Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 22nd, '08

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002



Volume VII, Issue Number I






























"Canada is a hotbed of movie pirating." – Mark Christiansen


"Roughly the equivalent of 500 million DVDs are being shared every month over P2P networks." – Tom Steinert-Threlkeld


"The students may have more time to pilfer copyrighted works because their classes might be canceled for lack of funding. Using conservative estimates, the piracy measure is equal to the price of about 100 Tennessee professors' wages and benefits." – David Kravets


"It’s cool to do something that big, but it’s scary that it’s so few people managing that of a big system. PLEASE, people, start more trackers! Put them out there, have open systems! We need the diversity." – Peter Sunde


"It definitely was bit intense at first. But it really didn’t bother me. I’m definitely all about looking at naked dudes." – Corinne Weiner


































November 22nd, 2008




Mininova Down, to Return Stronger Than Ever Before
Ernesto

Mininova, the leading BitTorrent search engine, has been offline for most of the day. Inevitably, BitTorrent addicts having been getting nervous, worrying about what is happening at the same time as they long for their daily fix. We have good news for them, the wait is almost over and when the site returns it will do so, fully prepared for the future.

Similar to The Pirate Bay, Mininova is experiencing a traffic surge. Since August, the number of visitors has grown by approximately 35%, to almost 5 million every day. It come as no surprise that such an increase is stretching the limits of the hardware setup.

Over the past few months, the number of .torrent downloads have also been growing steadily. In September we reported that 10 million torrents were downloaded in a single day, but this figure quickly increased to 12 million just a few weeks later.

To cope with this growing demand, Mininova updated their server park today, and moved all the data to a brand new setup. Initially, only a few hours of downtime were expected, but Mininova co-founder Erik told us that they ran into some problems along the way. “One of the critical machines refused to boot after we transferred the data, because the table with volume information got corrupted,” Erik told us.

Erik further said that the site is coming back slowly. All the data is transferred, and they are currently tweaking the servers to get the site running smoothly again. When everything is back up again, Mininova’s setup will be more easy to scale, and totally prepared for the future - whatever that may hold.
http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-dow...before-081117/





The Pirate Bay Sees Traffic and Peers Surge
Ernesto

Only a few days before the largest BitTorrent tracker will celebrate its 5th anniversary, the Pirate Bay reached a new milestone. The site now tracks 25 million peers, which is more than the entire populations of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark combined.

When The Pirate Bay was founded, November 2003, it was a site targeted at the Swedish population. This soon changed however, when the founders found out that most visitors came from outside Sweden, or even Scandinavia.

In the years to come, The Pirate Bay established itself as the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet. Recently, the number of peers that use the tracker at any given point in time grew larger than the entire population of Scandinavia. In fact, over the past 12 months, the number of peers more than tripled, to 25 million.

At the time of publication, The Pirate Bay tracks 25.064.271 peers, divided over close to 1.856.243 torrent files. Quite an accomplishment when you consider that it is not even 2 months ago since they the 15 million mark. Coincidentally, the server that tracks the statistics crashed due to a hard drive failure, right around the time they reached the new milestone.

We asked Peter Sunde, co-founder of the site, how this huge surge can be explained, and whether the traffic to the site is also increasing. “I think it’s because of the new updates to the software and recent additions in hardware,” Peter told TorrentFreak. “We’re putting up new trackers all the time to cope with the traffic increase. And yes, the traffic to the site is also increasing. New visitor records every week.”

In an attempt to make their “torrent tracking” record official, The Pirate Bay applied for an entry in the Guinness book of world records last week. A record that they will probably break themselves every weekend. It is estimated that The Pirate Bay tracks 50% of all public torrents, which means that they are responsible for a significant part of the total Internet traffic.

“It’s just weird,” says Peter in response to these mind boggling statistics. “It’s cool to do something that big, but it’s scary that it’s so few people managing that of a big system. PLEASE, people, start more trackers! Put them out there, have open systems! We need the diversity.”

It might indeed be a good idea to spread the load a bit. There are plenty of private trackers, but good and reliable open trackers remain scarce. Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay will continue to update their hardware, and tweak their software, while working on side-projects such as the recently updated email service Slopsbox.

Hollywood will probably not be too happy when they hear that the Swedish deviant has broken yet another record, but Peter and the other Pirate Bay founders couldn’t care less what they think. Peter has a message for them though: “Stop hating the future. Be smart and come over from the dark side.”
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...-surge-081115/





Justice Minister Offers Concessions on File Sharing Law
David Landes

The Swedish government has indicated it plans to move forward with a controversial anti-file sharing law but that the proposal will be altered in an attempt to appease some of the measure’s many critics.

The proposal, based on the European Union's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), would make it easier for copyright holders to track down those who download films and music over the internet.

The measure has mobilized critics who feel the law would give the entertainment industry too much power to harass citizens. The bill’s supporters feel a new law is needed to protect copyright holders from lost revenues.

According to Sveriges Radio, Sweden’s justice minister Beatrice Ask has asked her ministry, which is responsible for the law, to strike a clause which would have made the law enforceable retroactively upon coming into force on April 1st, 2009.

The language Ask wants to remove would have allowed the entertainment industry access to information about people who have been illegally downloading copyrighted material over the past few years, allowing the companies to file lawsuits against people for actions committed before the bill became law.

While the revised bill will still come into force on April 1st, film and record companies will not be allowed to know who has downloaded material prior to that date, according to Ask’s requested changes.

The change amounts to a free pass for illegal downloading of music and films until April 1st of next year, when the bill is expected to come into force.

After that date, internet service providers will be forced to give out the IP-addresses associated with computers which have downloaded copyrighted material without paying for it.

The government plans to present the bill for a vote on November 27th or December 4th, and Ask hopes the changes will be enough to assuage the doubts of some Riksdag members from within her own Moderate Party who have concerns about the bill.
http://www.thelocal.se/15844/20081121/





Bell Can Squeeze Downloads, CRTC Rules
Chris Sorensen

Bell Canada Inc. will not have to suspend its practice of "shaping" traffic on the Internet after a group of companies that resell access to Bell's network complained their customers were also being negatively affected.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission today released a decision that denied the Canadian Association of Internet Providers' request that Bell be ordered to cease its application of the practice to its wholesale customers.

But the CRTC did rule that Bell will now have to give the resellers at least 30 days notice before it makes future changes that affect the performance of that part of the network.

"Based on the evidence before us, we found that the measures employed by Bell Canada to manage its network were not discriminatory," said said Konrad von Finckenstein, the chairman of the CRTC, in a statement.

He noted Bell Canada also shapes the Internet traffic of its own retail customers.

As well, the CRTC reaffirmed a previous commitment to hold a separate hearing into the general practice of traffic shaping on Internet, which refers to the identification and slowing down of certain types of high-bandwidth traffic such as peer-to-peer downloads.

While Internet providers such as Bell and Rogers Communications Inc. say the practice is necessary to prevent a small number of heavy bandwidth users from degrading the entire service, critics say traffic management techniques are inherently discriminatory since they target certain types of Internet users.

They also complain it violates the philosophical principle of Net neutrality, which argues that Internet service providers should not play a roll in determining what type of content their subscribers are accessing on the Web.

The hearing is scheduled to begin on July 6 and interested parties will be able to make submissions beginning Feb. 16.

"Its main purpose will be to address the extent to which Internet service providers can manage the traffic on their networks in accordance with the Telecommunications Act," von Finckenstein said.
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/540321





The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality Without Regulation
Timothy B. Lee

An important reason for the Internet's remarkable growth over the last quarter century is the "end-to-end" principle that networks should confine themselves to transmitting generic packets without worrying about their contents. Not only has this made deployment of internet infrastructure cheap and efficient, but it has created fertile ground for entrepreneurship. On a network that respects the end-to-end principle, prior approval from network owners is not needed to launch new applications, services, or content.

In recent years, self-styled "network neutrality" activists have pushed for legislation to prevent network owners from undermining the end-to end principle. Although the concern is understandable, such legislation would be premature. Physical ownership of internet infrastructure does not translate into a practical ability to control its use. Regulations are unnecessary because even in the absence of robust broadband competition, network owners are likely to find deviations from the end-to-end principle unprofitable.

New regulations inevitably come with unintended consequences. Indeed, today's network neutrality debate is strikingly similar to the debate that produced the first modern regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission. Unfortunately, rather than protecting consumers from the railroads, the ICC protected the railroads from competition by erecting new barriers to entry in the surface transportation marketplace. Other 20th-century regulatory agencies also limited competition in the industries they regulated. Like these older regulatory regimes, network neutrality regulations are likely not to achieve their intended aims. Given the need for more competition in the broadband marketplace, policymakers should be especially wary of enacting regulations that could become a barrier to entry for new broadband firms.

Full Text of Policy Analysis no. 626

(PDF, 945 KB | HTML)
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9775





Video Is Not The Future of the Internet. It’s the Present.
Tom Steinert-Threlkeld

Auto companies may be going out of business. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is shrinking dramatically, by the day. Consumer confidence is at a post-war low. But Internet traffic is unabated.

Notably, it’s led by consumers. And video.

“We are living in unprecedented times,’’ noted Kelly Ahuja, senior vice president and general manager of the service provider routing technology group at Cisco Systems, at the UBS Global Technology and Services Conference Thursday. But, he soon added, “there is lots of traffic growth.”

“The majority of the traffic growth is occurring in the consumer space, driven by consumer Internet or video, whether it is IPTV or frankly even video over the Internet,” he said.

Here are Cisco’s basic numbers, from a study released in June.



Consumer traffic is more than double business traffic and will be more than triple business traffic in 2012.

And traffic generated by consumers on the open Internet will nearly quadruple in the next four years.

So, by then, video will be the dominant source of traffic, right?

Right. But it also already is.

Cisco doesn’t include peer-to-peer file sharing when it says that video will account for a quarter of consumer traffic on the Internet this year. But that’s hardly the case.

Roughly the equivalent of 500 million DVDs are being shared every month over P2P networks. If you figure 65 percent of the 2,361 petabytes of data that are being shipped each month from peer to peer comes from video sharing, there is no question that video now dominates Internet traffic.

The following chart takes an estimate from Cisco senior market analyst Arielle Sumits that 65 percent of P2P traffic in 2008 is due to consumer sharing of videos. And it uses her estimate that 95 percent of P2P traffic will be derived from video in 2012, when high-definition video has taken greater root.



Web browsing, email transport and basic data exchange will account for just 16% of traffic (not shown). It’ll be roughly the equivalent of the amount of traffic generated by Internet video going directly to TV screens. And video going to PC screens and file-sharing will far outweigh what is perceived today to be the fundamental uses of the Internet.

Video in 2012 will account for more than three-fourths of all consumer traffic on the Internet. But that future is far closer to now than you may think. More than 60 percent of today’s consumer traffic is from video, in all its forms of transit.

Now, the economy has taken a nose dive since this study was completed. And Internet service providers have not been hesitant to tell Ahuja what they think of the study’s traffic growth projections.

‘The smart ones look at us and go, well, you’re right. But you’re way off. They think we’re conservative,’’ he said.

Now, the more traffic the better for Cisco, so it should hope that’s right. It’s been kind of a tough week and bad month for John Chambers and crew.

So, if it’s true that the hour between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. at night is now becoming the Internet’s prime time, too, that could help its comeback from this latest economic bust. The Internet can’t be a collection of dumb pipes, at this point, argues senior manager of service provider marketing Thomas Barnett. Providers of Internet access will routinely have to prioritize traffic — read: in favor of video — if they are going to provide a “quality of experience” that allows them to charge for that access.

And somehow competes with the experience being provided by the closed networks of cable and satellite TV.

After all, nearly 80 percent of the traffic they handle will be coming from video when Barack Obama (backed by his cadre of the Web savvy) runs for re-election as president.

Of course, 60 percent already does.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=10959





House Investigation Sets Deadline For Kevin Martin
FMQB

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has been given a deadline of this Friday, November 21 to send in his comments on the House Energy and Commerce Committee investigation into the Commission's practices. The investigation accuses Martin of abusing his powers as head of the FCC.

Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), Chairman of the House committee, sent a letter to Martin and his aides on Friday, saying, "If you're unwilling to meet with our staff by next Friday, November 21, 2008, the committee staff will proceed to finalize its report on the investigation." He added, "Thus far, however, your office has failed to arrange a meeting in response to our calls...Given several events and proceedings over the past year, I am rapidly losing confidence that the [FCC] has been conducting its affairs in an appropriate manner."

A spokesperson for the FCC confirmed that the Commission received the letter and will continue to cooperate with the House committee's requests.

In other FCC news, President-elect Barack Obama has appointed Susan Crawford and Kevin Werlbach to head up his FCC transition team. Both are university professors and legal experts, and will advise the new administration on matters of policy, budget and personnel in regards to the FCC.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=988954





Obama Puts Well-Known Internet Advocate in Charge of FCC Review
Nancy Scola

Is this a peek into how the how the Obama Administration plans to handle the Federal Communications Commission when it comes to town in January? The Obama-Biden transition team has just named the staunchly pro-Internet Susan Crawford its co-lead in the review of the powerful FCC. Crawford, a leading expert on communications policy, is the founder of OneWebDay, called "an environmental movement for the Internet ecosystem." She was, until recently, also a member of the board of directors of ICANN, the organization charged with overseeing some of the Internet's operations.*

MORE: Wired's Sarah Lai Stirland has a good look at the sort of change in the Washington telecom world Crawford and her co-lead, former FCC counsel for "new technology policy" Kevin Werbach, might represent. Sarah has a great line, citing a session at this year's Technology Policy Summit:

[I ]n a final statement that's likely to send shivers down the spines of telecom company executives, she [Crawford] said that she believes internet access is a "utility."

The cable and phone companies who operate the series of tubes that make up the Internet's infrastructure would much rather deal with a government them as providers of a commercial service, like any other, so it's shivers indeed.
http://www.techpresident.com/blog/en...f_fcc_rev iew





Top Scientist Rails Against Hirings

Bush appointees land career jobs without technical backgrounds
Juliet Eilperin and Carol D. Leonnig

The president of the nation's largest general science organization yesterday sharply criticized recent cases of Bush administration political appointees gaining permanent federal jobs with responsibility for making or administering scientific policies, saying the result would be "to leave wreckage behind."

"It's ludicrous to have people who do not have a scientific background, who are not trained and skilled in the ways of science, make decisions that involve resources, that involve facilities in the scientific infrastructure," said James McCarthy, a Harvard University oceanographer who is president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "You'd just like to think people have more respect for the institution of government than to leave wreckage behind with these appointments."

His comments came as several new examples surfaced of political appointees gaining coveted, high-level civil service positions as the administration winds down. The White House has said repeatedly that all gained their new posts in an open, competitive process, but congressional Democrats and others questioned why political appointees had won out over qualified federal career employees.

In one recent example, Todd Harding -- a 30-year-old political appointee at the Energy Department -- applied for and won a post this month at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There, he told colleagues in a Nov. 12 e-mail, he will work on "space-based science using satellites for geostationary and meteorological data." Harding earned a bachelor's degree in government from Kentucky's Centre College, where he also chaired the Kentucky Federation of College Republicans.

Also this month, Erik Akers, the congressional relations chief for the Drug Enforcement Administration, gained a permanent post at the agency after being denied a lower-level career appointment late last year.

And in mid-July, Jeffrey T. Salmon, who has a doctorate in world politics and was a speechwriter for Vice President Cheney when he served as defense secretary, had been selected as deputy director for resource management in the Energy Department's Office of Science. In that position, he oversees decisions on its grants and budget.

Their recent career moves, along with those of several other Bush appointees, highlight the extent to which personnel who started their federal careers as presidential picks are making the transition into civil service. That practice, known as "burrowing" by career government workers, has been a regular occurrence in the waning days of previous administrations, as well.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said the administration was not involved in orchestrating any hires of political appointees, and he defended the right of political aides to apply for career positions.

"The White House has no policy on individuals applying for career jobs," he said. "There is no deliberate effort to shift political staff into career jobs."

At least one agency yesterday initially referred questions about the personnel moves to the White House, but Fratto said that was because the agency was wary of the media.

"We expect agencies to follow the rules as laid out" by the Office of Personnel Management, he said. "If there is an instance where those rules are not followed, OPM has the obligation and the responsibility to follow up with the career officials at those departments and agencies and take corrective measures."

But Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), raised concerns about the shifts in an interview yesterday.

"I believe it's unethical to do this. Clearly the people voted for change," Boxer said. She said she had discussed the issue with members of President-elect Barack Obama's transition team, adding: "They are on top of it."

Responding to congressional inquiries, Luis A. Reyes, deputy assistant to the president for presidential personnel, sent a letter yesterday to Democratic Sens. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) denying that a concerted effort was taking place.

"In hiring our Nation's Federal career workforce, the Administration adheres to a rigorous, transparent and competitive process in place at each agency that is managed by career officials and safeguarded by the merit system principles upheld by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), without White House involvement," Reyes wrote.

McCarthy at the AAAS specifically questioned Salmon's and Harding's qualifications, but DOE spokeswoman Healy Baumgardner said Salmon's duties include "operational administration and management," which are "not science-based." Baumgardner added that Salmon competed for the high-level Senior Executive Service post against "a number of other applicants."

At NOAA, spokesman Anson Franklin said Harding was selected in "a competitive process by career executives" and "the position did not require a scientific background, but a background in international relations."

Akers, a former GOP Capitol Hill staffer who did not make the list for the three best-qualified candidates when he initially applied for a GS-15 job at the DEA, got a second chance last month when the agency advertised it was taking applications for two weeks for a soon-to-be-vacant job in the Senior Executive Service.

Acting DEA chief Michele Leonhart announced on Nov. 13 that she had chosen Akers for the career position to help oversee a division called Demand Reduction, a headquarters job that the agency had previously told budget analysts it planned to eliminate.

A source familiar with the situation said the Justice Department raised concerns about the initial plan to hire Akers without opening the position for full competition. A Justice Department spokesman declined to elaborate but said the agency instructed the DEA to make the process fair and open.

Akers's career path within the DEA over the past three years has yielded considerable financial benefits. For nine years before joining the DEA, he worked for Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and as the director of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, where in 2005, his last year on the Hill, he made $39,000, legislative records show.

In his political "Schedule C" job at the DEA, Akers had a salary range of $115,00 to $149,000, depending on his step. His new senior executive position pays from $114,000 to $172,200.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...administration





Say Goodbye to BlackBerry? Yes He Can, Maybe
Jeff Zeleny

Sorry, Mr. President. Please surrender your BlackBerry.

Those are seven words President-elect Barack Obama is dreading but expecting to hear, friends and advisers say, when he takes office in 65 days.

For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign.

“How about that?” Mr. Obama replied to a friend’s congratulatory e-mail message on the night of his victory.

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. Mr. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.

Mr. Obama has not sent a farewell dispatch from the personal e-mail account he uses — he has not changed his address in years — but friends say the frequency of correspondence has diminished. In recent days, though, he has been seen typing his thoughts on transition matters and other items on his BlackBerry, bypassing, at least temporarily, the bureaucracy that is quickly encircling him.

A year ago, when many Democratic contributors and other observers were worried about his prospects against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, they reached out to him directly. Mr. Obama had changed his cellphone number, so e-mail remained the most reliable way of communicating directly with him.

“His BlackBerry was constantly crackling with e-mails,” said David Axelrod, the campaign’s chief strategist. “People were generous with their advice — much of it conflicting.”

Mr. Obama is the second president to grapple with the idea of this self-imposed isolation. Three days before his first inauguration, George W. Bush sent a message to 42 friends and relatives that explained his predicament.

“Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace,” Mr. Bush wrote from his old address, G94B@aol.com. “This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing with each of you.”

But in the interceding eight years, as BlackBerrys have become ubiquitous — and often less intrusive than a telephone, the volume of e-mail has multiplied and the role of technology has matured. Mr. Obama used e-mail to stay in constant touch with friends from the lonely confines of the road, often sending messages like “Sox!” when the Chicago White Sox won a game. He also relied on e-mail to keep abreast of the rapid whirl of events on a given campaign day.

Mr. Obama’s memorandums and briefing books were seldom printed out and delivered to his house or hotel room, aides said. They were simply sent to his BlackBerry for his review. If a document was too long, he would read and respond from his laptop computer, often putting his editing changes in red type.

His messages to advisers and friends, they say, are generally crisp, properly spelled and free of symbols or emoticons. The time stamps provided a window into how much he was sleeping on a given night, with messages often being sent to staff members at 1 a.m. or as late as 3 a.m. if he was working on an important speech.

He received a scaled-down list of news clippings, with his advisers wanting to keep him from reading blogs and news updates all day long, yet aides said he still seemed to hear about nearly everything in real time. A network of friends — some from college, others from Chicago and various chapters in his life — promised to keep him plugged in.

Not having such a ready line to that network, staff members who spent countless hours with him say, is likely to be a challenge.

“Given how important it is for him to get unfiltered information from as many sources as possible, I can imagine he will miss that freedom,” said Linda Douglass, a senior adviser who traveled with the campaign.

Mr. Obama has, for at least brief moments, been forced offline. As he sat down with a small circle of advisers to prepare for debates with Senator John McCain, one rule was quickly established: No BlackBerrys. Mr. Axelrod ordered everyone to put their devices in the center of a table during work sessions. Mr. Obama, who was known to sneak a peek at his, was no exception.

In the closing stages of the campaign, as exhaustion set in and the workload increased, aides said Mr. Obama spent more time reading than responding to messages. As his team prepares a final judgment on whether he can keep using e-mail, perhaps even in a read-only fashion, several authorities in presidential communication said they believed it was highly unlikely that he would be able to do so.

Diana Owen, who leads the American Studies program at Georgetown University, said presidents were not advised to use e-mail because of security risks and fear that messages could be intercepted.

“They could come up with some bulletproof way of protecting his e-mail and digital correspondence, but anything can be hacked,” said Ms. Owen, who has studied how presidents communicate in the Internet era. “The nature of the president’s job is that others can use e-mail for him.”

She added: “It’s a time burner. It might be easier for him to say, ‘I can’t be on e-mail.’ ”

Should Mr. Obama want to break ground and become the first president to fire off e-mail messages from the West Wing and wherever he travels, he could turn to Al Gore as a model. In the later years of his vice presidency, Democrats said, Mr. Gore used a government e-mail address and a campaign address in his race against Mr. Bush.

The president, though, faces far greater public scrutiny. And even if he does not wear a BlackBerry on his belt or carry a cellphone in his pocket, he almost certainly will not lack from a variety of new communication.

On Saturday, as Mr. Obama broadcast the weekly Democratic radio address, it came with a twist. For the first time, it was also videotaped and will be archived on YouTube.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/us...lackberry.html





Obama's Cellphone Account Breached by Verizon Employees
Amol Sharma

Verizon Wireless disclosed late Thursday that several of its employees accessed and viewed President-elect Barack Obama's personal cellphone account, and said it planned to discipline workers for the privacy breach.

"We apologize to President-Elect Obama and will work to keep the trust our customers place in us every day," the company's chief executive, Lowell McAdam, said in a statement.

Verizon said it discovered the unauthorized account access this week and said it related to an account that has been inactive "for several months." The device on the account was a standard feature phone, rather than a smartphone with advanced email and data capabilities.

The company said it has put all employees with access to the account on leave, with pay, as it sorts out which of those workers accessed the account without a justifiable business purpose. Those who did not have a good reason to view the account will be punished, the company said.

Verizon Wireless, the nation's No. 2 wireless carrier by subscribers, is a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC. The company is headquartered in Basking Ridge, N.J. and has 71,000 employees nationwide.

Cellphone companies have had other challenges protecting customer records in recent years. They have had to contend, for example, with third-party data brokers who illegally obtain customer records – sometimes by posing as employees of the cellphone company – and then sell them. They are sensitive to such privacy breaches, mindful that their subscribers could easily switch to rivals if they feel their personal information isn't secure.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1227...googlenews_wsj





Verizon Fires Workers Over Obama Cell Phone Records Breach

Verizon Wireless has fired employees connected to a breach of records from a cell phone used by President-elect Barack Obama this year, a Verizon source said Friday.

An Obama spokesman said Verizon Wireless workers looked through an old phone's billing records.

The source would not say how many people were terminated but said "we now consider this matter closed."

Verizon reported the breach Thursday, and Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said the transition team had been notified Wednesday. Gibbs said the president-elect no longer uses that phone, which has been inactive for months.

The fired employees were hired "to take care of customers," the Verizon source said, and were not authorized to access customer records unless asked to do so by the customer.

The source also said the employees in question could not have read text messages, if Obama sent or received them, and would not have been able to access the content of any voice mail messages, although they would have been able to see whether any had been left.

"This was some employees' idle curiosity," the source said, adding that records of no other customers of note were breached.

Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy and Technology said the employees probably had access to the dates and times of calls, the length of calls and the telephone numbers of those Obama spoke with.

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said Thursday that the company initially put all employees who had access to the account, "whether authorized or not," on leave during an investigation.

McAdam said the device on the account was a simple voice flip-phone, not a BlackBerry or other smartphone designed for e-mail or other data services, meaning none of Obama's e-mail could have been accessed.

Verizon Wireless, meanwhile, has launched a separate internal investigation to determine whether Obama's information was shared only among employees or whether "the information of our customer had in any way been compromised outside our company, and this investigation continues," McAdam said in an internal e-mail obtained by CNN.

The company has alerted "the appropriate federal law enforcement authorities," McAdam said.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/...one/index.html





A new voice in online privacy

Group Wants Tighter Rules for Collecting, Using Consumer Data
Kim Hart

A group of privacy scholars, lawyers and corporate officials are launching an advocacy group today designed to help shape standards around how companies collect, store and use consumer data for business and advertising.

The group, the Future of Privacy Forum, will be led by Jules Polonetsky, who until this month was in charge of AOL's privacy policy, and Chris Wolf, a privacy lawyer for law firm Proskauer Rose. They say the organization, which is sponsored by AT&T, aims to develop ways to give consumers more control over how personal information is used for behavioral-targeted advertising.

Internet companies have come under fire for tracking consumers' online habits in order to tailor ads relevant to their interests. Lawmakers have held several hearings this year to examine online privacy protections.

President-elect Barack Obama has cited privacy as one of the technology issues his administration would address, setting the stage for a debate over standards for online publishers and advertisers. Obama also said he would appoint the first chief technology officer, who may be charged with making government data more transparent while protecting citizens' privacy. The Future of Privacy Forum will seek to work with the government on these issues.

For example, the group may encourage companies to allow consumers to opt into tracking practices, rather than the typical method of requiring customers to opt out.

In the tightening economy, "advertisers are looking increasingly more to data to decide which marketing campaigns will be cut and which will survive," Polonetsky said. "There's a rush to make deeper decisions that will impact privacy."

A number of groups that examine and advocate for tighter privacy policies already exist, such as the Center for Democracy in Technology and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Mike Zaneis, vice president for public policy for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which represents online publishers such as Google and Yahoo as well as advertisers such as Verizon, said online privacy issues have long been debated and that "having another voice in this area could help."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...111601624.html





Privacy Groups Target Google Flu Trends
Declan McCullagh

Google's recent announcement that it may have found a way to predict U.S. flu trends has led to the inevitable expressions of concern from some privacy groups.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center and Patient Privacy Rights sent a letter this week to Google CEO Eric Schmidt saying if the records are "disclosed and linked to a particular user, there could be adverse consequences for education, employment, insurance, and even travel." It asks for more disclosure about how Google Flu Trends protects privacy.

In reality, Google is releasing precisely zero personally identifiable information about its users.

Instead, Google Flu Trends publishes one number per state, representing the company's best guess based on search queries at influenza-related cases in each state. These are the same type of regional statistics that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already publishes.

If you think that knowing that Alaska's "influenza-like illness" number for the week of November 9 is 2.035 and California's number is 1.384 is somehow worrisome and can identify you personally, it's time to break out your tinfoil hat.

"There are no new privacy implications," Mike Yang, a Google lawyer, told me on Friday.

EPIC acknowledges that Google Flu Trends may prove useful. But the group is also making a more subtle argument as well.

"The basic question I'm asking to Google is: how can it be that across all these key terms, you can generate aggregate anonymized data without any risk of reidentification?" said Marc Rotenberg, EPIC executive director.

Put another way, what if an attorney general in a state where marijuana was illegal sent a subpoena to Google asking for the identities of anyone who typed in "how to grow pot?" Or if abortion were illegal in a certain state, what if the subpoena wanted to know who typed in "how to get an abortion?"

Google has told us in the past that if, given a list of search terms, it can produce a list of people who searched for that term, identified by IP address and/or cookie value. If they're registered with Google, the company also knows the names they typed in when registering. (Google partially anonymizes log files after nine months. And, of course, the company has fought legal battles to keep these data confidential.)

EPIC's answer to these hypotheticals is to pressure Google--and this week's letter was a part of that strategy--to keep logs for an even shorter period of time, or not at all.

EPIC's Web site darkly warns: "There are no clear legal or technological privacy safeguards that prevent the disclosure of individual search histories. Without such privacy safeguards Google Flu Trends could be used to reidentify users who search for medical information. Such user-specific investigations could be compelled, even over Google's objection, by court order or presidential authority."

Yet keeping search logs for nine months may be useful for dealing with advertising-related questions and for optimizing a search engine's responsiveness. If users don't like that, nobody's forcing them to use Google. They also have the choice of using an anonymizing service like Tor.

But if the problem is bad laws and nebulous "presidential authority" that permits fishing expeditions, then it makes sense to fix them. This week's letter might have been better addressed to President-elect Barack Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress, asking them to make sure the Fourth Amendment's protections are extended to information stored by third parties like search engines. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen.

Disclosure: The author is married to a Google employee.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10097979-38.html





Online Age Verification for Children Brings Privacy Worries
Brad Stone

WHEN it comes to protecting children on the Internet and keeping them safe from predators, law enforcement officials have vocally advocated one approach in particular. They want popular sites, like the social network MySpace, to confirm the identities and ages of minors and then allow the young Web surfers to talk only with other children, or with adults approved by parents.

But performing so-called age verification for children is fraught with challenges. The kinds of publicly available data that Web companies use to confirm the identities of adults, like their credit card or Social Security numbers, are either not available for minors or are restricted by federal privacy laws.

Nevertheless, over the last year, at least two dozen companies have sprung up with systems they claim will solve the problem. Surprisingly, their work is proving controversial and even downright unpopular among the very people who spend their days worrying about the well-being of children on the Web.

Child-safety activists charge that some of the age-verification firms want to help Internet companies tailor ads for children. They say these firms are substituting one exaggerated threat — the menace of online sex predators — with a far more pervasive danger from online marketers like junk food and toy companies that will rush to advertise to children if they are told revealing details about the users.

“It’s particularly upsetting,” said Nancy Willard, an expert on Internet safety who has raised concerns about age verification on her Web site over the last month. “Age verification companies are selling parents on the premise that they can protect the safety of children online, and then they are using this information for market profiling and targeted advertising.”

Ms. Willard has raised specific questions about a company called eGuardian, which appears to be the furthest along in developing a system to confirm children’s identities on the Web. A small, 29-employee start-up based in Ontario, Calif., eGuardian has a clever if somewhat convoluted way of solving the age-verification-for-children quandary. It asks a parent to submit the birth date, address, school and gender of a child, then it asks schools to confirm the information.

Over the last year, eGuardian has been approaching schools, primarily in California, and offering them the entire $29 sign-up fee when they persuade parents to sign up their children. EGuardian’s real money-making hope — and this is what makes Ms. Willard nervous — is to have Web sites pay a commission for each eGuardian member. The Web site can then use the data on each child to tailor its advertising.

Ron Zayas, eGuardian’s chief executive, says that the company gives no specific information about users to Web sites and that parents are given the choice of opting out of having any data sent to advertisers. He says he understands the privacy concerns of people like Ms. Willard but calls it a “tradeoff.”

“When children go to Web sites today, they are already exposed to ads,” he said. “We make sure the ads are appropriate for children. We do not increase the volume of ads shown, nor do we ‘sell them out’ in any way to advertisers.”

Critics of these plans are not only worried about junk food advertisers licking their chops at the opportunity to reach children online. There are other problems with the system, too, they say. If widespread, it could overburden schools, which have enough to worry about without playing the role of digital notary.

Because companies like eGuardian are so new, it is difficult to gauge yet whether they are having much success. EGuardian says it has already signed up 750,000 children, but it is not actually charging anyone until it can find more Web sites that will use the data. It recently signed a deal with Kidzui, a browser that restricts where users go on the Internet, and Microsoft has said it will give users the option of signing up for eGuardian within its Windows operating systems.

EGuardian has also pitched the system to both MySpace and Facebook, which might use it to sign up members younger than 13, the age limit on most social-networking sites.

There is some evidence that schools are becoming wary of age verification systems. The California State PTA, which has about a million members, said it recently considered doing a promotion with eGuardian to reward new PTA members with an eGuardian subscription. A representative said it postponed the plan when it heard about the privacy concerns.

The future for companies like eGuardian may depend in part on a report due at the beginning of 2009 from the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, a group of experts from academia and Web companies charged with evaluating the market for online child safety tools. Created earlier this year by a group of state attorneys general, the task force has heard from about two dozen companies proposing age-verification technology, including eGuardian.

Richard Blumenthal, the attorney general of Connecticut, who has been a major proponent of age verification, said he had only recently heard about the privacy worries.

“The attorneys general would be very concerned about using age verification to promote marketing or any other kinds of promotional pitches or gimmicks aimed at specific age groups,” he said. “Targeted marketing may have its place, but it should not be coupled with the issue of childhood safety.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16ping.html





What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?
Randall Stross

ELLEN SPERTUS, a graduate student at M.I.T., wondered why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of six to one. And why were only 20 percent of computer science undergraduates at M.I.T. female? She published a 124-page paper, “Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?”, that catalogued different cultural biases that discouraged girls and women from pursuing a career in the field. The year was 1991.

Computer science has changed considerably since then. Now, there are even fewer women entering the field. Why this is so remains a matter of dispute.

What’s particularly puzzling is that the explanations for under-representation of women that were assembled back in 1991 applied to all technical fields. Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor’s degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys.

When one looks at computer science in particular, however, the proportion of women has been falling. In 2001-2, only 28 percent of all undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women. By 2004-5, the number had declined to only 22 percent. Data collected by the Computing Research Association showed even fewer women at research universities like M.I.T.: women accounted for only 12 percent of undergraduate degrees in computer science and engineering in the United States and Canada granted in 2006-7 by Ph.D.-granting institutions, down from 19 percent in 2001-2. Many computer science departments report that women now make up less than 10 percent of the newest undergraduates.

