trackers, they aren’t forced to either.

Cuban’s third point, “The P2P model of seeding is a HUGE problem for those using wireless broadband with bandwidth constraints or per bit or per minute costs. People are going to wake up and find that they owe Verizon, Sprint, whoever a lot more than they ever thought possible because they installed a client on their Laptops. That could lead to these networks blocking the protocol.”

This actually makes sense. The real problem here is miscommunication. In developing countries such as India, ISPs milk customers for money by charging them for every MB downloaded, and in some cases, for every minute spent online.

Some ISPs (Sify, for one) even lie about unlimited plans and have per-day limits (eg. 200 MB), which, if exceeded, cause the number of days the plan is valid for (usually a month) to be reduced every time the download limit is excedded. Someone I know actually ran up a bill of several hundred dollars because he thought he was on an unlimited plan, whereas in reality his ISP hadn’t processed his request to change plans. But as BitTorrent and P2P grow in popularity, users are quickly starting to demand ‘unlimited’ plans.

If you look at the trend, ISPs are more likely to cash in on the P2P phenomenon and offer unlimited plans for a premium than start blocking protocols. And although per-bit and per-minute plans are widespread in developing countries, I don’t know how much of a problem they are to European, Australian and North American users.

Cuban’s last point is, “There is a misconception that there is bandwidth savings for the end user. If you want to download a 1gb size file, 1gb of data will be delivered to your PC. There is no savings of bandwidth on the client side. In fact, the client is charged a bandwidth premium because after they have received the entire file, they are asked to particpate in the peering by delivering parts of the file to other users.”

Guess what? The end user doesn’t care if he’s uploading bits while downloading. Unlike hosting providers, users incur no cost from constantly uploading data. It doesn’t matter, as long as they can go about their other activities. And unless they're on a per-bit or per-minute plan, no “bandwidth premiums” are going to be charged. Also, no one is asking the user to “participate in the peering” (or simply, seed) once the download is complete. That is only a requirement of select private trackers.

When it comes to utilising BitTorrent in business, as part of a content store, I think Cuban’s looking at it the wrong way.

When the various BitTorrent stores (BitTorrent.com, Zudeo.com) are up and running, content creators are not going to be getting a free ride. Users are not going to pay the same price they do at conventional stores such as the iTunes Store and Amazon Unbox. Why should they? They’re acting as servers for content creators and are distributing content for no charge at all. But since money isn’t being deducted from their bank accounts, and seeding a torrent is not really affecting their web browsing, users are okay with uploading.

Keep in mind, this business model will only work if the rates at BitTorrent-powered content stores are significantly lower than conventional ones. In other words, users aren’t just going to let themselves be ripped off. If they feel they’re getting a raw deal, they’ll head straight to “illegal” torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and Isohunt. In fact, that’s what users are doing right now!

I’m open to the possibility that I’m dead wrong. I don’t know, maybe Cuban is right. Maybe BitTorrent is in fact doomed, and the video streaming technologies he pioneered with Broadcast.com in the 90s will make a major comeback.

I mean, who uses BitTorrent these days? Just a bunch of pirates, soon to be exiled to metal platform in the middle of the North Sea. Right? Right.

What do you think? Are the days of P2P over? Is the the balkanisation of BitTorrent imminent?
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/11111





The Pirate Bay: Serving over 4 Million Torrents a Day
Ernesto

The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular BitTorrent sites on the Internet, posted some interesting stats. At the moment 53 .torrent files are downloaded from The Pirate Bay every second, which adds up to 4,579,200 torrents a day.

Here are some more interesting stats from The Pirate Bay Blog:

· Serving the torrents takes up 1.72 Mbyte/s
· Apart from the torrents, 308 requests are made per second
· These request take up 712 Kbyte/s
· 86 searches are made every second
· The database server handles 1150 Requests per second
· Including the tracker The Pirate Bay is good for 150-170 Mbit/s

Close to 50% of all the torrents that are listed on public trackers are tracked by The Pirate Bay.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...orrents-a-day/





Why Pirated Vista Has Microsoft Champing at the BitTorrent
Eric Lai

As Microsoft Corp. gets ready to launch Windows Vista and Office 2007 to consumers, it claims a formidable new foe it lacked at its last major consumer software launch five years ago: the popular filesharing network known as BitTorrent.

This third-generation peer-to-peer (P2P) service, already used by tens of millions of Internet users to swap digital music and movies for free, is becoming a popular mechanism for those looking to obtain pirated software.

"Any software that is commercially available is available on BitTorrent," according to Mark Ishikawa, CEO of BayTSP Inc., a Los Gatos, Calif., antipiracy consulting firm.

Piracy and prerelease
Or in the case of Vista and Office 2007, before they were commercially available. Both products were released to corporations almost two months ago, but won’t be officially launched to consumers until Jan. 29.

But as early as mid-November, "cracked" copies of both products were available via BitTorrent. As of mid-January, more than 100 individual copies of Office 2007 and more than 350 individual copies of Windows Vista were available on the service, according to BigChampagne LLC, a Los Angeles-based online media-tracking firm.

The pirates that cracked early copies of Vista all sidestepped Microsoft’s latest antipiracy technology, the Software Protection Platform. SPP is supposed to shut down any copy of Vista not registered to Microsoft over the Internet with a legitimate, paid-up license key within the first 30 days.

Microsoft has quietly admitted that it has already found three different workarounds to SPP. It says it can defeat one, dubbed the Frankenbuild because of its cobbling together of code from beta and final versions of Vista. It hasn’t yet announced success against several other cracks, including one seemingly inspired by Y2k, which allows Vista to run unactivated until the year 2099 rather than for just 30 days.

"Pirates have unlimited time and resources," BayTSP’s Ishikawa says. "You can’t build an encryption that can’t be broken."

Microsoft popular with pirates
According to BayTSP’s most recent figures from 2005, six out of the 25 most widely pirated software packages on BitTorrent and eDonkey, another P2P network, originated at Microsoft. Office 2003 was the second most-pirated software behind Adobe Systems Inc.’s Acrobat 7. Other widely pirated Microsoft software includes InfoPath 2003, FrontPage 2003, Visio 2003, Office XP and Windows XP.

Cori Hartje, director of Microsoft’s Genuine Software Initiative, remains confident that SPP, along with another effort by Microsoft to clamp down on the abuse of corporate volume license keys by pirates, can reduce the rate of piracy of Microsoft’s latest products compared to previous ones.

But the company is taking no chances, fighting back on multiple fronts. To distract downloaders who may only be seeking a sneak peek at the new software, the company's offering free online test drives of Vista and 60-day trials of Office 2007.

To reach young people, who are the most enthusiastic users of P2P, Microsoft is putting comics up on the Web, mostly in foreign languages, decrying software piracy.

And on Monday, the company released statistics purporting to show that users downloading pirated software from P2P networks are at great risk infecting themselves with viruses or spyware.

According to an October 2006 report conducted by IDC and commissioned by Microsoft, nearly 60% of key generators and crack tools downloaded from P2P networks contained malicious or unwanted software. Similarly, one quarter of Web sites offering key generators -- software that create alphanumeric strings that users can type in to activate their pirated Microsoft software -- had such hidden software.

