Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 23rd, '06

[JackSpratts]

I'm a great fan of the OLPC project. The altruistic nature of the project is compelling. Giving children in the third world access to information through a durable machine without paying the MS-tax is all good. However, I want no less for my own children. Many kids in the first world will ask their parents for laptops this Christmas. Should their wish be granted? Will they be better off with $1000 (including MS-tax) laptop? I think not — we should give them $100 laptops instead, like the children of Massachusetts have been promised. At a global level, kids in rich and poor countries would be using the same machine. At a local level, the children of rich and poor parents would be using the same machine. As such, the machine will be an equalizer. And our kids will be spared a bleak future in the MS-Office tar pit.

- Håkon Wium Lie
















"It is certainly possible to get most movies for free, and a lot of people are doing it." – David Price


"We've been hearing for quite some time now that Blu-ray and HDDVD movies could prove to be too much for today's desktop microprocessors; today we finally have the proof. X-Men: The Last Stand encoded using the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile at 1080p requires more processing power to decode than affordable dual core CPUs can handle." – Derek Wilson


"Nearly every country issuing this passport has a few security experts who are yelling at the top of their lungs and trying to shout out: 'This is not secure. This is not a good idea to use this technology.'" – Lukas Grunwald


"If people are buying something because it says the Doors on it then, you know, you should give the Doors some of the money. Look, I need to pay my electric bill. I play an electric keyboard." – Ray Manzarek


"Opera runs beautifully on it." – Claudio Santambrogio


"Seeing Opera run on the OLPC for first time was a revelation — no browser has ever been more beautiful." – Håkon Wium Lie


"I probably spend an hour a day online and that's enough really. Whereas it would still be three hours in front of the telly. So telly's still winning." – Ricky Gervais


"People somehow got emotionally attached to the hand crank and want it back." – Håkon Wium Lie


"Good poets borrow; great poets steal." – T.S. Eliot





































December 23rd, '06







Peer-to-Peer Still Reigns Supreme for Video Downloads
Peter Cohen

A new study by the NPD Group shows that peer-to-peer digital video downloads reign supreme in the United States, outpacing legal alternatives such as the iTunes Store by five to one. What people are downloading is also an interesting point.

The study said that among U.S. households with members who regularly use the Internet, approximately 8 percent — six million households, all told — downloaded at least one digital video file 10MB or later from a peer-to-peer service for free in the third quarter of 2006.

By comparison, about 1.2 million U.S. households — about 2 percent of those households that regularly use the Internet — paid for a video download from an online store. The iTunes Store was far and away the most popular source for legal video downloads — 90 percent overall. Vongo, Movielink and CinemaNow trailed iTunes.

Of the pirated content downloaded through peer-to-peer services, about 60 percent was adult film content, while 20 percent was TV show content and 5 percent was mainstream movie content.

Comparatively, legal downloaded content consisted about 62 percent of TV program content, 24 percent of music video content and 6 percent of movie content, according to the report.

Russ Crupnick, vice president and senior industry analyst for the NPD Group, said that online video piracy is less pervasive than it is for music, but he called it a “crucial issue” for the film industry.

“Even though right now the majority of downloaded video content is adult-film content, the amount of intellectual property stolen from mainstream movie studios, networks, and record labels will continue to rise, unless strong and sustained action is taken to prevent piracy,” said Crupnick in a statement.

“Paid usage could double or triple within the next year as more content comes online, consumers acquire more video-enabled players and movies are offered that consumers can actually burn to DVD,” said Crupnick.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/macworld/200...piracy20061220





Skype Founders' Peer-to-Peer Video Service Ready for Public Beta
Stuart Corner

The Venice project, reported earlier this year to be a peer-to-peer video delivery service under development by Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom is getting ready for a public beta.

In a posting on the Project's website on 12 December, CEO Fredrik de Wahl, said: "We're finally there. This morning we've completed the last version of the software prior to sending out the 'big beta' - which marks the start of getting thousands and thousands of people on the platform in an invitation style manner. While we're still in the beta phase, we feel like we now have a strong proof of concept as we continue to build and enhance the platform....So next step will be to extend beta test invitations to a much larger group, by providing our current beta testers with tokens to invite others to participate."

While little has been said publicly about the project, there was much reporting of it, including on iTWire, after BusinessWeek broke the story in July. According to the project's web site "In essence the various journalists got the story almost exactly right: we're fixing TV; removing artificial limits such as the number of channels that your cable or the airwaves can carry and then bringing it into the Internet age; adding community features, interactivity, etc."

BusinessWeek had been given a demonstration of the planned service and described it as "combining professionally produced TV and video with the interactive tools of the Web." It quoted Friis as saying he expected the service, then in very limited beta with about 100 users, to be generally available by year end.