In 1998, when Ms. Spertus received her Ph.D. in computer science, women received 14 percent of the doctorates granted in the field. Today, she’s an associate professor at Mills College and a research scientist at Google. Her life story supports the hypothesis of Jane Margolis, co-author of “Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing,” who highlights the ambient ideas in a family that are enormously influential in career decisions.

Last week, Ms. Margolis said that “a lot of the girls who were doing computer science came from families of computer scientists and engineers.” Her explanation: “It was in the air. There was the expectation that they could do whatever they wanted.” Ms. Spertus’s father was an M.I.T.-trained engineer. She learned programming even before personal computers had arrived, using computer terminals in her house that were connected to a Honeywell mainframe used by the family’s business.

Twenty-five years ago, more young women in colleges and universities were drawn to computer science than today. From 1971 to 1983, incoming freshman women who declared an intention to major in computer science jumped eightfold, to 4 percent from about 0.5 percent.

Jonathan Kane, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, recalls the mid-1980s, when women made up 40 percent of the students who majored in management computer systems, the second most popular major on campus. But soon after, the number of students majoring in the program had fallen about 75 percent, reflecting a nationwide trend, and the number of women fell even more. “I asked at a department meeting,” he says, “ ‘Where have the women gone?’ It wasn’t clear.” His theory is that young women earlier had felt comfortable pursing the major because the male subculture of action gaming had yet to appear.

Justine Cassell, director of Northwestern University’s Center for Technology & Social Behavior, has written about the efforts in the 1990s to create computer games that would appeal to girls and, ultimately, increase the representation of women in computer science. In commenting as a co-contributor in a new book, “Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming,” Ms. Cassell writes of the failure of these efforts, “The girls game movement failed to dislodge the sense among both boys and girls that computers were ‘boys’ toys’ and that true girls didn’t play with computers.”

She said last week that some people in the field still believed that the answer to reversing declining enrollment was building the right game. Another school of thought is what she calls the “we won” claim because women have entered computer-related fields like Web site design that are not traditional computer science. Ms. Cassell points out that it’s not much of a victory, however. The pay is considerably less than in software engineering and the work has less influence on how computers are used, and whether this actually accounts for the diminishing numbers of female computer science majors remains unproved.

Ms. Cassell identifies another explanation for the drop in interest, which is linked to the pejorative figure of the “nerd” or “geek.” She said that this school of thought was: “Girls and young women don’t want to be that person.”

I spoke with Ms. Spertus last week about her thoughts about the declining percentage of undergraduate women majoring in the field. “Women choosing not to go into computer science is fine,” she said, “if there aren’t artificial barriers keeping them out.” She lamented the recent decision of one of her outstanding computer science students who chose to major in nursing because of what the student perceived as better prospects for finding employment.

Such students who choose not to pursue their interest may have been introduced to computer science too late. The younger, the better, Ms. Margolis says. Games would offer considerable promise, except that they have been tried and have failed to have an effect on steeply declining female enrollment.

At least we know one thing: it’s possible to have about the same number of men and women in computer science classes. That just about describes classrooms of 25 years ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16digi.html





Connections of Goo
90%

yes, that’s the approximate piracy rate for the pc version of world of goo. we casually mentioned that number recently and the news seemed to propagate far and wide, so we’d like to follow up with some more details, for those interested.

first, and most importantly, how we came up with this number: the game allows players to have their high scores reported to our server (it’s an optional checkbox). we record each score and the IP from which it came. we divided the total number of sales we had from all sources by the total number of unique IPs in our database, and came up with about 0.1. that’s how we came up with 90%.

it’s just an estimate though… there are factors that we couldn’t account for that would make the actual piracy rate lower than our estimate:

• some people install the game on more than one machine
• most people have dynamic IP addresses that change from time to time

there are also factors that would make the actual piracy rate higher than our estimate:

• more than one installation behind the same router/firewall (would be common in an office environment)
• not everyone opts to have their scores submitted

for simplicity’s sake, we just assumed those would balance out. so take take the 90% as a rough estimate.

this is in line with a previous estimate by russell carroll (director of marketing at reflexive) for the game ricochet infinity. russell estimated a 92% piracy rate and i found his analysis quite interesting (check it out here if you’re curious). one thing that really jumped out at me was his estimate that preventing 1000 piracy attempts results in only a single additional sale. this supports our intuitive assessment that people who pirate our game aren’t people who would have purchased it had they not been able to get it without paying.

in our case, we might have even converted more than 1 in a 1000 pirates into legit purchases. either way, ricochet shipped with DRM, world of goo shipped without it, and there seems to be no difference in the outcomes. we can’t draw any conclusions based on two data points, but i’m hoping that others will release information about piracy rates so that everyone could see if DRM is the waste of time and money that we think it is.

————————
UPDATE (and nerd alert): a lot of smart people have been questioning the accuracy of our 90% estimate, and with good reason, it’s a very rough estimate and the measurements are flawed. so we did some more digging to see if we might have missed the mark by a significant amount. here’s what we found:

1) based on the number of unique IPs and unique player IDs, we found that on average, there are 1.3 unique IP addresses per player (there is 1 player id for each profile created on any installation that submits scores to our server)

76% of players have contacted the server from 1 IP
13% from 2 IPs
5% from 3 IPs
3% from 4 IPs
1% from 5 IPs
1% from 6 IPs
1% from more than 6
this tells us that the dynamic IP issue is a relatively small factor in this calculation

2) we also looked at how many players IDs were created (rather than used) from each IP address. given that the vast majority of player IDs are associated with only a single IP, this is a fairly accurate measure of how many profiles the average user created. on average, a player has 1.15 profiles per installation.

when we take the total number of player IDs (which is smaller than the number of unique IPs from which leaderboard entries came) and divide it by 1.15 (the average number of profiles per installation) the number of estimated unique installations drops by about 35% as compared to the estimate based on unique IPs. let us further say that the average user installs the game on 1.25 computers with different IPs (i.e. not behind the same router), which i think is a high estimate. that lowers the estimated unique installations by another 20%. after factoring both of these in, the piracy rate would still be 82%, and we should keep in mind that this number doesn’t include those who never opted to submit scores to the leaderboard (it’s an option that’s off by default). so while it’s possible that the actual piracy rate is lower than 90%, it’s unlikely that it’s significantly lower. 2d boy hopes this satisfies the more rigorous number crunchers out there :)

oh, and yes, these numbers are exclusive of the demo… those scores are submitted to a different server entirely.
http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/





Record Labels to Sue Vuze, Limewire and SourceForge
Ernesto

French record labels have received the green light to sue four US-based companies that develop P2P applications, including the BitTorrent client Vuze, Limewire and Morpheus. Shareaza is the fourth application, for which the labels are going after the open source development platform SourceForge.

Société civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF), an umbrella group for several record labels in France, claims that the four file-sharing applications facilitate mass copyright infringement. Although the companies (and applications) themselves have nothing to do with copyright infringement, SPFF believes it has a strong case.

The record labels argue that the Vuze and the others are knowingly distributing software with the purpose to permit unauthorized access to copyrighted works. In essence they are saying that everything, or every application which allows a user to share files, will be indeed used for illegal purposes. In contrast, in the US, companies that don’t encourage their users to commit copyright infringement with their applications, are not acting illegally.

SPFF had already sued the various companies and organizations last year, but until now it has been unclear whether the US based companies behind the applications could be prosecuted under French law. A French court has now ruled that this is indeed possible, which means that they can proceed to court.

Recent French legislation which inspired the labels to go after the P2P companies, suggests that all P2P applications must have a feature to block the transfer of unauthorized copyright works. The clients that are sued by SPFF obviously don’t have such a feature. In fact, it is questionable whether it would be technically possible to develop such a filter. Nevertheless, SPFF demands it, and is claiming millions of dollars in damages for lost revenue.

Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa stated in a response to TorrentFreak, “While we appreciate the intent of the new French law, we believe SPPF’s complaint is misguided. Vuze is dedicated to the distribution of legitimate content using new technology. In that sense, our interests are aligned with the interests of all content owners, including SPPF’s members, against piracy.”

“We are disappointed that SPPF has taken this approach, given that our business is dedicated to the distribution of legitimate content,” BianRosa added. “SPPF’s claims against Vuze are simply wrong. The Vuze business complies fully with both French and American law. The recent ruling of the French Court was solely on a jurisdictional issue, not on any merits, and we believe it is in error.”

Interestingly, SPFF is also going after Sourceforge, the open source development website, because it hosts the P2P application Shareaza. Putting aside the discussion on the responsibilities of application developers for their users activities, the decision to go after SourceForge for hosting a application that can potentially infringe, is stretching credibility beyond all bounds”

Meanwhile, Vuze has appealed the decision. Separately, the company is suing SPPF for defamation based upon several false and harmful statements made by SPPF about Vuze. A different French Court has denied SPPF’s attempt to derail those claims recently , and is allowing the defamation lawsuit to proceed.

If SPPF succeeds in their case against organizations running the four P2P applications, FTP software and Internet browsers might be next, if they don’t go after Ubuntu and other operating systems first. Perhaps it is even better to shut down the Internet entirely.
http://torrentfreak.com/record-label...eforge-081114/





French Record Labels Sue, Um, SourceForge

Open source haven thumped for harboring P2P app
Austin Modine

The French music industry is suing four US-based companies for distributing P2P applications that can potentially be used to illegally share music.

Société civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF), a group representing French record labels, is targeting Limewire, Morpheus, and Vuze (formerly Azureus) in the legal action.

Its fourth mark is oddly the open source code repository SourceForge, for simply hosting the P2P client project, Shareaza.

At question is France's DADVSI copyright law, which includes an amendment barring making available software that's intended to distribute unauthorized protected works. The provision provides for penalties of up to three years in jail and a €300,000 fine.

SPPF first attempted to sue the companies late last year, but the proceedings were stalled while the court determined if the law could be applied to companies outside of France.

The law can also be used to force companies to develop a way to block the transfer of unauthorized copyright works. Presently, none of the applications have such a feature — and given that no massive file distribution business to our knowledge has figured out a reliable way to do this could result in some interesting repercussion in France.

TorrentFreaks, which flagged the story, notes enforcing a ban on platforms that can be used to distribute unauthorized content is certainly ripe for abuse. What else can be used to distribute content illegally? Oh, say, FTP, web browsers, and email. Hell, the entire Internet itself could be banned in France.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11...p2p_companies/





Calgary Man Becomes First Person Convicted Under Anti-Piracy Laws
Daryl Slade

A Calgary man who was caught recording the then new release "Sweeney Todd" in a local theatre last year has become the first person convicted in Canada under new movie pirating legislation.

Richard Craig Lissaman, 21, pleaded guilty on Friday to the unauthorized recording and was sentenced to $1,495 in fines and placed on probation for a year by provincial court Judge Catherine Skene.

Lissaman also is prohibited from entering any movie theatre or from purchasing, owning or possessing any video recording equipment, including one on a cell phone, outside his home during his probation period.

Skene said if one compared Lissaman's crime to shoplifting, it was not like someone stealing a loaf of bread or litre or milk for personal use but like someone taking a cart of meat to be re-sold for profit.

"You can say he and his pals will watch the movie, but he has an item that is more supportive of taking something to be used to make a profit," said the judge.

"It's not a simple theft of an item for personal consumption."

The conviction came as a relief to the motion picture industry, which had lobbied for the legislation that came into effect on June 1, 2007, and conducted a six-month investigation that led to Lissaman's arrest.

Before the Criminal Code amendment, the Crown had to prove a suspect was intending to distribute an illegally recorded film before action could be taken under copyright laws.

"Canada is a hotbed of movie pirating, which is a billion-dollar loss to the movie industry," Mark Christiansen, executive vice-president of operations for Paramount Picture's motion picture distribution, said outside court after reading his victim impact statement.

"The perception is that Hollywood stars are the only ones hurt by this, but it affects everybody who works in theatres."

Virginia Jones, director of policy and legal affairs for the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association, said the industry will continue to remain vigilant.

It will be closely watching two other cases before the court, both in Quebec, and include not only pirating but distribution of illegally-obtained movies.

"We would have liked to see jail time, sending a stronger message. We hope this is just a starting point," she said outside court, also after delivering a victim impact statement.

"But under old copyright laws, it was difficult to prove what had occurred."
She said all movies are distinctly watermarked, which means legal or illegal copies can be traced back to a specific theatre. That led to the lengthy surveillance.

Crown prosecutor Rob Bassett, who had sought a fine of about $2,000, said Lissaman smuggled a camcorder into Empire Studio 16 Country Hills during a matinee showing of the Johnny Depp movie Sweeney Todd on Dec. 21, the film's opening day.

"He was sitting in the top left corner of the theatre with the camera hidden in a sock, with duct tape over the red recording light to avoid detection," said Bassett.

"The house lights were turned on and the movie was shut off and Calgary police arrested him. The accused (later) admitted he had recorded the picture."

Defence lawyer Steven Jenuth, who sought a fine in unspecified hundreds of dollars, told the judge it appears to be a one-time event for his client, with no evidence of any other offences and no evidence of any sales or recordings.

He said his client had been working in the construction industry until he suffered a shoulder injury and now is on employment insurance benefits.

"When you look at the offence, he's only charged with recording a movie without consent," said Jenuth.
"He is not, despite the allegations, charged with distribution or even copying that movie."

However, Jones and Christiansen said in their statements to the court a single copy of a movie made in a Canadian theatre can be used to distribute both unlimited numbers of DVDs that are shipped around the world via the Internet or other means for distribution.

"Movie piracy is not a victimless crime," both Jones and Christensen said in similar statements. "Not only does piracy, which is the subject of this criminal matter, have a financial impact on Paramount, it negatively impacts jobs of people in the film industry and related businesses.

"Canadian film distributors, retailers, film rental businesses and government tax revenues are negatively impacted, as are drivers, carpenters, seamstresses, electricians, food-servcies personnel, theatre owners, ticket takers, employees in video rental stores and the like."

The Montreal cases are scheduled to be back in court in December and January, respectively, to set dates for trial, said Jones.
http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/...c-14047e71e3d6





RIAA Wins, Campuses Lose as Tennessee Governor Signs Campus Network Filtering Law
Richard Esguerra

Last week, the RIAA celebrated the signing of a ridiculous new law in Tennessee that says:

Each public and private institution of higher education in the state that has student residential computer networks shall:

[...]

[R]easonably attempt to prevent the infringement of copyrighted works over the institution's computer and network resources, if such institution receives fifty (50) or more legally valid notices of infringement as prescribed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 within the preceding year.

While the entertainment industry failed to get "hard" requirements for universities in the Higher Education Act passed by Congress earlier this year, the RIAA succeeded in Tennessee (and is pushing in other states) with this provision that gives Big Content the ability to hold universities hostage through the use of infringement notices. Moreover, the new rules will cost Tennessee a pretty penny -- in the cost review attached to the Tennessee bill, the state's Fiscal Review Committee estimates that the new obligations will initially cost the state a whopping $9.5 million for software, hardware, and personnel, with recurring annual costs of more than $1.5 million for personnel and maintenance. Not a penny of this will go to artists, nor to any of the record labels RIAA represents.

Unfortunately, the entertainment industry lobby seems to be succeeding, bit-by-bit, in persuading legislators to coerce universities into buying "infringement suppression" technologies -- expensive technologies that won't stop file sharing on campus networks. Even if the technologies did work (magical thinking in light of encryption), does anyone think they would somehow force students back into record stores or the iTunes Store? After all, today students on campus can swap multiple gigabytes hand-to-hand for pennies (see, e.g., blank DVD-R disks, or the price of portable hard drives, as well as the ease of copying from iPod to iPod).

It makes no sense to force universities to spend millions on technologies that will hobble innovation on campus while failing to stop file-sharing. Why not use those millions to compensate creators and copyright owners, and thereby make file-sharing legal, instead? Now, more than ever, the universities need to come forward with a collective licensing proposal that will protect their campus communities and their own bottom lines.

Meanwhile, universities under the gun should make sure to shun the hype of network filtering when possible and seek solutions more amenable to teaching and academic freedom -- our whitepaper on copyright infringement technologies on campus networks is a good place to start. For more detail, EDUCAUSE has in-depth resources on P2P, file sharing, and the Higher Education Act.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/11...vernor-signs-c





Tennessee Adopts $9.5 Million University Piracy Measure Despite School Layoffs
David Kravets

Combating music piracy at Tennessee's public university system is more important than hiring teachers and keeping down tuition costs.

Just-signed legislation requires the 222,000-student system to spend an estimated $9.5 million for file sharing "monitoring software," "monitoring hardware" and an additional "recurring cost of $1,575,000 for 21 staff positions and benefits (@75,000 each) to monitor network traffic" of its students.

Tennessee's measure, approved Wednesday by Gov. Phil Bredesen, was the nation's first in a bid to combat online file sharing within state-funded universities. The law, similar versions of which the Recording Industry Association of America wants throughout the United States, comes as the Tennessee public university system is increasing tuition, laying off teachers and leaving unfilled vacant instructor positions to battle a $43.7 million shortfall.

"This bill, the first of its kind in the nation, addressed the issue of campus music theft in a state where the impact is felt more harshly than most," said Mitch Bainwol, the RIAA's chairman and CEO.

Bredesen, governor of the nation's country music capital, said "The illegal downloading of music has a profoundly negative effect on the music industry. As home to so many record companies, music publishers, writers and artists, I am proud that Tennessee is taking action to prevent it."

The governor signed the bill the same day the Country Music Association doled out its annual music awards in Tennessee.

Cara Duckworth, an RIAA spokeswoman, said in an e-mail that the music companies' lobbying and litigation arm would be "happy to talk to any policymaker about these issues. It's up to them to decide appropriate action. "

Tennessee's law demands the state's public universities "implement a policy" that "prohibits the infringement of copyrighted works over the school's computer and network resources."

Still, it's likely the state's output of public resources for the anti-piracy program could end up a boondoggle if students move to encrypted file sharing programs. The Electronic Frontier Foundation added that, even if the filtering technology "magically" worked, students are gonna swap music.

The students may have more time to pilfer copyrighted works because their classes might be canceled for lack of funding. Using conservative estimates, the piracy measure is equal to the price of about 100 Tennessee professors' wages and benefits.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...see-adopt.html





Chinese Pirates Crack Blu-Ray DRM, Sell Pirated HD Discs
Jacqui Cheng

Forget boring old standard-def DVDs—movie pirates have moved on to selling high-definition discs in an effort to make money on the HD craze. The HD discs are not genuine Blu-ray discs and don't boast as high resolution as Blu-ray does, but they're apparently good enough to fool many consumers, and the movie industry is worried.

Law enforcement in Shenzhen, China raided a warehouse last month with that contained HD copies of a number of popular movies. There were over 800 discs (so, what is that, like eight spindles?) that were packaged in faux Blu-ray boxes, complete with holograms to make them appear legitimate. According to the Motion Picture Association International, this is the "first ever" seizure of these types of discs in China.

The pirates are apparently ripping high-def movies (cracking Blu-ray's AACS and BD+ encryption in the process) and re-encoding them using AVCHD, which offers a 720p picture. Because of the reduction in resolution, file sizes are smaller and can be burned to regular DVDs instead of the more costly Blu-ray discs, netting a tidy profit. Needless to say, the film industry isn't thrilled by the news. "We are concerned and are assigning priority to this issue," the MPA's Asia-Pacific managing director Mike Ellis told the Wall Street Journal.

Movie piracy in China is by no means a new trend, but the proliferation of Blu-ray fakes out of Asia is being viewed as a serious threat that could make its way to other countries quickly. Ellis pointed out that pirates in China can be very enterprising and have exported their wares all over the globe in the past, so there's nothing stopping them from doing so with this new format. "These syndicates are very quick to spot market opportunities," he said.

The news comes at a tough time for Blu-ray. The format's growth is stalling thanks to the high price of discs and players combined with the struggling economy, and in September, Blu-ray's market share actually fell in favor of the cheaper and ubiquitous standard-definition DVDs as well as HD downloads. With the Chinese Blu-ray clones going for as little as $7 apiece (compared to the typical Blu-ray disc at $30+), it comes as no surprise that they're being viewed as a threat—especially if they're dressed up as Blu-ray discs and consumers aren't clear on what they're getting.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...concerned.html





Law Professor Fires Back at Song-Swapping Lawsuits
Rodrique Ngowi

The music industry's courtroom campaign against people who share songs online is coming under counterattack.

A Harvard Law School professor has launched a constitutional assault against a federal copyright law at the heart of the industry's aggressive strategy, which has wrung payments from thousands of song-swappers since 2003.

The professor, Charles Nesson, has come to the defense of a Boston University graduate student targeted in one of the music industry's lawsuits. By taking on the case, Nesson hopes to challenge the basis for the suit, and all others like it.

Nesson argues that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 is unconstitutional because it effectively lets a private group - the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA - carry out civil enforcement of a criminal law. He also says the music industry group abused the legal process by brandishing the prospects of lengthy and costly lawsuits in an effort to intimidate people into settling cases out of court.

Nesson, the founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said in an interview that his goal is to "turn the courts away from allowing themselves to be used like a low-grade collection agency."

Nesson is best known for defending the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers and for consulting on the case against chemical companies that was depicted in the film "A Civil Action." His challenge against the music labels, made in U.S. District Court in Boston, is one of the most determined attempts to derail the industry's flurry of litigation.

The initiative has generated more than 30,000 complaints against people accused of sharing songs online. Only one case has gone to trial; nearly everyone else settled out of court to avoid damages and limit the attorney fees and legal costs that escalate over time.

Nesson intervened after a federal judge in Boston asked his office to represent Joel Tenenbaum, who was among dozens of people who appeared in court in RIAA cases without legal help.

The 24-year-old Tenenbaum is a graduate student accused by the RIAA of downloading at least seven songs and making 816 music files available for distribution on the Kazaa file-sharing network in 2004. He offered to settle the case for $500, but music companies rejected that, demanding $12,000.

The Digital Theft Deterrence Act, the law at issue in the case, sets damages of $750 to $30,000 for each infringement, and as much as $150,000 for a willful violation. That means Tenenbaum could be forced to pay $1 million if it is determined that his alleged actions were willful.

The music industry group isn't conceding any ground to Nesson and Tenenbaum. The RIAA has said in court documents that its efforts to enforce the copyright law is protected under the First Amendment right to petition the courts for redress of grievances. Tenenbaum also failed, the music group noted, to notify the U.S. Attorney General that that he wanted to contest the law's constitutional status.

Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the RIAA, said her group's pursuit of people suspected of music piracy is a fair response to the industry's multibillion-dollar losses since peer-to-peer networks began making it easy for people to share massive numbers of songs online.

"What should be clear is that illegally downloading and distributing music comes with many risks and is not an anonymous activity," Duckworth said.

Still, wider questions persist on whether the underlying copyright law is constitutional, said Ray Beckerman, a Forest Hills, N.Y.-based attorney who has represented other downloading defendants and runs a blog tracking the most prominent cases.

One federal judge has held that the constitutional question is "a serious argument," Beckerman said. "There are two law review articles that have said that it is unconstitutional, and there are three cases that said that it might be unconstitutional."

In September, a federal judge granted a new trial to a Minnesota woman who had been ordered to pay $220,000 for pirating 24 songs. In that ruling, U.S. District Judge Michael J. Davis called on Congress to change copyright laws to prevent excessive awards in similar cases. He wrote that he didn't discount the industry's claim that illegal downloading has hurt the recording business, but called the award "wholly disproportionate" to the industry's losses.

In the Boston case, Nesson is due to meet attorneys for the music industry for a pretrial conference on Tuesday, ahead of a trial set for Dec. 1.

Entertainment attorney Jay Cooper, who specializes in music and copyright issues at Los Angeles-based Greenberg Traurig, is convinced that Nesson will not persuade the federal court to strike down the copyright law. He said the statutory damages it awards enable recording companies to get compensation in cases where it is difficult to prove actual damages.

The record companies have echoed that line of defense. In court filings in Tenenbaum's case, they contend that the damages allowed by the law are "intended not only to compensate the copyright owner, but also to punish the infringer (and) deter other potential infringers."

But are these lawsuits the only way the record industry could deter piracy? Nesson believes the industry could develop new ways to prevent copyright material from being shared illegally. One idea would be to bundle music with ads and post it for free online, he says.

"There are alternative ways," he said, "of packaging entertainment to return revenue to artists."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...DING?SITE=WIRE





Final Judgment in SCO v. Novell: SCO Loses Again
Groklaw

The final judgment [PDF] from Utah is here at last. It recites what the August 10, 2007 and July 16, 2008 orders said, but it also resolves the recent dispute over SCO's desire to voluntarily waive some claims and then bring them back to the table after an appeal, should it prove successful. Here's SCO's motion to voluntarily dismiss, and Novell's response, so you can verify that this judgment indeed represents another loss for SCO. You'll see that it was Novell that suggested the wording regarding SCO's voluntarily dismissed claims that we see in the judgment, that they be dismissed "without the possibility of renewal following appeal."

SCO caved on its voluntarily dismissed claims, then, and Novell did not. So, another loss for SCO. No matter what happens on appeal, then, SCO can't resurrect those claims. It can appeal the rest of the matters it lost in August 2007 and July of 2008.

Novell, however, in an identical circumstance, can pull its voluntarily dismissed claims out of its back pocket and go after SCO. And I'm sure it would. In the wording of the judgment, Novell has "the right to pursue these claims only in this action, should there be a subsequent adjudication or trial in this action." So if there were an appeal and SCO got the case sent back to Utah for a jury trial, for example, SCO's favorite daydream, then Novell could bring back to the courtroom all its voluntarily dismissed claims.

Here, in contrast, is the wording on the SCO claims from the judgment:

3. The remaining portions of SCO's claims for Breach of Contract (Count II), Copyright Infringement(Count IV), and Unfair Competition (Count V) are voluntarily dismissed with prejudice, without the possibility of renewal following appeal.

So, all the tricky language SCO suggested to the judge was for naught. Whew.

Here's the docket entry:

11/20/2008 565 - FINAL JUDGMENT in favor of Novell, Inc., SCO Group and also against Novell, Inc., SCO Group. Case Closed. Magistrate Judge Brooke C. Wells no longer assigned to case. See Judgment for details. Signed by Judge Dale A. Kimball on 11/20/08. (ce) (Entered: 11/20/2008)
Now it's on to an appeal, if SCO can afford it, I suppose. As SCO's lawyer, Arthur Spector, told the court at the September hearing in the bankruptcy, that could take a year and a half or it could take five.

Of course, Novell could appeal also, independent of SCO, and it might decide to, in some alternate universe where companies throw away a hard-won victory. I guess they could appeal the amount they won, trying to get it higher, or Novell might want to appeal the judgment from July that SCO had the right to enter into the Microsoft and SCOsource end user licenses. I know I would like them to. If SCO appeals, then I think Novell might just go ahead. If not, who'd blame them for wanting to forget they ever met anybody called SCO?

If it were me, I'd decide based on whether I thought SCO was going to get new funding. If they did, I'd go ahead and appeal, because otherwise whoever buys up the litigation or backs it could restart SCOsource. I think that's what all the delay in bankruptcy has been about, actually. SCO isn't so keen on showing its hand, I'd imagine.

Anyway, after the lull in SCO news, for sure it's going to get really interesting again pronto.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?s...81120195227418





Kraftwerk Copyright Case Overturned in Germany
Martial Trezzini

Germany's highest civil court has dealt electronic band Kraftwerk a blow in ruling that sampling music does not in principle violate copyright.

Thursday's decision overturns a Hamburg state court ruling in Kraftwerk's favor that said reusing even the shortest bit of a song infringed on copyright. The Hamburg court will now have to take up the case again.

The civil court ruling, however, forbids sampling of a song melody and insists that the sample must be part of a completely new musical work bearing no resemblance to the original.

Kraftwerk had sued German rap producer Moses Pelham for using a two-second sample from their 1977 track "Metal on Metal" in the rhythm sequence in the song "Nur Mir" by Sabrina Setlur that appeared in 1997.
http://www.southernledger.com/ap/198...ned_in_Germany





MTV's TRL Gets Star-Studded Send-Off
FMQB

After 10 years and more than 2,500 episodes, MTV's long-running countdown show TRL signed off on Sunday night with Total Finale Live, a three-hour party which proved to be a star-studded extravaganza. A slew of TRL alumni performed on stages both inside and outside of the studio, starting with Beyoncé who sang "If I Were a Boy" and then flipped the switch to "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" and "Crazy in Love." Fall Out Boy (who were without Pete Wentz because his wife Ashlee Simpson reportedly went into labor) were next up, playing on a flatbed truck that was parked in Times Square. Later in the night, Ludacris, Nelly and Snoop Dogg performed their biggest TRL hits, then teamed up for "Drop It Like It's Hot." The Backstreet Boys sang "I Want It That Way" for old time's sake, and 50 Cent rocked "In Da Club" and his current hit, "Get Up."

Other stars didn't perform but made cameo appearances, such as Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift, Diddy and Kid Rock. And of course, there was one last video countdown. TRL hosts former and current, Carson Daly and Damien Fahey, took viewers through the 10 most iconic clips in TRL history, which went as follows:

10.) OutKast - "Hey Ya"
9.) Blink-182 - "What’s My Age Again"
8.) Usher feat. Ludacris and Lil Jon - "Yeah"
7.) Beyoncé feat. Jay-Z - "Crazy in Love."
6.) Kid Rock - "Bawitdaba"
5.) Christina Aguilera - "Dirrty"
4.) ‘N Sync - "Bye Bye Bye"
3.) Backstreet Boys - "I Want it That Way"
2.) Eminem - "The Real Slim Shady"
1.) Britney Spears - "...Baby One More Time"

http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=989184





Guns N' Roses Album to Debut on MySpace
Steven Musil

Guns N' Roses fans who have waited 17 years to hear the rock band's new album are mere hours from having their patience rewarded with a free Web debut before it goes on sale next week.

Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy will make its debut on the band's MySpace page starting Thursday, according to a Reuters report Wednesday. Fans will be able to stream the album for free before it goes on sale Sunday in an exclusive deal with Best Buy. Listeners, however, will not be able to download tracks from the site.

Also reported to be debuting Thursday was Electric Arguments by Paul McCartney's side project group, The Fireman. However, Eliot Van Buskirk at Wired.com noted that NPR Music got the jump on MySpace by beginning its streaming of the album Tuesday.

The News Corp.-owned social network launched its MySpace Music service in September with the backing of the four largest recording companies. The service represents the most significant challenge to Apple--at least in terms of firepower--in some time. The site offers free streaming music and sells unprotected MP3 downloads, ringtones, and merchandise.

MySpace has long been a place where bands market their wares to the Web. According to MySpace, 65 percent of its users already have streaming music on their profiles and 6 billion songs are played every month.

The free exposure for fledgling performers sometimes has big payouts. The rock band Boston recently hired its new lead singer from a fan's tribute page on the social-networking site.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10103315-93.html





Microsoft Lets Zune Music Subscribers Keep Tunes
AP

Microsoft Corp. is giving an early holiday gift to people who pay for all-you-can-listen access to the Zune digital music store: 10 songs to keep each month, included in the $14.99 monthly subscription fee.

The decision may appeal to people who have been reluctant to test out the subscription model, preferring to own their music instead of rent it. Microsoft's Zune Pass, RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody and others give users unlimited access to millions of songs in exchange for a monthly fee. But as soon as the user stops paying, the music stops playing unless he or she forks over extra money to buy each track.

With the new Zune Pass perk, subscribers can use the Zune desktop software as usual to buy individual songs, and the service keeps track of how many free ones remain for the month. In most cases, the song will come in the MP3 format, which can be freely copied to multiple devices and computers.

"I think the 10 free tracks is going to be a huge accelerant" to subscriber numbers, said Adam Sohn, Zune's marketing director. "People will enjoy owning that music, and I think they'll be more apt to transact more in the store."

The company did not disclose how many subscribers it has.

Microsoft's Zune is a minor player compared with Apple Inc.'s line of iPods. Apple snagged 71 percent of MP3 player sales from January to September of this year, to Microsoft's 3 percent, according to market researcher NPD Group.

Microsoft and Apple both sell digital tracks for 99 cents, but so far, Apple has resisted the idea of a subscription service while Microsoft has tried to use it as a way to stand out.

The Orchard, a large independent music distributor who signed onto the new plan, said it hoped the offer would create more demand for its artists, who are paid a larger proportion of subscriber fees the more their music is accessed.

"What I want on behalf of our artists and labels are larger audiences that they can monetize in lots of different ways," said the Orchard's chief executive, Greg Scholl. "There's a lot of different paths to the waterfall."

Microsoft also said late Wednesday that it signed deals with two major music labels, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group, so that Zune users can buy MP3-formatted songs, not just ones protected with digital rights management software.

EMI Music and Warner Music Group, along with many independent labels, already allowed Microsoft to sell their catalogues as MP3s.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...112000921.html





Toyota Claims Ownership of Fan Wallpapers
Ben Jones

Motoring giant Toyota is normally ahead of the curve when it comes to technology. The company is known for innovations like the Synergy Drive in the Prius, as well as long term reliability. However, if you take pride in your Toyota, and have it as a wallpaper on your system, Toyota doesn’t want you sharing.

Toyota, one of the biggest car companies in the world, is often a name synonymous with quality. There is even a philosophy of doing business, called “The Toyota Way”, which emphasizes that the right result will come from the right process, and that solving the root problems brings the organization the greatest benefit.

This ‘Way’ is probably not communicated to its lawyers in great detail, which is why Desktopnexus, a site that provides desktop backgrounds, has been contacted by them. In perhaps one of the most wildly arrogant demands in DMCA history, Toyota’s lawyers are demanding the withdrawal of all wallpapers that feature a Toyota, Scion, or Lexus. The site’s owner, Harry Maugans contacted Toyota to clarify. He was told that all images featuring Toyota vehicles should be removed, even images with copyright belonging to others.

Speaking to TorrentFreak, Maugans said: “Their lawyer, Garrett Biggs, told us that if we wanted them to specifically identify their images, we would have to pay for them to do so”. Maugans also said he was afraid it would come to a lawsuit, fearing the attrition effect that is so common now in copyright disputes. Toyota, with cash assets of over $23Billion can surely afford to spin out the legal costs in an attempt to bankrupt the site – the same strategy that is often used to ‘encourage‘ a settlement in RIAA cases.

Yet, Toyota has also been cagey. These demands have not been sent in the form of a DMCA notice. While sending such a notice would require the takedown, it also requires that the person sending the notice legally certify that they are legal representatives for the copyright holders at issue. Making a false statement is ‘punishable under penalty of perjury‘, which is not taken lightly in US courts.