The perils of P2P?
Hartje claims that many pirates are irresponsibly uploading malware along with their cracked goods to BitTorrent.

"They may not be running a clean shop, and don’t care if viruses are on the software," she says.

IDC researchers used popular antivirus packages from McAfee Inc. and Symantec Corp. to detect malware. However, the researchers did not differentiate between more serious viruses and spyware and less harmful unwanted code such as adware. IDC also conceded that some P2P networks deploy built-in virus scanning that "strip[s] out most of the malicious software" before it reaches users.

Some skeptics say that Microsoft’s "education" campaign is primarily an attempt to sow FUD -- fear, uncertainty and doubt -- in the minds of consumers, a tactic the company has been called out for in the past, and which could backfire.

"Warning customers about viruses and spyware in counterfeit software is a nice PR thing for Microsoft, but for the most part, I doubt that it's really effective," says Paul DeGroot, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent consulting firm in Kirkland, Wash., who applauds Microsoft’s other antipiracy efforts.

Microsoft hopes to scare consumers straight, he says, because efforts to guilt and shame consumers into not downloading, have had little success. Moreover, the company rarely targets end users of counterfeit software with lawsuits for fear of alienating customers.

"Our main concern is preventing pirates from putting counterfeits in the hands of unsuspecting customers," says Matt Lundy, a senior attorney at Microsoft.

The technology advances
P2P technology, meanwhile, has advanced greatly since Microsoft released Windows XP in late 2001. At the time, P2P networks such as Napster and Gnutella were solely used to exchange music files. Since that time, Napster has been closed and re-opened as a legitimate pay music service similar to Apple Inc.’s iTunes. The second-generation Gnutella has waned in popularity because of aging technology and partial neutering by the record companies, which have flooded Gnutella with decoy files masquerading as songs, Ishikawa says.

Enter BitTorrent, which boasts faster file transfers and more reliable downloads than other P2P networks. BitTorrent was not the first P2P network to host pirated DVDs and software, but it was the first to make the trade of such hefty files practical. Moreover, BitTorrent claims it automatically cleanses its network of both viruses as well as decoy files. The latter defeats related antipiracy efforts by the music industry.

BitTorrent’s other great advantage is its ease of use compared to "darknet" services used by more sophisticated pirates, such as Internet Relay Chat channels, private FTP sites and Usenet newsgroups. For most Internet users, darknets remain hard to find -- you can’t simply Google them -- and intimidating to use.

Microsoft’s worst nightmare would come to pass if P2P software piracy becomes as pervasive as the movie and music piracy. Already, the number of songs swapped illegally online surpasses the number sold in stores or online at sites like iTunes, says BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland, citing music industry estimates.

Victory by assimilation?
Faced with this situation, music and movie companies are starting to co-opt P2P. Record companies are using services like BigChampagne to scout music trends and sign up-and-coming bands, while movie studios such as Paramount and Fox have linked up with BitTorrent to sell movies via downloads.

The software industry lags by comparison. Microsoft is allowing consumers to download and buy Vista from its own Web site for the first time. Otherwise, Microsoft has "nothing new to announce in regards to any new distribution channels," Hartje says.

BitTorrent did not return a call and an e-mail seeking comment.

For Microsoft to ink a deal with BitTorrent to sell full software or even put up free trials would send out mixed messages, Ishikawa says.

"If you ever want to litigate, don’t send out any freeware," he says.

Still, people like BigChampagne’s Garland point out that P2P software piracy today remains a drop in the bucket compared to video piracy, which involve similarly hefty files. His reason: downloaded movies are just entertainment, but business software is used to run companies, do people’s taxes and other important things. For those, most users still prefer the security blanket of technical support, access to software fixes and updates -- even manuals -- that only buying the software can provide, Garland says.

"Forget backdoor viruses or trojans," he says. "There are some things that are worth paying for."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...pageNu mber=1





BBC to Join NBC, CBS, in YouTube Deal?
The Blog Herald

It looks like the BBC is in negotiations to sign a deal that see its content placed on YouTube, much like NBC and CBS have already done. The International Herald Tribune reports that negotiations are underway with the Google-bought company, with as yet undisclosed terms. Its unclear whether or not they would have a dedicated channel, such as NBC, or, merely syndicate different shows, like CBS has done with shows like the David Letterman show.

What’s not unclear, however, is the rationale for heading towards YouTube.

There’s no doubt that the BBC has its own plans for distributed video, but with the number of users that YouTube has, its probably viewed more as a distribution channel. And its ability to “channel” viewers is obvious.

Last fall year CBS produced data that showed increased off-line viewership after it began to syndicate a number of its television shows on YouTube. In particular, shows such as the “The Late Show, with David Letterman”, “The Late Late Show, with Craig Ferguson”, had all increased its viewership 5-7% after CBS began seeding its videos on YouTube. While the exact numbers might be indispute, it did provide some data that suggested that — shocking, I know — providing grainy poor-resolution, in-front-of-your-PC “free” shows improved the value of ad-supported higher resolution on-your-couch shows.

Look for the actual details to be disclosed this Wednesday.

Article





Become an Internet Sensation on YouTube

70 million videos are watched every day
AP

So you want to be a viral video star.

Now that web sites like YouTube have created a democratized platform for celebrity, anyone who uploads a video has a chance to become a sensation. And we've seen deals follow with TV networks and record labels.

Sounds easy, right? Except that more than 70 million videos are watched on YouTube daily. In that enormous digital wilderness, most videos fall without a sound.

To reach the pinnacle of YouTube celebrity, your video must generally rank among either the most-viewed or most-subscribed lists, which each include only 100 videos, arranged daily, weekly, monthly and by all-time.

A look at how to rise up the charts:

The Video

Nobody knows what will become a hit. The most popular videos ever posted on YouTube include a balding man dancing (39 million views), an impression of a computer bug (6 million) and a dog that seems to hate his left hind foot (7 million).

"It's really about finding out what you do best and putting it out there," says Ben Going, a 21-year-old Alabama waiter who as "boh3m3" is one of the best-known members of the YouTube community.

Then there's the consistent popularity of cute, young girls. YouTube's biggest star -- lonelygirl15 -- probably wouldn't have succeeded as a middle-aged man. In recent months, many have sought to exploit the male impulse to click on anything that has the slightest chance of showing some skin.

One of the week's most-viewed clips has a thumbnail photo of a buxom blonde and calls itself "Chicks Gone Wild!!! 2" And thus more than a million people have clicked on a video of baby chickens.

Last month, dot-com entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who frequently blogs critically on YouTube, wrote: "That's what YouTube has become. Fake porn and commercials."

One good way to make a name for yourself is to parody something that's already popular on YouTube. For example, Richard Stern -- known as "Lazydork" -- became well known after making a rap video titled "LonelyGirl: Lazydork is Better Than You."

Actor Jamie Kennedy's recent parody "How To Blow Up on YouTube" recomended mixing Mentos with Diet Coke, playing with cats, singing into the camera or pairing yourself with a teenage girl.

Capturing eyeballs

Once you've uploaded your video and tagged it with relevant subjects, your work has just begun. Some people may stumble on your video and maybe your friends will share it with others, but you've got to create your audience just as you created your video.