BusinessWeek described the service as turning the PC into a TV screen but with many more capabilities. "Jiggle your computer mouse, and a variety of tools appear along the edges of the screen, even as the video continues to play. At the bottom of the screen, there are controls like those on a DVD player, including stop, pause, and fast-forward, as well as a search window to find new videos. An image on the left includes a menu of preset channels."

Interviewed by blogger, Om Malik, Friis described The Venice Project as "a streaming P2P platform for television." He claimed it would be "good for content owners, for advertisers and of course the viewers...Sometimes we think content owners have legal reasons to restrict content locally and the technology allows them to do that. He claimed the service would deliver "near television quality" and would require around 1Mbps of bandwidth.

In a progress report emailed on 17 December, de Wahl, said: "We've come out of a long testing period that has resulted in us delivering a client that we hope you will want to use and share with your friends...There's plenty to be excited about and I am pleased to say that we've now started to send out the first invitations to those who have requested access to the beta...Among the latest features that we've incorporated are 'seek' for better content surfing, improvements to the installer, an elegant UI and many other enhancements that improve functionality all around.

A posting on the project's web site on 23 November said: "We hired our first developers on January 1st - and now, 10 months later - we're ready to show the world our baby. Or at least a small part of it; most of the work will remain hidden on our servers, transcoding chains, and other backend systems. It has been a fun ride - people from 20 or so countries descending on Leiden, and it was nothing short of amazing to see developers, both from Open Source communities such as Ubuntu, Apache, Mozilla or Subversion and from industry, hit the floor running, collaborating, re-using enormous amounts of Open Source code in large chunks and rarely stumbling."

The poster indicated that the project would be supported by a global network of servers " As we're still rolling out servers across the globe, as not all fibre has been lit - we will contain things a bit - so expect us to run in an invitation style mode (where each beta tester gets some invites to give away; letting us grow exponentially yet controlled) for a little longer."

De Wahl said: "The reason we are holding back somewhat with these invitations is logistics. The fibre to Leiden [the development centre in Holland] is capped and our primary data centre is not online yet. Which means that we'll continue to add people until we've hit capacity, and then continue with additional batches as the ordered bandwidth becomes available.
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/8151/53/





VeriSign to Distribute Movies
AP

VeriSign Inc., best known for managing e-commerce security and Internet addresses, said it will start distributing family-friendly movies early next year.

The movie download service will be run by AxiomTV, a subsidiary of Axiom Entertainment Inc., based in Rochester, Mich.

Axiom is developing an Internet TV channel that will run kid-themed, parent-approved movies and shows. It will deploy technology called "Mother" to block pornography, violence and foul language.

A test version will launch Jan. 8, with general availability scheduled for Feb. 1. Subscribers would buy and install some cables and other simple hardware to watch movies on their television.

AxiomTV claims to be the first Internet movie service focused on family-friendly entertainment.

CinemaNow Inc., Movielink LLC, Amazon.com Inc.'s Unbox, Time Warner Inc.'s AOL Video are among the online movie services with a wider selection.

VeriSign will be distributing AxiomTV movies through its Intelligent Content Delivery Network, which uses a peer-to-peer system to save costs and improve speeds. With peer to peer, a movie file might come from a neighbor's hard drive when available rather than from a distant server.

Mountain View-based VeriSign operates the key databases that help computers find Web sites ending in ".com" and ".net" as well as the machines containing the master list of all of the Internet's suffixes, such as ".fr" for France. It also sells digital security certificates to help consumers know when an e-commerce transaction is encrypted.
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...y/16283054.htm





Movie Downloads Coming to PSP
Eric Bangeman

Sony is expected to launch a new video download service centered around its PSP handheld, according to multiple sources. Expected to arrive early in 2007, the service will allow PSP owners to download movies and other video content directly to their PCs; the content can then be moved to a Memory Stick for playback on the PSP. The Wall Street Journal is also reporting that a direct-to-PSP downloading option is also in the works.

Movies on the PSP are nothing new. When the handheld was introduced in late 2004, it came with an all-new optical disc format, UMD. Sony's high hopes for UMD have largely gone unrealized, as sales have lagged and studios have cut back on releases in the format. PSP owners also have the option of ripping and moving their own video content to Memory Sticks via the PSP Media Manager or other applications.

Offering movie downloads would give PSP owners another means of getting content onto their devices and would better position Sony to face off against the Apple-iTunes-iPod juggernaut. Sony currently sells a number of digital audio players, but none of them are capable of playing video.

Content from Sony Pictures would be made available via the download service, and the consumer electronics giant is reportedly still negotiating with other studios to sell or rent their titles on the PSP. The company is also in talks with Amazon, CinemaNow, and Movielink to tie their movie download services to the PSP. Movie pricing is not yet known, but it is expected to be in line with other download services.