That copyright holders should be properly identified is also not lost on Mr. Maugans. “What if Toyota comes back and says “yes, we own the copyright to all of those [Toyota images on site]“. How can we know if they’re lying to get us to take them all down? How can we prove they do in fact own the copyrights on those wallpapers? Some are very hard to believe, such as this which looks more like Fan Art than a professionally designed marketing photo. Or this one which they’re claiming they own, but it has a “Created by:” line at the bottom by someone who doesn’t seem to have any connection to the actual Toyota company.”

The ‘huh what?’ value of Toyota’s position has been noticed by others as well. On the FreeCulture News site, one comment questions the action saying “What are they trying to accomplish by attacking free advertising?” Indeed, this is what it comes down to. Instead of embracing free advertising and word of mouth, Toyota seems desperate to control and micromanage every aspect of it’s publicity.

At the end of the day, the best question is that asked by Mr Maugans, “Has DMCA abuse really gotten this bad?”

At the time of press, Toyota Inc. did not respond to requests for comment.
http://torrentfreak.com/toyota-claims-ownership-081114/





Glossed Over
lesley.blume

The news coming from Condé Nast gets bleaker. Most of the headlines, of course, have been about the humbling of pet-project print magazines like Men's Vogue and Portfolio, but the real story is the company's increasingly tortured relationship with the Internet.

This week, the company laid off more than three dozen online staffers [1] from its CondéNet division, which oversees its popular "destination" Web sites like Epicurious.com and Style.com (as opposed to the online versions of the company's print magazines). This follows the decision two weeks ago to cut back the print version of Portfolio to 10 times a year, fire most of the staff of Portfolio.com, and curtail most of the site's original content.

According to one report [2], a Portfolio.com staffer who asked a company executive why the Web site was being penalized for the magazine's woes was told that Condé Nast is first and foremost a magazine company.

"Any rational person would say that's crazy," says a former Condé Nast editor who, like every former or current Condé Nast employee consulted for this article, insisted on anonymity. "To say that we're just a magazine company in this day and age is like saying that we're a buggy company."

What is behind Condé Nast's bellicose approach to the Web? Other traditional media outlets properly regard the Internet as both destroyer and savior and have gone into overdrive to translate themselves into online brands. By axing its online properties, Condé Nast is revealing its apparent online strategy: looking the other way while Jaws devours the back of your boat.

Condé Nast is certainly not the only publisher with a wary relationship with the net. There are very few examples of successful category-leading Web sites built around magazines. One notable exception is People.com, which says that it receives 8.6 million unique visitors and some 733 million page views a month. Those are large and impressive numbers, but compare the site to CNN.com (35 million page views daily, 276 million on Election Day alone) or ESPN.com (67 million page views each Monday night for its NFL content alone) and you begin to get a feel for magazines' relatively meager presence in the world of old media transformed online. Similarly, in a bid for survival and relevance, the nation's largest newspapers—the New York Times, Washington Post (parent company of The Big Money), Los Angeles Times, and USA Today—have all built extensive sites laden with video features and reporter blogs, which makes Condé Nast's latest string of decisions seem peculiar, even shocking.

Some magazine publishers are tiptoeing into the brave new world by converting print titles into exclusively online venues. Hearst recently announced that its last print issue of CosmoGirl will appear in December, and that afterward the magazine will appear exclusively online; ditto for Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S.'s ELLE Girl. Time Inc. did the same when it shut down Teen People.

But those moves smack of desperation, not strategy. Many magazine editors seem to believe that digital is the future but are grappling with how to make it viable in the present. The burning question: How can crown-jewel publications like Vogue and Vanity Fair be made as profitable online as they were as peak-performing print publications?

The predominant—and unhappy—answer is that it's probably not possible, at least not right away. While advertisers are increasingly interested in online platforms, an Internet-ad dollar is still not the same as a print-ad dollar. The price of advertising is measured in CPM, or cost per thousand readers; one media expert estimates that online CPM is worth between one-seventh and one-tenth of a print CPM.

This means that swapping out online-for-print publication right now literally amounts to trading in dollars for pennies—which is hardly an alluring prospect for publishing companies used to commanding lavish ad revenues.

"No one has figured out how to make real money from online content," says Glynnis MacNichol, editor of Mediabistro.com's FishbowlNY. "The print ad structure can't keep up with the technology. Right now we're still in the Wild West. That said, it's inevitable that someone will figure out how to make a ton of money out of this."

Indeed, a new generation of online publishers is hell-bent on finding new ways to advertise effectively online, going beyond the irritating banners and buttons that blink along the edges of Web sites now.

"Branded entertainment is the new advertising," says Jimmy Jellinek, an executive hired to oversee Playboy.com's extensive, soon-to-be revealed digital overhaul. "You sit down, figure out the brand values, create a program; it can be a viral video, a written piece, anything in your imagination. You have to be as flexible as possible."

But magazine mega-publishers are clearly reluctant to make this leap. Condé Nast made some promising moves by purchasing the social media site Reddit and the Web publication Ars Technica in recent years. Yet the company has long neglected to build the necessary infrastructure—from software to writers—to be a competitive presence on the Web. When Condé Nast bought Wired magazine in 1998, it didn't even bother to buy the Web site. Former Condé Nast staffers from the magazine Web sites say that it was a bureaucratic nightmare to get desperately needed technical staff or even the most remedial features added to the magazines' bare-bones Web sites. In most cases, the company insists that new site technologies be developed by nail-bitingly slow internal IT teams rather than using high-quality, inexpensive technologies widely available on the market. It took one editor a whole year just to obtain a flash audio player. The company has famously refused to make magazine content available online and has not been willing to hire a generation of writers to create original content.

"You live and die by the quality of the content you create," says Jellinek. "If you're just a magazine clone, you're never going to attract an audience. The failure of [Condé Nast's] Web sites is a failure of vision and ability to translate the DNA of their titles into an online environment."

"They've been willing to lose $100 million to make a magazine profitable," adds a former Condé Nast online employee. "But for some reason, they've never been able to apply that thinking to the Web."

Ultimately, it comes down to trickle-down attitude and changing a deeply entrenched magazine culture. When magazines first began to go online in the mid- to late-90s, their corporate imperative was often to promote subscriptions to the print publication, not to create a new medium. And countless reports from inside Condé Nast confirm that this is still the thinking at the top—the Web is there to drive print subscriptions, nothing more.

And if magazine publishers were disinclined to build this infrastructure when they were relatively flush, now all of their dwindling resources are going to shore up their core products, making a meaningful transition online even less likely.

But what happens when the core product is no longer profitable, and you haven't built a bridge to a new medium?

"Then you get to where the music industry is," says another former Condé Nast editor. "They just don't know what to do. All of the rules have been thrown out. You have billion-dollar companies trying to figure out a model in a free fall."

It's heartbreaking, in a way. Condé Nast's Portfolio.com says that it was attracting 3 million unique visitors a month. If so, there are plenty of companies that could make a handsome business out of that, but Condé Nast evidently believes that it cannot—or is simply disinclined to do so, at the expense of many jobs and missed opportunities.

It must be tempting to look the other way and hope for the best. After all, nearly every person consulted for this article said that it's too early to sound the death knell for the industry, that magazines will always be around.

Then again, that's what people thought about Lehman Bros.
http://tbm.thebigmoney.com/articles/...3/glossed-over





Where’s the Beef?

They Couldn’t Get Past the ‘Mimbos’
Cara Buckley

NOT long after Nicole Caldwell became editor in chief of Playgirl magazine, she realized that looking at photos of naked men all day was not everything she had imagined it would be. When she would meet them, there was often a curious vapidity to the men, who Ms. Caldwell took to describing as “mimbos.”

Readers, Ms. Caldwell decided, deserved more.

So she and her fellow editors, all women in their 20s and all relative neophytes to the world of magazines — and pornography — resolved to fill Playgirl with something different. They aspired to bring Playgirl back to its roots, back to a time when the magazine covered issues like abortion and equal rights, interspersing sexy shots of men with work from writers like Raymond Carver and Joyce Carol Oates.

All the while, the editors juggled the demands of the publisher, Blue Horizon Media, which they said pushed to fill Playgirl with even more nudes and fewer words.

“It always felt like this uphill battle,” said Jessanne Collins, 29, who was Playgirl’s senior editor.

The women’s dreams crashed when Blue Horizon Media, which also puts out hard-core magazines, announced it was shutting Playgirl. The last issue, dated January/February 2009, recently arrived on newsstands.

Although the Playgirl Web site is still running, the graphic content is geared more toward gay men. None of the magazine’s editors are involved.

Ms. Caldwell said Playgirl magazine suffered from the twin malaises of rising costs and declining sales; Blue Horizon Media did not return repeated calls for this article.

Playgirl’s passing certainly will not be lamented as would the death of a more respected, or even a mildly respected, magazine. Yet for its writers and fans, something tangible has been lost in its closure.

“It was almost a way to get back at Playboy,” said Pamela Des Barres, the famed former rock groupie, who wrote a music column for Playgirl. “It was a great idea, and it could have been done better. It did offer women a way to see some gorgeous hot, young, sexy guys, and nothing’s wrong with that.”

Playgirl was started 35 years ago as a feminist response to Playboy and Penthouse. (Playboy sued Playgirl in 1973 for trademark infringement; the suit was settled amicably.) Over the years, the magazine changed ownership, began catering more to gay men, and whittled its operations down. Still, the magazine drew an avid readership, Ms. Caldwell said, selling 600,000 copies per issue in more than three dozen countries.

In contrast to much of the slender offerings of pornography aimed at women, which tends to be softer and more story-driven than that marketed toward men, Playgirl was in-your-face.

Now the three editors’ nudie magazine with feminist leanings is gone, and with it, strange and exciting career moments.

“I think a different kind of porn is very degrading to women, but the kind of stuff we were peddling was about what women wanted,” said Ms. Caldwell, who is 26. “For better or worse, this was a real blow for feminism. We were the only magazine that offered naked men to women.”

In the end, Playgirl was run by a skeleton crew of these three editors, along with what Ms. Caldwell described as “a whole horde of eager unpaid interns.”

Ms. Caldwell was a New Jersey girl who had helped run a community newspaper and graduated from Columbia’s journalism school; Ms. Collins has a master’s in creative writing from the New School; and Corinne Weiner, 26, the magazine’s designer for its last two and a half years, was a graduate of Pratt.

Ms. Weiner and Ms. Caldwell got their jobs the old-fashioned way: by sending in a résumé. Landing such a high-profile job just four months out of graduate school seemed “so over the top,” Ms. Caldwell said. “In the end,” she said, “that was far greater than reservations I had.”

Ms. Caldwell hired Ms. Collins after she wrote an essay for the magazine about orgasm-related migraines. Ms. Weiner was the only one who said she half aspired to a career in pornography publishing. “It definitely was bit intense at first,” she said. “But it really didn’t bother me. I’m definitely all about looking at naked dudes.”

Playgirl shared offices with Blue Horizon’s other publications in a fluorescent-lighted hive of gray cubicles in an old Art Deco building near Grand Central Terminal. Outwardly, it seemed the blandest of places, were it not for the lurid photos and videos that filled workers’ computer screens.

After being hired at Playgirl, each woman followed a similar trajectory of experiences:

¶First week: shock at being inundated with photos of naked men; slight horror at catching sight of photos from Blue Horizon’s triple X magazines; terror at having to put out a magazine with only two other people.

¶Second week: less shock, less terror, less horror. Amusement at all the full-frontal photos that regular Joes — plumbers among them — mailed in.

¶Third week: the realization that one’s eyes are glazing over at the sight of photos of naked men, who all begin to look the same. Bewilderment at the letters from female fans, who wanted specific fantasies to appear. (A common theme: a naked man doing chores for the fully dressed lady of the house. The editors complied with a photo spread.)

Ms. Caldwell was struck by how many people would assume she was an expert in sex and then go on to disclose highly private details about their lives. Ms. Weiner said her parents found her job “hilarious.” Ms. Collins’s parents were congratulatory, at first. But just after being hired, she called their home in eastern Connecticut and sensed some hesitation in her father’s voice.

“ ‘I thought you were really into this,’ ” she said.

“Yeah,” her father replied. “That’s before Mom went out and bought a copy of the magazine.”

The editors strove to publish articles that were saucy but relevant. They printed articles about a campaign to take toxic chemicals out of cosmetics and about problems with Amsterdam’s red-light district. To her delight, Ms. Caldwell landed interviews with Jack LaLanne and Dolly Parton.

A do-it-yourself ethic bloomed. The magazine had no marketing or public relations budget, so its editors sought to revive the Playgirl brand themselves, throwing parties at a Lower East Side bar. After Blue Horizon denied a request to finance a blog, Ms. Collins built one herself, starting it on WordPress, a free platform.

Their efforts, the women said, got virtually no support; indeed, their higher-ups, all of them men, usually resisted their push to give the magazine editorial heft.

Early in 2008, warning signs surfaced. While newsstands sales were up, Ms. Caldwell said, so were production costs. In the spring, subscription cards suddenly vanished; the staff members were told it was a cost cutting measure. Then they were told that issues would come out bimonthly. In July, a subscriber wrote to complain about a letter from Blue Horizon saying that Playgirl was no longer in print.

Ms. Caldwell entered the office of an executive editor at Blue Horizon and asked: “Is there something you want to tell us?” After some blustering, she learned that the magazine’s end was near.

And so began the death throes of Playgirl, which, for all its swinging history and sass, ended remarkably unremarkably.

There were no final cocktails, no last hurrah. Instead, there was a frigidness between the Playgirl staff members and the other Blue Horizon workers. “It was kind of like a long breakup, where you’re both still living together and neither of you have left the apartment,” Ms. Weiner said.

The magazine’s editors said they were never told why the magazine was shut down. But, they said, they were always struck by the paucity of ads.

“I’m not a publishing expert, but it seems to me like it would be impossible to sustain a magazine on the quantity of ads Playgirl sold,” Ms. Collins said.

ON the Monday of her last week, Ms. Caldwell was called into a morning meeting, where she received an awkward round of applause from Blue Horizon staff members. Two days later, the executive editor took Ms. Caldwell and Ms. Collins out for sushi. (Ms. Weiner had already left.)

Ms. Caldwell’s last day was Oct. 3. Ms. Weiner and Ms. Collins were not around; they had already found new jobs — Ms. Weiner as an officer manager in Brooklyn, Ms. Collins as a copy editor at a male lifestyle magazine. (Ms. Caldwell now edits at Diamond District News.)

By 6 p.m., Ms. Caldwell had nearly cleared her desk. She rode the No. 4 train home.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/fa...6playgirl.html





PC Magazine, a Flagship for Ziff Davis, Will Cease Printing a Paper Version
Stephanie Clifford

Ziff Davis Media announced Wednesday that it was ending print publication of its 27-year-old flagship, PC Magazine, and would take the title online only.

It is the latest of several magazine publishers to drop a print edition, as advertising plummets and the cost of printing a paper version rises.

“The viability for us to continue to publish in print just isn’t there anymore,” Jason Young, chief executive of Ziff Davis, said in an interview.

While most magazines make their money mainly from print advertising, PC Magazine derives most of its profit from its Web site. More than 80 percent of the profit and about 70 percent of the revenue come from the digital business, Mr. Young said, and all of the writers and editors have been counted as part of the digital budget for two years.

The change will not require much of an adjustment, because the focus has been on getting articles to the Web first, said Lance Ulanoff, the editor of the PCMag Digital Network, which is what PCMag.com and its accompanying Web sites were renamed on Wednesday. “All content goes online first, and print has been cherry-picking for some time what it wants for the print edition,” Mr. Ulanoff said.

Circulation at PC Magazine has been declining since the late 1990s, when it hit a peak of 1.2 million. This year, the magazine’s rate base was 600,000.

Mr. Young said that while the print magazine would be profitable in 2008, he forecast that it would lose money in 2009 because of fewer advertisements and rising costs. The final print edition will be the January 2009 issue.

“Obviously, the macroeconomic condition is putting pretty significant pressure on all forms of advertising,” Mr. Young said.

Seven production, circulation and advertising employees will be cut as a result of the move, out of a total of about 140 who work on PC Magazine and PCMag.com. Mr. Young said the company was considering taking its other print magazine, the video-game publication Electronic Gaming Monthly, into an online-only format, but would not make a decision before the end of the year.

Other publishers have also moved publications online only.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a small publication that was established in 1945 and won a National Magazine Award last year, recently announced it would go online only beginning in January. “We’re trying to deal with the cost pressures,” said Jonas Siegel, the Bulletin’s editor, in an interview.

The Christian Science Monitor announced in October that it would cease printing its paper weekday edition in favor of its Web site; also in October, the Hearst Corporation closed CosmoGirl but kept its Web site.

“If you look at the list of the magazines that have gone to online, almost all of them have been magazines in trouble,” said John Fennell, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. “Magazines in general are going to be dependent on print advertising for a long time into the future,” he said.

But magazine and newspaper publishers have been contending with a decline in advertising at the same time that their costs, including ink, printing, and distribution, are rising.

Advertising pages for the December issues of monthly magazines are down more than 17 percent from the December issues of 2007, according to the Media Industry Newsletter, and that is leading to layoffs and the closing of titles.

On Tuesday, Time Inc. said that it would shut down Cottage Living, part of the Southern Progress division of Time Inc., along with the CottageLiving.com Web site. Nine of the 47 staff members will get jobs elsewhere in Time Inc., and the 38 others will be laid off, said Debra Richman, a Time Inc. spokeswoman.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/bu...dia/20mag.html





Gosh, I Thought “PC Magazine” Died Years Ago
Charles Petzold

I see from my friend Sheryl Canter's blog that the print edition of PC Magazine is being euthanized. I'm not sure I would have noticed otherwise.

In January 1984 I sent PC Magazine an unsolicited article about the new DOS command PROMPT and the neat things you could do with it. They sent me a check for $600. It was the first time I was paid for my writing.

Several months later I got a call from John Dickinson. He had been hired by the magazine to put together an issue reviewing every printer available for the PC. They needed writers who lived in the New York City area to come into the PC Magazine offices and review printers. That was lots of fun and I met all the editors and other writers. One day I showed John some assembly language programs I had written for the PC and he steered me into Paul Somerson's office.

At that time, both programmers and regular users read PC Magazine, and the “back of the book” (Somerson's bailiwick) had a bunch of columns for programmers. I started writing little assembly language programs for the magazine as well as hardware and software reviews. I had a “real” job at New York Life Insurance Company, so I would often take vacation days to go into the PC Magazine offices. (New York City's a small town: The two offices were only about 500 yards apart.)

By June 1985 I had used up all my New York Life vacation days that were supposed to last through the following March. This didn't bother me too much because I was making enough money writing for PC Magazine to quit that job and write full time, which I've been doing ever since except for some consulting work this year to compensate for a (ahem) temporary slump in book sales. For two years I did the PC Tutor column, which answered reader's technical questions. (One question got me thinking about writing a book that later became Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software.) Then for 8 years or so I did a column called Environments, about OS/2 and Windows programming.

I never counted the number of articles and columns I wrote for PC Magazine, but considering that it was published 22 times a year (unbelievable now) and I had at least one article in almost every issue for 10 years, I usually just say I wrote "hundreds" of articles for the magazine.

The glory days of PC Magazine were under the editorship of Bill Machrone. I thought then — and I still think now — that Bill Machrone was one of the true geniuses of magazine publishing. He was able to make that magazine target a sweet spot of comprehensiveness and integrity. Bill Machrone's PC Magazine was required reading. That Bill doesn't even have a Wikipedia article is a gross injustice and characteristic of the short memories of this industry.

My last work for PC Magazine (ending in 2002) were some utilities for Windows. But I always thought the little free utilities we wrote for the magazine were primarily for pedagogical purposes. The magazine instead used them for promotions and eventually began charging money for them. Yuck!

So I guess PC Magazine and I parted out of creative differences. By that time I hadn't actually read the magazine for many years, and I guess I wasn't the only one.
http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2008/11/190941.html





Kindle Economics
Jason Perlow

A few weeks ago I evaluated Amazon’s Kindle. While I really liked the device, the big problem I had with it was that at its current price of $359.00 it was too expensive at this point for mass consumer adoption. I also had a number of issues with the fact that despite being based on Linux, the device is a closed book, literally.

At what point, however, do consumers start ditching their dead-tree books for e-books? And how many books do you actually have to read per year in order for the convenience factor of the Kindle — its light weight, its ability to store hundreds of books in its memory, and the instant gratification of being able to download books via the Amazon Whispernet EVDO Sprint network — to outweigh its costs?

Others have attempted to take a swag at “Kindlenomics” before. But I decided to engage in a mental exercise (click for Excel Spreadsheet) in order to determine where the “sweet spot” in price might actually be for a large number of people to start using ebooks instead of buying dead-tree versions or going to the library.

Chris Dawson over at ZDNet Education wrote a great post about what it would take to get Kindle-type devices or paperless educational curricula to replace textbooks and reading lists in elementary school and high school, and some of the problems that would have to be addressed. Indeed, to get Kindles in the hand of 5th graders, we’re going to have to think about battle hardening the devices (think a companies like Motorola Symbol Technologies or Panasonic’s Toughbook division stepping in to help) and having them owned by the schools, because unless the prices of these things drop to the point where the replacement costs are roughly equivalent to what it currently costs to outfit kids with textbooks and literature for a wear and tear lifetime of 3 to 5 years, it’s going to be a non-starter — kids are going to lose these things and destroy them. This of course, is assuming your kids don’t go to a school district where textbooks are 30 years old because of budgetary issues.

In my study, I decided to focus on two likely market segments — higher education, and consumers. Right now, the Kindle is actually a realistic contender to replace textbooks in higher education because college and graduate degree textbooks are very expensive. However, most college and graduate textbooks don’t exist on the Kindle yet, so this exercise was purely a “What If”.

We took a representative sampling of college and graduate-level textbooks that we could find on Amazon that had both Kindle as well as dead-tree versions, and came up with an average price of $73.04 per new textbook and $49.19 for used. It is my experience that college and graduate students will opt for used textbooks first, and then if a used version is not available, will buy new copies. The average Kindle textbook price was $39.04. With these numbers, we could extrapolate what students might spend per semester on books, based on a class load of 15 credits per semester and six textbooks purchased. This came out to an average cost of $438.23 per semester if they bought the new books on Amazon (which is cheaper than what most universities charge for new books) or at $295.13 per semester used. However, a more realistic scenario would be a blended cost, with half new and half used, at $366.00 per semester. If they had purchased all of the books on the Kindle, they would have spent $234.00, or a savings of $132.00 per semester. Over a period of 8 semesters, that’s $1056.00, which if you subtract the cost of the Kindle at current prices, we’re talking about a net savings of $700.86 over four years, which is not insignificant. To put this another way, if college students had the ability to buy all their textbooks on Kindles, they could wipe out the cost of a Kindle with their savings over printed books in 3 semesters, or a year and a half.

To get a reality check on these numbers, we had a friend forward us their wife’s 1st year of graduate school curricula for their Masters in Mental Health Counseling at a major New England university. As it turned out, he bought all of his wife’s textbooks on Amazon — which again, would have been cheaper than at a campus bookstore. The current Amazon price for all of those books came out to $692.17. If we apply the same relative discount that we got from our textbook sampling, we come up with $429.00, or a net savings of $198.00 per year. This is not out of line with our projected numbers in our sampling — and would also align with the Kindle’s cost being wiped out in approximately 3 semesters. I will note, however, we did not factor some students returning their texts at the end of the semester and getting a credit for approximately half the price they paid for them, in which case, that’s going to to alter the model if you take that into consideration.

So clearly, it makes a lot of sense, even with the Kindle’s current prices, to think about getting higher education on-board with electronic versions of textbooks. Within 2 or 3 years, when more and more electronic textbooks are available, a Kindle might be a nice High School graduation present. Certainly, if you’re an English Literature student now or read a lot of classics, a Kindle or another competing e-book reader is currently very viable, because the cost of your books are going to be very cheap on Amazon, or zero if you download stuff from Project Gutenberg.

So it certainly makes sense to get Kindles in higher education. But what about the average consumer? How many books do you need to read per year to make the convenience factor outweigh the costs?

So as with our textbook price sampling, we took a look at twelve New York Times best sellers, and totaled up the prices, assuming mostly hardcover with some paperbacks — this came to $168.15 if we bought them on Amazon. The Kindle cost would have been $109.11. In other words, if you read one book per month, and you subtract the cost of the Kindle, your net savings per year is approximately $59.04. To wipe out the cost of the Kindle completely, you have to buy and read six books per month to wipe out the Kindle’s cost over the course of one year. That’s a pretty voracious reading schedule — and if you’re reading that many books, you’re probably spending most of your time in a library and not purchasing them on Amazon.

So it would seem that unless the convenience factor of the Kindle currently outweighs its costs, the Kindle is not a huge value proposition for your average consumer today. But if its cost were to drop approximately in half – say, between the 3 and 4 book per month level — at around $200 per unit – then we might start seeing greater e-book adoption by a larger segment of the population. At the two books per month level, it’s going to need to cost around $125.00 or $150.00 or so.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=9320





France Dominates Europe’s Digital Library
Stephen Castle

France has never been shy about promoting its culture, so few were surprised when it took a close interest in a new digital library intended to showcase Europe’s history, literature, arts and science.

But when the new site, called Europeana, begins life on Thursday, more than half of its two million items will come from just one of the 27 countries in the European Union: France.

So comprehensive is France’s cultural dominance over this cyberspace outpost that other countries are having their own history written for them — in French, of course.

“I find the figures extraordinary,” said Viviane Reding, the European commissioner responsible for the project. “France has half the content — the collapse of the Berlin Wall is illustrated with a French TV documentary.”

She said that some countries that had been skeptical about the project changed their minds now that the library was a reality.

Europeana combines the digital resources of museums and libraries, and the information provided includes paintings, maps, videos and newspapers.

Material is free of copyright so it can be downloaded for blogs, research or schoolwork by anyone with an Internet connection.

Already, the images online include the Magna Carta from Britain, the Vermeer painting “Girl With a Pearl Earring” from the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague and a copy of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”

But only 1 percent of the content has information about Germany, 1.4 percent about Spain and only 10 percent about Britain.

Stephen Bury, head of British and American Collections at the British Library, described it as a “great achievement” and said his institution was relaxed about the dominance of Gallic culture.

The European Commission says that if it achieves its aim of putting 10 million items onto the digital library by 2010, it will come at a price of 350 million to 400 million euros.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/bu...20digital.html





First the Halon Collider…

Europeana Goes Online and Is Then Overwhelmed
Stephen Castle

A new digital library of Europe’s cultural heritage crashed just hours after it went online and will be out of operation for several weeks, the European Commission said Friday, attributing the embarrassing failure to overwhelming public interest.

Europeana, a Web site of two million documents, images, video and audio clips, opened on Thursday with international publicity and acclaim from researchers. But by Friday, those trying to log on were greeted with a message telling them that the service may not be running again until mid-December, while computer capacity is upgraded.

The designers of Europeana had expected a maximum of five million hits an hour. But there was as much as three times the predicted traffic, a unusual phenomenon for any Web site associated with the European Union.

Europeana was a “victim of its success,” said Martin Selmayr, a spokesman for the European commissioner responsible for the project, Viviane Reding.

Mr. Selmayr did not apologize to disappointed users but regretted that the site had failed.

It was, he added, caused by thousands of users’ searching simultaneously for famous cultural works like the “Mona Lisa” or manuscripts of literature by Kafka, Cervantes or James Joyce.

Many European cultural institutions in Europe had been hesitant about offering digitized items to Europeana because they did not think there was enough interest, Mr. Selmayr said. “Well, we have the answer,” he added.

The system’s three servers in the Netherlands, where the site is based, were unable to deal with the number of hits, the commission said.

The most interest came from Germany, at 17 percent, followed by France, at 10 percent, Spain at 9 percent, Italy at 6 percent, the Netherlands at 5 percent and Belgium and the United States at 4 percent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/te...ital.html?_r=1





Study: OpenOffice Five Times More Popular than Google Docs

But both still lag behind Microsoft, which hopes to cement its lead with Office Web
Eric Lai

Confirming recent comments by Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer, an independent study released Friday found OpenOffice.org's free office suite to be five times more popular among adult U.S. internet users than Google Docs.

Microsoft Office remains dominant, with 51% of American internet users over age 18 using it, according to a 6-month study conducted by market researcher ClickStream Technologies.

OpenOffice.org was used by 5% of people, versus Google Docs' 1%, according to the survey of 2,400 users on their home PCs conducted between May and November of this year. OpenOffice.org was also found to be used more often, 8.7 days, versus 1.5 days; and longer, an average of 9.3 minutes, versus 3.4 minutes for Google Docs, according to ClickStream's panel, of which two-thirds was comprised of women.

During a keynote speech at a Gartner Inc. conference last month, Ballmer said: "We have better competition today than Google Docs and Spreadsheets. We get more competition from OpenOffice and StarOffice, frankly."

Microsoft hopes to cement that domination with its upcoming Office Web, as well as online versions of its Exchange and SharePoint products to be announced on Monday.

OpenOffice.org may provide some resistance, however. The latest version, OpenOffice.org 3.0, had a strong first week in October, with more than 3 million downloads. After one month, OpenOffice.org 3.0 had been downloaded 10 million times, the group said.
ClickStream also found that 68% of Google Docs or Spreadsheets users also used Microsoft Word at least once, "indicating that Google Docs has yet to be considered a stand-alone product by most of its users."

In contrast, 74% of OpenOffice users didn't use Word at all.

"Although Google Docs and Spreadsheets has been touted as a potential competitor to the Microsoft Office Suite, OpenOffice is currently the more likely app to take that position, possibly indicating the value of offline and local processing enabled by installed applications," said ClickStream.

A Google spokesman said in response to ClickStream's finding, "Google Docs has millions of active users and hosts tens of millions of documents. It has seen strong and steady growth since it launched two years ago as people have increasingly shifted to the cloud in order to access and collaborate on documents online."

ClickStream's figures are not surprising. A NPD Group Inc. survey reported similar findings last year.

But the ClickStream findings may arouse some skepticism. The company's CEO, Cameron Turner, formerly worked at Microsoft doing similar market research on Microsoft Office and its competitors.

Turner said ClickStream was not paid by Microsoft to conduct this study.

He added that ClickStream does paid research projects for a number of software vendors, including Microsoft and a major competitor, Adobe Systems Inc. It also monitors the use of Mac and Linux software.

According to ClickStream's findings, Google Docs was even less popular than Corel Corp.'s WordPerfect suite.

Version 12 of WordPerfect alone was used by 3% of users, according to ClickStream's panel, which includes users recruited through cash and prizes, making it the third most popular productivity application behind OpenOffice.org. Adding up versions 9 through 13 of WordPerfect gave it a total usage of 6%, though ClickStream said the likelihood of overlap meant that its actual share was still lower than that of OpenOffice.org.

ClickStream's figures for OpenOffice.org include usage of StarOffice, a near-identical version that is sold for $70 and officially supported by Sun Microsystems Inc. Google began distributing StarOffice via its free Google Pack download service in August 2007.

But it recently pulled StarOffice from Google Pack, suggesting that Google is starting to feel competitive with OpenOffice.org.

Not so, says Google. "We are constantly evaluating which products to include in Google Pack to make it more valuable to users. At this time the agreement to distribute StarOffice through Google Pack has expired, and we have decided with Sun not to renew the agreement," a spokesman said.

Other free Microsoft word processers are actually far more popular than OpenOffice.org or Google Docs. Notepad was used by 48% of those surveyed by ClickStream, though more sparingly than OpenOffice.org. WordPad, meanwhile, was used by 21% of apparently thrifty users.

Fewer than 1% of users used Zoho Office, while none of ClickStream's sample used ThinkFree or WriteBoard.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9120418





Rather’s Lawsuit Shows Role of G.O.P. in Inquiry
Jacques Steinberg

When Dan Rather filed suit against CBS 14 months ago — claiming, among other things, that his former employer had commissioned a politically biased investigation into his work on a “60 Minutes” segment about President Bush’s National Guard service — the network predicted the quick and favorable dismissal of the case, which it derided as “old news.”

So far, Mr. Rather has spent more than $2 million of his own money on the suit. And according to documents filed recently in court, he may be getting something for his money.

Using tools unavailable to him as a reporter — including the power of subpoena and the threat of punishment against witnesses who lie under oath — he has unearthed evidence that would seem to support his assertion that CBS intended its investigation, at least in part, to quell Republican criticism of the network.

Among the materials that money has shaken free for Mr. Rather are internal CBS memorandums turned over to his lawyers, showing that network executives used Republican operatives to vet the names of potential members of a panel that had been billed as independent and charged with investigating the “60 Minutes” segment.

Mr. Rather attracted the ire of Republican bloggers and talk radio in particular after the segment, which was broadcast on a weekday edition of “60 Minutes” in September 2004. It purported to have unearthed evidence about favorable treatment extended to President Bush during his Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard.

The network eventually responded to its critics by saying it could no longer vouch for the authenticity of the documents on which the report had been based. The network also commissioned an investigation led by Dick Thornburgh, a prominent Republican and former United States attorney general, and Louis D. Boccardi, a former chief executive of The Associated Press, not so much to verify the documents, but to determine how the segment got on the air.

In its final report, which was issued in January 2005, the panel cited a breakdown in standards by CBS in rushing the Bush segment onto the air but found no evidence of liberal bias in CBS’s preparation of the segment.

By the time the panel’s report was issued, Mr. Rather had already announced that, under pressure, he would step down as anchor of “CBS Evening News.” But he did not leave the network until more than a year later.

In September 2007, he filed the $70 million lawsuit charging that CBS had violated his contract and that the investigation was compromised. A New York State Supreme Court judge has since jettisoned parts of the suit, including Mr. Rather’s contention that CBS had engaged in fraud.

But the judge has permitted Mr. Rather to go forward with the core of his case, including his argument that CBS had limited his work as a correspondent after he left the anchor desk and, in the process, damaged his reputation. The case is on track to go to trial soon, possibly early in the new year.

Those who have worked on the case with Mr. Rather, 77, say he has approached it with the zeal of a correspondent trying to report out a “60 Minutes” segment about himself, burying himself in deposition transcripts late into the night and providing his lawyers with road maps of leads he thinks they should pursue. He rarely misses a court hearing on the case.

“I want to go the distance,” Mr. Rather said recently over a lunch of chili and cornbread at a barbecue restaurant. “Like any good reporter, I want to get as many as facts as possible; I want to get to the bottom of the story.”