"One of the things that we always recommend is to build a YouTube channel and be an active part of the community," says Aaron Ferstman, a spokesman for YouTube. "It's really about producing creative content, contributing it, getting comments and just participating with other people."

Francis Stokes, a 34-year-old independent filmmaker, spent years at film festivals with his movie "Harold Buttleman, Daredevil Stuntman." Now his "God, Inc." series on YouTube has brought fame and industry notice in a matter of weeks.

The first episode of "God, Inc.," which presents heaven as an office, has received nearly one million views since being added in early December -- but it didn't happen overnight.

"I uploaded the video thinking, 'Oh, people will find it.' And then after a while, I started getting to know YouTube and getting to know who was popular, so I sent out some e-mails and made some comments," he said.

To infuse yourself into the community, you can post video responses and comments to the videos of popular YouTubers.

Damien Estreich has become a unique presence in online video with his channel, YourTube News. His videos -- sometimes hosted by a professional broadcaster -- report what's happening on YouTube and profile notable contributors. But he also had to fight to become relevant.

"I just marketed my heart out on people's pages and got social networking going," says Estreich, who lives in Australia. "I got popular members doing video responses -- got the name in there."

Going, however, is reluctant to lend his spotlight to those who approach him: "That's not what it's all about."

Occasionally, suspicion arises that a video has become artificially inflated by "gaming" the system -- repeatedly posting comments on one's own video to make it one of the "most discussed" videos, or by using multiple user names to increase subscription numbers.

YouTube spokeswoman Jennifer Nielsen notes that to make a YouTube profile, you need to have a unique e-mail address, which would make dummy accounts time-consuming to create. For security reasons, she won't discuss YouTube's anti-gaming software that prevents repeated refreshing of pages to falsely drum up view counts.

Viral infection

Some viral videos spread of their own magical volition, but many get help. One of the best boosts is to become featured on the home page of YouTube.

A video picked by the site's home page editors is virtually guaranteed to at least break 100,000 views. The YouTube blog (www.youtube.com/blog) recently profiled one of its editors with his thought process behind choosing a week's worth of videos. He showed a taste for the cute ("The Cuppycake Song"), the unusual ("World Freehand Circle Drawing Champion") and videos that interact with others in the community.

It's possible to e-mail your video to these editors and hope it catches their fancy. Going first gained a large number of subscribers after his video appeared on the front of YouTube, and it was the key to Stokes' jump in popularity.

"I woke up the next morning and we were up to 300,000 and my e-mail inbox had 50 e-mails -- people all over the world," says Stokes. "Somebody was translating it into Spanish."

Inward-looking vlogs like Estreich's YourTube News and a similar channel called UTubeUrTube can also bring attention to your video.

Estreich was one of the early YouTubers to promote a singer named Mia Rose. That got the ball rolling for the 18-year-old, who over the past month has become the most-subscribed musician ever on YouTube. Estreich is now working as one of Rose's representatives, and the young singer says she has offers from several music labels.

On YouTube, popularity breeds more popularity. Once you've made it to the most-viewed list, more and more people will click on it; growth can become exponential. The most popular YouTube clip of all-time, Judson Laipply's "Evolution of Dance," has now been seen by more than 39 million people.

Like many others at the top, Laipply has frequently been profiled by traditional media, including The Associated Press. And that media attention represents the final rung of the viral video ladder.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1029631





YouTube to Share Revenue With Users
Paul Haven

Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, said Saturday that his wildly successful site will start sharing revenue with its millions of users.

Hurley said one of the major proposed innovations is a way to allow users to be paid for content. YouTube, which was sold to Google for $1.65 billion in November, has become an Internet phenomenon since it began to catch on in late 2005. Some 70 million videos are viewed on the site each day.

"We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users," Hurley said. "So in the coming months we are going to be opening that up."

Hurley, who at 30 is one of the youngest Internet multimillionaires, gave no details of how much users might receive, or what mechanism would be used.

In October 2005, Revver _ which like YouTube offers video clips online _ announced plans to attach advertising to user-submitted videos and give their creators a cut of the profits. Revver has said it would split the ad revenue evenly with content creators.

Hurley said that when YouTube started, he and the site's other co-founders _ Steve Chen and Jawed Karim _ felt revenue-sharing would build a community of users motivated by making money, rather than their love of videos.

But that as the site has grown, the three, who continue to run the company, have come to see financial remuneration as a way of improving content.

Hurley spoke on the last full day of the World Economic Forum, which brings together the world's political, social and business leaders for a five-day gathering on the problems facing the world.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012700557.html





Fox Subpoenas YouTube After '24' Episodes Posted
Andrew Wallenstein and Carl DiOrio

20th Century Fox served YouTube with a subpoena Wednesday, demanding that the Google-owned viral-video site disclose the identity of a user who uploaded copies of entire recent episodes of "24" and "The Simpsons."

The subpoena, which first came to light on the blog Google Watch, was granted by a judge in U.S. District Court in San Francisco after being filed Jan. 18 by the News Corp.-owned studio. It is not yet known whether YouTube has complied with the request.

In addition, lesser-known video site LiveDigital was served with a similar subpoena. A spokesman for LiveDigital confirmed the company received the subpoena and intended to comply immediately.

A Fox spokesman confirmed the subpoenas were filed and served but declined further comment. A spokesman for YouTube declined comment.

The "24" episodes in question actually appeared on YouTube before their primetime Jan. 14 premiere on the Fox broadcast network, which spread four hourlong episodes of the hit drama over two consecutive nights. Fox became aware thst the episodes were on YouTube on Jan. 8, according to the subpoena.

Filed on the basis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the subpoena includes testimony of Fox Entertainment Group vp Jane Sunderland suggesting Fox has been unable to determine the users' identities on its own. The uploaded material could cause Fox "irreparable harm," Sunderland said, but it was not immediately clear if the episodes in question still were posted on the site or had been removed.

However, the subpoena identifies the YouTube subscriber by the username "ECOtotal." A search under that username on the YouTube site unearths a user by that name with a banner across the top of the subscriber's page that reads, "This user account has been suspended."

Still, identifying "ECOtotal" won't necessarily explain how unaired episodes of "24" made it onto the Internet. Before Jan. 8, there were reports that the same episodes had popped up on illegal file-sharing sites, which might have transmitted them even before they appeared on YouTube.

This is not an unprecedented request for YouTube. In May, before its $1.65 billion acquisition by Google, the site complied with a Paramount Pictures request to identify a user who shot his own unauthorized short film adapted from the screenplay of the Oliver Stone film "World Trade Center."

But Google has a history of fighting subpoenas seeking the names of those using its services.

YouTube and most other similar sites typically tell content providers they will delete copyright video when alerted by owners of the material.

Among the content companies, much of the more aggressive policing of peer-to-peer and community-based Web sites has been by Universal Music Group. UMG has sued MySpace and others over what it calls illegal postings of its artists' music videos, and it came close to legal action against YouTube before striking a licensing agreement with that site last year.

Terence Clark, a copyright attorney with the Los Angeles law firm Greenberg, Traurig, said Fox, appears to be proceeding along proscribed legal lines in the matter.