Sony launched a video download service for the PSP in Japan earlier this year, but has yet to make the service widely available. The 60GB PlayStation 3 is able to to stream media wirelessly to the PSP, including old-school PSOne titles.

Although the PSP is arguably best known as a portable gaming device, its gorgeous LCD screen makes watching video while on the go a rewarding experience. Sony is hoping that offering movie downloads will give the PSP a boost in the handheld market against the popular Nintendo DS Lite. Sony originally hoped to ship 12 million PSPs during the current fiscal year (which ends in March 2007), but later revised the figure downward to 9 million.

Movie downloads won't be a cure-all for the PSP, but if the download service is implemented well and the prices are reasonable, it could win Sony a few converts while opening up a new audience for the device. The key will be taking advantage of the PSP's built-in WiFi functionality to allow users to download movies directly to the handheld. If Sony can pull that off, it could make the PSP the instant gratification device of choice for travelers stuck in airports and in need of an entertainment fix.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061218-8444.html





BBC Moves to File-Sharing Sites

Hundreds of episodes of BBC programmes will be made available on a file-sharing network for the first time, the corporation has announced.

The move follows a deal between the commercial arm of the organisation, BBC Worldwide, and technology firm Azureus.

The agreement means that users of Azureus' Zudeo software in the US can download titles such as Little Britain.

Until now, most BBC programmes found on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks have been illegal copies.

Beth Clearfield, vice president of program management and digital media at BBC Worldwide, said that the agreement was part of a drive to reach the largest audience possible.

"We are very excited to partner with Azureus and make our content available through this revolutionary distribution model," she said.

High definition

Azureus is best known for developing a BitTorrent client, or program, that allows large media files to be easily shared over the internet. The program has been downloaded more than 130 million times.

Earlier this month the company launched a video sharing site similar to YouTube, codenamed Zudeo. The site allows users to upload and view content.

However, in contrast to most video sharing sites, Zudeo offers high definition videos. Users must also download a program to access and upload content.

The new deal means that users of the software will be able to download high-quality versions of BBC programmes, including Red Dwarf, Doctor Who and the League of Gentleman. Classic series such as Fawlty Towers will also be available through a BBC "channel".

The titles will be protected by digital rights management software to prevent the programmes being traded illegally on the internet.

"This will be a very different experience from traditional file-sharing networks," said Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Azureus.

Users will also be able to link to programmes from blogs, social networks and fansites.

"If you have Zudeo running it will take you to that programme; and if you don't, it will suggest you install it, like the first time you download a flash movie," said Mr BianRosa.

"Once you have watched a show, you can rate it, comment on it and recommend it to a friend."

Mr BianRosa believes the cult status of many BBC programmes will make these features appealing to Zudeo users.

Legal services

File-sharing is often associated with illegal distribution of copyrighted content. But in recent months a number of networks have tried to shake off this old image.

BitTorrent, the company behind the original file-sharing software of the same name, has recently signed a number of deals with content providers, such as 20th Century Fox, in a bid to become a legitimate download service.

Earlier this year, Sharman Networks, the owners of Kazaa, did similar deals. Kazaa uses advertising to provide content for free.

No pricing structure for the BBC content on Zudeo has been revealed.

Azureus is expected to announce other partnerships in the New Year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/6194929.stm





Future of TV: Ricky Gervais
BBC interview

Ricky Gervais is one of the first big stars to create original video and audio material just for the internet.

The Office and Extras star's radio-style audio podcasts on iTunes have become record-breakers, while his video podcasts have also attracted a large following.

Why did you start making audio shows just for the internet?

Anything that increases artistic freedom is exciting for me. We didn't have a boss. We didn't have rules or restrictions that you do on radio.

We could do it when we wanted, for as long as we wanted. We could put it up there and then people would go to it at any time.

But I suppose the most exciting thing is that it's global. If you've got a computer and an MP3 player and a phone line, you can listen to it all around the world. And they did. And that's because The Office is shown in 80 countries.

What has the response taught you about how people want stuff on the web?

I think that first series got about four to five million downloads. And it's still going. That's a lot of people. That's quite a big TV show. And I think it was Karl [Pilkington, sidekick] who said: 'Why don't we charge for it?' He'd just given up his job.

We honestly didn't do it for the money - we did it as an experiment. We thought - would people pay? And I think they did because they didn't have a choice, it wasn't available free any more.

But I think they also thought it's only a quid. And it wouldn't have worked if it was a breakfast show every single day of the year for 10 years.

In all now we've had about 10 million downloads, but that will do for now. It's not going to be the main part of our business because I get bored very quickly. I have the attention span of a child.

We'll do some more but it was never meant to be a realistic business venture. It was more like I wonder if it could be a business venture. It worked out for us.