Some of the documents unearthed by his investigation include notes taken at the time by Linda Mason, a vice president of CBS News. According to her notes, one potential panel member, Warren Rudman, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire, was deemed a less-than-ideal candidate over fears by some that he would not “mollify the right.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Thornburgh, who served as attorney general for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, was named a panelist by CBS, but only after a CBS lobbyist “did some other testing,” in which she was told, according to Ms. Mason’s notes, “T comes back with high marks from G.O.P.”

Another memorandum turned over to Mr. Rather’s lawyers by CBS was a long typed list of conservative commentators apparently receiving some preliminary consideration as panel members, including Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan. At the bottom of that list, someone had scribbled “Roger Ailes,” the founder of Fox News.

Asked about the assembly of the panel in a sworn deposition, Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News, acknowledged that he had wanted at least one member to sit well with conservatives: “CBS News, fairly or unfairly, had a reputation for liberal bias,” and “the harshest scrutiny was obviously going to come from the right.”

Other documents, meanwhile, suggest that Ms. Mason, who reported to Mr. Heyward, was getting updates from panel investigators on some of their findings, at a point when CBS News was telling outsiders that the network was staying out of the investigation.

Jim Quinn, a lawyer at Weil, Gotshal & Manges who is representing CBS, said in an interview that whatever Mr. Rather had learned in the discovery process would not help his case. He said it was the network that had gained the most ground, especially in persuading the judge to dismiss five of the seven original claims by Mr. Rather, as well any claims against individual CBS executives. CBS is believed to be spending about as much on its defense as Mr. Rather is spending.

Mr. Quinn also said CBS would consider asking for a summary dismissal of the case, once the process of discovery had concluded. “Either on summary judgment or at trial, we feel very comfortable we’ll succeed,” he said. “We feel the case is meritless.”

Still, Chaim B. Book, a Manhattan employment lawyer who is not connected to the case, said that Mr. Rather and his team had already reached something of a milestone.

“Getting through discovery and getting a case significantly closer to trial, in and of itself, is an achievement,” Mr. Book said. “Discovery, besides being expensive and time-consuming, can lead to embarrassing disclosures.”

One of Mr. Rather’s initial goals was to compel depositions of many of his former bosses and colleagues under oath. Thus far, in addition to Mr. Heyward and Ms. Mason, his lawyers have questioned Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS; Gil Schwartz, executive vice president of communications for CBS; Sandra Genelius, a former CBS News spokeswoman; and Michael J. Missal, who helped oversee the panel report on behalf of Mr. Thornburgh.

Each could conceivably be called to testify in open court, as could Sumner M. Redstone, executive chairman of CBS. (Mr. Rather’s lawyers have expressed interest in deposing Mr. Redstone, a request the judge, Ira Gammerman, has neither granted nor ruled out.)

The day after Election Day, the two sides squared off in Judge Gammerman’s courtroom in State Supreme Court in Manhattan over a request by Mr. Rather’s lawyers, led by Martin R. Gold of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, to gain access to several thousand documents that were used by the investigative panel to compile its report, including notes from interviews and e-mail messages from top executives.

Lawyers representing the panel have resisted Mr. Rather’s request for documents, citing attorney-client privilege. At the same time, CBS suggested in its latest filing that Mr. Rather was engaging “in nothing more than an intrusive and expensive fishing expedition.”

In court in July, Judge Gammerman spoke openly about the extraordinary attention that a Rather-versus-CBS trial would attract and reassured the lawyers that, having previously tried cases involving Woody Allen and Rosie O’Donnell, he could promise both sides a fair hearing.

“And I tried a case involving Joan Collins,” he said, adding that, despite intense publicity, “the jury was able to reach what was a reasonable decision.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/bu.../17rather.html





Clive Barnes, Critic, Dies at 81
William Grimes

Clive Barnes, who as an influential critic in Britain and later for The New York Times helped bring dance to a broad audience with an exuberant, highly personal style and who for many years was a theater critic for The Times and then The New York Post, died early Wednesday. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.

His death, at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, was caused by complications of cancer, his wife, Valerie Taylor Barnes, said. Until a few weeks before his death, he continued filing reviews for The Post, as he had for the last 30 years.

Mr. Barnes, a buoyant, energetic Londoner who once described himself as “your typical working-class overachiever,” made his mark by waging a sustained assault on British dance criticism as it was then practiced just after World War II. It was, he argued, provincial and ill-informed scribbling usually by music critics.

Writing for several publications simultaneously, primarily The Spectator and The Times of London, which hired him as its first full-time dance critic in 1961, he exposed his readers to foreign dance companies and choreographers like George Balanchine and Martha Graham when most British critics were ignoring them.

His 13 years as dance critic at The Times, from 1965 to 1977, coincided with a rapid expansion of the dance world and an explosion of new talent. As chief theater critic, a position he held for nearly a decade, he championed plays by Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, wrote appreciatively of the young David Mamet and embraced, initially with some reservations and later with none, the musical “Hair.”

It was as a dance critic, however, that he made his strongest impact. He witnessed and described, as he later observed in Dance magazine, “dance’s finest hours in all its brief history,” a period in which Jerome Robbins and Balanchine were at their peak, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor moved from strength to strength, and new choreographers like Eliot Feld and Twyla Tharp were beginning to make a stir.

At The Times, Mr. Barnes made dance an art for all, taking both dance criticism and American dance out of its specialized niche. His erudition, distilled into shrewdly pithy analysis, prompted not just readers but also choreographers and dancers to sit up and learn something new.

“He was literate, knowledgeable and passionate,” said Lynn Garafola, a professor of dance at Barnard College. “When it came to a challenging work, he would review not just the first performance, but the second performance and third performance, and then write an analytic piece, too. He also had a remarkable visual memory. He wasn’t just seeing the ballet in front of him. He had a bank of memories that went back half a century.”

Clive Alexander Barnes was born in London. His father, an ambulance driver, deserted the family when Clive was 7. His mother, a secretary for a theatrical press agent, passed along free tickets to her son, who began attending theater and ballet at an early age.

After attending a boarding school on scholarship, he enrolled at the University of London’s medical school. That did not work out. “He wanted to be a psychiatrist, but that was 10 years away, and he couldn’t stand the sight of blood,” his second wife, the former Patricia Winckley, told Dance magazine.

After spending two years with the Royal Air Force, he earned a scholarship to Oxford, where he joined the Ballet Club and became an editor of Arabesque, its quarterly journal. He also began writing for the journal Dance and Dancers, eventually becoming its executive editor.

He and a coterie of like-minded dance writers mounted a kind of cultural takeover bid, taking deliberate aim at the dance establishment and pushing themselves forward as the voices of the rising generation.

“We all began freelancing, and we were all terribly mean to the established dance critics, who were all music critics, really, and didn’t know a thing about dance,” Mr. Barnes told McCall’s magazine in 1969. “We were kind of young Turks, obnoxious as hell, but it worked. We wanted every paper in London to have a specialist dance critic, and we won. Now they all do.”

Mr. Barnes began writing on dance for New Statesman and published his first book, “Ballet in Britain Since the War” (Watts) in 1953. In 1956, after toiling as a planner for the London County Council for several years, he was hired by The Daily Express, a tabloid newspaper, to review dance, theater, film and television. With his left hand he turned out dance criticism for several other newspapers under pseudonyms.

An early marriage ended in divorce, as did subsequent marriages to Ms. Winckley and Amy Pagnozzi. In addition to his fourth wife, Ms. Barnes, he is survived by a son, Christopher, of London; a daughter, Maya Johansen, of Woodstock, N.Y.; and two grandchildren.

In 1965 editors at The New York Times, which was reorganizing its cultural news coverage, asked Mr. Barnes, who had been contributing reviews from London for several years, to become the newspaper’s dance critic. Although undecided, Mr. Barnes jumped at the offer of a free airplane ticket to New York, where Balanchine’s “Don Quixote” was about to receive its premiere. Once in New York, he decided to stay.

As a critic he stood out for open-mindedness and enthusiasm. Dance was traditionally divided into audiences attached to a single choreographer; Mr. Barnes could champion Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham at the same time.

He was one of the first to point out, in 1966, that Mr. Cunningham, then leaving audiences dumbfounded, was not interested in specific meaning but rather was an artist “who brings something to our attention to make of it just what we will.”

“We have to meet the artist halfway, we have to bring something before we can take something away,” Mr. Barnes wrote.

He excelled at pithy, perceptive description. The masculine style of Paul Taylor’s company, which he supported, he called “teddy-bear athleticism.”

As for ballet, Mr. Barnes extolled it to a mass audience. Rudolf Nureyev might have attracted balletomanes from the start, but somebody had to spread the word. In 1967 Mr. Barnes became the first in the West to single out the new, 19-year-old talent Mikhail Baryshnikov. Although Frederick Ashton, the great British choreographer with the Royal Ballet, was his hero, Mr. Barnes was also an early supporter of Balanchine and paid tribute to him in a typically distilled insight when the New York City Ballet opened its 1972 Stravinsky Festival: “Many choreographers have borrowed Stravinsky, but Mr. Balanchine has continually returned interest on the loan.”

He could be scathing. He once called the Bolshoi “Swan Lake” “a national catastrophe.” Yet he was unafraid of extravagant prose. Reviewing a performance of Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet,” with Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn in the principal roles, he wrote, “it is the image of Dame Margot and Mr. Nureyev that remains, like the blood-red shape of an instant left on a sun-lit retina when the eyes are closed.”

In 1967, after The New York Herald Tribune and several other newspapers ceased publication, editors at The Times, concerned that too much power was now concentrated in one critic, divided the theater job. Walter Kerr, the daily critic, was assigned to write weekly critical essays in the Sunday arts section, and Mr. Barnes was offered the vacant slot, which he initially refused. “I felt that I was a first-rate dance critic and did not want to be a second-rate drama critic,” he told Newsweek at the time.

Once on the job, he went at it with gusto. He showed a marked taste for experimental and unconventional theater, once dismissing standard Broadway fare as “stage visualizations of TV dramas.” The criticism was punchy, chatty and quirky, with a witty turn of phrase that some found delightful, others infuriating.

“One sure gauge I have of telling whether a play is boring me is when a telephone rings in the last act and I start in my seat and hope it’s for me,” he wrote of the doomed “What Did We Do Wrong?” in 1967.

In “The Season,” his chronicle of the 1967-8 Broadway season, William Goldman complained that Mr. Barnes was biased toward British playwrights and actors and, unforgivably, had failed to recognize Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller as modern masters. The combustible producer David Merrick vowed to stay on Broadway if only “for the pleasure of throwing his fat limey posterior out in the street.”

In 1978 editors at The Times decided that one critic could not, realistically, cover two disciplines, and Mr. Barnes was ordered to give up the theater job. He accepted a dual-critic position with The Post, where for the next 30 years he was its chief drama and dance critic. His last review, on the American Ballet Theater, appeared on Oct. 31. In it he heralded a new sensation, Daniil Simkin, a 21-year-old Russian appearing in his first major role. His dancing, Mr. Barnes wrote, “had the glint of gold in it.”

He also wrote the “Attitudes” column for Dance Magazine from 1989 and contributed to the French magazine Ballet 2000 and the British magazine The Stage. And he wrote or contributed to many books, among them “Frederick Ashton and His Ballets” (1961), “Dance Scene U.S.A.” (1967) and “Nureyev” (1982).

Prolific and influential, he nonetheless maintained a consistently skeptical attitude toward criticism in general and his own in particular. “The job’s impossible,” he once said, “and one must pray that one will be only moderately incompetent.”

Anna Kisselgoff contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/ar...barnes.html?hp





The Voice Behind the Drawing Board
Brooks Barnes

AS a visual development artist for Walt Disney Animation Studios, Mark Walton normally toils far from public view. His cubicle, located in a remote corner of the studio here, is a rat’s nest of old newspapers, geek memorabilia and garbage. Human resources once got involved, but Mr. Walton won; the giant troll statue stayed.

So it was a bit disconcerting recently for Mr. Walton, 40, to find himself on display in Roy Disney’s former office, a rarified space built inside a giant version of the sorcerer’s hat from “Fantasia.” Nervous and fidgety, Mr. Walton was giving an interview under SWAT-team surveillance from Disney publicists. The subject: “Bolt,” the studio’s coming film about a dog who mistakenly thinks he has superpowers.

Mr. Walton is the unlikely voice of Rhino, an overweight, television-obsessed hamster who is shaping up to be the film’s breakout character. (Sorry, Bolt.) Described in the script as “rolling thunder” because he is both excitable and confined to a plastic exercise ball, Rhino gets most of the laughs. Test audiences loved the character so much that Disney is playing him up in the marketing campaign.

Mr. Walton is so thrilled that he can barely contain himself, but it’s not because an average guy like him is getting more attention than John Travolta, who provides the voice of Bolt.

“Who cares about fame and fortune?” he said, clenching his fists in excitement and waiving them in the air. “I’m going to be a plush animal.”

The computer-animated “Bolt,” which opens in theaters on Friday, is the story of a German shepherd who has lived his entire life on the Hollywood set of his own television show, playing a superhero dog who battles evil to protect a little girl named Penny. His days of scripted triumphs come to an end, however, when a studio worker accidentally mails him to New York.

Trying to find his way home, Bolt meets a sarcastic, streetwise cat named Mittens (voiced by Susie Essman of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”). Still convinced he has superpowers — despite heavy mocking by Mittens — the two set off on a cross-country trek and are soon joined by Rhino. The hamster, so excited to meet his favorite TV star that he fogs up his ball, has memorized every nerdy detail of Bolt’s televised missions.

A lot of extra weight is riding on “Bolt” because it represents an effort by Disney to restore its animation division to prominence after a prolonged slump. “Bolt” is the first Disney film to be overseen entirely by John Lasseter, the co-founder of Pixar who took charge of creative matters at Disney Animation after Pixar was acquired by Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion.

Disney dominated animation as recently as the mid-1990s, when “The Lion King” became one of the highest-grossing feature films in history. But Disney — reluctant to move into computer-generated animation — started bleeding talent to rivals like Pixar and DreamWorks Animation. The low point for Disney came in 2002 with “Treasure Planet,” a flop so terrible that the company was forced to restate its quarterly earnings downward by $47 million. Mr. Lasseter was not dainty in his retooling of “Bolt,” which was already deep in development when he joined Disney. He fired the original director, removed a snarky story line involving a radioactive rabbit and changed the central character to a white German shepherd from a brown mutt. He gave the newly installed directors, Byron Howard and Chris Williams, just 18 months to complete the reworked film, about half the time it takes to produce one of Pixar’s titles. (Mr. Lasseter’s pet chinchilla also provided the inspiration for Rhino; he had brought it to an animators’ retreat where its rolling around in an exercise ball led to the idea of a hamster instead of a rat.)

The pressure to make “Bolt” a hit — if it fails, Disney will come under new scrutiny for paying such a hefty price for Pixar — makes Mr. Walton’s good fortune even more incredible. A celebrity voice in the role would have helped market the picture, particularly in crucial overseas markets.

Mr. Williams said he auditioned several actors to voice Rhino (he’s not naming names) but couldn’t find anybody who performed the role better than his slightly peculiar colleague. “Mark is emotional and excitable and has a big personality, which is exactly Rhino,” Mr. Williams said.

Mr. Howard added: “All that enthusiasm that you hear in Rhino is Mark’s everyday persona. It’s not put on at all. Every time we’d hear a new recording with him, we’d just crack up.”

It is rare for an animator to land a major role in a big-budget film — Disney executives can’t remember another example at the company, though Brad Bird, the director of the Pixar film “The Incredibles,” supplied the voice of Edna Mode, that movie’s haughty fashion designer — but employees routinely provide “scratch” voices for characters early in the filmmaking process.

Because each professional voice is recorded separately, and later in the process, directors recruit secretaries and people like Mr. Walton to do early readings. Animation directors find it particularly helpful with timing and humor.

Mr. Walton had managed to squeak into the credits of two earlier Disney movies by providing a scratch voice that directors decided to keep. He had a cameo in the 2004 dud “Home on the Range” as Barry and Bob, two longhorn steers. In 2005’s “Chicken Little,” he got to voice the small role of Goosey Loosey, which involved a lot of honking and squawking. For Rhino, Mr. Walton volunteered to provide the scratch voice. It was so good — particularly his high-pitched, high-energy laugh — that the co-directors kept asking him to record more lines as the script changed.

Soon, the studio announced Mr. Travolta’s casting. Then Ms. Essman’s contract was drawn up. Mr. Walton kept waiting for the day when he would arrive at work to find out that Danny DeVito or some other celebrity was taking over for Rhino.

A couple months ago, though, the co-directors asked Mr. Walton to meet them in the recording studio. He assumed it was to re-record a line that was slurred or too quiet. Instead he was told he was the voice of Rhino.

The directors suddenly had a very animated 6-foot-2 bearded man on their hands. “I jumped up and down and screamed like a girl,” Mr. Walton said. “There’s a videotape to prove it.”

As that videotape attests, Mr. Walton is a bit of a character in real life. One year at Halloween he arrived work dressed as the eccentric teenager at the center of “Napoleon Dynamite.” Mr. Williams recalled the time Mr. Walton attended a Beastie Boys concert and was dancing so manically that he was asked to calm down. “Which is saying something,” Mr. Williams said with wide eyes.

Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Mr. Walton originally set out to be a newspaper cartoonist but applied on a whim in 1995 for an internship at Disney’s Florida animation operation, now defunct. There he met Mr. Williams, who started at the company as an intern in 1994 and became a story apprentice on “Tarzan.”

A collector of movie posters, children’s story books and “Star Wars” figurines — a giant Han Solo stands guard next to that troll in his cubicle — Mr. Walton is a fixture at Comic-Con, the annual comic book and movie marketing extravaganza in San Diego.

“I’m a fanboy, I admit it,” he said, adjusting his “H. R. Pufnstuf” T-shirt.

As if to prove his geek credentials, he then broke into one of his lines from “Bolt” — a sequence that oddly describes recent events in his own life: “Ring, ring. Who is it? Destiny?

“I’ve been expecting your call.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/movies/16barn.html





New Project Aims to Unite Science and Hollywood
David Shiga

Scientists may have less to cringe about when they go to the movies, if a new initiative designed to foster cooperation between scientists and the entertainment industry is successful.

The new effort, called the Science and Entertainment Exchange, is a project of the US National Academy of Sciences, and will be run by science writer Jennifer Ouellette, author of The Physics of the Buffyverse.

By bringing scientists together with Hollywood-types, the project aims to improve the scientific accuracy of what the entertainment industry produces and also help scientists communicate more effectively with the general public.

The project is "vitally important", said Seth MacFarlane, creator of the television show Family Guy, at a press conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday. Other entertainment industry figures were also at the event, including Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the screenplays for The Empire Strikes back and Return of the Jedi.
Science 'undervalued'

Married film producers Janet and Jerry Zucker, who were among the driving forces in setting up the Exchange, started paying more attention to science when their daughter was diagnosed with diabetes after becoming ill.

"They gave here a shot of insulin and this was like a miracle, because she was laying there on the examining table, and within a few hours she came alive again, her lustre came back," Janet Zucker said.

The experience motivated them to get involved in the fight for increased funding for stem cell research in California, and more recently to help set up the Exchange.

MacFarlane, who is a member of the Exchange's advisory board, said he feels that in recent years science has been "undervalued and degraded". "This idea that intelligence is somehow not cool or not American or something to be scorned has been kind of embraced by a lot of people," he said.
Point of contact

Just exposing entertainers to more science will help improve the situation, he said, noting that he just finished making a Family Guy episode based on the possibility that there are multiple universes, prompted by a documentary he saw on the subject.

"I didn't really know that that was a real thing, that it was possible [and] being theorised about," he said. "So we did a story about it."

Aside from serving as a point of contact for members of the entertainment industry seeking advice on scientific accuracy, people involved in the Exchange hope that it will help create new partnerships between scientists and entertainers to promote scientific literacy and inspire the next generation of scientists.

After Wednesday's press conference, the Exchange organised a symposium, sponsored in part by New Scientist, in which scientists and entertainers were to discuss hot topics in science like climate change and genomics.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ef=online-news





James Bond, Armed With Record, Controls Box Office
Brooks Barnes

James Bond brushed off some lackluster reviews to sell an estimated $70.4 million in tickets at North American theaters, setting an opening-weekend record for this 46-year-old film franchise.

“Quantum of Solace,” starring Daniel Craig as 007, arrived in the United States unusually late; MGM and Sony Pictures released it overseas in late October. The move may have contributed to strong domestic sales. By withholding the hotly anticipated picture from fans in the world’s largest movie market, the studios stoked an online frenzy.

The movie’s global cumulative gross through Sunday was $322 million, according to Sony. “It’s an extraordinary opening that speaks to how much audiences have embraced Daniel Craig as Bond,” said Rory Bruer, Sony’s president for domestic distribution.

The stronger-than-anticipated opening is a relief to the two studios because of the picture’s outsize cost. The combined production and marketing budgets are estimated at about $400 million, although Sony places the number lower because of tax credits. MGM in particular was counting on a strong opening; a hit of this size helps shore up its financial footing.

Many critics poured cold water on “Quantum of Solace,” complaining that filmmakers strayed too far from the franchise’s signature story elements. The movie depicts a bitter and emotional 007 seeking revenge for the death of a lover. Assisted by a Russian-Bolivian agent (Olga Kurylenko), he stops a criminal (Mathieu Amalric) from taking control of a country’s water supply.

Domestic sales for “Quantum of Solace” were sharply higher than those for “Casino Royale,” the 2006 franchise entry that marked Mr. Craig’s debut in the role. That film sold $40.8 million in tickets during its first weekend in theaters. The previous high watermark was set by “Die Another Day,” which opened with $47.1 million in 2002.

The DreamWorks Animation film “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa” was No. 2 at the weekend box office with $36.2 million in sales (for a new domestic total of $118.1 million). “Role Models,” an R-rated comedy from Universal Pictures, was third with $11.5 million ($37.8 million over all), and “High School Musical 3: Senior Year” (Disney) was fourth with $5.7 million ($84.3 million over all).

“Changeling” (Universal), the period drama starring Angelina Jolie, rounded out the Top 5 with $4.2 million ($27.6 million over all).
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/mo...tml?ref=movies





A Studio, a Star, a Fateful Bet
Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply

If there was a nervous moment at Friday night’s showing here of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s new James Bond movie, “Quantum of Solace,” it came with a trailer for the studio’s next big bet: “Valkyrie,” in which Tom Cruise plays a German officer who tried to kill Hitler.

The audience watched. Mr. Cruise loomed in all his uniformed glory as Col. Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg.

And the appearance passed without a single hoot or holler.

It was not a bad start for a movie that has become unusually tangled in the fortunes of both its star and the company that made it.

“Valkyrie,” directed by Bryan Singer, with an original script by Christopher McQuarrie, was conceived about 20 months ago as a dramatic showcase for Mr. Cruise. It was also a high-profile effort to kick-start United Artists, the MGM unit of which he and his producing partner, Paula Wagner, had become part owners.

But Ms. Wagner has since resigned under pressure as United Artists’ chief executive, while Mr. Cruise has cut back his involvement in the studio, which was never as day-to-day as Ms. Wagner’s, and turned his attention to rebuilding his acting career.

The movie, meanwhile, bounced from one intended release date to another, finally landing on Dec. 26, among a clutch of Oscar contenders and expensive Christmastime competitors, including “Yes Man,” with Jim Carrey, and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” with Brad Pitt.

Along the way, “Valkyrie” has turned into a test not only of Mr. Cruise’s career durability, but of MGM’s determination — with new ownership, and under the chairmanship of Harry E. Sloan since 2005 — to be taken seriously as a producer and distributor of the kind of risky event films that define a major studio.

If “Valkyrie” succeeds, even moderately, MGM wins a modicum of credibility in image-is-everything Hollywood. A failure brings fresh sniping that the studio does not know what it is doing, making the job of attracting top-notch talent even harder.

Financially speaking, the stakes are considerable. With a stated production budget of $75 million — competitors insist it is closer to $90 million — “Valkyrie” is the most expensive film made for distribution by MGM under Mr. Sloan’s watch. The studio will now spend about $60 million to market the movie — if nothing else, to make the point that it can play in the big leagues.

(“Quantum of Solace” was much more costly. But it was co-financed and co-distributed by Sony Pictures Entertainment. The movie sold $70.4 million worth of tickets in North America in its first three days of release, the biggest opening ever for a James Bond film.)

“Valkyrie” will also test the mettle of a 46-year-old Mr. Cruise: If it fails, his status as a superstar, damaged by a rough parting with Paramount Pictures in 2006, slips another notch. And this time United Artists — clipped by a Cruise flop last year in “Lions for Lambs” — slips with it.

Mr. Cruise has become one of Hollywood’s more puzzling assets. He is still pursued for projects and has enormous cachet: Few stars have reliably drawn the kind of audience he attracted even to “Mission: Impossible III,” which took in nearly $400 million in theaters worldwide in 2006.

Yet he has been a magnet for negativity, fed in part by hostility to his association with Scientology, and in Hollywood perhaps more by the delay in “Valkyrie’s” release and his two-year absence from the screen, other than relatively modest roles in “Lions for Lambs” and last summer’s “Tropic Thunder.”

And just as Hollywood will scrutinize the outcome of “Valkyrie,” so will the potential investors MGM has been aggressively courting, to no avail. After Ms. Wagner’s ouster five months ago, Mr. Sloan stepped up his hunt for a new $650 million production fund to bankroll his new motion picture team’s ambitious slate of films, including two installments of “The Hobbit” and the next James Bond film, of which MGM has sole custody. “There’s no doubt that we’re going to get the money,” he said at the time.

But that hunt is over, according to two bankers with knowledge of the matter, in part because of the global economic crisis, but also because of MGM’s already staggering $3.7 billion debt load. Options remain — taking out loans against expected revenue from “Quantum of Solace” and “Pink Panther 2,” due next year, or dipping into its own cash reserves — but those are unfavorable.

Mr. Sloan and other MGM executives declined to be interviewed, as did Mr. Cruise.

Jeff Pryor, the company’s chief spokesman, sent a 1,000-word e-mail message proclaiming the studio’s finances as robust. “MGM is not having financial problems,” Mr. Pryor wrote. Among his phrases: “MGM is not planning any large-scale financial cutbacks or employee layoffs”; “the studio has no short or midterm liquidity issues”; “MGM is not for sale”; “MGM has extremely solvent shareholders.”

By various accounts, Mr. Cruise has scaled down his involvement with United Artists since Ms. Wagner resigned in August — perhaps signaling that stardom and studio management do not mix.

Both continue to own a stake in the company, and Mr. Cruise maintains an office in MGM’s Century City high-rise. But Ms. Wagner now produces films on her own. Mr. Cruise meanwhile has focused on plans to star in a movie for another company. Mary Parent, chairwoman of MGM’s motion picture group, has largely taken charge of United Artists, although the unit continues to employ its own marketers and chief operating officer.

A leading candidate for Mr. Cruise’s next film is “The Tourist,” an action-thriller financed by Spyglass Entertainment Holdings. Tentatively set for production in the spring, its script is being rewritten by Mr. McQuarrie — who originated the “Valkyrie” project — at the insistence of Mr. Cruise.

If that points to Mr. Cruise’s continued faith in “Valkyrie,” he is not alone. Speaking on condition of anonymity to minimize conflict, more than a dozen people involved with “Valkyrie” and MGM described a campaign in which the studio and its allies for months have been quietly fighting to change the public perception of a film they believe was unfairly tainted by knee-jerk hostility toward the casting of Mr. Cruise as a German war hero.

Insiders believe the company has corrected early blunders, successfully repositioning the film as a character-driven suspense thriller. The mood inside MGM is not exactly euphoric on the release, but is hardly foreboding. “Let’s face it, there was a time when the movie wasn’t on track; it is now,” said one person with knowledge of the situation, but who asked for anonymity for fear of angering Mr. Cruise.

To some extent, saving the movie has meant soft-pedaling the star. Billboards that blossomed around Los Angeles last week flank a barely recognizable figure of Mr. Cruise with five fellow actors and three slogans. The last of them, notably group-oriented, reads: “The conspiracy begins this December.”

Online promotions now feature Mr. Singer, who directed “The Usual Suspects” and “X-Men.” Images of Mr. Cruise with an eye patch — widely ridiculed when they surfaced as the movie was being shot — have yielded to battle scenes in new trailers. The shift, in fact, had long been planned, but was delayed until Mr. Singer, who filmed most of the movie in Germany, finished action sequences in the Southern California desert in June.

This month, Mr. Cruise put in a surprise appearance at an Amazon.com employees’ town hall meeting in Seattle. After a 10-minute onstage interview, he announced a free screening of “Valkyrie” for employees: The star is clearly still using his muscle for United Artists, particularly where the film is involved.

In an especially delicate maneuver, “Valkyrie” will open with no Oscar campaign, though it arrives at the height of Hollywood’s awards season, and is not without credentials: Mr. McQuarrie is a past winner (for writing “The Usual Suspects”), and Mr. Cruise has been nominated three times as an actor (for “Magnolia,” “Jerry Maguire” and “Born on the Fourth of July”).

MGM instead is banking on audience appeal. Yet it will have to scrape for prime theaters in a holiday week in which Mr. Pitt, Mr. Carrey, Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston, Clint Eastwood and Will Smith will compete for attention among at least a dozen major films set for late December.

MGM raised eyebrows in August when it plunked “Valkyrie” into such a competitive slot. Insiders say the decision was made mostly because of the large adult audience available to see films in the two-week holiday period.

While Hollywood and the media obsess over “Valkyrie,” the studio’s production executives have shifted their focus to the pipeline. A remake of “Fame” is in preparation along with “Cabin in the Woods,” billed as a twist on the horror thriller. The studio is also keen on a talking animal picture titled “Zookeeper” and has remakes of “Robocop” and “Poltergeist” in the works.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/bu.../17cruise.html





For Studio, Vampire Movie Is a Cinderella Story
Brooks Barnes

Until now, tiny Summit Entertainment has been largely ignored by the major studios and looked down on by A-list agents and managers. But because of a classic bit of Hollywood bungling, the fledgling movie company finds itself sitting atop one of the biggest pop-culture phenomena of recent years.

When “Twilight,” based on the first of Stephenie Meyer’s hugely popular teenage vampire novels, opens in theaters on Friday, audiences will be greeted not by the Warner Brothers shield or the 20th Century Fox drum roll but by Summit’s logo: an abstract squiggle evoking a mountain ridge.

Most pointedly, the potential blockbuster will not open with the more realistic mountain peak of Paramount Pictures, the studio that at one time controlled the rights to “Twilight” but let them slip away because someone at the studio decided in 2006 that the series was a dud. (A game of finger-pointing is now under way at Paramount over who deserves the blame.)

Ticket sales for the movie’s opening weekend could approach $60 million, box office analysts say, driven by Ms. Meyer’s devoted fans and Summit’s marketing pyrotechnics. That kind of money — especially for a film that cost just $37 million to produce — propels to the center of Hollywood a studio known for obscurities like “P2,” a horror movie set in a parking garage, and “Sex Drive,” about a loser who works in a doughnut shop.

“It’s the first time a little engine that could has come along in a while, and that’s getting the attention of people who never thought twice about Summit,” said Tara S. Kole, a partner at the entertainment law firm Gang, Tyre, Ramer & Brown, which represents clients like Steven Spielberg and Mary-Kate Olsen.

“Summit has obviously played this very smart in the marketing, but the smartest decision was noticing the property in the first place,” Ms. Kole added.

Summit Entertainment for years was an overseas seller of movies that also dabbled in production, putting money into films like “Michael Clayton” and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” that were made by more experienced studios. But backed by $1 billion from a group of investors, Summit recast itself as a full-fledged studio in April 2006.

Led by Robert G. Friedman, formerly vice chairman of Paramount, and Patrick Wachsberger, a veteran international sales agent, the new Summit is set up to produce and distribute as many as 12 pictures a year.

When Paramount passed on making “Twilight,” Mr. Friedman heard about it. Erik Feig, Summit’s production chief, did some research and noticed an intense following online even though the book had not yet reached stratospheric status. Summit pounced, seeing a potential franchise.

The studio bought the movie rights to all four books in the series, which together have sold about 8.5 million copies in the United States and 17 million copies worldwide.

“We saw a great Romeo and Juliet story that has a very interesting modern sensibility,” Mr. Friedman said.

The challenge with “Twilight,” directed by Catherine Hardwicke and unabashedly cheesy in spots, is broadening the audience beyond teenage girls and their mothers. Box office tracking companies say interest among men is increasing, but still tepid. While seeking to reduce expectations — Summit insists it expects no more than $30 million in sales this weekend, despite what other forecasters say — the company has worked to woo men by advertising the action in the movie.

But that message is being drowned out by the mobs of teenage girls who have been turning up for a mall tour by the movie’s two stars, Robert Pattison, a unknown Briton who plays the tormented but tender vampire, and Kristen Stewart, cast as the sulky girlfriend. To get an idea of the size of the frenzy, an estimated 10,000 people attended a recent appearance in Dallas.

At Monday’s premiere in Los Angeles, about 3,000 fans lined the streets around the two theaters screening the film. More than a thousand people were denied entry to the packed premiere party.

The studio’s executives seem a bit discombobulated by all the fuss. Mr. Friedman and Mr. Wachsberger, interviewed jointly, appeared to have differing views on some matters, including what “Twilight” means for the profile of their company and its 135 employees, and they had trouble explaining the brand they are trying to create.

Mr. Friedman, for instance, dismissed the notion that blockbuster results for “Twilight” would open new doors for Summit in the industry, saying that every door is already open. “We’ve been supported and embraced by all the agents and management companies since the day we started,” he said.

But Mr. Wachsberger disagreed. “What we’ve proven with ‘Twilight’ is that we can market a movie as well as any other studio,” he said. “That makes it much easier for agencies to let their big stars come do a movie with us.”

When it comes to brand, the film industry almost universally agrees that people outside the Hollywood bubble do not make moviegoing decisions based on what studio makes the picture, with the notable exception of the Walt Disney Company. But Mr. Friedman said he believed “Twilight” would make the name Summit mean something with consumers. “We will probably create a brand with this,” he said.

What exactly is that brand? The two men were silent. Finally, Mr. Friedman said, “I would call it commercial.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/bu.../20summit.html





DVDs, Hollywood’s Profit Source, Are Sagging
Brooks Barnes

Conventional wisdom holds that Hollywood’s fortunes go up when the economy goes down. People still crave entertainment, particularly of the escapist variety, and movies remain within the budgets of most people.