"It's the process available under the Digital Copyright Act," Clark said. "There are certain procedures you can follow to get some information (but) this also impinges on the question of the privacy issues of the users of the sites."

Some sites might need to defend strongly against actions like Fox is taking, but ultimately the studio is likely to prevail, said Tom Ferber, a copyright attorney with the Pryor Cashman law firm in New York.

"It's always a policy decision of the entity involved," Ferber said. "So if you're the hard-news press, for instance, usually money is no object if it's seen as infringing on (your) rights. And (these sites) may have business issues of concern as well. But I think ultimately the studio is going to get the names that they want."

As for the 12 "Simpsons" episodes identified by the subpoena, most of them are from Season 7 of the long-running animated Fox series. One, however, is as recent as Jan. 7, while still another dates back to 1990.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...9492015f195e99





NBC Universal Ex-Treasurer Arrested on $800,000 Theft Charge
Larry Neumeister

The former treasurer of NBC Universal was arrested Thursday on charges that he stole more than $800,000 from the media company to spend on himself, federal prosecutors announced.

Victor Jung, 34, of Manhattan, was charged with two counts of wire fraud, accused of using some of the stolen money on private flights to Miami, Antigua and the Turks and Caicos Islands, U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia said in a statement.

During the flights, Jung and his travel companions enjoyed delicacies including shrimp cocktail, Veuve Clicquot champagne and Mondavi wine, the prosecutor said.

If convicted, Jung could face a maximum of 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000 or twice the gain resulting from the crime.

Through his lawyer, Christopher Brennan, Jung pleaded not guilty before U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein, who freed him on $250,000 bail.

Outside court, Brennan said his client looked forward to fighting the charges.

"He plans to vigorously defend himself," Brennan said.

An indictment in U.S. District Court accuses Jung of stealing the money while he worked as the treasurer for NBC Universal in its offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in midtown Manhattan.

NBC Universal, formed in 2004, is one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies. It owns and operates a television stations group and a movie production studio and was responsible for the hit films "The Pianist" and "A Beautiful Mind," among others.

Jung, who was responsible for the company's collection efforts and for oversight of the company's bank accounts, stole the money by setting up an unauthorized company, NBCU Media Productions LLC, and transferring money into its accounts, the indictment said.

The company, which was not a part of NBCU or its parent company, General Electric Capital Corp., was set up in November 2005, along with bank accounts at a branch of Commerce Bank in Manhattan, according to the indictment.

Jung caused two wire transfers - one for about $575,000 this month and another for approximately $238,450 last April - to be deposited into the company's bank account from an account held by GE in Stamford, Conn., prosecutors said.

In a statement, NBC Universal said it was "committed to and vigilant about the enforcement of its compliance policies."

It added: "When we discovered the potential integrity breach, we promptly brought it to the appropriate authorities and are cooperating fully with the investigation. We will continue to monitor the situation to its resolution."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...01-25-17-26-46





Where is Internet Video Going?
Antony

Where is internet video heading? It’s a question I think about often (unsurprising given my job is 100% concerned with the medium) and as this the MSN Video Editor’s blog, I decided to share my thoughts here.

At the moment YouTube is the king of online video. The upload-and-share model that has become so successful has also been adapted by Google Video and Microsoft’s Soapbox (Link: request access to the beta release), and is similar to the format of other file-sharing websites such as the photo based Flickr. It’s easy to see what makes these sites so successful. They’re either free or cheap to use, they’re quick to use, and they’re less restricted than alternative video sites. These are three very important factors.

Think quality matters? It doesn’t, or at least not as much as you would expect. Video-sharing sites are awash with dull video blogs, desperate Jackass style stunts, anime clips mixed to soundtracks of cult movies (I really don’t get that phenomenon) and amateur pornography. There is quality footage to be found, and it does have to be found, but it’s only there because so much footage is uploaded. And it’s all uploaded because the systems are fast, free, and have few restrictions.

CDs didn’t replace Vinyl because the sound quality was better (arguably it’s not). It was because CDs were quicker and easier to use, and could hold more music (i.e. they were less restricted). MP3s aren’t usurping CDs because they’re better quality either. They most definitely are not. Yet again they are quick, cheap, and this time thousands can be held on one player.

So quality doesn’t matter when it comes to format, but what about content? What makes an individual video popular? The two most watched videos on MSN Video in the past ten days have been a news story about a six-legged cow and a clip of two footballers fighting. These are short and visual clips. Unlike some news items the information they contain needs to be seen rather than read. Videos that just contain newsreaders never do well. The information being delivered to you is often better suited as a text article than a video. Usability consultant Jakob Nielsen highlighted this when he wrote about an eyetracking study and concluded “Talking-Head Video is Boring Online”. What does work is small bursts of a visual performance – videos that rarely last longer than 2 minutes. Online videos that can’t be played anywhere other than the site in which they reside have trouble stepping into feature-length film territory.

Which means longer, professionally produced videos have more success offline. The other massive development in internet video is Bittorrent (full description here), another variation on file-sharing but one that enables users to download broadcast quality videos of entire feature films and TV shows. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. The Bittorrent growth has largely been lead by piracy, with users placing copies of movies and shows online for sharing, and taking them offline for watching. The technology works so well that last year the BBC announced plans to offer hundreds of episodes of popular shows using the file-sharing technique (though they'll be "protected" using DRM - more about that soon).

The online/offline video swapping is also growing in the form of hardware such as the Slingbox variants. These allow users to watch their own television shows wherever they are in the world (provided they have a decent internet connection) but also watch online videos on their television. Slingbox has been around for sometime (novelist Neil Gaiman extolled the virtues of his machine nearly a year ago), but is only just being reported in the mainstream British press (link to video).

Unfortunately the use of new technologies is not expanding as much as they might. In some cases they are being forced backwards (note that I’m talking about the application of technologies rather than the creation and development of them) by various film and television companies.

It started with the understandable, though not necessarily well thought-out, requests by media companies to have their copyrighted material removed from video-sharing sites should someone have uploaded it. The material only had to be removed if the copyright owner requested it.

Then, in October 2006, YouTube gave Paramount lawyers data on one user after a subpoena was issued. That information was then used by Paramount to track down the user and sue him. (Link: “Video site helped Paramount Pictures track down and sue filmmaker”).

In December 2006, Twentieth Century Fox apparently sent out takedown notices to sites that linked to their copyrighted material on YouTube. Were they claiming that even posting a URL to their material infringed on their intellectual property rights? Think about it. If it was illegal to link to any copyrighted material on the web (i.e. all of it in one form or another) then we’d not have search engines as we know of them today. We’d barely have a World Wide Web at all.

Around this time last year, Google Video introduced the opportunity to buy videos online. On the face of it, this appears to be a reasonable service. Pay approximately $3 (the service is not available in the UK) to legally watch a decent length video. A video that would be taken down were it posted on a free site.

The problem occurs when you realise you can’t watch the videos you have paid for anywhere except on Google’s website using Google’s player. This DRM (Digital Rights Management) system is not a good service from the users’ point of view because you haven’t bought the video you want to watch, you haven’t even rented it. At best you’ve paid for a license to watch a video with massive restrictions. Imagine buying a book and being told you can only read it in Waterstones, and if anyone else wants to read the book you’ve paid for, they’ve got to pay for it too. (Link: "Google Video DRM: Why is Hollywood more important than users?")