That may prove true this time around, too — ticket sales have been particularly robust in recent weeks — but studio prosperity stopped depending on box-office results a long time ago. DVDs propel profits these days, and there is a creeping dread in the movie capital that buyer interest is plummeting as the global economic crisis worsens.

“Every studio is claiming, ‘We’re O.K. so far, but we’ve looked at the overall competitive sales data and we have some concerns,’ ” said Amir Malin, a partner at Qualia Capital, a media-focused investment firm with assets that include several large film libraries.

So far, total DVD sales are down by about 4 percent for the year, with most of that weakness coming in October, according to data compiled by Warner Brothers, the largest distributor of DVDs.

The independent tracking service Nielsen VideoScan paints a bleaker picture, reporting a 9 percent drop in overall DVD sales during the third quarter alone and a 22 percent decline in sales of higher-priced new titles, although its data does not include results at Wal-Mart.

Most troubling, industrywide sales of next-generation Blu-ray discs — promoted as a high-defintion technology that will restore growth to the medium — are growing but will miss sales projections for the year by 25 percent or more, according to Warner.

Weak consumer spending is not the only culprit. Media companies, desperate for revenue, are dumping more obscure titles on the market, leading to downward pricing pressure, according to Distribution Video and Audio, a home entertainment overstock company in Burbank, Calif. Consumers, in living rooms already stacked with DVDs, are being more selective. There are signs that digital downloads are cutting into sales, too.

And Blu-ray discs are still causing widespread confusion in the marketplace, with shoppers still doubtful that Blu-ray is here to stay after a lengthy format war with a rival technology. Indeed, 57 percent of standard DVD customers say they are “waiting to make sure Blu-ray is really the standard the industry will stick with,” according to an industry study released last week.

“As a result, a number of consumers are sitting on the sidelines and not buying anything,” Mr. Malin said.

Studio executives prefer to look on the bright side, saying that the DVD market is stronger even in decline than other media businesses, like broadcast television. Studios also say the economic downturn might actually help kindle sales of high-definition discs because the supply of Blu-ray players is likely to sharply exceed demand in the coming holiday season, pushing down prices.

A year ago, the cheapest high-definition players cost about $500, according to David Bishop, president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy are now poised to sell machines at $199, with Black Friday promotions bringing the cost as low as $128. Player sales jumped in October compared with the same month a year ago, Mr. Bishop said, even as most other retail categories had sharp declines.

Hollywood has been counting on Blu-ray to drive its crucial home entertainment business. After years of rapid increases, domestic DVD sales fell 3.2 percent last year to $15.9 billion, according to Adams Media Research. It was the first annual drop in the medium’s history.

DVDs remain a blockbuster business, but any decline is cause for concern because disc sales on a worldwide basis can account for as much as 70 percent of revenue for a new film. Blu-ray discs, which use a Sony technology that includes interactive bells and whistles, typically sell for 25 percent more than standard DVDs.

Underscoring the alarm, the major studios are working in lockstep to push DVDs in general and Blu-ray in particular. The studios, along with several consumer electronics companies, are spending $25 million on a television and print advertising campaign that highlights coming releases from the Walt Disney Company (“Wall-E”), Sony (“Hancock”) and Warner (“The Dark Knight”).

“We think this is a do-or-die time for Blu-ray,” said Ron Sanders, president of Warner Home Video. “We must get it established as a favorite holiday item.”

Individual studios, meantime, have also been mounting solo assaults. Disney released “Sleeping Beauty” on Blu-ray and standard DVD last month, taking the unusual step of including a free standard DVD in the Blu-ray package to spur interest. Disney is also working with Panasonic on a “Blu-ray demystification” television and online campaign.

Universal Studios Home Entertainment staged a lavish party last week at a Hollywood nightclub to promote the Nov. 11 release of “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” on DVD and Blu-ray. A spokeswoman said it had been several years since the studio organized such an expensive DVD event.

Retailers also count on DVD sales, and the biggest chains are planning to put more muscle behind the category. Chains are dedicating more shelf space to the medium (at the expense of CDs and video games) and Wal-Mart plans to spend $30 million advertising home entertainment products during the holiday season, according to several studios. Best Buy is devoting more resources to in-store displays.

Last week, the presidents of home entertainment from the top seven Hollywood studios took the unusual step of participating in a joint symposium in Los Angeles that draped the high-definition push in favorable statistics. Regarding recent declines in DVD sales, Amy Jo Smith, executive director of the Digital Entertainment Group, a trade organization, told the audience, “In the face of the current economic crisis, this is really a remarkable performance.”

Indeed, home entertainment has held its own during previous economic downturns, giving some studios hope that declines will be modest. An uptick in overall sales at Wal-Mart as the economy declines is also soothing studio nerves, although Circuit City’s decision to enter bankruptcy protection poured some rain on that parade. “We’re cautiously optimistic about the fourth quarter,” said Mr. Bishop of Sony.

Without question, DVD bright spots remain. Direct-to-DVD movies in the family genre have shown strength, with “Tinker Bell” from Disney easily selling a million copies in its first week in stores, well exceeding expectations.

Movies that have crossover appeal with video game enthusiasts are also proving resilient. “Hellboy II,” for instance, is beating sales projections by about 10 percent, according to Craig Kornblau, president of Universal Studios Home Entertainment. “The Incredible Hulk,” released by Universal on Oct. 21, also sold well.

“I’m feeling really bullish, and I’m not being naïve,” Mr. Kornblau said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/business/21dvd.html





For a Thrifty Audience, Buying DVDs Is So 2004
Brooks Barnes

MATTHEW BOWERS, of Chicago, has been paying to have HBO piped into his home every month for nearly two decades. He tunes in for the occasional episode of “Entourage” and every couple of months orders a movie on demand. Recently, the whole family watched “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”

But when his company laid him off in September, he started to think about the value he was getting out of the premium cable channel. “It’s ridiculous to pay for this service I rarely use when I can get the same stuff online and save a lot of money,” he said. The result? HBO is losing a customer.

Does an economy in tatters slow down or speed up the shift to watching TV shows and movies on the Web and mobile devices? The entertainment industry doesn’t like the answer that is rapidly becoming clear: A global economic crisis almost certainly means a sharp acceleration in the move to new ways of consuming content, setting the stage for a new clash between consumers and studios.

Historically, the movie factories haven’t been terribly afraid of tough economic times. In fact, they have almost welcomed them. During the Great Depression, people continued to turn to the movies for escape. VHS rentals boomed during the recession of the early 1980s, while DVDs got a boost from the downturn earlier this decade.

And an HBO spokesman said he was sorry to see Mr. Bowers go, but he dismissed the notion that many other people would be joining him. “No industry is recession-proof, but pay television has performed very well in previous downturns,” said the spokesman, Jeff Cusson.

But the current gloom has the Hollywood establishment rattled. DVDs are now where the industry makes its money, and Nielsen VideoScan reported a 9 percent drop in DVD sales in the third quarter over the quarter a year earlier — before the economy ran into a buzz saw. In television, crucial car advertising is drying up.

Moreover, consumers now have cheaper ways to see movies and TV shows. Hulu. Vudu. YouTube. Netflix. Amazon Video on Demand. iTunes. Crackle. FunLittleMovies.com. Movielink. CinemaNow. The list goes on. As a result, movie and television studios seem more intent than ever on protecting their established businesses from cannibalization by new media, which are growing rapidly but still generating very little revenue comparatively.

Warner Brothers Television, which supplies “The Mentalist” and “Eleventh Hour” to CBS, recently asked the network to pull full-length episodes from its Web site, along with the comedy “Big Bang Theory.” The thinking is that they were potentially too hurtful to old-fashioned syndication sales to television stations down the road.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s recent deal with YouTube to stream full-length movies and TV episodes did not include any of the studio’s prize assets like the James Bond movies or “Rocky.” Instead, MGM is giving YouTube movies like the flop “Bulletproof Monk” and reruns of the original “American Gladiators” series — a safe deal for this stage of the game. (MGM says that more-sought-after content will follow, and notes that it has been one of the more aggressive movie studios when it comes to disseminating content on new platforms.)

Studio experimentation in digital distribution is going by the wayside, too. When DVD sales were booming a couple of years ago, for instance, companies could afford to stream a TV show here and a movie there. But with operating income at 20th Century Fox down 31 percent in the recent quarter over the year-earlier period, and Walt Disney Pictures down 42 percent, studios are newly afraid.

“The days of studios making little digital deals so they can put out a press release and look enlightened are over,” said Steve Mosko, the president of Sony Pictures Television, who also oversees digital distribution of Sony films. “The days of making this a real business are here,” he said.

The problem is that consumers are clamoring for the product even if it doesn’t make money for the studio. “I see people demanding an enormous acceleration in professionally produced Web and mobile video,” said David van Eyssen, an independent film producer who recently signed a production deal with Paramount Digital Entertainment. “The low-cost alternative to traditional media is the Internet.”

A JupiterResearch study, released in late September, asked consumers how the troubled economy would affect their media spending habits. Among adults ages 25 to 34 — the group of young adults cherished by media companies — movie tickets and premium cable channels were the first to go. The last was broadband.

Think nobody wants to watch a two-hour movie on a computer or hand-held device? When “Iron Man,” starring Robert Downey Jr., became available on iTunes in late September, it sold more than $1 million in $2.99 downloads in its first seven days of release, analysts say. That’s almost pure profit, because the cost of delivery is so low, analysts note. But it’s still a drop in the bucket compared with the $140 million in DVD revenue that “Iron Man” racked up in its first week.

“We’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much revenue is starting to come from sites like Hulu,” said John Sloss, an entertainment lawyer and founder of Cinetic Rights Management, a firm that helps independent filmmakers distribute their work on new platforms.

Not all studios are circling the wagons. Sony, for one, increasingly believes that new and old media businesses are complementary. “When TV came along, people thought it would ruin movies, but it didn’t,” said Mr. Mosko. “It’s the same situation here. These businesses can coexist.” (Sony, of course, makes a lot of money from digital devices.)

Most media companies are in a tighter spot. But James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, predicts that any renewed efforts by studios to dig in their heels will be futile. “At this point, slowing down the flow of movies and TV shows to new platforms would be a little bit like cutting off a drug from a junkie,” he said. “People want more, more, more.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/business/23steal.html





HD Video Made Sleek and Simple
David Pogue

As a tech reviewer, my pulse races whenever a product is introduced with superlatives attached. “Fastest.” “Smallest.” “Thinnest.” It makes my day; I’ve got my news angle built right in.

So when Pure Digital says that its new 3.3-ounce Flip Mino HD ($230) is the world’s smallest, lightest and least-expensive high-definition camcorder, attention must be paid. That’s three superlatives in one.

The original Flip and its spinoffs, like the Flip Ultra and the even smaller, sweetly named Flip Mino (pronounced “minnow”), have spent two years shaking up the tech world. They’re little cellphone-size plastic boxes that make recording video one-button simple.

Bloggers and feature-counters have always spit on the Flip because it’s so shockingly stripped-down. What kind of self-respecting camcorder has no menus, no manual controls, no still photos, no video light, no flip-out screen, no lens cap, no removable memory card and no image stabilizer? There’s not even an actual zoom — only a 2X digital one that degrades your picture by blowing it up.

But evidently, the masses think differently — and they have flipped for the Flip, making it a megahit. Today, according to Pure Digital, the Flip has, if you can believe it, 30 percent of the camcorder market. According to the consultants at Deloitte, Pure Digital’s revenue has grown 44,667 percent in five years.

And it’s all because the camera is small, it’s cheap, it turns on in two seconds, and above all, it’s absolutely, positively idiot-proof. Three-year-olds and technophobic 90-year-olds alike master the thing in the first 10 seconds.

But there was still one downside to the Flip: the video wasn’t as good as a real camcorder’s. The low-light sensitivity is astonishing — you get clear, bright video in dim situations where ordinary camcorders would hunt for focus and produce useless grainy footage. But over all, the regular Flip’s video is a little soft — ever so slightly blurred.

So when Pure Digital announced that it would be releasing a high-definition Flip, you might have been forgiven for assuming that it meant the sort of pseudo hi-def that’s all too common these days. Too many cameras and camcorders record enough pixels to qualify, technically, for the term high definition — and yet the video looks terrible on playback, nothing like what you’d see on a hi-def TV broadcast. Basically, they’re cheating.

Happily, the Mino HD does not cheat. It grabs really great-looking video. It’s not up to the quality of hi-def tape camcorders like the Canon HDV30. But especially when the light is good, the Mino’s video is incredibly crisp and the colors are true. Best of all, the Mino HD preserves its predecessor’s uncanny low-light abilities. The resulting scene actually looks brighter in the video than it does to your naked eye.

The audio is good, too, even when you’re interviewing somebody who is 10 feet away. Clearly, there’s a lot of engineering mojo going on in this little machine’s video and microphone circuitry. (You can see and hear for yourself in this week’s Pogue video at nytimes.com/tech; I used the Flip HD to document my recent Geek Cruise to Italy, Greece, Turkey and Egypt.)

There’s only one physical button on the Flip — the big red Record button. All the other buttons are touch-sensitive spots that light up on the shiny black back panel only when relevant. For example, when you’re recording, + and – buttons appear to control the zoom. When playing back, a Trash icon appears so you can delete a clip. And so on. All of this helps the Mino HD live up to the Flip’s track record for simplicity.

Sure, a smaller camcorder is always more convenient than a bigger one, no matter what the event. But having a cellphone-size camera that records one hour of real 720p high-definition video presents some new possibilities. You can attach this little Flip to your arm, handlebars or helmet when doing extreme sports (the company sells a connector for this purpose). People have duct-taped Flips to their dogs’ collars for a new perspective, or to their car dashboards for scenes of driver-passenger conversation.
Flips are also much less obtrusive than regular camcorders, so they’re ideal for making interview subjects, especially shy children, feel comfortable on camera. And as for spies and private investigators — well, ’nuff said.

In short, the size/quality ratio of the Flip HD is just, as those crazy kids might say, ridiculous.

Unfortunately, some aspects of the Mino HD are ridiculous in the traditional sense of the word.

First, this model has the same 1.5-inch, square screen as the regular Flip cameras. A square screen? On a camera that takes widescreen video?

That arrangement means that you wind up with black letterbox bars above and below the image. (The designers have tried to justify those gaps by displaying the “Rec” indicator and battery gauge there, but still.) It also means that the image is very, very tiny.

Second, there’s no image stabilizer. Listen, we all get it — this thing is supposed to be very cheap and very basic — but the Mino HD wouldn’t be any more complicated to use if it steadied out your hand jiggles. The widescreen format of hi-def only magnifies camera unsteadiness, and it’s quite pronounced on the Mino. Good thing it has a tripod mount.

Third, the Mino HD comes with a proprietary cable that connects it to your TV. Unfortunately, and incredibly, it’s a composite cable — one of those three-headed, red-white-yellow RCA cables. In other words, your hi-def video is converted to standard definition. That’s right: the Mino HD is a hi-def camcorder that can’t play your movies in high def on a high-def TV.

You can watch the full-quality videos on your computer, of course, and, because the movie files are in the standard H.264 format, burn them to a high-definition Blu-ray DVD someday. With the press of a button, the Flip’s famous U.S.B. connector pops out of the camera and slides right into your PC or Mac. (That’s also how you recharge the built-in two-hour battery.)

Not only does the U.S.B. jack spare you the hassle of tracking and packing a cable, but software for editing and sharing your movies is also right there on the camera.

This software has been completely rewritten. It’s now identical for Mac and Windows, and is wonderfully effective. Without even a glance at the Help pages, you can view your clips, trim their ends, drag them into a sequence, add background music, and then fire the whole thing off to YouTube, save it as a new movie file on your hard drive, shoot it off as an e-mail attachment, or even upload it to Pure Digital for conversion into a DVD. (The finished disc is mailed to you in three days, and you’re charged $20.)

By the way, if you order the Mino HD at theflip.com, you can get it custom-painted with hundreds of designs — or create one by uploading your own graphic or photo. Many of them look truly great, and make the Mino feel that much more personal. (Especially if you decide to offer your design to the public. Each time someone orders a Flip with your design, you earn $10. Ka-ching!)

Now, you can’t sell 1.5 million of something without attracting rivals. The Kodak Zi6, the RCA Small Wonder EZ300HD and the Creative Vado HD, for example, are all similar in concept and either available now or coming soon. Most have features the Mino HD lacks.

But none is likely to have quite the combination of small size, polished built-in software, customizability and high video quality of the Mino HD. On top of all of its other superlatives, here’s another title that this pocketable hi-def cam deserves: most likable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/te...h/20pogue.html





Film Industry Sues iiNet Over BitTorrent Downloads

The major film studios and Channel 7 are suing iiNet, claiming its customers have infringed their copyright.
Howard Dahdah

The leading film studios and Channel 7 have taken legal action against iiNet claiming the ISP is complicit in the infringement of their copyrighted material.

The action was filed in the Federal Court today.

According to a statement of claim, “the ISP knows that there are a large number of customers who are engaging in continuing infringements of copyright by using BitTorrent file sharing technology”.

The plaintiffs — Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Disney Enterprises, and the Seven Network — claim that iiNet is aware of the problem but has chosen not to take reasonable steps, including enforcing its own terms and conditions, to prevent known unauthorised use of copies of the companies’ films and TV programs by iiNet’s customers.

“iiNet refused to address this illegal behaviour and did nothing to prevent the continuation of the infringements by the same customers,” said executive director of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), Adrianne Pecotic, speaking on behalf of its film industry members.

“iiNet has an obligation under the law to take steps to prevent further known copyright infringement via its network,” she said.

iiNet CEO Michael Malone disputed AFACT’s claim that it refused to address the issue.

“We have been replying to them each time as well,” he replied. “We have been passing on all those complaints directly on to the state police – who are in our building. The police have reams of this stuff from AFACT,” he said.
I think they genuinely believe that ISPs have a secret magic wand that we are hiding and if we bring it out we can make piracy disappear just by waving it
iiNet CEO Michael Malone

According to Malone, AFACT is expecting iiNet to do the impossible.

“They send us a list of IP addresses and say ‘this IP address was involved in a breach on this date’. We look at that say ‘well what do you want us to do with this? We can't release the person’s details to you on the basis of an allegation and we can't go and kick the customer off on the basis of an allegation from someone else’. So we say ‘you are alleging the person has broken the law; we’re passing it to the police. Let them deal with it’.”

He said another problem with this traffic is that is not on its network. “It is transiting our network along with the billions of other things passing across the network which are perfectly legal. We are not traffic cops. We can't stand in the middle of it and stop the individual items that might be against the law. These guys are asking us to be judge, jury and executioner," Malone said.

"I think they genuinely believe that ISPs have a secret magic wand that we are hiding and if we bring it out we can make piracy disappear just by waving it. And it doesn’t exist."

According to AFACT, some of the titles infringed by the iiNet network include I Am Legend, Happy Feet, American Gangster and episodes from TV series such as Heroes, Family Guy, The Simpsons, and Prison Break.

The film companies are seeking unspecified damages.

The proceedings will be back before the court on 17 December.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/arti...rent_downloads





Sony Pictures Celebrates NXE Eve by... Blocking Xbox 360 Netflix Movie Streaming
Richard Lawler

Just hours before the Xbox 360's newest dashboard update hits tomorrow morning (10:00 a.m. GMT), our friends at Joystiq noticed the list of movies available for Netflix Watch Instantly streaming has suddenly dropped. The culprit? Sony Pictures Home Entertainment subsidiary Columbia Pictures, flicking previously available titles like Superbad, Bad Boys, and We Own the Night over to "Not available on Xbox" status (curiously, SPHE movies are still available to all.) Word from the official Netflix blog cites "the ebb and flow" of what is available on license at any given time causing a few hundred titles to be "temporarily" unavailable on the console, while still open for streaming for other devices, with an eye towards licensing them for the Xbox 360 soon. There's no way to know what movies won't work until adding them to your queue, so when you find your Karate Kid trilogy watching time suddenly wide open for more Gears of War 2 or Left 4 Dead action, just remember you have Sony to thank.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/18/s...x-360-netflix/





Digitally Restricted Macs

Apple Brings HDCP to a New Aluminum MacBook Near You
David Chartier

High Definition Content Protection (HDCP)—you can't live with it, but you practically can't buy an HD-capable device anymore without it. While HDCP is typically used in devices like Blu-ray players, HDTVs, HDMI-enabled notebooks, and even the Apple TV in order to keep DRMed content encrypted between points A and B, it appears that Apple's new aluminum MacBook (and presumably the MacBook Pro) are using it to protect iTunes Store media as well.



When my friend John, a high school teacher, attempted to play Hellboy 2 on his classroom's projector with a new aluminum MacBook over lunch, he was denied by the error you see above. John's using a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter, plugged into a Sanyo projector that is part of his room's Promethean system. Strangely, only some iTunes Store movies appear to be HDCP-aware, as other purchased media like Stargate: Continuum and Heroes season 2 play through the projector just fine. Attempts to play Hellboy 2 or other HDCPed films through the projector via QuickTime also get denied. Other movies that don't work include newer films like Iron Man, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and Love Guru, but older films like Shawshank Redemption are restricted as well.

The technology in Apple's MacBooks that prevents a seemingly arbitrary collection of iTunes Store files from being played on HDCP non-compliant devices is perhaps more accurately called DPCP, or DisplayPort Content Protection. As we've covered in the past, DisplayPort was designed as an open, extensible standard for computers that offers lower power consumption over DVI (especially in the Mini DisplayPort format that Apple uses on the new MacBooks). But more importantly, DisplayPort also beats DVI in the studios' books by offering the option of 128-bit AES encrypted copy protection.

All of the tested files are wrapped in the same iTunes Store FairPlay Version 3 DRM, save for Stargate: Continuum, which John says has version 2. While Apple's own Apple TV has used HDCP to protect video files playing from its HDMI port, this is the first time we've heard of Apple bringing HDCP DPCP to its hardware. (It has, however, been brought to our attention that other users have been complaining about this in Apple's discussion forums for a couple of weeks.)
http://arstechnica.com/journals/appl...cbook-near-you





Media Companies Help Promote Laptop Project
Steve Lohr

After a rocky beginning, the nonprofit group One Laptop Per Child thinks an advertising campaign will give a lift to the organization’s effort to place low-cost laptops in the hands of children in developing nations.

About 500,000 of the group’s light and rugged machines are being used in 31 countries, including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Lebanon, Peru, Rwanda and Uruguay. But the cost of the laptops, at less than $200 each, has been prohibitively high for many countries, and the number of laptops distributed has fallen short of early projections.

An additional 500,000 of these XO laptops are in transit or being built, and should be in use by early next year, said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the education and computing project.

The marketing campaign seeks to sharply increase those numbers. Television time, billboard space and magazine pages are being donated by media companies, including the News Corporation, CBS and Time Warner.

The goal, Mr. Negroponte says, is greatly increasing the donation program, “Give a Laptop. Get a Laptop. Change the World.” For $399, a person can donate an XO laptop and also receive one. Or donors can simply donate $199, to give a child a laptop, at www.amazon.com/xo.

The advertising time is donated, and the spots are expected to start conversations. One spot is an uplifting vision of a 7-year-old girl in a South African township, sitting in a dark room, her face lighted only by the laptop’s glow. “With education, we will solve our own problems,” she says.

Another TV spot says children learn quickly, whatever their tools of survival are — whether loading an AK-47 or mastering an XO laptop. Other settings show child labor camps and child prostitutes. “There are some very challenging scenes,” said Paul Lavoie, chairman of Taxi, the agency that created the ads.

Other innovative ads are in the works. Mr. Negroponte is talking to Yoko Ono about using lifelike digital images of John Lennon in ads discussing the opportunity to end the digital divide between rich and poor nations.

Marketing, Mr. Lavoie says, can help One Laptop Per Child move toward its original goal of a $100 laptop, which is possible only with the economies of high-volume manufacturing. “To get there, they need to sell a lot of computers,” he said.

By now, Mr. Negroponte insists, enough of these learning machines are in the hands of children in the developing world to see results. The children, from 6 to 12 years old, are more passionate about learning and educators are reporting fewer problems with discipline and truancy. “It’s unequivocally working,” said Mr. Negroponte, the founding director of the M.I.T. Media Lab. “The issue is the economics.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/te.../17laptop.html





A Computing Pioneer Has a New Idea
John Markoff

Steven J. Wallach is completing the soul of his newest machine.

Thirty years ago, Mr. Wallach was one of a small team of computer designers profiled by Tracy Kidder in his Pulitzer Prize winning best seller, “The Soul of a New Machine.”

It was Mr. Wallach, then 33, who served as the architect and baby sitter for his “microkids,” the young team that designed the Data General MV 8000, the underdog minicomputer that kept the company alive in its brutal competition with the Digital Equipment Corporation.

At 63, he is still at it. He plans to introduce his new company, Convey Computer, and to describe the technical details of a new supercomputer intended for scientific and engineering applications at a supercomputing conference in Austin, Tex., this week.

Mr. Wallach thinks he has come upon a new idea in computer design in an era when it has become fashionable to say that there are no new ideas. So far, he has persuaded some of the leading thinkers in the high performance computing world that he might be right. Both Intel and a second chip maker, Xilinx, have joined as early investors.

“Steve comes from a long history of building successful machines,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who helps maintain the list of the world’s fastest 500 computers. “He understands where the bottlenecks are.”

After leaving Data General, Mr. Wallach helped found Convex in 1982 to build a low-cost supercomputer.

Mr. Wallach may be one of the few people remaining to recall a bold generation of computer designers once defined by Seymour Cray, the engineer who created the world’s first commercial supercomputers during the 1960s.

His newest effort in computing design is intended to tackle one of the principal limitations in the world of supercomputing. Typically supercomputers are intended to excel in solving a single class of problems. They may simulate the explosion of a nuclear weapon or model global climate change at blinding speed, but for other problems they will prove sluggish and inefficient.

Today’s supercomputers are assembled from thousands or even tens of thousands of microprocessors, and they often consume as much electricity as a small city. Moreover, they can prove to be frightfully difficult to program. Many new supercomputers try to deal with the challenge of solving different classes of problems by connecting different kinds of processors together Lego-style. This can give programmers fits.

For decades, computer designers have struggled with different ways to sidestep the complexity of programming multiple chips, in order to break up problems into pieces to be computed simultaneously so that they can be solved more quickly.

Mr. Wallach came up with his new design idea in 2006 after he found himself rejecting many of the start-up companies who were coming to the venture capital companies he was advising.

“I would say, ‘No, no, no, they’re clueless,’ ” he said. “I find it difficult to think of myself as the old man of the industry, but it feels that the same as it was in the early 1980s.”

One of the venture capitalists grew frustrated with Mr. Wallach’s repeated criticisms and said to him, “All right Mr. Bigshot, what would you?”

Two weeks later, Mr. Wallach had a new idea. He had long been fascinated with a chip technology called Field Programmable Gate Arrays. These chips are widely used to make prototype computer systems because they can be easily reprogrammed and yet offer the pure speed of computer hardware. There have been a number of start-ups and large supercomputer companies that have already tried to design systems based on the chips, but Mr. Wallach thought that he could do a better job.

The right way to use them, he decided, was to couple them so tightly to the microprocessor chip that it would appear they were simply a small set of additional instructions to give a programmer an easy way to turbocharge a program. Everything had to look exactly like the standard programming environment. In contrast, many supercomputers today require programmers to be “heroic.”

“The past 40 years has taught us that ultimately the system that is easiest to program will always win,” he said.

Mr. Wallach approached Applied Micro Devices about partnering, but it was skeptical. So he went to Intel, where he knew Justin Rattner, the company’s chief technology officer and a veteran supercomputer designer.

“We’ve had enough debates over the years that Justin has some respect for me,” he said.

The Convey computer will be based around Intel’s microprocessors. It will perform like a shape-shifter, reconfiguring with different hardware “personalities” to compute problems for different industries, initially aiming at bioinformatics, computer-aided design, financial services and oil and gas exploration.

Mr. Wallach acknowledges that starting a company going into a recession in the face of stiff competition from Cray, I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and more than a dozen smaller companies is daunting. However, Convey was put together in just two years on a shoestring. It has raised just $15.1 million.

“In a lot of ways, it’s easier than it was in 1982,” he said. “You need less money and I don’t think a lot of people have grasped this.”

One who does get the idea and who is enthusiastic about it is Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist who is director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at the University of California, San Diego. He believes that the most important quality of the Convey computer is that it will be a green supercomputer.

“The I.T. industry is going to become the boogeyman for global warming,” he worries.

Three decades after designing the computer that brought the idea of computing into the public consciousness, Mr. Wallach gives no hint that he is slowing down.

He still wears the earring that he began wearing 15 years ago when his daughter suggested that he was getting old.

“Isn’t that required to be a computer architect?” he asked recently.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/te...17machine.html





Burned Once, Intel Prepares New Chip Fortified by Constant Tests
John Markoff

Rows and rows of computers in Intel’s labs here relentlessly torture-tested the company’s new microprocessor for months on end.

But on a recent tour of the labs, John Barton, an Intel vice president in charge of product testing, acknowledged that he was still feeling anxious about the possibility of a last-minute, show-stopping flaw.

After all, even the slightest design error in the chip could end up being a billion-dollar mistake.

“I’m not sleeping well yet,” Mr. Barton said.

Intel’s Core i7 microprocessor, code-named Nehalem, which goes on sale Monday, has already received glowing technical reviews. But it is impossible for Mr. Barton to predict exactly how the chip will function in thousands of computers running tens of thousands of programs.

The design and testing of an advanced microprocessor chip is among the most complex of all human endeavors. To ensure that its products are as error-free as possible, Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif., now spends a half-billion dollars annually in its factories around the world, testing the chips for more than a year before selling them.

There is good reason for the caution. In 1994, the giant chip maker was humbled by a tiny error in the floating point calculation unit of its Pentium chips. The flaw, which led to an embarrassing recall, prompted a wrenching cultural shift at the company, which had minimized the testing requirements of the Pentium.

A series of bugs last year in the Barcelona microprocessor from Intel’s main competitor, Advanced Micro Devices, was equally devastating.

A.M.D., based in Sunnyvale, Calif., had been making steady progress, offering new processor technologies long before Intel and handily winning the power-efficiency war. But the quality problems that slammed A.M.D. cost the company revenue for several quarters and landed it in a hole from which it has yet to dig out.

If Nehalem is a hit for Intel, it will represent vindication for Andrew Grove, the company’s former chief, who acknowledged that he had been blindsided by the Pentium problems and then set out to reform the company.

The Pentium bug badly damaged Intel’s brand with consumers. The company quickly became a laughingstock as jokes made the rounds of the Internet: Q: Know how the Republicans can cut taxes and pay the deficit at the same time? A: Their spreadsheet runs on a Pentium computer.

After initially appearing to stonewall, Intel reversed course and issued an apology while setting aside $420 million to pay for the recall.

The company put Mr. Grove’s celebrated remark about the situation on key chains: “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”

Those words weigh heavily on the shoulders of Mr. Barton and his colleagues — as does the pressure from Intel’s customers around the world whose very survival is based on the ability to create new products with the company’s chips at their heart. Nehalem is initially aimed at desktop computers, but the company hopes it will eventually be found in everything from powerful servers to laptops.

“Our business model is now predicated on saying to the consumer, ‘You will get a new set of functionality by a particular date,’ ” Mr. Barton said. “We did get a new dimension of business pressure that says we can’t take our merry time turning it out whenever we feel like it.”

The pressure for a successful product is especially intense now as the overall technology industry faces a serious slump. Intel’s chief executive, Paul S. Otellini, said last month that the company was getting “mixed signals” from customers about future spending. Intel’s stock fell 7.7 percent on Friday to $13.32, a six-year low, in a broad market drop.

With Nehalem, Intel’s designers took the company’s previous generation of chips and added a host of features, each of which adds complexity and raises the possibility of unpredictable interactions.

“Now we are hitting systemic complexity,” said Aart de Geus, chief executive of Synopsys, a Silicon Valley developer of chip design tools. “Things that came from different angles that used to be independent have become interdependent.”

Trying to define the complexity that Mr. Barton and his team face is itself a challenge. Even in the late 1970s, chips were being designed that were as complicated as the street map of a large city.

Mr. Barton’s love affair with the world of electronics began as a child, when he took apart a walkie-talkie his father had given him and counted its transistors: a total of seven. The change in his lifetime, he said, has been “mind-boggling.”

Going from the Intel 8088 — the processor used in the IBM PC 27 years ago — to the Nehalem involves a jump from 29,000 transistors to 731 million, on a silicon chip roughly the same size.

Mr. Barton equates the two by comparing a city the size of Ithaca, N.Y., to the continent of Europe. “Ithaca is quite complex in its own right if you think of all that goes on,” he said. “If we scale up the population to 730 million, we come to Europe as about the right size. Now take Europe and shrink it until it all fits in about the same land mass as Ithaca.”

Even given a lifetime, it would be impossible to test more than the smallest fraction of the total possible “states” that the Nehalem chip can be programmed in, which are easily more plentiful than all the atoms in the universe.

Modern designers combat complexity by turning to modular design techniques, making it possible to simplify drastically what needs to be tested.

“Instead of testing for every possible case, you break up the problem into smaller pieces,” said G. Dan Hutcheson, chief executive of VLSI Research, a semiconductor consulting firm.

After the Pentium flaw, Intel also fundamentally rethought the way it designed its processors, trying to increase the chance that its chips would be error-free even before testing. During the late 1990s it turned to a group of mathematical theoreticians in the computer science field who had developed advanced techniques for evaluating hardware and software, known as formal methods.

“For several years Intel hired everyone in the world in formal methods,” said Pat Lincoln, director of SRI International’s Computer Science Laboratory.

The Intel designers have also done something else to help defend against the errors that will inevitably sneak into the chip. Nehalem contains a significant amount of software that can be changed even after the microprocessor leaves the factory. That gives the designers a huge safety net.

It is one that Mr. Barton and his team are hoping they will not have to use.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/te...es/17chip.html





USB 3.0 to Deliver a Tenfold Speed Increase
Priya Ganapati

Tighten your seat belts. Data transfer is going into overdrive as the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus, better known as USB, prepares to make a tenfold jump in speed.

That means the vast sea of USB devices -- from HD camcorders to hard drives and music players -- will be able to transfer music, video, photos and other data much, much more quickly.

The new standard, the first update to the USB specification in eight years, will also deliver greater power efficiency and the ability to recharge a wider variety of gadgets -- and it will most likely mean the death of the competing standard known as FireWire.

To get a sense of the speed increase, consider this: Transferring high-definition video of 27 GB, the amount on a standard Blu-Ray disc, takes about 10 minutes with the current USB 2.0 standard. With USB 3.0, it will take just about a minute.

"What the user will see is really a much faster response time, less waiting, more productivity," says Patrick Moorhead, vice president of advanced marketing at AMD, one of the supporters of the USB 3.0 standard.

The USB Implementers Forum, a non-profit group founded by companies to promote the standard, will announce Monday the final set of specs that will clear the way for the adoption of USB 3.0 by device and component manufacturers. It's the first major update to USB technology in nearly eight years.

"USB 3.0 will take USB 2.0 to the next level and take away performance as an issue for data transfer in many devices," says Brian O'Rourke, an analyst with research firm In-Stat. "USB 3.0 will make it even more pervasive across devices than it is today."

Since the USB specification was first introduced in 1996, it has changed the way we interact with our computers. USB has allowed everything from keyboards, mouse, PDAs, printers, digital cameras and personal media players -- pretty much the entire spectrum of consumer electronics -- to be connected to a host PC using a single standardized socket.

It has also made the process truly plug-and-play. Devices can be connected and disconnected without having to reboot the host computer and offered perks such as allowing for many devices to be charged using the USB socket with no need for individual device drivers to be installed first.

Not surprisingly, USB's ease of use and capabilities has meant it has become nearly ubiquitous. More than 2.6 billion USB-enabled devices were shipped in 2007, estimates research firm In-Stat.

And USB's star will continue to rise, says the firm. Nearly four billion USB-enabled devices are expected to ship by 2012. Its ubiquity has meant that some manufacturers use USB ports and plug for recharging devices such as bluetooth headsets and phones without utilizing its data-transfer capabilities.

But USB 2.0 is getting a bit long in the tooth, with its slow speed, inefficient power usage and relatively small wattage. The new standard takes aim at all of those shortcomings.

Pour on the Speed

The new spec will support data transfers at 4.8 gigabits per second (Gbps), nearly ten times faster than the current standard's 480 megabits per second and six times faster than FireWire 800. It's also 400 times faster than the 12Mbps offered by the original spec, USB 1.0.

USB 2.0 is also known as "Hi Speed USB," while USB 3.0 will have the confusingly similar moniker "SuperSpeed USB."

The new USB 3.0 connectors and devices will be compatible with older USB ports (on devices using USB 2.0 and 1.0) but they will be limited to the older ports' slower speeds.

The first USB 3.0 devices probably won't show up until the end of 2009 or early 2010, say analysts. But users can get a glimpse into future devices sporting SuperSpeed USB as early as the annual Consumer Electronics Show in January.

"The first places that you will see this show up is where you get the biggest benefits---HD video cameras and hard drives," says Moorhead.

Power and Efficiency

USB 2.0 uses a polling based architecture, which means the host computer has to constantly check the bus to see if any devices are attached and if so, whether they are doing anything. As a result, that keeps the host computer busy, drawing power even when it's not needed.

"It's a problem when you attach a USB device to a laptop running on battery," says Steve Kleynhans, vice-president, client computing for research firm Gartner.

USB 3.0 offers better specifications for power management. "We will move to an interrupt-driven architecture where your PC can ignore the connected device till the latter actually does something," says Kleynhans. "That can really lower the power consumption."

It also has better power output, 900 milliamps compared to 100 milliamps with USB 2.0. That means up to four devices can be charged from a single USB port and charged faster.

Standardizing the specifications for USB 3.0 hasn't been easy. Two months ago, Intel released part of the draft specifications for USB 3.0 to developers resolving a dispute between it, Nvidia and AMD over it.

Nvidia and AMD claimed that Intel was not sharing the specifications that potentially compete with it. Intel denied it.

"There was some debate between us," says Moorhead, "but we have buried the hatchet and we are all in the same boat now."

USB Implementers Forum chairman Jeff Ravencraft declined to be available for comment.

While USB 3.0 devices are coming soon, consumers won't immediately see all the benefits. "You can get the USB 3.0 speeds only when one 3.0 device connects to another," says Gartner's Kleynhans. So the latest SuperSpeed USB-enabled devices connecting to older PCs running USB 2.0 or lower will experience data transfer rates that are much slower.

Killing FireWire

USB 3.0 is likely to signal the death of FireWire/IEEE 1394, a competing interface standard also known as i.Link and Lynx. Today, the industry is bifurcated between IEEE 1394 and USB 3.0. Many devices support both, though a single standard would be optimal.

"If we are all aligned, we are saving money and development time for the industry," says Moorhead.

With Apple seemingly taking step away from FireWire, it seems like USB could gain the upper hand. Apple's newly introduced MacBook computers lack a FireWire port and instead has USB. MacBook Pro still sports FireWire 800.

That leaves Sony as one of the few remaining proponents of the standard.

"FireWire stably declining in most markets and USB 3.0 will continue that trend," says O'Rourke. "We could see USB emerge as the standardization of a high-speed interconnect."

Monday's first USB 3.0 developer conference will be a big step towards that, say experts. "It's for everyone in the USB value chain, from chip makers to software makers to learn the new USB standard and get on it," says O'Rourke.
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/1...peed-us-1.html





Bellevue Patent Firm Lures Universities, But Some Schools Hold Back
Eric Engleman

A few years ago, the New Jersey Institute of Technology wasn’t making much money off its discoveries, and had a box of 50 invention documents gathering dust on the shelf.

Then the school sold a bunch of patents to a Bellevue firm called Intellectual Ventures. Over three years, the school’s licensing revenue jumped from “practically nonexistent” to seven figures, according to an official.

But despite Intellectual Ventures’ growing profile as a middleman between researchers and technology companies — the firm recently completed its 100th tech-transfer deal with a university — the Bellevue firm is not receiving academia’s universal embrace.

Stanford University, one of the top technology-producing schools, has resisted partnering with Intellectual Ventures, despite approaches. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is another prominent holdout.

“We’re trying to look for a licensee that will develop a technology and bring it forward,” said Katharine Ku, director of technology licensing at Stanford. “It’s not clear to us that Intellectual Ventures will do that.”

Intellectual Ventures, founded by former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold, also buys patents from inventors and businesses, and generates some in-house. But academia is clearly part of the company’s ambitious expansion plans.

In addition to inking its recent 100th university deal, with the University of Texas at Austin, the Bellevue firm is preparing to open five offices in Asia that will work with universities there.

Dozens of universities generate millions of dollars each year from licensing their research, but not all schools have gotten traction with their inventions.

That’s created an opening for Intellectual Ventures. The firm acts as a go-between with industry, and provides a cut of the revenue to universities if their patents are successfully licensed.

“A significant portion of our work is being funded by Intellectual Ventures,” said Carl Georgeson, manager of patents and licensing administration at the 8,200-student New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark.

Despite the multiple deals with Intellectual Ventures, however, Georgeson said his university has kept some pending patents, from its nanotechnology program, off-limits from the firm, believing it can successfully market those to industry itself.

“We wouldn’t hand that to IV,” Georgeson said. “We’ve had over 60 inquiries from around the world on this stuff. They don’t even know about it.”

It’s not just small universities that are working with Intellectual Ventures.

David Gibbons, senior licensing officer at the University of California, San Diego, said his office receives roughly 350 faculty and student invention disclosures every year, but takes only a third of them through the full patent process, which can take years and cost thousands of dollars. Intellectual Ventures, he said, has created a “secondary market” for inventions that the university is unable or unwilling to license itself.

“Those ones that are difficult to place, IV creates a new second chance because they do pick up all the patent costs,” Gibbons said. “Some would have been abandoned for lack of funding support.”

Intellectual Ventures declined to specify the terms of its deals with universities, but says it pays upfront dollars to the schools for patents and shares in any resulting licensing proceeds. The firm says it has the unique ability to pull together patents from a variety of sources and put them together in meaningful technology portfolios.

“The universities have pretty disparate technologies — little parts of the pie. We create the pie and make it broadly available,” said Elizabeth Holohan, director of university programs for Intellectual Ventures.

She said it’s getting easier to persuade universities to do business with the firm.

However, the firm continues to have vocal critics, who consider Intellectual Ventures a “patent troll” that gobbles up and hoards ideas, extracts payment and hinders innovation.

“My concern would be that the individual university doesn’t fully take into account the potential cumulative cost to innovation of striking a deal with Intellectual Ventures,” said Michael Heller, a professor at Columbia University and author of “The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives.”

Universities get the “short-term gain of having a more powerful marketing partner for their discoveries,” Heller said, but “their individual profit comes at the cost of the public ability to innovate. The university’s larger mission is to serve the public interest, and some of these deals work against that public interest.”

Intellectual Ventures says it’s fostering, not hindering, innovation. The company says it doesn’t plan to use litigation against companies, but won’t rule the option out entirely.

Despite the debate over Intellectual Ventures’ model, some schools, including the University of Washington, are considering doing business with the company.“I’m delighted there’s another interested party at the table,” said Linden Rhoads, the UW’s recently installed vice provost for technology transfer. “The best way to understand this new model is to start working with them and figure it out.”
http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/s...15/story7.html





Music Patron Is Convicted of Fraud
Daniel J. Wakin

Alberto W. Vilar, the investor and music lover accustomed to opulent living, front-row opera seats and the gratitude of arts impresarios, now faces a more humble prospect: prison.

A federal jury in Manhattan on Wednesday convicted him of defrauding clients of his firm, Amerindo Investment Advisors, finding him guilty on all 12 counts. The jury also convicted his former business partner, Gary A. Tanaka, on 3 of the 12 counts.

As the foreman of the jury pronounced the first verdict, the 67-year-old Mr. Vilar blinked once but remained stone-faced throughout the recitations of “guilty,” looking down at the table in front of him. Outside the courtroom, when Mr. Vilar was asked what had gone wrong, he said softly, “I don’t know.”

His lawyer, Herald Price Fahringer, promised an appeal. “We’re deeply disappointed in the jury’s verdict,” he said. “We expect to be fully vindicated on appeal.”

The verdict came after a two-month trial and three and a half days of often heated deliberations. Raised voices were heard inside the jury room at one point. A juror sniffled as she left the courtroom. One juror said there was name-calling during deliberations, Bloomberg News reported.

The two men were charged in a 12-count indictment alleging conspiracy and securities fraud, investment adviser fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, making false statements and money laundering. Mr. Tanaka, 65, was found guilty of conspiracy, securities fraud and investment adviser fraud.

Glenn C. Colton, Mr. Tanaka’s lawyer, said the nine not-guilty counts showed how troubled the jury was in deciding what role his client played.

The more serious counts carry up to 20 years in prison. The judge, Richard J. Sullivan, did not set a sentencing date and both defendants remain free on bail, but the judge said he would hear arguments on changing bail conditions on Nov. 26.

Prosecutors charged that Amerindo gambled with clients’ money in volatile technology stocks instead of the safe investments the defendants promised. When the market plunged in 2000, shriveling Amerindo’s holdings, the defendants lost millions of dollars of clients’ money, prosecutors said. They turned to fraud to pay expenses and satisfy other customers who were demanding their money back, the government said.

According to one of the more lurid accusations, an Amerindo employee in London cut and pasted the signature of a client, Lily Cates, to loot her account of $250,000 so Mr. Vilar could pay his mortgage and avoid foreclosure. Ms. Cates, the mother of the actress Phoebe Cates, also said she was swindled of $5 million.

The defense argued that the investors did not actually lose money until the authorities froze the business with their arrests in May 2005, and that in fact other clients, like the Los Angeles and Chicago Police Department pension funds, made big profits.
The verdict was the last movement in Mr. Vilar’s fall from grace, which began in 2002 when it became public that he had reneged on a series of promises to give millions of dollars to the Metropolitan Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Los Angeles Opera, the Washington National Opera and others.

When he failed to make the donations, institutions erased his name. The Met removed it from the grand tier and the Washington National from its young artists program. His alma mater — Washington and Jefferson College — and New York University and Columbia University also did not receive promised donations.

Before the trial began, Mr. Vilar blamed his high profile as a major benefactor for drawing the attention of prosecutors. And he expressed bitterness that many of his professed friends in the cultural world melted away after his troubles became public.

Despite the failed promises, Mr. Vilar still ranks as a major donor, having given as much as $100 million. He often demanded prominent recognition, which he said was a way of encouraging other wealthy people to give. Some acquaintances suggested he was really striving for attention and legitimacy.

Tall and reserved and rarely without a suit and tie, Mr. Vilar was a familiar sight at opera houses. His seat at the Met was A-101, in the first row. Throughout the trial, Mr. Vilar lived in splendid isolation in his condominium, with its larger-than-life-size bronze statue of a young Mozart, gold brocade drapes and marble floor.

Much of the case centered on a $5 million investment by Ms. Cates, a longtime friend of Mr. Vilar’s and one of his earliest clients. Prosecutors charged that Mr. Vilar, desperate for funds, induced her to put the money in a new small-business investment fund backed by the government.

Evidence showed that Mr. Vilar never had approval to open the fund. The money was routed to a corporate checking account and to Mr. Vilar’s personal account so he could fulfill pledges to Washington and Jefferson and the American Academy in Berlin, prosecutors said. Most went toward a settlement with other clients who were seeking their money back, prosecutors told the jury.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/ar...20vila.html?hp





Bahrain Prince Sues Michael Jackson in UK Court

A son of the king of Bahrain took U.S. pop star Michael Jackson to court on Monday for reneging on an agreement to record a new album and write an autobiography.

Bankim Thanki, the lawyer representing Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad al-Khalifa, told London's High Court that his client had made several payments to Jackson from 2005 onwards, including $35,000 to pay utility bills at Jackson's Neverland Ranch.

The court heard that the following month, in April 2005, Jackson asked for one million dollars through an assistant, the Press Association reported.

"Sheikh Abdullah made many more payments on his behalf or to others," Thanki said.

"Sheikh Abdullah began to support Mr. Jackson financially after 2005 when it became clear that Mr. Jackson was in very serious financial difficulties, much to Sheikh Abdullah's surprise," Thanki added.

The early financial support coincided with Jackson's 2005 trial on child molestation charges. Despite his acquittal, the case left the 50-year-old performer's reputation and financial status in tatters.

Jackson spent time in Bahrain as a guest of the royal family following the trial, and in April 2006 a statement was released on behalf of Bahrain music label Two Seas Records announcing he would record a new album for release in 2007.

The sheikh is suing the pop legend for allegedly reneging on a $7 million "pay-back" agreement designed to repay money he advanced to Jackson during his financial troubles.

He said he and Jackson entered into a "combined rights agreement" under which the star was committed to a recording contract, an autobiography and a musical stage play.

But Jackson contests that there was no valid agreement and that the sheikh's case was based on "mistake, misrepresentation and undue influence."

In his pleaded defense, Jackson said the payments he received were "gifts" and that no project was ever finalized.

At the start of a court hearing set for up to 12 days, the judge heard that an application would be made for Jackson to give evidence via video link from Los Angeles.

(Writing by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...4AG68S20081117





Teenagers’ Internet Socializing Not a Bad Thing
Tamar Lewin

Good news for worried parents: All those hours their teenagers spend socializing on the Internet are not a bad thing, according to a new study by the MacArthur Foundation.

“It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media, whether it’s on MySpace or sending instant messages,” said Mizuko Ito, lead researcher on the study, “Living and Learning With New Media.” “But their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”

The study, conducted from 2005 to last summer, describes new-media usage but does not measure its effects.

“It certainly rings true that new media are inextricably woven into young people’s lives,” said Vicki Rideout, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation and director of its program for the study of media and health. “Ethnographic studies like this are good at describing how young people fit social media into their lives. What they can’t do is document effects. This highlights the need for larger, nationally representative studies.”

Ms. Ito, a research scientist in the department of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, said that some parental concern about the dangers of Internet socializing might result from a misperception.

“Those concerns about predators and stranger danger have been overblown,” she said. “There’s been some confusion about what kids are actually doing online. Mostly, they’re socializing with their friends, people they’ve met at school or camp or sports.”

The study, part of a $50 million project on digital and media learning, used several teams of researchers to interview more than 800 young people and their parents and to observe teenagers online for more than 5,000 hours. Because of the adult sense that socializing on the Internet is a waste of time, the study said, teenagers reported many rules and restrictions on their electronic hanging out, but most found ways to work around such barriers that let them stay in touch with their friends steadily throughout the day.

“Teens usually have a ‘full-time intimate community’ with whom they communicate in an always-on mode via mobile phones and instant messaging,” the study said.

This is not news to a cluster of Bronx teenagers, gathered after school on Wednesday to tell a reporter about their social routines. All of them used MySpace and instant messaging to stay in touch with a dozen or two of their closest friends every evening. “As soon as I get home, I turn on my computer,” said a 15-year-old boy who started his MySpace page four years ago. “My MySpace is always on, and when I get a message on MySpace, it sends a text message to my phone. It’s not an obsession; it’s a necessity.” (School rules did not permit using students’ names without written parental permission, which could not be immediately obtained.)

Only one student, a 14-year-old girl, had ever opted out — and she lasted only a week.

“It didn’t work,” she said. “You become addicted. You can’t live without it.”

In a situation familiar to many parents, the study describes two 17-year-olds, dating for more than a year, who wake up and log on to their computers between taking showers and doing their hair, talk on their cellphones as they travel to school, exchange text messages through the school day, then get together after school to do homework — during which time they also play a video game — talk on the phone during the evening, perhaps ending the night with a text-messaged “I love you.”

Teenagers also use new media to explore new romantic relationships, through interactions casual enough to ensure no loss of face if the other party is not interested.

The study describes two early Facebook messages, or “wall posts,” by teenagers who eventually started dating. First, the girl posted a message saying, “hey ... hm. wut to say? iono lol/well I left you a comment ... u sud feel SPECIAL haha.” (Translation: Hmm ... what to say? I don’t know. Laugh out loud. Well I left you a comment ... You should feel special.)

A day later, the boy replied, “hello there ... umm I don’t know what to say, but at least I wrote something ...”

While online socializing is ubiquitous, many young people move on to a period of tinkering and exploration, as they look for information online, customize games or experiment with digital media production, the study found.

For example, a Brooklyn teenager did a Google image search to look at a video card and find out where in a computer such cards are, then installed his own.

What the study calls “geeking out” is the most intense Internet use, in which young people delve deeply into a particular area of interest, often through a connection to an online interest group.

“New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a classroom setting,” the study said. “Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/us/20internet.html?hp





Florida Teen Commits Suicide in Front of Webcam
AP

Authorities say a South Florida teen committed suicide in front of a live online webcam audience after blogging about his plan to kill himself.

Broward County medical examiner's office investigator Wendy Crane says 19-year-old Abraham Biggs died Wednesday from a toxic combination of opiates and benzodiazepine (ben-ZOH'-die-AZ'-uh-peen), a depressant used to treat insomnia.

People were watching through a body building Web site and Crane says some were encouraging, others tried to talk him out of it, and a few were debating whether the dose he took was lethal. Crane says someone notified the moderator, who traced the teen's location and called police. Biggs was dead by the time they got there.

Crane says he was just seen lying on the bed at that point.
http://www.newstimes.com/national/ci_11041446





Web Providers to be Named and Shamed over Offensive Content
Patrick Wintour

Politicians are ready to introduce league tables naming and shaming the speed with which internet service providers take down offensive material.

The culture minister, Barbara Follett, and her Tory shadow, Ed Vaizey, have backed the idea that web providers must be embarrassed into dealing with violent, sexually explicit web content.

Follett said she wants to see the pre-screening of material on sites such as YouTube, as occurs at present on MySpace. She admitted there was growing chaos out there on the internet, and order needed to be brought.

She has also admitted barriers aimed at preventing children from accessing over-age material on the internet are not just porous but leak like a sieve. "People can get straight through it, or straight by it."

Follett warned: "We must teach children of the dangers of the internet. It is sad to make children more scared than interested, but fortunately the internet is so interesting that children tend to overcome their fear."

Discussing the internet and video games at a Westminster debate and facing suggestions that the industry is lax about controlling content, Follett said: "We agree information about take-down times and levels of search need to be much clearer." Asked if she supported league tables of take-down times by internet service providers, she said "name and shame can sometimes can work very well indeed."

Follett said: "Many people have said that the internet is like the wild west in the gold rush and that sooner or later it will be regulated. What we need is for it to be regulated sooner rather than later.

"We need the service providers to come forward and show that they are the sort of responsible organisations whose services we can trust to our children."

She added: "We must ensure that search engines have a clear link to child safety information and safe search settings on the front page of their website."

She also said she saw "some value in some form of age identity card for the internet. It is useful when it comes to alcohol and cigarettes and it is certainly useful when it comes to buying video games and other material on the internet."

She added parents needed "control software to communicate automatically with websites' age verification systems to prevent children from signing up to sites with false dates of birth."

In theory social networking sites are not supposed to be accessed by anyone under 13, but this guideline is totally ignored. She said she was interested in some form of "age identification card", or requiring banks to specify on credit card statements that the card had been used to access internet sites or games, so parents could be warned of their child's activities.

She also said she backed pre-screening of user-generated internet content saying she was glad this was being carried out by MySpace. "It is that kind of responsible action that we are looking for, as it means people can trust a company." Ministers and politicians have been locked in battle with Google, the owners of YouTube, who claim that there is too much material going onto its site for it to be pre-screened.

The proposal for a "take-down" league table is backed by Vaizey. He said: "The government is in a position to put out the information, and it is up to the internet service providers to react to it. If they are happy to be 55th in a league table of take-down times so be it."

Overall, Follett's remarks suggest she will be more interventionist than some other ministers, although she has stressed she favours the internet and largely thinks self-regulation is best option.

She also insisted there was not yet compellingly persuasive evidence of a link between watching violent video games and subsequent acts of violence.

Ministers have just set up a new child internet safety council following the review conducted for the Department of Children, Schools and Families by Dr Tanya Byron, the psychologist.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ernet-children





Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs
Richard Pérez-Peña

Over the last two years, some of this city’s darkest secrets have been dragged into the light — city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, misleading crime statistics.

Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego’s television and radio stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from downtown’s glass towers — a site that did not exist four years ago.

As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.

Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.

Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.

The fledgling movement has reached a sufficient critical mass, its founders think, so they plan to form an association, angling for national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete for singly. And hardly a week goes by without a call from journalists around the country seeking advice about starting their own online news outlets.

“Voice is doing really significant work, driving the agenda on redevelopment and some other areas, putting local politicians and businesses on the hot seat,” said Dean Nelson, director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. “I have them come into my classes, and I introduce them as, ‘This is the future of journalism.’ ”

That is a subject of hot debate among people who closely follow the newspaper industry. Publishing online means operating at half the cost of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is not robust enough to sustain a newsroom.

And so financially, VoiceofSan Diego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience contributions and a little advertising.

New nonprofits without a specific geographic focus also have sprung up to fill other niches, like ProPublica, devoted to investigative journalism, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which looks into problems around the world. A similar group, the Center for Investigative Reporting, dates back three decades.

But some experts question whether a large part of the news business can survive on what is essentially charity, and whether it is wise to lean too heavily on the whims of a few moneyed benefactors.

“These are some of the big questions about the future of the business,” said Robert H. Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Nonprofit news online “has to be explored and experimented with, but it has to overcome the hurdle of proving it can support a big news staff. Even the most well-funded of these sites are a far cry in resources from a city newspaper.”

The people who run the local news sites see themselves as one future among many, and they have a complex relationship with traditional media. The say that the deterioration of those media has created an opening for new sources of news, as well as a surplus of unemployed journalists for them to hire.

“No one here welcomes the decline of newspapers,” said Andrew Donohue, one of two executive editors at VoiceofSanDiego. “We can’t be the main news source for this city, not for the foreseeable future. We only have 11 people.”

Those people are almost all young, some of them refugees from older media. The executive editors, Mr. Donohue, 30, and Scott Lewis, 32, each had a few years of experience at small papers before abandoning newsprint. So far, their audience is tiny, about 18,000 monthly unique visitors, according to Quantcast, a media measurement service.

The biggest of the new nonprofit news sites, MinnPost in the Twin Cities and the St. Louis Beacon, can top 200,000 visitors in a month, but even that is a fraction of the Internet readership for the local newspapers.

VoiceofSanDiego’s site looks much like any newspaper’s, frequently updated with breaking news and organized around broad topics: government and politics, housing, economics, the environment, schools and science. It has few graphics, but plenty of photography and, through a partnership with a local TV station, some video.

But it is, of necessity, thin — strictly local, selective in what it covers and with none of the wire service articles that plump up most news sites.

VoiceofSanDiego grew out of a string of spectacular municipal scandals. City councilmen took bribes from a strip club owner, a mishandled pension fund drove the city to the brink of bankruptcy and city officials illegally covered up the crisis, to name a few.

A semiretired local businessman, Buzz Woolley, watched the parade of revelations, fraud charges and criminal convictions, seething with frustration. He was particularly incensed that the pension debacle had developed over several years, more or less in plain sight, but had received little news coverage.

“I kept thinking, ‘Who’s paying attention?’ ” Mr. Woolley recalled. “Why don’t we hear about this stuff before it becomes a disaster?’ ”

In 2004, his conversations with a veteran columnist, Neil Morgan, who had been fired by The Union-Tribune, led to the creation of VoiceofSanDiego, with Mr. Woolley as president, chief executive and, at first, chief financial backer.

Most of this new breed of news sites have a whiff of scruffy insurgency, but MinnPost, based in Minneapolis, resembles the middle-age establishment. Its founder and chief executive, Joel Kramer, has been the editor and publisher of The Star Tribune, of Minneapolis, and its top editors are refugees from that paper or its rival, The Pioneer Press in St. Paul.

MinnPost is rich compared with its peers — with a $1.5 million bankroll from Mr. Kramer and several others when it started last year, and a $1.3 million annual budget — and it has been more aggressive about selling ads and getting readers to donate.

The full-time editors and reporters earn $50,000 to $60,000 a year, Mr. Kramer said — a living wage, but less than they would make at the competing papers. MinnPost has just five full-time employees, but it uses more than 40 paid freelance contributors, allowing it to do frequent reporting on areas like the arts and sports.

If MinnPost is the establishment, The New Haven Independent is a guerrilla team. It has no office, and holds its meetings in a coffee shop. The founder and editor, Paul Bass, who spent most of his career at an alternative weekly, works from home or, occasionally, borrows a desk at a local Spanish-language newspaper.

In addition to state and city affairs, The Independent covers small-bore local news, lately doing a series of articles on people who face the loss of their homes to foreclosure.

With a budget of just $200,000, it has a small staff — some are paid less than $30,000 — and a small corps of freelancers and volunteer contributors. It does not sell ads, which Mr. Bass says would be impractical.

“There’s room for a whole range of approaches, and we’re living proof that you can do meaningful journalism very cheaply,” Mr. Bass said.

Crosscut.com, a local news site in Seattle, does reporting and commentary of its own, but also aggregates articles from other news sources. It began last year as a business, but is changing to nonprofit status.

VoiceofSanDiego took yet another approach, hiring a crew of young, hungry, full-time journalists, paying them salaries comparable to what they would make at large newspapers and relying less on freelancers. Mr. Donohue and Mr. Lewis earned $60,000 to $70,000 last year, according to the VoiceofSan Diego I.R.S. filings.

On a budget under $800,000 this year — almost $200,000 more than last year — everyone does double duty. Mr. Lewis writes a political column, and Mr. Donohue works on investigative articles. But the operation is growing and Mr. Woolley says he has become convinced that the nonprofit model has the best chance of survival.

“Information is now a public service as much as it’s a commodity,” he said. “It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It’s one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn’t doing it very well.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/bu...8voice.html?hp





District Court Halts Keylogger Spyware Sales
Stephanie Condon

A U.S. District Court has temporarily halted the sale of RemoteSpy keylogger spyware at the request of the Federal Trade Commission, which claims the software violates the FTC Act.

The FTC filed a complaint against Florida-based CyberSpy Software on November 5, alleging the company has violated the FTC Act by selling software that can be deployed remotely by someone other than the owner or authorized user of a computer, can be installed without the owner's knowledge, and can used to surreptitiously collect and disclose personal information. The FTC also claims CyberSpy unfairly collected and stored personal information gathered with RemoteSpy.

In its complaint, the FTC asked the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Orlando Division, to issue a temporary restraining order halting the sale of RemoteSpy while its case is pending, permanently ban the sale of RemoteSpy, and require CyberSpy to pay restitution for any injury to consumers resulting from its violations of the FTC Act.

The court, in its temporary restraining order filed November 6 against CyberSpy, said there is a "substantial likelihood" that the FTC will be able to prove the spyware maker violated the FTC Act.

"The sale and operation of RemoteSpy is likely to cause substantial harm to consumers that cannot be reasonably avoided and is not outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or to competition," the court wrote. "The likely harm includes financial harm (including identity theft) and endangering the health and safety of consumers."

Along with barring CyberSpy from selling RemoteSpy, the restraining order bars the company from disclosing or making available any information obtained through the software. It also requires CyberSpy to ensure any Web sites associated with the product, including www.remotespy.com, are not publicly accessible.

The FTC's complaint names Tracer R. Spence, the registered agent and manager of CyberSpy, as liable for the charges against the spyware maker.

CyberSpy's possible violations were first brought to light to the FTC in a complaint filed in March by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Though other federal agencies have been known to use keylogger software, the FTC has been challenging the distribution of spyware for the past four years.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10099123-38.html





FOIA Docs Show Feds Can Lojack Mobiles Without Telco Help
Julian Sanchez

Courts in recent years have been raising the evidentiary bar law enforcement agents must meet in order to obtain historical cell phone records that reveal information about a target's location. But documents obtained by civil liberties groups under a Freedom of Information Act request suggest that "triggerfish" technology can be used to pinpoint cell phones without involving cell phone providers at all.

Triggerfish, also known as cell-site simulators or digital analyzers, are nothing new: the technology was used in the 1990s to hunt down renowned hacker Kevin Mitnick. By posing as a cell tower, triggerfish trick nearby cell phones into transmitting their serial numbers, phone numbers, and other data to law enforcement. Most previous descriptions of the technology, however, suggested that because of range limitations, triggerfish were only useful for zeroing in on a phone's precise location once cooperative cell providers had given a general location.

This summer, however, the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Justice Department, seeking documents related to the FBI's cell-phone tracking practices. Since August, they've received a stream of documents—the most recent batch on November 6—that were posted on the Internet last week. In a post on the progressive blog Daily Kos, ACLU spokesperson Rachel Myers drew attention to language in several of those documents implying that triggerfish have broader application than previously believed.

As one of the documents intended to provide guidance for DOJ employees explains, triggerfish can be deployed "without the user knowing about it, and without involving the cell phone provider." That may be significant because the legal rulings requiring law enforcement to meet a high "probable cause" standard before acquiring cell location records have, thus far, pertained to requests for information from providers, pursuant to statutes such as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) and the Stored Communications Act.

The Justice Department's electronic surveillance manual explicitly suggests that triggerfish may be used to avoid restrictions in statutes like CALEA that bar the use of pen register or trap-and-trace devices—which allow tracking of incoming and outgoing calls from a phone subject to much less stringent evidentiary standards—to gather location data. "By its very terms," according to the manual, "this prohibition applies only to information collected by a provider and not to information collected directly by law enforcement authorities.Thus, CALEA does not bar the use of pen/trap orders to authorize the use of cell phone tracking devices used to locate targeted cell phones."

Perhaps surprisingly, it's only with the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001 that the government has needed any kind of court order to use triggerfish. While previously, the statutory language governing pen register or trap-and-trace orders did not appear to cover location tracking technology. Under the updated definition, these explicitly include any "device or process which records or decodes dialing, routing, addressing, and signaling information."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...elco-help.html





Digital Images Contain Their Maker's Mark
Paul Marks

IF YOU thought your digital photos could not be traced back to you, think again. It turns out that digital cameras leave a telltale fingerprint buried in the pixels of every image they capture. Now forensic scientists can use this fingerprint to tell what camera model was used to take a shot.

To capture an image, digital cameras use a light-sensitive microchip called a charge-coupled device, or CCD, made up of millions of bucket-like wells filled by electrons. The total charge of each well depends on the amount of light that hits it. Each well is topped by a lens and a colour filter - either red, green or blue - so that a mosaic of three of them provides the information needed to generate one pixel.

To translate this into a usable colour and brightness signal, every camera has built-in "demosaicing" software. This software has to be tailored to a particular camera type to cater for the many peculiarities of each model, including colour filter arrays, CCD chips and lenses. One of the algorithm's tasks is to work out the colour a screen pixel should adopt without jarring with the colours of neighbouring pixels.

Nasir Memon and his team at the Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, New York, have discovered how to work backwards from neighbouring pixel values in a photo to identify the model-specific demosaicing algorithm that created it. Early tests have shown the technique can identify cameras with 90 per cent accuracy.

If it proves viable in further tests, the idea could make a big difference to detective work, says Mark Pollitt, a former FBI crime lab scientist who is now at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He gives the example of a photo of a kidnap victim being emailed to a press agency: "If we can identify the camera, then there is a possibility that we can identify who bought it and where."

If we can identify the camera, we might be able to identify a kidnapper

While many people own the same camera models, Pollitt believes that this technique can still be used forensically. He says that because digital cameras have a shelf life of only 18 months, this can help to narrow down when and where it was sold.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...kers-mark.html





Row Over Altered US Army Photo
AP

The Pentagon has become embroiled in a row after the US Army released a photo of a general to the media which was found to have been digitally altered.

Ann Dunwoody was shown in front of the US flag but it later emerged that this background had been added.

The Associated Press (AP) news agency subsequently suspended the use of US Department of Defense photos.

A Department of Defense spokeswoman insisted that the photo had not violated army policy.

Ms Dunwoody, the highest ranking US female military officer, was recently promoted to become a four-star general.

In an original photo of her, she appears to be sitting at a desk with a bookshelf behind her.

The altered photo, distributed by the army and initially sent by AP to its clients around the world, shows Gen Dunwoody against a background of the stars and stripes.

When the digital alteration was discovered, AP immediately withdrew the photo and began an investigation.

AP says that adjusting photos and other imagery, even for aesthetic reasons, damages the credibility of the information distributed by the military to news organisations and the public.

"For us, there's a zero-tolerance policy of adding or subtracting actual content from an image," said Santiago Lyon, AP's director of photography.

Mr Lyon said AP was developing procedures to protect against further occurrences and, once those steps were in place, it would consider lifting its ban on the use of US Department of Defense photos. He said AP was also discussing the problem with the military.

Colonel Cathy Abbott, chief of the US Army's media relations division, said the Dunwoody photo did not violate army policy that prohibited the editing of an image to misrepresent the facts or change the circumstances of an event.