This is not to say the system is wrong or immoral, it’s just bad business for everyone involved.

Bittorrent is a fantastic use of technology that is overrun with pirated movies largely because the film companies haven’t embraced the technology (Link: "A Torrent or a Trickle?"). When they do make a token attempt, they restrict it in as many ways as possible. They make it so a user can only watch the movie on one or two computers (got a PC and laptop? Be prepared to choose which one you want to watch your movie on) and they make it so the file can’t be copied (you paid for the movie, yet you can’t convert to a format that can be watched on your PSP). The companies make the mistake of offering the customer a worse service than they can get elsewhere, albeit illegally. It’s not like the piracy of VHS in the 80s, which was mainly about money – the same product for cheaper. Online video piracy is about customers finding an easier way to get a much better product.

So why do the media companies continue to insist that DRM be installed on various files and media players by Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc? They say it’s to combat piracy, but is it? There is a convincing argument that DRM is actually about increasing revenue streams (Link: “Privately, Hollywood admits DRM isn't about piracy”). Are media companies are trying to sell you the same product many times over? After all, if DRM was about piracy then why isn’t it working?

Three years ago novelist and blogger Cory Doctrow gave a speech to Microsoft employees in Redmond on the negative values of DRM systems. You can watch a video of his speech here or just read a transcript of it here. I recommend you watch/read it, but for now I’ll pick a few choice quotes. This is Doctrow explaining that media companies have made the copy protection mistake before:

“DRM only works if your record player becomes the property of whomever's records you're playing.

This is the worst of all the ideas embodied by DRM: that people who make record-players should be able to spec whose records you can listen to, and that people who make records should have a veto over the design of record-players.
…
It used to be illegal to plug anything that didn't come from AT&T into your phone-jack. They claimed that this was for the safety of the network, but really it was about propping up this little penny-ante racket that AT&T had in charging you a rental fee for your phone until you'd paid for it a thousand times over.

When that ban was struck down, it created the market for third-party phone equipment, from talking novelty phones to answering machines to cordless handsets to headsets – billions of dollars of economic activity that had been suppressed by the closed interface. Note that AT&T was one of the big beneficiaries of this: they *also* got into the business of making phone-kit.

DRM is the software equivalent of these closed hardware interfaces. Robert Scoble is a Softie who has an excellent blog, where he wrote an essay about the best way to protect your investment in the digital music you buy. Should you buy Apple iTunes music, or Microsoft DRM music? Scoble argued that Microsoft's music was a sounder investment, because Microsoft would have more downstream licensees for its proprietary format and therefore you'd have a richer ecosystem of devices to choose from when you were shopping for gizmos to play your virtual records on.

What a weird idea: that we should evaluate our record-purchases on the basis of which recording company will allow the greatest diversity of record-players to play its discs! That's like telling someone to buy the Betamax instead of the Edison Kinetoscope because Thomas Edison is a crank about licensing his
patents; all the while ignoring the world's relentless march to the more open VHS format.”

The article I mentioned previously also touches upon the emergence of VHS:

“In 1982, then-MPAA head Jack Valenti testified before the House of Representatives on the emerging phenomenon of VCR ownership. He famously said, "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone." Valenti said this in response to a claim that the VCR would be the greatest friend the American film producer ever had. Valenti was vehement in his opposition to the idea that the VCR could be a good thing. He, and many in the industry, believed that it was fundamentally wrong to allow the public to make decisions for themselves about how to use a VCR. They even expressed worry that multiple people could watch the same movie on a VCR, but not all of them would have to pay. The idea of Joe User buying a movie for a fixed price and then inviting friends over to see it was anathema to the industry.

Yet by the late 1990s, sales of VHS movies were generating more revenue than movie ticket sales. DVD, the successor to VHS and Betamax, greatly widened the gap thanks to outstanding profit margins. The "Boston Strangler" was nowhere in sight. Of course, Hollywood lost the battle over the VCR, and its enemy became the best friend it ever had... that is, until behaviour-modifying DRM was born, and Hollywood saw another chance to take a crack at the holy grail.”

For now, DRM stumbles on. Perhaps someone will make it work someday, but it’s unlikely. What’s comforting is that the better technology always won through eventually. The media companies were forced to change what they were selling to fit with progress, instead of halting progress so they could continue to sell what they already did.

The future of internet video is Soapbox and YouTube style sites with copyrighted material available. It’s Bittorrent downloads available from Amazon or HMV. It’s watching your home television wherever you are in the world. It’s watching broadcasts from any global location in the comfort of your own home. The future of internet video is already here, they just haven’t made it all legal yet.
http://ukvideo.spaces.live.com/Blog/...E52F!175.entry





Who Wants Their IPTV -- and Why?
Johna Till Johnson

If you’re like a lot of folks, you’re probably thinking IPTV is just a tad overhyped: Service providers from AT&T to BT to India’s Reliance Infocomm have announced IPTV initiatives. Market researchers Dittberner Associates forecast an IPTV services market of $12 billion in 2013, an increase from virtually nothing in 2005 (now that’s a long-range crystal ball). And Microsoft has been investing heavily in the technology — a sure sign that the hype-fest is at its height.

And the arguments favoring it seem singularly lame. Not that I’ve got anything against TV — on the contrary, I’m addicted to it. (C’mon, with 500 channels, what are the odds that somewhere there’s a Vin Diesel movie on?). But at first blush, it’s hard to see how delivering TV over IP makes it appreciably better.

Take the argument that IPTV provides better integration: tomorrow’s kids will be able to surf the Web, play interactive games and watch TV all on the same screen. Oh, wait, they already do all that with peer-to-peer applications that let them download shows from the Web. Another purported IPTV plus is personalization: viewers will be able to download virtually any show at any time -- just as, um, TiVo owners do today.

So what exactly is the benefit of IPTV? For one thing, it gives telcos a sustainable consumer offering whose margins aren’t eroding. And by doing so, it introduces competition into the content-distribution business.

Carriers have been hammered by the one-two punch of the Internet and VoIP. Yahoo, Google and other search engines have chewed up the profits from directory services (not so long ago, the yellow pages used to be a cash cow for the telcos). Meantime, VoIP has been steadily driving voice revenues down to zero.

IPTV lets carriers reverse that trend by giving them a shot at selling something for which the market demand is demonstrably insatiable: content.

Aha, you may be saying, what about the growing trend toward free content ? The telcos appear to be jumping on the content bandwagon just as it’s headed for the ditch. Won’t peer-to-peer undercut the margins of content services the same way VoIP demolished voice margins?

It’s a logical worry, but here’s why I think it’s unfounded: People don’t pay for content itself. They pay for content to be packaged and delivered to them in a form factor that’s convenient. Take music: If free services destroyed the market for paid services, satellite radio wouldn’t be flourishing.

What IPTV gives carriers is the flexibility to experiment with content offerings until they hit on the packaging formula that consumers will pay money for (hint: I’m still waiting for that all-Vin-all-the-time channel, guys).