She added that she did not know who had changed the photo or which office had released it.

"We're not misrepresenting her," Col Abbott said. "The image is still clearly Gen Dunwoody."

Second case

In September, AP banned use of a photo of Darris Dawson, a soldier who was killed in Iraq, in which his face and shoulders appeared to have been digitally altered.

Ms Abbott said Mr Dawson's unit did not have an official photo of him and wanted one that could be used for a memorial service.

"That photo was released to the public strictly by accident," she said. "We apologised for that."

The Dunwoody incident is the latest example of pictures being apparently doctored before being presented to the world's media.

In July, Iran was accused of altering an image of a missile test.

Correspondents say it was an apparent attempt to cover up the fact that one of the missiles had misfired.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7738342.stm





TSA's 'Behavior Detection' Draws Scrutiny in Light of Few Arrests

Counterterrorism effort is crucial, agency says
Thomas Frank

Fewer than 1% of airline passengers singled out at airports for suspicious behavior are arrested, Transportation Security Administration figures show, raising complaints that too many innocent people are stopped.

A TSA program launched in early 2006 that looks for terrorists using a controversial surveillance method has led to more than 160,000 people in airports receiving scrutiny, such as a pat-down search or a brief interview. That has resulted in 1,266 arrests, often on charges of carrying drugs or fake IDs, the TSA said.

The TSA program trains screeners to become "behavior detection officers" who patrol terminals and checkpoints looking for travelers who act oddly or appear to answer questions suspiciously.

Critics say the number of arrests is small and indicates the program is flawed.

"That's an awful lot of people being pulled aside and inconvenienced," said Carnegie Mellon scientist Stephen Fienberg, who studied the TSA program and other counterterrorism efforts. "I think it's a sham. We have no evidence it works."

TSA spokeswoman Ellen Howe said the program has been "incredibly effective" at catching criminals at airports. "It definitely gets at things that other layers of security might miss," Howe said.

In many cases, the extra scrutiny is a casual conversation with a TSA behavior officer that shows someone is innocent, Howe said. Studies are underway that analyze the program's effectiveness, she added.

The program has grown from 43 major airports last year to more than 150 airports, including some with just 20 flights a day. The number of behavior officers will jump from 2,470 to 3,400 by October.

The TSA has not publicly said whether it has caught a terrorist through the program. The agency says that some who are arrested, particularly on fake ID charges, may be scouting for a possible attack.

Some scientists say the TSA effort is just as likely to flag a nervous traveler as a terrorist.

"The use of these technologies for the purpose that the TSA is interested in moves into an area where we don't have proven science," said Robert Levenson, a psychologist at the University of California-Berkeley.

Although observers can perceive whether someone appears anxious or is acting deceptively, they can't tell whether that person is planning an attack or something such as an extramarital affair, Levenson said.

Levenson and Fienberg were part of a National Academy of Sciences team whose report last month said "behavioral surveillance" has "enormous potential for violating" privacy.

The report calls for more research and says surveillance should be used only as "preliminary screening" to find people who merit "follow-up investigation." That is how the TSA uses the program, Howe said.

Paul Ekman, a San Francisco psychologist who helped design the TSA program, said it can be effective, but it needs more study.

"The shortcoming is, we don't know how many people are showing suspicious behaviors and aren't being noticed," Ekman said.
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition...18_dom.art.htm





New York Police Fight U.S. Over Eavesdropping
David Johnston and William K. Rashbaum

An effort by the New York Police Department to get broader latitude to eavesdrop on terrorism suspects has run into sharp resistance from the Justice Department in a bitter struggle that has left the police commissioner and the attorney general accusing each other of putting the public at risk.

The Police Department, with the largest municipal counterterrorism operation in the country, wants the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to loosen their approach to the federal law that governs electronic surveillance. But federal officials have refused to relax the standards, and have said requests submitted by the department could actually jeopardize surveillance efforts by casting doubt on their legality.

Under the law, the government must in most cases obtain a warrant from the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before it can begin electronic monitoring of people suspected of spying or terrorism. The requests are subjected to sharp scrutiny, first by lawyers at the F.B.I., then by lawyers at the Justice Department, and finally by the court itself.

New York’s department, as a local police force, cannot apply directly, but must seek warrants through the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. The police want those agencies to expedite their requests, and say that the federal agencies unfairly blocked the city’s applications for surveillance warrants, first in June and then in September. The disagreement, in which the Bush Justice Department has taken a more cautious approach than police officials, is something of an unexpected twist for an administration that has more often seemed willing to stretch legal boundaries to fight terrorism.

The dispute has played out since midsummer in a highly unusual exchange of letters between Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner, and Michael B. Mukasey, the attorney general, in which each accuses the other of mishandling terrorism cases and embracing an approach that made the public more vulnerable. The letters have not been publicly released.

While the letters do not specifically identify the target of the eavesdropping requests, Mr. Mukasey said that the Police Department had sought authority in one of them to eavesdrop on “numerous communications facilities” without providing an adequate basis for their requests. Some officials who have been briefed on the cases said the requests, from the police Intelligence Division, were unusually broad, and included telephones in public places, like train or subway stations, rather than phones used by a specific individual.

Even in the best of times, the police and the F.B.I.’s New York office can be quarrelsome partners, and current and former officials say the dispute between the two — which share overlapping responsibilities for security in New York — has brought the relationship to a new low.

The inability of the Justice Department to resolve the conflict may mean that the matter ends up in the hands of Eric H. Holder Jr., who is expected to be nominated by President-elect Barack Obama to become the next attorney general. Based on Mr. Obama’s statements during the campaign, it appears unlikely that his administration would adopt a more permissive attitude toward eavesdropping than the Bush administration.

In his five-page letter on Oct. 27, Mr. Kelly wrote to Mr. Mukasey charging that the F.B.I. and Justice Department had thwarted the Police Department’s intelligence efforts in two specific cases. He wrote that federal authorities were “constraining” critical terrorism investigations in New York and said the federal government “is doing less than it is lawfully entitled to protect New York City,” concluding that “the city is less safe as a result.”

Mr. Mukasey, in a seven-page retort, dated Oct. 31, dismissed what he called Mr. Kelly’s “alarming conclusions” as factually incorrect. Mr. Mukasey wrote that Mr. Kelly was in effect proposing that the Justice Department and the F.B.I. disregard the law, as spelled out in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

“Not only would your approach violate the law, it would also in short order make New York City and the rest of the country less safe,” wrote Mr. Mukasey, a federal judge in Manhattan before he became attorney general.

In a statement, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for legal matters, S. Andrew Schaffer, who has advised Mr. Kelly on the matter, said that Mr. Mukasey’s contention that Mr. Kelly had proposed an illegal course of conduct was “preposterous and categorically untrue.”

“We have asserted,” the statement continued, “based on actual cases, that FISA warrants were not sought in a timely manner in part because of a self-imposed standard of probable cause which is higher than that required by Supreme Court precedent.”

On Wednesday evening, the Justice Department issued a statement confirming the exchange of letters “regarding an issue of mutual concern.” The statement said that the two agencies continued to work together effectively and that the Justice Department had taken several steps to improve coordination.

Indeed, a police official said that what he characterized as “this spirited exchange of letters” resulted in “an expediting of the FISA process — in other words, from the Police Department’s view, the desired result.”

The contents of the letters were made known to The New York Times by people who believed the matter should be made public. In addition, 10 people, including some on each side of the debate, agreed to interviews in which they provided details about the dispute but insisted that they not be identified.

The police Intelligence Division makes its requests for eavesdropping warrants through the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, a unit in which F.B.I. agents, police detectives and investigators from other agencies work together. The Intelligence Division and the task force work independently of each other, a situation that has been at the heart of the worsening relationship.

Mr. Mukasey said in his letter that he had personally investigated two cases Mr. Kelly had said were behind his complaints and wrote that he had been “unable to have a meaningful conversation” with the commissioner when the two discussed the issue in a July 25 telephone call because “you were not versed on the facts.”

An independent effort to investigate the dispute was undertaken in recent months by the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board, a panel of high-level business executives, former intelligence and foreign policy experts appointed by President Bush.

The board’s review concluded that both local and federal officials were sometimes confused about important aspects of the law and recommended more training and better coordination.

The clash comes at a potentially significant moment for Mr. Kelly. Some officials suggested the letter was a way for Mr. Kelly to announce his availability for a high-level job in the Obama administration, possibly secretary of homeland security. His name has circulated as a possible candidate, but associates have denied that Mr. Kelly is seeking a job in Washington, although they have been unwilling to say he would decline to take one.

The forceful response from Mr. Mukasey, a well-regarded jurist brought to Washington last year to restore credibility and ballast to the Bush administration’s beleaguered Justice Department, was more remarkable coming from an official known for his bland public pronouncements and keeping a low profile. In the 1990s, as a federal judge, Mr. Mukasey presided over the longest and most complex terrorism trial ever presented in a United States court in which Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman was convicted of conspiring to wage war against the United States.

In his letter, Mr. Kelly said that the Police Department’s efforts to use the national security law had been tangled in bureaucratic confusion. “On September 15, for instance,” he wrote, “the most senior F.B.I. officials in New York informed N.Y.P.D. that predication for a particular FISA warrant could not be established with available evidence only to learn a few hours later that the application had been approved on an emergency basis.”

But in his letter, Mr. Mukasey blamed the Police Department for delays. “For example, in one of the cases you cite in your letter, the N.Y.P.D. failed to disclose relevant information about investigative steps it had taken in connection with a terrorism suspect. This failure delayed our ability to seek FISA coverage from the court.”

Mr. Kelly complained that Justice Department lawyers imposed a needlessly high standard to be certain that every surveillance application submitted to the court would be approved. “Intelligence collection operations against potential terrorist threats to the homeland often involve considerable uncertainty,” he wrote. “D.O.J. should not hesitate to present judges with close cases. Some requests for warrants will inevitably be denied.”

But Mr. Mukasey said that submitting such cases to the court would be a mistake. “The less the FISA court comes to trust the validity of the applications, the more inclined the judges will be to impose on all applications the kind of scrutiny that doubtful applications merit, which of course takes more time and causes more delay because the court’s resources are limited,” he said. “The greater the delay, the fewer the applications can be processed and granted within a given time. The fewer successful FISA applications, the less intelligence can be gathered. The less intelligence gathered, the greater the danger to all Americans, including New Yorkers. That is not a complex formula.”

Nearly 150 Police Department detectives work with a like number of F.B.I. agents and roughly 100 others from nearly four dozen other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, several officials said. At the same time, the Police Department’s Intelligence Division has several hundred other detectives working separately, running a sweeping network of informants and collecting a mass of intelligence aimed at forestalling another attack in New York.

The Intelligence Division is run by David Cohen, a former top Central Intelligence Agency official who holds the rank of deputy commissioner and is often a vocal and unapologetic critic of the F.B.I. Indeed, the Police Department and the C.I.A. are two agencies that often seem to have contempt for the F.B.I., even as investigators work together on many cases.

Tensions between the task force and the Intelligence Division detectives, according to a number of investigators and officials in both agencies, have become intense and in some instances, of significant concern. The detectives have sought to infiltrate some of the same groups singled out by the task force and collect information in some of the same mosques, bookstores and other locations without notifying the task force, the investigators and officials said.

At the same time, morale on the task force, where few agents have more than five years’ experience, and supervisors not much more, is extremely low, officials said. Many rookie and veteran agents are loath to work on its squads because of excessive red tape and what they view as few opportunities for advancement, investigators and officials said.

The Intelligence Division under Mr. Cohen has come under criticism in the past for its surveillance activity and has been mired in litigation over its extensive undercover investigation of political groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention. It long worked under a 1985 consent decree, stemming from a lawsuit over harassment of political advocacy groups, that restricted its ability to conduct such surveillance. The terms of the decree were changed in 2003 as a result of the 2001 terror attacks.

David Johnston reported from Washington, and William K. Rashbaum from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/wa...terror.html?hp





Rolling surveillance

Ponca City Announces World Class Wireless Network
Press release

"Our goal is to be one of the most mobile communities in America, and this is a significant step in that direction" ,said Homer Nicholson, Mayor of Ponca City. "Seventy-five percent of the Citys staff performs duties outside an office. So this network is an important productivity tool for our employees. And the enhanced communications mean improved safety and service for our residents, and reduced costs for the City."

This project was constructed under a contract with Honeywell, Inc., which implemented a broadband mesh network – comprised of more than 490 wireless nodes and gateways from Tropos Networks that will provide coverage for approximately 60 square miles of Ponca City. The mesh network offers the City reliability and redundancy through its self-healing capabilities; meaning if one radio node becomes unavailable, the network automatically routes wireless signals to a different node, ensuring uninterrupted service.

Nearly every City department, including police, fire and emergency, parks and recreation, public works and energy, will have applications to leverage the new network. Once online, City employees will gain remote access to programs, files and information, which will help the City improve safety and security, expedite reporting, reduce paperwork and improve communications.

For example, the City is installing wireless video cameras in police vehicles, so precinct dispatchers and supervisors can monitor activities during traffic stops, and quickly deploy additional officers and resources if necessary. Police officers can also instantly connect to online databases when making a routine traffic stop to check for outstanding warrants or to determine whether a vehicle is stolen – further increasing officer and public safety.

"We explored various wireless options for more than five years", said Craige Baird, Technology Services Director for the City of Ponca City. "When Honeywell combined its installation and service expertise with the Tropos technology, we knew this was the right solution. It met all our requirements for public safety, as well as for the rest of our departments."

To top it all off - the City is offering residents and business in the coverage area free high-speed Internet access! Ponca City Free WiFi is a FREE Wireless Internet Service being offered to Ponca City residents and businesses, as part of an ongoing effort to meet the ever changing needs of our hometown! "The applications for this network are nearly limitless," said Gary Martin, City Manager for the City of Ponca City. "This project will improve our ability to better serve the community. It gives us an advantage as we attract new business to the area, boosting our economic development efforts and helping provide a more livable community for our youth after college and our seniors upon retirement."

Baird enthusiastically agrees to the countless applications now available, stating "With a Wi-Fi-enabled device, you can get access to the internet for free by accessing Ponca City Free WiFi almost anywhere in Ponca City. Once connected you can check your email while watching a sporting event or you can connect to the internet to look up a recipe while waiting to pick up your child from school, check the weather radar while fishing on Lake Ponca, or check the caloric content of different menu items while ordering at a restaurant."

Wi-Fi is a trade name for this popular wireless technology used in home networks, mobile networks, and electronic devices, like laptops and iPhones that utilize this type of wireless network to connect to the internet or to a private network. Nicholson stated, "This technology became available in Ponca City after the outdoor wireless network was installed to provide field communications for City services, in order to improve worker efficiencies and level of service for customers. However, the testing of this network showed that it was robust enough to handle not only municipal traffic, but also citizens traffic." Nicholson continued, "So the Ponca City Board of Commissioners voted to allow the extra internet access to be given to the citizens of Ponca City for free! Ponca City is the first municipality in Oklahoma to provide this community service to its citizens. Few cities worldwide provide this service, especially at this coverage and speed."

"Using innovative technology to create safer, more secure and productive environments is a cornerstone of our work,” said Paul Orzeske, President of Honeywell Building Solutions. "Having city-wide wireless broadband puts Ponca City in a select league, making the city a better place for people to live and do business, and creating a foundation for a more connected future. The broadband network is currently online. Honeywell and Ponca City are working on a second phase of the project, which will expand the network and wireless coverage to more than 700 square miles, including hard-to-reach areas such as Kaw Lake."

"In taking the step of building a wireless IP foundation, Ponca City has demonstrated its leadership and commitment towards achieving its vision of becoming one of the most mobile communities in the country", said Tom Ayers, president and CEO of Tropos. "Ponca City joins the Tropos family of over 500 other municipalities who are using city-owned, communication infrastructure to make their communities greener, smarter, and safer."

Other potential uses for the broadband network:Emergency responders can send vital information from the ambulance to the emergency room, so doctors can begin advising on trauma care and better prepare for patients to arrive. And building inspectors can quickly access records and input data into their laptops while working in the field to generate permits without traveling back to the office reducing fuel costs and increasing site inspections per day.
http://www.myponcacity.com/cms/City-...ssrelease.aspx





Early Test for Obama on Domestic Spying Views
James Risen and Eric Lichtblau

President-elect Barack Obama will face a series of early decisions on domestic spying that will test his administration’s views on presidential power and civil liberties.

The Justice Department will be asked to respond to motions in legal challenges to the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program, and must decide whether to continue the tactics used by the Bush administration — which has used broad claims of national security and “state secrets” to try to derail the challenges — or instead agree to disclose publicly more information about how the program was run.

When he takes office, Mr. Obama will inherit greater power in domestic spying power than any other new president in more than 30 years, but he may find himself in an awkward position as he weighs how to wield it. As a presidential candidate, he condemned the N.S.A. operation as illegal, and threatened to filibuster a bill that would grant the government expanded surveillance powers and provide immunity to phone companies that helped in the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants. But Mr. Obama switched positions and ultimately supported the measure in the Senate, angering liberal supporters who accused him of bowing to pressure from the right.

Advisers to Mr. Obama appear divided over whether he should push forcefully to investigate the operations of the wiretapping program, which was run in secret from September 2001 until December 2005.

Mr. Obama recently started receiving classified briefings on intelligence operations from Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence. The Obama transition team declined to say whether Mr. Obama had been briefed on the agency’s eavesdropping operations.

His transition team also declined requests to discuss his current views on domestic surveillance or how his administration would respond to legal challenges growing out of it. But there has been no shortage of debate among lawyers involved in the challenges to the program.

“I don’t think President-elect Obama embraces Dick Cheney’s theory of unfettered presidential power,” said Jon B. Eisenberg, a San Francisco lawyer involved in one lawsuit against the wiretapping program. “So if President-elect Obama doesn’t embrace that theory, one would expect a change in the direction of how the new administration handles this litigation.”

But other legal and political analysts suggest that Mr. Obama, as president, may be more willing to accept the broadened presidential powers that he once condemned as a candidate, particularly since Congress has approved expanded surveillance powers for the government.

In the proposal in June that Mr. Obama ultimately voted to support, Congress set up a new surveillance framework that gave intelligence officials much broader authority to eavesdrop on international communications without prior court approval.

One of the first clues of how the Obama administration will deal with the issue of domestic surveillance may come in a court case in Alexandria, Va., where a judge has ordered the Justice Department to turn over material from the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies on possible eavesdropping on Ali al-Timimi, an Islamic leader convicted of supporting terrorism. The Justice Department has never acknowledged that it has used intercepts from the N.S.A. program in any criminal or civil case, which could be unlawful because the wiretaps were conducted without court warrants.

Mr. Timimi has claimed that he did not get a fair trial because prosecutors secretly used N.S.A. wiretaps in his case, and he also argues that the government has turned over to the court only intercepted conversations that make him look guilty, while withholding those that might prove he is innocent. A recently unsealed transcript, citing a closed hearing, strongly suggests that the wiretaps were used in Mr. Timimi’s criminal trial.

“We believe that the undisclosed interceptions already uncovered in this case are serious and knowing violations of federal law,” said Jonathan Turley, a lawyer for Mr. Timimi.

Meanwhile, an Islamic charity in Oregon that had its assets frozen by the Treasury Department on the ground that it was also supporting terrorism is pushing ahead with a lawsuit of its own. The Obama administration must decide whether to continue to use the state-secrets privilege in order to block the disclosure of information about any N.S.A. eavesdropping.

The charity, Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, is charging, based in part on a classified document that the government mistakenly gave to its lawyers, that it was the target of wiretapping without warrants. Lawyers for the group say they believe that the N.S.A. listened illegally not only to the international phone calls of members of the charity itself, but also to the calls of two of its lawyers in Washington.

Mr. Eisenberg, a lawyer for Al-Haramain, said the Justice Department had frustrated efforts to develop evidence in the case both by invoking the state-secrets claim and by refusing to grant security clearances to some members of the charity’s legal team.
“In every way, they’ve stonewalled us, and the new administration can change all that,” Mr. Eisenberg said. “They can take the blindfolds off.”

In perhaps the most critical test, civil liberties groups that are suing major phone companies that took part in the N.S.A. program are waiting to find out whether a federal judge will throw out the lawsuits based on immunity granted by Congress in June.
The Justice Department has already moved to take advantage of the immunity provision by certifying in court that the phone companies were complying with a presidential order. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that has taken the lead in the lawsuit, maintains that Congress acted beyond its powers.

A hearing is set for Dec. 2. Cindy Cohn, legal director for the foundation, said that as the case moved forward the new administration could act to withdraw the immunity certification made by the Bush Justice Department.

“Nothing will be over by Jan. 20,” when Mr. Obama is inaugurated, Ms. Cohn said.

The Obama Justice Department will inherit the litigation in all of those cases, and some of the defense lawyers involved in the cases may try to force legal action that could tip the hand of the new administration.

Mr. Timimi’s lawyers may soon file a new challenge, ensuring that a new attorney general would have to decide almost immediately on taking office how to respond.

But at least one Obama legal adviser said that new administrations often faced complex decisions on whether to change course in the middle of continuing legal matters.

“It’s not always an easy thing for the office of legal counsel or the solicitor general on when to change a position,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School who taught Mr. Obama when he was a law student there.

Another early decision facing the administration will be whether to work with the Democratic-controlled Congress to investigate the Bush administration officials who approved and ran the wiretapping program. While Congress gave the telecommunications companies legal immunity, it did not extend immunity to administration officials.

Some Democratic lawmakers have said they would like to conduct a more thorough investigation than was possible during Mr. Bush’s tenure, but other Democratic advisers say they see little gain from trying to investigate past abuses and that an investigation risks harming the bipartisan spirit of cooperation that Mr. Obama has promised.

Since the election, Mr. Obama has not said whether his administration would engage in such inquiries of his predecessor’s government.

But Mr. Obama was one of only 15 senators who voted against the confirmation of Michael V. Hayden as director of the Central Intelligence Agency in May 2006, largely because of Mr. Hayden’s role as director of the N.S.A. when the wiretapping program was begun. At the time, Mr. Obama called Mr. Hayden a “troublesome choice” for C.I.A. director, and said he was “voting against Mr. Hayden in the hope that he will be more humble before the great weight of responsibility that he has not only to protect our lives but to protect our democracy.”

During the general election campaign, Mr. Obama’s aides offered cautious statements about whether he believed any investigations of past administration actions would be appropriate.

In an interview last summer, Gregory B. Craig, who is Mr. Obama’s pick for White House counsel, said that Mr. Obama believed that Mr. Bush had abused his power by authorizing wiretapping without warrants. “The idea that the president can do almost anything that he deems necessary in the name of his war powers or national security, there is nothing in the Constitution that supports that, and it goes against 200 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence,” Mr. Craig said.

Some senior Democratic lawmakers are reluctant to comment now on whether they will pursue investigations of the wiretapping program or other Bush administration actions.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and a former federal prosecutor who now sits on the Judiciary and Intelligence committees, responded cautiously Friday when asked whether the Senate might investigate the program.

“I expect Congress will work with the Obama administration to assure the American people that their government will not go down this unlawful path again,” Mr. Whitehouse said, adding that he was awaiting the results of an investigation of the N.S.A. program by the Justice Department inspector general and ethics office.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/wa.../18nsa.html?hp





New AG Choice Advocated To Stifle Speech On Web
Kerry Picket

In April 1999, the Columbine High School massacre happened. The shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, reportedly learned how to construct sophisticated bombs through their internet activity. This discovery caused then Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to say the following (audio uploaded at Eyeblast.tv:)

The court has really struck down every government effort to try to regulate it. We tried with regard to pornography. It is gonna be a difficult thing, but it seems to me that if we can come up with reasonable restrictions, reasonable regulations in how people interact on the Internet, that is something that the Supreme Court and the courts ought to favorably look at. – May 28, 1999 NPR Morning Edition

As tragic as Columbine was, Holder’s reaction to stifle free speech on the internet is nonetheless disturbing. Combine his zeal for what he may consider “reasonable regulations” along with his advocacy for a federal hate crime law(H/T to National Review), and internet users may find themselves in a world of legal woe after the Obama administration takes over in January.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/kerry-p...fle-speech-web





Secure OS Gets Highest NSA Rating, Goes Commercial

Unlike existing commercial OSes, Integrity OS is designed and certified to defend against sophisticated attacks
Kelly Jackson Higgins

An operating system used in military fighter planes has raised the bar for system security as a new commercial offering.

After receiving the highest security rating by a National Security Agency (NSA)-run certification program, Green Hills Software has announced that its Integrity-178B operating system was certified as EAL6+ and that the company had spun off a subsidiary to market the OS to the private sector as well as government agencies.

"[EAL6+] is the highest [rating] in the world [given to an OS so far today]. This means that the OS was designed and certified to defend against well-funded and sophisticated attackers," says David Chandler, CEO of Integrity Global Security, the new Green Hills subsidiary.

Windows and Linux, meanwhile, are EAL 4+ certified, which means they can defend against "inadvertent and casual" security breach attempts, Chandler says. Integrity-178 B meets the rigorous Common Criteria Separation Kernel Protection Profile (SKPP) standard, which guarantees that malicious code can't corrupt or harm any other application running on the system.

"I'm delighted that they have accomplished this," said Stephen Hanna, co-chair of the Trusted Computing group and distinguished engineer with Juniper Networks, during his keynote at the CSI 2008 conference in National Harbor, Md., Tuesday. "This is serious security."

The OS, which was first deployed in the B1B bomber in 1997, today runs in military and commercial aircraft, including the F-16, F-22, and F-35 military jets, and the Airbus 380 and Boeing 787 airplanes. "It was developed for the highest level of security and reliability," Chandler says. "It's designed to provide a separation, so that what's happening in one area of the computer will not hurt the other part of the OS."

Popular operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, and MacOS, can run atop Integrity-178B, basically as virtual "guests" on the OS, while Integrity runs in hardware. Each operates in its own partition so that if one area is compromised, it can't spread to other areas of the system. "If a hacker got in past the firewall, intrusion detection system, and through Linux," he couldn't get anywhere else in the system, Chandler says.

The OS can run as the sole OS or on servers and clients running Windows, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, and VxWorks, as well as on Palm OS and Symbian PDA's.

Why go commercial now with the hardened OS? Integrity's Chandler says enterprises have been ready for "quite some time" for a more secure operating system. The system and its associated integration and consulting services are custom solutions, says Chandler, who declined to reveal pricing details for that reason.

But whether enterprises will have room in their budgets for hardening their OS environments is unclear as the global financial crisis worsens.

Chandler maintains that locking down the OS saves money for security in the long run. "There's an opportunity that this [solution] could be a cost savings for enterprises, with all that is spent on intrusion prevention" and other security tools and efforts, he says.

Meanwhile, Neil MacDonald, vice president and fellow at Gartner, says partitioning is key to ensuring the security of data and represents the foundation of Gartner's Adaptive Security Infrastructure vision. "Security software running on the same physical machine as the workloads and information it is protecting can't be unequivocally trusted without strong isolation, high assurance, and resiliency of the software," he says.
http://www.darkreading.com/security/...leID=212100421





Pentagon Hit by Unprecedented Cyber Attack

Bans outboard drives

The Pentagon has suffered from a cyber attack so alarming that it has taken the unprecedented step of banning the use of external hardware devices, such as flash drives and DVD's, FOX News has learned.

The attack came in the form of a global virus or worm that is spreading rapidly throughout a number of military networks.

"We have detected a global virus for which there has been alerts, and we have seen some of this on our networks," a Pentagon official told FOX News. "We are now taking steps to mitigate the virus."

The official could not reveal the source of the attack because that information remains classified.

"Daily there are millions of scans of the GIG, but for security reasons we don't discuss the number of actual intrusions or attempts, or discuss specific measures commanders in the field may be taking to protect and defend our networks," the department said in an official statement.

Military computers are often referred to as part of the Global Information Grid, or GIG, a system composed of 17 million computers, many of which house classified or sensitive information.

FOX News obtained a copy of one memo sent out last week to an Army division within the Pentagon warning of the cyber attack.

"Due to the presence of commercial malware, CDR USSTRATCOM has banned the use of removable media (thumb drives, CDRs/DVDRs, floppy disks) on all DoD networks and computers effective immediately."

FOX News' Justin Fishel and Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2008...dented-attack/





10 Answers to Your Questions About Botnets

Michael Kassner recently asked TechRepublic members to submit questions about botnets, promising to forward them to the experts at Arbor Networks. Dr. Jose Nazario volunteered to provide the following informative answers.

Note: This information is also available as a PDF download.

#1: Could you define what a bot or zombie is and how they become part of a botnet?

A botnet is a collection of machines that have been compromised by software installed by the attacker so that they now respond to commands sent by the attacker. This malcode can be installed by exploits on the base OS (e.g., as in the Sasser worm), through browser exploits, or through Trojan horse activities such as fake games or pornography codecs.

#2: What are botnets used for — are they profitable?

Botnets are used by the attackers for a wide variety of tactics: spamming, hosting phishing sites, harvesting information from the infected PCs for use or resale (such as credit card or banking information), denial of service for pay or extortion, adware installations, etc. The botnet is a platform for the criminal underground, providing unfettered access to the compromised PC and its resources — disk, bandwidth, IP reputation, personal information, etc. — for the attacker. It’s a way to load arbitrary software onto the machine, as well as to pull arbitrary information off of the machine.

We see botnets used all over the world: the United States, Europe, Russia and the Ukraine, China, Korea, Japan, South America — all over. The main motivations in the past few years have become monetary, as opposed to curiosity or joy riding.

#3: If I understand correctly, there are different command and control philosophies used by botnets. Could you explain how they work and their effectiveness?

The two main types of command and control structures used by botnets are a centralized mechanism and a decentralized, peer-to-peer mechanism. There is also a third, hybrid approach. Command and control refers to the server(s) that the infected hosts, the bots, contact to receive new commands from the attacker.

IRC botnets are the classic centralized structure, with one or more single IRC servers acting as the main hub. This is still the most popular way to run a botnet, using IRC, HTTP, or other protocols with a single hub. The storm worm used a hybrid approach, where it would pass messages to other bots using P2P, but it would use a central set of servers for files and updates. Finally, the Nugache botnet is the biggest and most well known true P2P botnet.

Obviously, if you can take one server out and disrupt a botnet, that is the most desirable way to approach it. If we take out the hubs of the botnet, the bots are still infected but not acting on commands. P2P botnets are far harder to disrupt and shut down.

#4: Are all operating systems equally vulnerable to rootkits? Is there any advantage to using one operating system versus another?

Almost all commonly available operating systems — Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Windows — are vulnerable to rootkits, either kernel-mode or user-land rootkits. These can be used to hide processes or files from the user. In the end, given that all systems have flaws and can be attacked, the only advantage one OS has over another is the research time devoted to it by an attacker.

#5: My computer’s CPU usage is more than 50%, and outgoing network activity is far from normal, so I suspect my computer may be part of a botnet. How can I confirm this?

AV scans can be of some help, through a number of means, assuming it’s up to date. First, if you can scan with multiple scanners, this can make a significant difference in the detection rates. This can be easily done with free online AV scanners, as every major AV vendor has them.

Second, scan with something like a rootkit detector to see if a rootkit has been installed; this is usually not a major source of traffic and CPU usage, but would indicate malware infections that may be hidden from AV or manual inspection.

Third, look at your external IP using a check my IP service and then query a tool to see if the IP address is blacklisted for spamming. This is another sign than your system is infected and is a spam bot. The tools at Robtex can be very helpful at this.

Finally, a tool like Trend Micro’s RUBotted can help spot some signs of botnet participation. All of these tools can be used freely. But always be wary of software that claims to be free until it charges you a sum to clean up your system; that’s usually a scam product.

#6: I’ve heard that rootkit scanners aren’t effective. Is that true? If scanners are effective only for certain types of rootkits, how do I know which ones to use? Which scanners would you recommend?

They’re somewhat effective, but they’re being defeated by newer rootkits. GMer is one of the better rootkit scanners. It is kept up to date with new techniques and appears to address almost all common rootkits.

#7: I thought my computer was protected by a firewall and antivirus program, yet the computer became infected with Rustock.B and ultimately a member of some botnet. I was told my only option was to completely rebuild the computer. I did, but what if anything can I do to prevent my computer from getting rooted again?

Keep up to date with AV software, keep updated on patches, don’t run as Administrator (or with equivalent permissions), and run a personal firewall. If possible, if you’re running Windows, run Vista, which does much of this for you. If not, use XP SP2. Make sure that your AV is enabled for e-mail and Web browsing.

#8: I’m a systems administrator for a typical company network. I assume that there’s more risk, just from the sheer number of computers. Is there any information I can pass on to the users (especially mobile workers) that will minimize the risk?

Mobile workers are probably the most susceptible, as they enter hostile networks (e.g., the broadband networks they may use at home). They should be told to not ignore software updates, keep their AV updated, and not to cancel such updates or to disable such software. The benefits of these simple hygienic approaches can’t be understated.

#9: Could you suggest any good sources of information related to rootkits and botnets (Web sites, forums, RSS feeds) that would allow me to stay current?

I maintain a website, InfosecDaily that covers some of the better blogs and news sites. It’s freely available. I also recommend a handful of major sites:

• The F-Secure blog is very good and timely.
• Obviously, I’m pleased with Arbor Network’s ASERT blog.
• The filtered news stream from Team Cymru is also very good, selecting the best and most important stories of the day.

I use an RSS reader to fetch and maintain my news; RSS is vital to simplifying your daily news digestion in this business!

#10: From all that I’ve read, it appears as though there’s very little I can do to prevent my computer from becoming a member of some botnet. Is that really the case?

I don’t think so; I feel this is a winnable battle. The best things you can do are to keep your software updated; the base OS, your browser (most important), and any add-ons. Most bots and malcode get in by using well known vulnerabilities.

The next best thing to do is to keep your AV software updated; most people don’t update their AV software — hourly or even daily, in some cases — and have no real benefit from it as a result. Finally, a good anti-spam filter can do wonders to prevent threats via e-mail.
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=448





Mark Cuban Is Charged With Insider Trading
Michael J. de la Merced and Floyd Norris

As anyone who follows the National Basketball Association knows, Mark Cuban, the Internet entrepreneur turned owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, has never shied from a fight. But now the pugnacious billionaire is squaring off against his biggest adversary yet: the federal government.

On Monday, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil suit charging Mr. Cuban with insider trading for selling shares of a small Internet search company in 2004, just before its share price fell.