And that’s the second real advantage of IPTV: It’s not about making TV better; it’s about giving more players the opportunity to get creative about packaging and delivering it to consumers. Will that result in improved services? Probably, because competition usually has that effect. So bottom line: despite the hype, I’ll be watching for IPTV.
http://www.networkworld.com/columnis...7-johnson.html





V2 Music and Brilliant Technologies Announce Qtrax Global Licensing Agreement
Press Release

V2 Music UK, the leading independent record label that is home to such artists as The Stereophonics, Little Man Tate and Paul Weller, and Brilliant Technologies Corporation today announced a global agreement to make the V2 catalog available for distribution via Brilliant's Qtrax platform. Qtrax is the world's first legal, ad-supported peer-to-peer music service, offering music fans free access to high-fidelity digital music files.

Beth Appleton, Head of New Media and Business Development for V2, remarked: 'V2 acknowledges the power of P2P technology and embraces business models that legitimise sharing music, building revenues for artists and labels. The music industry cannot ignore the fact that this is how music fans naturally want to enjoy and share music and we need to work quickly to enable mass distribution of copyright material in a way that the music fan still enjoys the experience with the artist and label critically receiving a proportion of revenue earnt as a result of the value of their music. The Qtrax service will provide the V2 stable of artists with a tremendous new outlet for connecting with fans and we are excited to be working with the Qtrax team as they gear up for launch.

'I cannot stress enough the importance the independent label sector's endorsement of Qtrax. In this regard, V2 UK is a critical piece of our global licensing strategy,' stated Allan Klepfisz, Brilliant's Chairman and CEO. 'The music industry is in an undeniable shift in focus from traditional commercial exploitation models to business models that promise dynamic new income streams. From the start, V2 has demonstrated forward thinking and a keen ability to recognize innovative new business models like Qtrax. We are truly heartened by the encouragement and support of the independent label and music publishing communities and we welcome V2 as one of its prominent members.

Qtrax is the recognized leader in the ad-supported digital music arena and, in addition to V2, boasts music from major record labels and music publishers including EMI Music, Warner Music Group, Sony/ATV Publishing and Universal Music Publishing, as well as independents including TVT and the hundreds of labels represented by The Orchard.
http://top40-charts.com/news.php?nid=29941





A Powerful New Free Application Enables the First True Peer-to-Peer Photo and Image Sharing
Press Release

A free, downloadable application that enables users to automate photo sharing and organize digital photos, was introduced today by PowerSnap Inc.

The free application, PowerSnap 2.0, may be downloaded from http://www.powersnap.com/.

"Until now, photographers -- including folks taking pictures on their cell phones -- had to juggle numerous different environments and passwords just to send, receive and manage their photos," says Santosh Jayaram, founder and CEO of PowerSnap. "There's no easy way to manage and share the mountains of unorganized photographs buried in people's computers.

"Now, for the first time, PowerSnap puts the user's entire photo experience all in one place. It creates the first communities based on images, rather than words."

PowerSnap 2.0 lets users automate photo sharing and enables digital photo organization so users can find all their pictures within a single easy-to-use application. For the first time users can manage all their photographs, automatically sending and receiving pictures in near real-time, and synchronize their uploaded albums with their desktop instead of struggling with multiple sites and applications.

PowerSnap not only creates the first true peer-to-peer network for photo sharing, but also offers a seamless, intuitive experience, comparable to sending email amongst different email providers -- an experience that until now was not possible with digital photographs.

Sample Applications

1. A new mom doesn't have the time to answer every request for pictures
of the new baby. She sends everyone free subscriptions to her
PowerSnap photos within the album "Molly". Now, every time she takes
a new picture of Molly, she loads it onto her computer and it's
automatically sent out to every subscriber.

2. A teenager sits in the back of her mom's SUV, dreading another endless
shopping trip. She makes a face and takes a picture of herself on her
cellphone, tagged "Ivana," and "shopping stinks" and emails it to
Flickr. All her friends, who have subscribed to her pictures tagged
"Ivana" instantly get the photo in their PowerSnap in-box.

Key Features

1. Real-time notification to subscribers when new photos are uploaded
2. Mass tagging, captioning and commenting.
3. Sophisticated filtering to set and determine permissions on photos.
4. Automated timeline organization and viewing of all photographs on file.
5. Open platform for other photosites, besides Flickr, to allow automated
photo sharing.

About PowerSnap

PowerSnap Inc. was founded in 2006 by Santosh Jayaram, former founder/CEO of Mietus, Inc. and a recent honors graduate of Oxford University's Said Graduate School of Business; Ayush Gupta, a technologist who has worked for Cisco, Qualcomm, Sun Microsystems, Autodesk and Xerox; and Supreet Singh, a user interface pioneer who has worked on product design for Ford, IBM, HP, ESPN Star, SAP Labs, MTV Europe and British Telecom.
Website: http://www.powersnap.com/
http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-e...3012007-1.html





Dreaded 'F' Word Haunts Music Industry

With global music sales down for a seventh straight year, the talk at an annual industry meeting in Cannes, France, has become heated over how to develop digital sales against competition from the dreaded F word - free.

Global sales are expected to be down again for 2006 despite digital sales almost doubling to $US2 billion and the popularity of music being as strong as ever.

Critics of the major players in the industry argue that they have been distracted by the fight against piracy and in doing so, hindered the growth of the legal business.

In response, the accused argue that they had little choice.

"Many people around the world tell me that we've handled our problems in an incorrect manner but no one tells me what we should have done," John Kennedy, the head of the industry's trade body IFPI, told Reuters in an interview.

"Free is just impossible to compete with".

Much of the debate at the gathering on the French coast has centred around the concept of digital rights management or DRM which can restrict the use of music bought online and was introduced in a bid to contain piracy.

Its supporters say DRM also offers alternative methods such as subscription or advertising-supported services as the music cannot then be offered onto peer-to-peer networks.

But one result of DRM is that tracks bought legally from websites such as Rhapsody cannot be used on the market-leading iPod as they are not compatible, potentially restricting the growth of legal sales.

"DRM is like polonium to some people," Kennedy said. "Digital rights management is exactly that, it's the management of digital rights and if we weren't managing it the headlines would be 'irresponsible music industry ... creates anarchy."'

But not everyone agrees.

David Pakman is chief executive of eMusic, the second biggest service after iTunes in the U.S. market, and an ardent critic of DRM.

His service is the only one on a large scale delivering tracks in the MP3 format, meaning they can be played on any portable music player, including the iPod.

That stance however has resulted in none of the four major labels, who are responsible for around two thirds of the world's music, supplying to the service.

"It's the same model that was used for the CD and DVD, universal compatibility, and we think it's the principal thing holding back the growth of digital today," he told Reuters.

Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired magazine, argues that some form of piracy should simply be accepted.

"You cannot have zero piracy and if you try to get to zero piracy you will make the experience of consuming music so painful you'll have zero industry."

Among the many music executives discussing the alternatives at Cannes was Terry McBride, the chief executive of Canada's Nettwerk Music Group which manages such acts as Avril Lavigne.

Among McBride's many ideas was the plan to tap into the peer to peer market where fans could recommend a track, and receive a small percentage of the sales if the track was purchased.

"We are now entering the era where the socialisation of the internet is happening," he told Reuters. "Why not truly harness the power of peer to peer."

But despite the many issues created by digital, the industry is united and excited by its potential.

Barney Wragg, the head of digital for EMI Music, told Reuters that digital was revolutionising the way they work.

"I was just talking to (British singer) Joss Stone who is very excited about the opportunities this offers," he said. "We're not constrained to the plastic CD box any more. It offers the possibility to do things that could never be done before."

Warner is also looking at new ways to develop.

"As an industry we really need to innovate, and bring new products and services to the market," head of digital strategy Alex Zubillaga told reporters in London last week.

"We at Warner have put out a series of premium products and ... we immediately doubled the amount of digital albums that we were selling by just attaching a video, attaching some special lyrics or a photo gallery.

"We weren't selling twice as many by selling them for less. We were selling twice as many by selling them for significantly more money.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/digita...e#contentSwap1





The Ethics Of Peer-to-Peer Networks
Peter Nisbet

There is nothing illegal about peer-to-peer networks, and nothing illegal with using them to distribute files. What is illegal is to use these networks and associated software to download material which is protected by copyright.

It is not always obvious what is still copyright protected, though you can be fairly certain that anything recent, such as recent chart hits or new computer games, cannot be legally copied using P2P software. Blockbuster films will also be copyright protected, but there are many films which have been specifically made for free distribution.

There are lots of new artists who use peer to peer networks to get themselves known. There are many computer games which are released on P2P networks to have them tried out prior to fixing the bugs and releasing them for general sale. This is the one aspect of the use of P2P services that makes me think of the morality of such networks rather than the legality.

The reasons for observing copyright restrictions are well known. Copyright is a protection of an artist's work from plagiarism and unauthorized copying. If everyone copied every piece of music or every film from a free online service such as peer-to peer networks, then the originators and the artists would make no money from them. This would result in the breakdown of the entertainment industry, and I can understand that line of reasoning.

So don't get me wrong. I am not proposing that people should be allowed to break the law, and I firmly agree that copyright violation should be illegal and should be punished. My argument is against the movie and music industry and their false morality in campaigning for such high fines for copyright violation by young kids while condoning, and in some cases positively encouraging, lawbreaking, obscene and improper behaviour and illegal drug taking by so called artists who are making them money.

What sickens me is the way many pop stars complain and bleat about us breaking the law, then have another snort on their line. Once they stick to the law they may be qualified to complain about others who do not. Many forget where they came from and how they got to be famous.

Have you ever heard something online that you found interesting? Have you heard a track by an unknown artist that inspired or stimulated you to find out more about the artist? I have. I downloaded something by a young girl called Amy Winehouse about three years ago. It was quite illegal, but I liked it and it prompted me to go out and find more of her work. I found she had an album called ‘Frank', so I bought it – bought it please note, not downloaded it!

The point I am making is that had I not heard her on a peer-to-peer network and downloaded the track, I would not have bought the album and all her work since. OK, she seems a bit of an alkie and perhaps into drugs, but she is a great singer. P2P helped her to get a fan and some sales so why should she want me arrested? Perhaps too many of these egotistical superstars forget who ultimately pays them and who helped them when they were unknowns! Lot's of people have downloaded a track or two then bought a ticket to see the act live.

Who is doing most harm: the superstar junkie keeping the pushers in a job or the school kid downloading a track from his favourite band that he can't find in his local music store? Even if he can find it, he probably can't afford it due the obscene prices being charged in order that the artists can afford their drugs or drinks or whatever.

This is where morality becomes an issue with me. Would the large recording companies not be better cleaning up their own act, and those of the superstars they employ, than targeting kids who are copying tracks from peer-to-peer networks? How can they bleat on about copyright infringements while they pay filthy sex and drug-ridden junkies and gun-totin' grunters to produce the rubbish that is called music nowadays?

Once they stop breaking the law themselves, and inciting others to do so in order to increase sales, I might listen to their whining and misplaced righteousness. Didn't many of these so-called stars use these internet services to advertise themselves until they became known? Why, then, give their approval to the RIAA and its tactics to prosecute school kids for using a service they themselves used to promote.

It would be understandable if the RIAA were prosecuting the big boys who are making fortunes by copying and selling thousands of movies and albums, such as are continually found on eBay or sold in practically every bar in the land. But no, these big guys are ignored. They are too hard to prosecute, so they target the kids for prosecution. Kids whose mums have to struggle to find the money to pay the fines. They can't afford to buy obscenely overpriced CDs for their kids' birthdays so where can they find the money to pay the massive fines ($30,000 - $150,000).

The morality of the movie and music industries is open to question, and we can all see the egotistical brain-dead drug-ridden examples of the people they overpay in the name of so-called entertainment on our screens every day. Once they start observing the law, acting with some decency and begin to set an example to the youth of our world – once they start displaying some morality and become proper role models for our children, then that is when I shall erase my copy of MP3 Rocket or Limewire. In any case I only use them as they should be used: to find out what is new and popular, and if I find something I like I will download it, listen to it, then go out and buy the album. That should not be illegal, yet it is.

If they want people arrested, leave the kids alone and target the consortiums that are making a lot of money by copying and marketing material downloaded from peer-to-peer networks. It's not the law I have issue with, it's the hypocrites who run RIAA and MPAA and also pay their law-breaking artists.
http://www.articledashboard.com/Arti...etworks/136781





The Public Domain

Unabomber Wages Legal Battle to Halt the Sale of Papers
Serge F. Kovaleski

Nine years after he began serving a life sentence for the Unabomber crimes, Theodore J. Kaczynski is fighting to reclaim more than 40,000 pages of his writings and correspondence so he can preserve them in their rawest form for the public to read.

Mr. Kaczynski, 64, is in a legal battle with the federal government and a group of his victims over the future of the handwritten papers, which include journals, diaries and drafts of his anti-technology manifesto.

The journals contain blunt assessments of 16 mail bombings from 1978 to 1995 that killed 3 people and injured 28, as well as his musings on the suffering of victims and their families. The government wants to auction sanitized versions of the materials on the Internet to raise money for four of Mr. Kaczynski’s victims.

But, citing the First Amendment, Mr. Kaczynski has argued in court filings that the government is not entitled to his writings and has no right to alter them. The writings were among the items taken from his remote Montana cabin after his arrest in April 1996. In a motion drafted in pen, he said he planned to argue that the government had too much discretion under a federal restitution law to confiscate writings.

The four victims pursuing restitution from Mr. Kaczynski were initially reluctant to agree to the auction, fearing it could ghoulishly generate more notoriety for him and further publicize their pain. But some were equally horrified by the prospect of Mr. Kaczynski reclaiming his writings.

One of the victims, Gary Wright, a computer-store employee seriously injured in an attack 20 years ago next month, said it was difficult for the four to reach a consensus.

“How do you take four people and try to come to an agreement when they have been wronged in different ways and are in different stages of healing with different types of losses?” said Mr. Wright, now a businessman in Salt Lake City. “I’m sure that emotions were running rampant and that people were reliving it.”

Mr. Kaczynski came to be known as the Unabomber after the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s code name for the case, Unabom, coined because the targets included universities and airlines. In his 18-year bombing campaign Mr. Kaczynski seemed bent on thwarting the advance of technology, and his victims included university professors, scientists and business executives.