Mr. Cuban saved himself a $750,000 loss, according to the complaint filed in United States District Court in Dallas.

Mr. Cuban swiftly fired back, accusing the regulator of “prosecutorial misconduct” and alleging that he was the victim of a political vendetta by the agency in the waning days of the Bush administration.

“I am disappointed that the commission chose to bring this case based upon its enforcement staff’s win-at-any-cost ambitions,” Mr. Cuban said. “The staff’s process was result-oriented, facts be damned.”

Since he bought the Mavericks in 2000 with money he earned by selling his start-up, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo for $5.9 billion before the dot-com crash, Mr. Cuban has become one of the biggest lightning rods in American professional sports. From his seat behind the Mavericks bench, clad in his signature team gear, he has not hesitated in picking arguments, and has paid nearly $1.7 million in fines to the N.B.A.

(After once saying he would not hire the N.B.A.’s chief of referees to “manage a Dairy Queen,” Mr. Cuban paid a $500,000 fine — and spent a day at a Dairy Queen serving Blizzards to fans.)

But he also turned around a flagging franchise, attracting star players and helping to bring the Mavericks to the brink of an N.B.A. championship in 2006.

Mike Bass, an N.B.A. spokesman, declined to comment.

The charges could pose a problem for his dreams of a burgeoning sports empire. Mr. Cuban is widely reported to be the lead bidder for the Chicago Cubs baseball team, but he is thought to be too hot to handle by many of Major League Baseball’s current owners. The insider-trading lawsuit may only make his quest for the baseball team more difficult to fulfill.

At issue in the S.E.C.’s lawsuit is Mr. Cuban’s sale in June 2004 of shares in Mamma.com, a small Internet search engine based in Canada, whose corporate name is now Copernic.

Mr. Cuban had purchased 600,000 shares, or a 6.3 percent stake, just three months earlier as the stock was soaring. The share price tripled over a two-day period in early March on volume that totaled more than 12 times the number of outstanding shares. That prompted an S.E.C. investigation that ended without charges being filed.

Scott W. Friestad, the S.E.C.’s deputy director of enforcement, said the investigation of Mr. Cuban’s trading began in early 2007, but declined to say what had set off the inquiry.

On June 28, 2004, Mr. Cuban called Mamma.com’s chief executive after receiving an e-mail message from the executive, who told him of a planned stock offering and asked if he would like to invest. Such offerings often depress share prices, at least temporarily.

According to the complaint, Mr. Cuban was told the information was confidential.

After the conversation, the chief executive wrote to the company’s chairman in an e-mail message: “As anticipated, he initially ‘flew off the handle’ and said he would sell his shares (recognizing that he was not able to do anything until we announce the equity).”

But within minutes of the call Mr. Cuban began selling his shares, and completed the sales on June 29, according to the lawsuit, fetching an average of $13.24 a share. The next day, after the offering was announced, Mamma.com stock opened at $11.89, sparing him a $750,000 loss. By July 8, the shares had plummeted to $8. On Monday, the stock closed at 28 cents.

“Mamma.com entrusted Mr. Cuban with nonpublic information after he promised to keep the information confidential,” Mr. Friestad said. “Less than four hours later, Mr. Cuban betrayed that trust by placing an order to sell all of his shares. It is fundamentally unfair for someone to use access to nonpublic information to improperly gain an edge on the market.”

In a press release (and in a post on his blog), Mr. Cuban accused the S.E.C. of being “infected by the misconduct of the staff of its enforcement division,” but did not discuss details of the suit.

A person close to Mr. Cuban provided what he said was one of a series of e-mail messages from Jeffrey B. Norris, an S.E.C. lawyer in Fort Worth, who accused the billionaire of being unpatriotic for helping to finance a movie named “Loose Change.” In the e-mail message, Mr. Norris described the movie as a “vicious and absurd documentary” that “posits that President Bush planned the demolition of the World Trade Center as a pretext for going to war against Iraq.”

In the e-mail message, sent from his S.E.C. e-mail address, Mr. Norris said he was informing Christopher Cox, the chairman of the S.E.C., of Mr. Cuban’s actions.

“If this upsets you, I wonder how George Bush feels,” Mr. Norris wrote. “I assume that Mr. Cox would view your involvement with ‘Loose Change’ much as I do. After all, he served his country as a Republican congressman from Orange County for nearly 20 years and was appointed by President Bush.”

An S.E.C. spokesman said that Mr. Norris had no role in or knowledge of the Mamma.com investigation, which was handled by the S.E.C. in Washington.

He said the e-mail matter was “referred for disciplinary action,” but did not say what action, if any, was taken against Mr. Norris. Mr. Norris did not return a phone call.

The S.E.C. spokesman said Mr. Cox had recused himself when the commission voted to approve filing the complaint. The S.E.C. has the authority to bring only civil suits, not criminal complaints. The Justice Department can file criminal insider-trading charges, but does so only rarely and did not in this case. Mr. Cuban presumably could have settled the S.E.C. case by paying the $750,000 and perhaps an additional penalty, and accepting an injunction barring him from further violations of securities laws.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/bu...18insider.html





Why Apple Won't Allow Adobe Flash on iPhone
Brian X. Chen

Don't hold your breath waiting for the iPhone to support Adobe's Flash software: Apple's terms-of-service agreement prohibits it.

Although Adobe says it is working on a version of its popular Flash player for the iPhone, Apple is unlikely ever to permit it to appear in the handset's App Store, no matter how much customers want it.

"I'm pretty skeptical that Flash could be implemented in a way that doesn't violate the Terms of Service of the developer's agreement," said Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous, developer of the popular Tap Tap Revenge iPhone game.

Flash is Adobe's highly popular platform for displaying interactive graphics, animations and multimedia within a browser. According to Adobe, 98 percent of desktop computers currently support Flash, which has led to its widespread use by web developers. Adobe's recent announcement that it is working on a version of Flash for Windows Mobile has prompted speculation that an iPhone version might be coming soon. But the speculators may be waiting in vain, based on Apple's TOS and the company's history of tightly controlling applications for its smartphone platform.

Allowing Flash — which is a development platform of its own — would just be too dangerous for Apple, a company that enjoys exerting total dominance over its hardware and the software that runs on it. Flash has evolved from being a mere animation player into a multimedia platform capable of running applications of its own. That means Flash would open a new door for application developers to get their software onto the iPhone: Just code them in Flash and put them on a web page. In so doing, Flash would divert business from the App Store, as well as enable publishers to distribute music, videos and movies that could compete with the iTunes Store.

Apple's well aware of these problems, which is why the company wrote a clause in its iPhone developers' Terms of Service agreement that prohibits Flash from appearing on the iPhone:

"An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise," reads clause 3.3.2 of the iPhone SDK agreement, which was recently published on WikiLeaks. "No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."

This could come as major disappointment to iPhone owners, as the lack of Flash support has been a paramount complaint about the handset since its release. No Flash means that the iPhone browser is incapable of displaying a large portion of the internet. For example, free Flash games aren't supported, videos can't be streamed from the vastly popular television and movie site Hulu, and websites that use Flash to render content or navigation won't work on the iPhone.

It's no wonder Adobe is expressing reluctance about the prospects of Flash for iPhone. The company on Monday demonstrated a version of Flash for Windows Mobile handsets. And all that product manager Michele Turner could say about iPhone was, "We are working on Flash on the iPhone, but it is really up to Apple."

Adam Dann, CEO of Nullriver, agrees that Flash would take away some of Apple's control. Apple eventually banned Nullriver's application NetShare because it violated AT&T Terms of Service agreement by turning the iPhone into a wireless modem for tethering. If Apple introduced Flash to iPhone, it's possible Nullriver could code a Flash version of NetShare, repeating that violation, Dann said.

Dann added that the only way Flash could ever appear on the iPhone is if Adobe offered an extremely stripped-down version of the software. But even if there is a "Flash Lite" for iPhone, that just reinforces the point that the handset's owners still will not have a true Flash experience.

And aside from taking software control away from Apple, Flash would introduce a slew of other potential headaches as well. Flash apps could hurt battery life, suck up the graphics-processing unit's power, use an inordinate amount of memory, or potentially introduce security risks. Apple has plenty of customer complaints to address about the iPhone; the last thing it needs is to add Adobe and Flash to the pile.

In August, Britain's Advertising Standards Authority pulled an iPhone advertisement because the commercial said, "All the parts of the internet are on the iPhone." The lack of Flash and Java support on iPhone were enough for the ad to be deemed misleading. And it's looking like Apple won't be able to air that ad again.

Apple did not return phone calls for comment
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/1...-flash-on.html





German Wikipedia Back Online After Legal Dispute
AP

The German-language version of the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia is back online after a left-wing lawmaker dropped a legal complaint.

Luebeck state court had ordered the site shut down over the weekend after Left Party lawmaker Lutz Heilmann claimed the entry about him contained false allegations.

Court documents say Heilmann objected to the entry's claims that he once threatened a former partner and that he had not been open about his past with East Germany's secret Stasi police.

Heilmann told the Associated Press he did not want to cut off Wikipedia users, but wanted these "points removed."

The article has deleted the disputed passages, and the court said today that Heilmann withdrew his complaint.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





FHA Seller-Funded Down-payment Outfit Sues

Note: ML-Implode's existence is once again threatened by the costs of legal defense. Free speech isn't free; please do consider helping us out.

Press release

Opposition To Injunction and Temporary Restraining Order Filed

On October 7, 2008, the Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter (ml-implode.com) filed a Memo of Opposition in response to pre-litigation motions by plaintiffs to enjoin the Implode-O-Meter and restrain publication of materials critical of the Grant America Program.

The suit was filed by plaintiffs Global Direct Sales, LLC, and (principals) Christopher Russell and Ryan Hill, and (collaborators) the Penobscot Indian Tribe, on September 19, 2008 in Maryland Federal Court, and the motion for injunction and Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) was filed September 26th.

The suit concerns an investigative article written by analyst Krista Railey, posted on ml-implode.com in its final form on September 15, 2008. The article was critical of the Global Direct Sales scheme, which effectively attains 100% financing -- insured by the FHA -- by making use of an Indian tribe ("sovereign nation") as an intermediary. This arrangement has allowed bans and restrictions on FHA insured seller-funded down payment programs to be circumvented.

Railey's article pointed out that the IRS has called similar seller-funded down-payment systems "scams," and Forbes has called them (with specific reference to Russell's activities) a "racket." Seller-financed FHA lending was completely banned (beginning October 1, 2008) by H.R. 3221, signed into law July 30th, 2008. This ban covers the Grant America system involving Indian Nations. However the tug-of-war continues, e.g., with H.R. 6694 (under legislative consideration) proposing to roll back the ban, subject to credit score and pricing "controls."

As argued in the Implode-O-Meter's Opposition Memo and Railey's Declaration, all points in the article on the Grant America/Penobscot program are well supported by the evidence, including reports, rulings, and statements from government agencies and courts.

The Implode-O-Meter believes that removal of the article and a ban of further discussion of the Grant America Program would be unlawful suppression of free speech. In this case such suppression would be particularly egregious because of the public interest and legislative aspects of the controversy (the public -- that is, taxpayers -- ultimately insure the Grant America Program mortgages).

The Implode-O-Meter argues that such an injunction and prior restraint in fact constitutes a frivolous filing, and violation of Federal court rules.

The Implode-O-Meter also points out that the filing by Russell (et al) contains many other major defects including: ambiguously making reference to a draft of the article which was only briefly posted, failing to point out specifically which remaining statements are defamatory, and failing to demonstrate actual malice in the posting.

The Implode-O-Meter believes that the suit, given the nature of the tactics involved, is meant to intimidate us and raise the costs of our legal defense against an opponent that has made millions engaging in unsound lending activities. The plaintiffs' clearly are willing to resort to "any means necessary" to see us relent and remove an article which is distasteful (and perhaps existentially threatening) to them, and go silent on the issue of the Grant America/Penobscot program and related activities of the principals.

Given the above points, the Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter anticipates a speedy denial of the injunction and restraining order. A full copy of the article is available online here.
http://ml-implode.com/viewnews/2008-... lenceCr.html





Microsoft Announces Plans for No-Cost Consumer Security Offering

New anti-malware solution will broaden PC protection and help improve Windows experience.Related Links
Press release

To address the growing need for a PC security solution tailored to the demands of emerging markets, smaller PC form factors and rapid increases in the incidence of malware, Microsoft Corp. plans to offer a new consumer security offering focused on core anti-malware protection.

Code-named “Morro,” this streamlined solution will be available in the second half of 2009 and will provide comprehensive protection from malware including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans. This new solution, to be offered at no charge to consumers, will be architected for a smaller footprint that will use fewer computing resources, making it ideal for low-bandwidth scenarios or less powerful PCs. As part of Microsoft’s move to focus on this simplified offering, the company also announced today that it will discontinue retail sales of its Windows Live OneCare subscription service effective June 30, 2009.

“Customers around the world have told us that they need comprehensive, ongoing protection from new and existing threats, and we take that concern seriously,” said Amy Barzdukas, senior director of product management for the Online Services and Windows Division at Microsoft. “This new, no-cost offering will give us the ability to protect an even greater number of consumers, especially in markets where the growth of new PC purchases is outpaced only by the growth of malware.”

Built on Microsoft’s award-winning malware protection engine, “Morro” will take advantage of the same core anti-malware technology that fuels the company’s current line of security products, which have received the VB100 award from Virus Bulletin, Checkmark Certification from West Coast Labs and certification from the International Computer Security Association Labs. The new solution will deliver the same core protection against malware as that offered through Microsoft’s enterprise solutions, but will not include many of the additional non-security features found in many consumer security suites.

Windows Live OneCare, one of the first all-in-one suites to be launched in the consumer market, includes a number of non-security features, such as printer sharing and automated PC tune-up. By shifting to focus on the core anti-malware features that most consumers still don’t keep up to date, “Morro” will be able to provide the essential protections that consumers need without overusing system resources, and will help more consumers have better protection against online threats.

“Because uptake of standard anti-malware is low around the world, particularly in developing nations, the availability of basic protection for anyone who wants it is all the more important,” said Roger Kay, founder and president of Endpoint Technologies Associates. “By offering such basic protection at no charge to the consumer, Microsoft is promoting a safer environment for PCs, service providers and e-commerce itself, since it is through unprotected PCs that the worst threats are introduced to the system as a whole.”

“Morro” will be available as a stand-alone download and offer malware protection for the Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems. When used in conjunction with the ongoing security and privacy enhancements of Windows and Internet Explorer, this new solution will offer consumers a robust, no-cost security solution to help protect against the majority of online threats.

Windows Live OneCare will continue to be sold for Windows XP and Windows Vista at retail through June 30, 2009. Direct sales of OneCare will be gradually phased out when “Morro” becomes available. Regardless of their method of purchase, Microsoft will ensure that all current customers remain protected through the life of their subscriptions.

More information is available on the Windows Live OneCare Team Blog at http://windowsonecare.spaces.live.com.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/p...ecurityPR.mspx





LIFE Photo Archive Available on Google Image Search
Press release

The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; and the entire works left to the collection from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen. These are just some of the things you'll see in Google Image Search today.

We're excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We're digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.

It has been a thrill for us to explore this archive, filled with images captured by LIFE's famous photographers. See masters like Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White documenting pivotal world events, capturing the evolution of lifestyles and fashions, and opening windows into the lives of celebrities and everyday people.

Alfred snapped this in 1963, at the climax of Guignol's "Saint George and the Dragon" in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. Just as the dragon is slain, some children cry out in a combination of horror and delight, while others are taken aback in shock. Every child is consumed with emotion, masterfully captured by Eisenstaedt's camera. These amazing photos are now blended into our Image Search results along with other images from across the web.

Once you are in the archive, you'll also notice that you can access a rich full-size, full-screen version of each image simply by clicking on the picture itself in the landing page. If you decide you really like one of these images, high-quality framed prints can be purchased from LIFE at the click of a button. Think of the holiday gift possibilities! It doesn't get much easier than that.

So please take a look for yourself and experience these great photos. Your exploration will be limited only by your imagination and your desire to keep on clicking. Be sure to check back often as more photos from the LIFE archive will be added regularly to Google Image Search. We hope that you enjoy them as much as we do!

Posted by Paco Galanes, Software Engineer
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/...on-google.html





Microsoft's Decision to Change Vista Capable Marketing for Intel Angered HP, Others

E-mails unsealed in a class-action suit shed light on a key change made for Intel in the software's marketing program and how Microsoft dealt with the angry fallout from other partners.

By Seattle Times technology staff

Internal Microsoft e-mails made public late Monday illustrate how executives debated whether to lower the standards for the Vista Capable marketing program to appease one of the company's most important partners: chip maker Intel.

Once the decision was made, e-mails show, Microsoft scrambled to contain the fallout with other partners.

The messages are evidence in a Windows class-action lawsuit brought by PC customers in U.S. District Court in Seattle. Microsoft is accused of deceiving consumers who bought PCs in 2006 labeled "Vista Capable," but which could only run a basic version of the operating system.

Surprise, then scramble

Jan. 30, 2006, was a long Monday for the Windows team at Microsoft.

Word of the company's controversial decision to drop a new Windows Vista graphics technology from requirements for the Vista Capable marketing program was quickly spreading among its customers.

The technology, known as the Windows Device Driver Model, or WDDM, was dropped in part because a widely used Intel "915 chipset" would not support it, meaning computers built with that chip would not qualify for a "Windows Vista Capable" sticker, making them appear less desirable and hurting sales.

Intel had pressured Microsoft to make the change to the marketing program, designed to prop up PC demand during the 2006 holiday shopping season, before Vista PCs would be on the market.

"We need good messaging for the elimination of WDDM in Capable, as we have had this as a requirement since inception over 18 months ago," wrote Mark Croft, a Microsoft marketing director, in an e-mail to several others on the Vista team that morning.

Microsoft was scrambling to coordinate communication of this major surprise revision, which some would love and others — Hewlett-Packard in particular — would hate.

Croft circulated draft talking points outlining the change. Employees on several teams prepared to make potentially uncomfortable phone calls and e-mails to their partners in the PC industry explaining the decision.

(The next day, a Microsoft general manager urgently requested the communications plan for graphics chip makers Nvidia and ATI, noting he needed to be ready to "diffuse this situation.")

In the talking points, Microsoft noted that even though the WDDM requirement was being eliminated from the Vista Capable program, Microsoft still viewed it as "an important aspect of the Windows Vista PC experience."

Midmorning on the 30th, Mike Ybarra, a product manager, sent a message marked "urgent due to customer satisfaction escalation" to then-Windows boss Jim Allchin and Will Poole, then in charge of the Windows Client Business.

Poole was the one who ultimately made the decision to drop the WDDM requirement.

In an August 2005 meeting, "you both committed to HP that we would not move off the WDDM requirement and HP made significant product roadmap changes to support graphics for the full experience," Ybarra wrote, adding that an HP executive committed to investing in graphics "if MS would give him 100% assurance that we would not budge for Intel."

By noon, anger from HP was reaching Microsoft, which had planned to communicate its changes the next day. Poole wrote to Ybarra and Allchin at 12:16 p.m.: "Intel leaked this despite my explicit agreement with [an Intel senior vice president] that we would communicate together."

The WDDM change, apparently too late to reverse, seemed to take Allchin by surprise.

Microsoft had announced four months earlier that Allchin would retire at the end of 2006 as part of a broad company restructuring meant to streamline decision making.

"I knew nothing about this," he wrote. "Will, you need to explain. I don't even understand what this means. ... "

E-mails flew back and forth at least as late as 11:06 p.m. that night as the team finalized its communications plan.

— Benjamin J. Romano

Months of tension

The tension between Microsoft and Intel over the 915 chipset went back months.

Rajesh Srinivasan, a senior product manager in the Windows Client group, called out "egregious Intel behavior" in an e-mail on Aug. 6, 2005.

Srinivasan was concerned that business customers would be misled by "enterprise guidelines," telling them what it would take for computers to be Vista-ready.

Specifically, he was concerned about statements suggesting the 915 chipset would provide "for an optimal Windows Vista experience."

"When I met with Intel yesterday to review this page, I clearly told them that including Intel 915 chipset under mobile graphics category makes me uncomfortable. The 915 chipset for mobile does not provide an 'optimal Windows Vista experience' and this is clearly misleading. It should not even be in the list of recommended hardware for Windows Vista," he wrote.

In an Aug. 8 e-mail, he discussed escalating his concerns about Intel's messaging to Chris Jones and Will Poole.

"I feel strongly about this — their misleading enterprise customers ... would significantly impact enterprise adoption of Windows Vista. Can you please advise?"

— Brier Dudley

Column swipe

An article by Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg noted in October 2005 — more than a year before Vista was introduced — "[y]ou also won't have to worry about Vista if you buy one of Apple Computer's Macintosh computers, which don't run Windows. Every mainstream consumer doing typical tasks should consider the Mac."

It struck a chord inside Microsoft, where workers were hashing out a two-tiered system to help shoppers chose a PC that could later run different versions of Vista.

Wrote Padmanand Warrier: "A premium experience as defined by Walt = Apple. This is why we need to address."

Richard Russell replied that his take was Microsoft had "failed to communicate Vista's value. ... Apple doesn't differentiate between 'standard' and 'premium'. Vista does," he wrote. "Vista will give a very good experience and as lots of value even if it is not running on a premium system."

— Kristi Heim
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...crosoft18.html





Spam Turns Serious and Hormel Turns Out More
Andrew Martin

The economy is in tatters and, for millions of people, the future is uncertain. But for some employees at the Hormel Foods Corporation plant here, times have never been better. They are working at a furious pace and piling up all the overtime they want.

The workers make Spam, perhaps the emblematic hard-times food in the American pantry.

Through war and recession, Americans have turned to the glistening canned product from Hormel as a way to save money while still putting something that resembles meat on the table. Now, in a sign of the times, it is happening again, and Hormel is cranking out as much Spam as its workers can produce.

In a factory that abuts Interstate 90, two shifts of workers have been making Spam seven days a week since July, and they have been told that the relentless work schedule will continue indefinitely.

Spam, a gelatinous 12-ounce rectangle of spiced ham and pork, may be among the world’s most maligned foods, dismissed as inedible by food elites and skewered by comedians who have offered smart-alecky theories on its name (one G-rated example: Something Posing As Meat).

But these days, consumers are rediscovering relatively cheap foods, Spam among them. A 12-ounce can of Spam, marketed as “Crazy Tasty,” costs about $2.40. “People are realizing it’s not that bad a product,” said Dan Johnson, 55, who operates a 70-foot-high Spam oven.

Hormel declined to cooperate with this article, but several of its workers were interviewed here recently with the help of their union, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 9. Slumped in chairs at the union hall after making 149,950 cans of Spam on the day shift, several workers said they been through boom times before — but nothing like this.

Spam “seems to do well when hard times hit,” said Dan Bartel, business agent for the union local. “We’ll probably see Spam lines instead of soup lines.”

Even as consumers are cutting back on all sorts of goods, Spam is among a select group of thrifty grocery items that are selling steadily.

Pancake mixes and instant potatoes are booming. So are vitamins, fruit and vegetable preservatives and beer, according to data from October compiled by Information Resources, a market research firm.

“We’ve seen a double-digit increase in the sale of rice and beans,” said Teena Massingill, spokeswoman for the Safeway grocery chain, in an e-mail message. “They’re real belly fillers.”

Kraft Foods said recently that some of its value-oriented products like macaroni and cheese, Jell-O and Kool-Aid were experiencing robust growth. And sales are still growing, if not booming, for Velveeta, a Kraft product that bears the same passing resemblance to cheese as Spam bears to ham.

Spam holds a special place in America’s culinary history, both as a source of humor and of cheap protein during hard times.

Invented during the Great Depression by Jay Hormel, the son of the company’s founder, Spam is a combination of ham, pork, sugar, salt, water, potato starch and a “hint” of sodium nitrate “to help Spam keep its gorgeous pink color,” according to Hormel’s Web site for the product.

Because it is vacuum-sealed in a can and does not require refrigeration, Spam can last for years. Hormel says “it’s like meat with a pause button.”

During World War II, Spam became a staple for Allied troops overseas. They introduced it to local residents, and it remains popular in many parts of the world where the troops were stationed.

Spam developed a camp following in the 1970s, mainly because of Monty Python, the English comedy troupe. In a 1970 skit, a couple tried to order breakfast at a cafe featuring Spam in nearly every entree, like “Spam, Eggs, Sausage and Spam.” The diners were eventually drowned out by a group of Vikings singing, “Spam, lovely Spam, wonderful Spam.”

(Familiar with the skit, Internet pioneers labeled junk e-mail “spam” because it overwhelmed other dialogue, according to one theory.)

Here in Austin, local officials have tried to capitalize on Spam’s kitschy cultural status, even if a decidedly unpleasant odor hangs over the town (a slaughterhouse next to the Hormel plant butchers 19,000 hogs a day). Austin advertises itself as “Spamtown,” and it boasts 13 restaurants with Spam on the menu.

Jerry’s Other Place sells a Spamburger for $6.29. Johnny’s “Spamarama” menu includes eggs Benedict with Spam for $7.35. At Steve’s Pizza, a medium Spam and pineapple pizza costs $11.58.

“There are all kinds of people who have an emotional connection to Spam,” said Gil Gutknecht Jr., the former Minnesota congressman, who was in the gift shop at the Spam Museum buying a Spam tie, sweatshirt and earrings. Mr. Gutknecht recalled that he once served as a judge in a Spam recipe contest.

“The best thing was Spam brownies,” he said, with more or less a straight face.

No independent data provider compiles sales figures that include all the outlets where Spam is sold, including foreign stores, so it is not clear exactly how much sales are up. Hormel’s chief executive, Jeffrey M. Ettinger, said in September that they were growing by double digits.

The company would not discuss more recent sales of the product or permit a tour of the Spam factory, citing rules that Hormel said prevented it from speaking ahead of a forthcoming earnings report.

However, Hormel executives appear to be banking on the theory that Spam fits nicely into recession budgets. Workers on the Spam line in Austin — more than 40 of them work two shifts —see no signs that their work schedule will let up.

“We are scheduled to work every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas,” said Darwin Sellers, 56, a Spam “formulator” who adds salt, sugar and nitrates to batches of Spam. “Mr. Ettinger is negotiating with the man upstairs to get us to work eight days a week.”

Mr. Sellers said he had not seen much of his family in recent months, but the grueling schedule had been good for his checkbook. He bought a new television and planned to replace a 20-year-old refrigerator.

Unlike his colleagues though, he has no plans to stock up on Spam. “It’s not something I’ve ever developed a taste for,” he said.

A rising segment of the public, it seems, does have a taste for Spam, which is available in several varieties, including Spam Low Sodium, Spam with Cheese and Spam Hot & Spicy.

James Bate, a 48-year-old sausage maker, was buying it at Wal-Mart in Cleveland recently. Not only was it cheap, but he said it brought back fond memories of his grandfather’s making him Spam sandwiches.

“You can mix it with tomatoes and onions and make a good meal out of it,” he said. “A little bit of this stuff goes a long way.”

Christopher Maag contributed reporting from Cleveland.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/bu...15spam.html?em





Web Retailers Are Waging Seasonal Price Wars
Claire Cain Miller and Brad Stone

As deserted malls and department stores struggle to court cash-short consumers with steep discounts this holiday season, a similar and even more ferocious price war is being waged online.

Internet retailers, trying to navigate what is shaping up to be the first truly dreary holiday shopping season ever on the Web, are engaging in price-cutting and discounting so aggressive that it threatens their profit margins and, in some cases, their very survival.

For example, Sony introduced its HDR-SR11 high-definition digital video recorder in April with a suggested retail price of $1,200. This week, Dell.com was selling it for $899, and the electronics retailer Abe’s of Maine had it on its site for $750 — and both were throwing in free shipping.

At Lori’s Designer Shoes, a Web site that sells women’s accessories, a brown leather Hype tote bag started at $338, fell to $246 and is now available with a 20 percent discount coupon for $196.80. Lori Andre, the owner, said she generally tried to avoid online promotions “because then you train the customer and they’ll expect that, and you’re not going to make any money.” But last week, traffic hit a wall and sales on the site fell by nearly a quarter. “We’ve been in business for 25 years, and never seen the bottom drop out like this,” she said.

Traditional retailers are facing the same problem, of course, and discounts are proliferating from suburban malls to Fifth Avenue. But the price-cutting is fiercest on the Web, where customers can easily shop for the best price with a quick search on Google or on specialized shopping engines like Shopping.com. Online, the competition is only a click away. For many Web sites, the discounts and price cuts are the only way to hold on to customers as online buying unexpectedly plummets. The research firm comScore reported Tuesday that sales growth on e-commerce sites slowed to a meager 1 percent in October compared with the previous year — the lowest rate ever for online retail and well down from the industry’s typical 20 percent gains.

Sales of music, movies, books, computer software, flowers and gifts have been hit the hardest, with double-digit declines, comScore said. “A lot of these retailers aren’t running on big margins to begin with, so it’s pretty challenging,” said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore. “But it’s a Catch-22 situation: They have to run these deals because that’s what consumers are looking for this season.”

To preserve the sanctity of their brands and some level of pricing control, some Web companies are promoting discount sites separately from their main brands. Zappos.com, a shoe retailer based in Henderson, Nev., never runs promotions on its site. Instead, it quietly moves shoes that do not sell in six months to 6pm.com, a clearance site it acquired last year, but runs separately. This month, the company is buying more search ads for 6pm.com, where a pair of colorful slip-on Keds sneakers is on sale for $12.73 — 74 percent off the original price on Zappos.com.

Even when these extreme discounts mean selling shoes for less than Zappos.com paid for them, it is better to recoup some cash than none, said Tony Hsieh, the company’s chief executive.

The discounting is not just drastic, but is also occurring unusually early in the season. Kmart, a division of Sears Holding, initiated Black Friday prices on electronics — 40 to 50 percent off — on Nov. 2, nearly four weeks before the real Black Friday, the busy shopping day just after Thanksgiving that usually marks the beginning of the holiday buying season.

Kmart’s discounts are available both online and in stores, but the retailer is throwing in free shipping on Web purchases of $49 or more this week, a measure it has never taken before.

E-commerce experts said they expected the cutthroat price competition to be fatal to some struggling retailers. “Folks that have been on the ropes or near the ropes during the good times are going to go under. There is no question about it,” said George Michie, co-founder of the Rimm-Kaufman Group, a search marketing company.

Many boutique stores opened e-commerce sites because they were simple to build and inexpensive to run, yet those same advantages also forced them to compete with thousands of other sites selling similar products, each offering steeper discounts.

Plasticland, now an online boutique selling clothes, home décor and jewelry, started in 2002 as a single store in San Diego. The owners, lured by the global audience of the Web, moved it online in 2005. They were caught off guard this spring, when sales started to plummet.

The company, now based in Plano, Tex., switched to lower-priced merchandise and began moving unsold goods onto its clearance pages a month earlier than usual. A necklace with a red apple pendant now sells there for $32.50, down from $65, and a serving platter for $37.80, down from $54.

“Our profit per piece obviously drops, which means that we have to ship a lot more merchandise to make the same amount of money,” said Rebecca Nyhus, the store’s co-owner. “Lowering price points has helped us weather the downturn, but it has really bogged us down because shipping is so time-consuming” and expensive.

Like many other small e-tailers caught in the holiday margin squeeze, Plasticland was forced to raise its minimum order for free shipping to $100, from $50 to try to recoup some of the lost profits.

Free shipping is becoming a painful imperative for all e-commerce sites. Three-quarters of online shoppers said in a comScore survey that they would shop elsewhere if a site did not offer free shipping, and nearly all sites offered it for at least some purchases.

E-commerce giants like Amazon.com, which offers free shipping on orders over $25 and eliminates even that minimum for customers who pay a flat annual fee, can easily absorb shipping costs. But small online vendors struggle. Powell’s Books, a bookstore in Portland, Ore. with a site that competes for customers with Amazon.com, offers free shipping on orders over $50.

“In our business model, we could not afford to give free shipping on every package. It just would not work,” said Dave Weich, director of marketing at Powell’s.

To exacerbate matters, a major expense for online retailers seems to be rising: the cost to advertise products on the search engine Google, the source of considerable traffic and visibility for most e-commerce sites.

Over the last year and a half, prices for text ads related to women’s fashion have quadrupled, say apparel retailers. In the popular gifts category, the price to advertise alongside results for common search queries like “gift baskets” jumped 50 percent from the 2006 holidays to 2007 and is expected to climb again this year.

For Delightful Deliveries, a 10-year-old company that was selling gift baskets online, that extra expense — plus the challenge of competing on price against its own wholesalers, which also sell on the Internet — proved too much. The eight-employee company, based in Port Washington, N.Y., closed in September.

Eric Lituchy, the founder of Delightful Deliveries, is now watching the Internet price war from the sidelines. “I think everyone is praying that this economy does not get any worse and that people find reasons for optimism and spend some money at Christmastime,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/te...0slashing.html





A penny saved

US$69bn Worth of Unlicensed Music Shared Over Peer-To-Peer Networks
John Kennedy

A new online market for fair market value music via peer-to-peer (P2P) networks has emerged, representing US$69bn in potential revenue that the music industry has failed to capture.

Until now, unlicensed music via P2P networks has been considered the result of piracy, but, in this case, a whopping US$69bn worth of music based on fair market value per track is changing hands.

“A US$69bn figure is staggering to contemplate, but it effectively illustrates the impact of piracy on the music industry,” said Rick Sizemore of MultiMedia Intelligence.

“It is important to note that piracy has expanded well beyond music. Content owners of TV episodes and full-length movies are seeing a growing impact. This is precisely why efforts from groups such as the DCIA (Distributed Computing Industry Association) and those related to digital fingerprinting (eg MySpace and MTV) are vital to foster a ‘safe’ environment – one conducive to growth and maturation.

“With an ever-burgeoning flow of content over the digital pipes, the need for efficient distribution becomes all the more vital, and we would be remiss to think of P2P exclusively as a tool for pirates,” Sizemore said.

MultiMedia Intelligence’s new research also found that the number of unlicensed full-length movies ‘shared’ will grow almost four times from 2007 to 2012 – although the number of video files will remain smaller than music.

Not all P2P content is unlicensed. The grow rate for licensed content files distributed over P2P networks is much higher than unlicensed, although it is fair to note that we are starting from a much smaller base.

P2P internet traffic, despite having grown at a torrid pace for years, will grow almost 400pc over the next five years, growing from a level of 1.6 petabytes of internet traffic per month in 2007 to almost 8 petabytes per month by 2012.
http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/...-peer-networks


















Until next week,

- js.



















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