One victim who is not seeking restitution, David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, said in a letter to the court that he hoped “the criminal’s property will be destroyed, or (if need be) sealed for a century at least and then made available at no charge to scholars of depravity.”

A federal judge in Sacramento approved the government’s auction proposal last August as a way for the group seeking restitution to collect some of the $15 million it is owed by court order. But the judge ordered that any references to Mr. Kaczynski’s victims be deleted.

Mr. Kaczynski challenged the deletions, asserting that they would violate his right to freedom of expression, and that his writings should remain intact.

A lawyer for Mr. Kaczynski, John P. Balazs, said his client wanted to donate the originals to a library.

The Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, which houses materials on anarchism and other protest movements, already has a sizable collection of Mr. Kaczynski’s more recent writings and of correspondence since his arrest. Kelly Cunningham, a spokeswoman for the university, said that if Mr. Kaczynski offered to turn over additional writings, the university would examine them to determine whether they were suitable for the collection.

Among the documents that would be auctioned are letters that Mr. Kaczynski received over 25 years at his Montana cabin from his brother, David, and his mother, Wanda.

It was David Kaczynski who led the F.B.I. to his older sibling. And while he expressed support for the victims, he said he was distressed that private family correspondence might fall into the hands of strangers and that the government had not asked him if he wanted the letters.

“I’m in favor of anything that would help the victims,” David Kaczynski said in an interview. “But in a personal sense, having these letters treated as murderabilia is appalling to us. How do you balance the need for human decency and dignity with doing the best thing?”

David Kaczynski said this would not be the first time that he had felt crossed by the federal government. The F.B.I. had promised to keep his role in the case a secret and to give the family at least one day’s warning before they arrested his brother. They did neither.

“I feel our family has a stake in preserving our privacy and dignity,” he said, “but certainly our dignity is compromised by having our letters to Ted transformed into letters of curiosity for some collector of celebrity murder cases.”

In the latest twist in a three-year legal battle over the writings, Theodore Kaczynski is adopting a new strategy that could, one of the prosecutors said, mire the case in the federal courts for at least another year or two.

Also known as Inmate 04475-046 at the federal maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo., Mr. Kaczynski has asked an appeals court to assign him a new lawyer who is an expert in First Amendment litigation. Otherwise, he has told the court, he wants to represent himself in an appeal of the ruling that authorized auctioning the papers.

In approving the auction, Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. rejected Mr. Kaczynski’s argument that the sale and altering of the original writings would violate the First Amendment.

Because of the pending appeal of Judge Burrell’s ruling, the four victims cannot receive, for the time being, the $7,025 the government collected towards restitution from the sale of Mr. Kaczynski’s interest in his Montana land, according to Ana Maria Martel, an assistant United States attorney.

Susan Mosser, whose husband, Thomas J. Mosser, was killed 12 years ago after opening a package containing a bomb that had been sent to their North Caldwell, N.J., home by Mr. Kaczynski, expressed indignation.

“Did he worry about the rights of Hugh Scrutton, Tom Mosser or Gil Murray, from whom he took the right to live?” she wrote in an e-mail message sent through her lawyer.

“Or the rights of the other fathers, sons, brothers, sisters or husbands who were recipients of his bombs, and who suffered real, painful and genuine irreparable harm? Or the rights of those who loved them?” asked Ms. Mosser, who is one of the parties seeking restitution.

Mr. Kaczynski wrote prolifically. He was the author of a 35,000-word manifesto that was published in The Washington Post seven months before his capture. The New York Times jointly financed publication of the tract. Soon after his arrest, Mr. Kaczynski appealed unsuccessfully to the Supreme Court, arguing that his prosecution had been so tainted by news reports that the government had forfeited its right to prosecute him. In January 1998, he pleaded guilty to the federal charges against him.

In addition to Mr. Kaczynski’s writings, the government’s auction inventory includes an assortment of more than 250 books from his cabin. The titles include “The Brothers Karamazov,” “Roman Political Ideas and Practices” and “Fundamentals of Analytical Chemistry.” Among the other items cataloged for auction are bowstrings and arrows in a quiver, two axes, a scabbard and a Montana driver’s license.

In a July 2005 opinion that led the prosecution to propose an auction, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the government’s original plan for the sale of Mr. Kaczynski’s possessions “plainly fails to serve the victims and their families.”

“Though the government purported to represent these individuals, we see nowhere in the record their viewpoints and desires regarding the enforcement of the restitution order,” the opinion said.

The court said its understanding of the restitution plan was that the government would assign a value to Mr. Kaczynski’s items, deposit that amount of taxpayer money into an account for the victims and keep the property indefinitely. The ruling sent the matter back to the district court and stipulated that if the government did not produce a reasonable plan to maximize the monetary return to the victims, Mr. Kaczynski would get his property back.

Ms. Martel, the assistant United States attorney, said the group of four victims pressing for restitution initially had been unequivocal about not wanting any of Mr. Kaczynski’s possessions sold.

“Every time there was a discussion about what we should do with the goods, it was like opening a scab for them,” Ms. Martel said. “They were very anguished that Kaczynski would receive more publicity, and that someone was going to be buying his writings about taking pleasure in their suffering. But it was clear that if they didn’t agree to an auction, it would all go back to Kaczynski.”

The prospect of an auction also did not sit well with Mr. Gelernter, the Yale professor who was severely injured by one of the mail bombs in 1993. He filed a letter with the court in late 2005 in which he asked that the proposed sale not happen.

“My wife and I are outraged that the court has decided to turn the sale of this criminal’s property into a circus — or (more accurately) into a P.R. bonanza, starring the criminal himself,” Mr. Gelernter wrote. “Why have you decided to help vicious misfits with cash to burn lionize this evil murderer?”

In a recent e-mail message to The New York Times, Mr. Gelernter said he had nothing but pity and contempt for anyone who would bid on Mr. Kaczynski’s items unless “they’re acting for a police agency or some serious research project that seeks to rid the world of (not ‘understand’) such vicious cowardly thugs.”

But he emphasized that the other victims had the right to “call their own moral shots” and that he hoped that they received everything they wanted .

“God knows they deserve it,” Mr. Gelernter said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/us...rtner=homepage





Unpaid Fee Closes State Debt Groups' Web Site

An association of debt management offices, who together manage billions of dollars of government debt, has had its Web site closed after it failed to pay the $35-a-year fee to keep the Web address registered.

The World Association of Debt Management Offices (Wadmo), a forum for treasury officials from more than 40 developing countries, ran the wadmo.net Web site, but the domain name expired on January 15.

Cecilia Mendoza, of the Wadmo secretariat in the Philippines Treasury, said Wadmo planned to renew the address but had been held up because it was cutting ties with the UN's UNCTAD agency, and transferring the body's duties to different officials.

"It's because we couldn't even withdraw money, because the (new) signatories are not yet authorized," Mendoza told Reuters by telephone from Manila.

Domain Bank, the domain name registrar, charges just $35 a year to register a ".net" internet address, or $250 a decade.

Wadmo's members span Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and South America, and include state debt management offices in Russia, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Romania, according to a cached version of Wadmo's Web site.

Article


















Until next week,

- js.



















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