Are you going to start selling original TV-style video online or do deals with websites to create original video?

We put out some free videos. We just made little films, little sketches. Sometimes it was just us chatting.

Now I don't think we could do that as a business venture because with audio, you can compete with anything. You can compete with comedy records or with radio shows if you've got a decent microphone and something to record it on and something to listen back on.

Whereas you can't compete with great DVD and video. You can't knock up an episode of The Sopranos or 24 on a little handheld digital camera. So I don't think that would work.

I don't think you'll ever be able to sidestep TV or DVD. But TV companies will embrace it. With the American Office, they did things called webisodes where some of the peripheral characters had their own storylines and they did little 10-minute things and put them out.

Now that's exciting for fans, it's like a DVD extra or something. And it's an advert. You might come across that before you've actually sat down and watched The Office on a Thursday night on NBC.

What if someone like Google offered you a lot of money to make a TV-style show - but just for their site?

I could see it happening but I'd think - what's the point?

If it's going to be as good as watching it on TV, then it's probably going to be as expensive. And if it's as expensive, then why don't we just put it on TV?

I don't think TV's got to be running scared yet. And of course it's fighting back. One of the greatest inventions of the past few years is Sky+.

The good thing about watching things online and watching things on Sky+ is that you do them when you want - no-one tells you when.

The bad thing is it loses a bit of the common consciousness. There is something nice about everyone sitting down and watching a programme at the same time then talking about it the next day. That's exciting as well.

How do you feel about people who watch Extras or The Office on illegal sites, which may prevent them from buying the DVD?

I don't know that it does. I'm guessing here and I'm sure record companies and networks would say it is damaging. But is it?

I haven't seen it being too damaging because at the moment, most people aren't downloading. Your aunts and uncles, they're not going on YouTube or scouring the internet to find On the Buses.

But they will see it in Woolworths if someone re-releases it and says On the Buses Retrospective. So that's still the bigger business at the moment.

What is exciting about this is choice, and we don't know where it will go because we don't know how many people soon will have a computer and an iPod.

I'm sure when the BBC first launched, they were going: 'Ah, not many people have got tellies. Who's watching this?' So it's good to get your act together. And then people catch up with the know-how and the means to watch it.

Have you got any favourite online viewing?

I still wouldn't call myself a big internet buff. I've got e-mail. I Google things now as opposed to going to the library or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

But there are half a dozen websites that I go to - the BBC, some entertainment websites and YouTube. And that's about it.

I probably spend an hour a day online and that's enough really. Whereas it would still be three hours in front of the telly. So telly's still winning.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...nt/6164812.stm





Broadcast Radio Turns 100

BBC World Service Discovery - Fessenden: King of the Radio Waves

The world's first radio broadcast took place a hundred years ago on Christmas Eve 1906.

The broadcast, a programme of live music, readings and phonograph recordings, was transmitted to ships in the Atlantic Ocean by Reginald Fessenden – a prolific inventor largely forgotten by history.

Presenter Richard Hollingham traces the events of the world's first radio broadcast in Discovery - Fessenden: King of the Radio Waves on Wednesday 20 December.

In the early 1900s, people communicated by radio using Morse code. Fessenden, a Canadian rival of Marconi, decided to broadcast a voice message. His invention of AM radio was years ahead of its time.

On 24 December 1906, radio operators at sea were startled to hear a voice coming over their receivers. Before the word broadcast had even been invented, they heard a mix of speech with live and recorded music – including a rendition of 'silent night'. However, Fessenden's innovation failed to take off commercially and it wasn't until the 1920s that the massive potential of radio for entertainment was realised.

Fessenden originally planned to broadcast across the Atlantic to Scotland. With considerable effort, masts and equipment were built at the small hamlet of Brant Rock near Plymouth, Massachusetts and at Machrihanish on the west coast of Scotland. When, at the last minute, a storm destroyed the Scottish installation, he decided to broadcast to ships at sea instead.

Presenter/Richard Hollingham, Producer/Georgie Robinson

Programme times:
Europe: Wed 1232 rpt 1632, 2032, Thu 0032, Sat 1032, Sun 0332
Australasia: Tue 2232 rpt Wed 0432, 1032, 1432
East Asia: Wed 0132 rpt 0832, 1332, 2132, Sat 0032
South Asia: Wed 0432 rpt 1032, 1532, 2232, Sat 0632
East Africa: Wed 0632 rpt 1432, 2232, Thu 0132
West Africa: Wed 0832 rpt 1432, 2232, Thu 0132, Sat 0332
Middle East: Wed 0732 rpt 1332, 1932, Sat 0432
Americas: Wed 1232 (not Caribb), 1332 (Caribb only) rpt 2332, Thu 0332, Sun 0732

Listen on demand:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/pr...iscovery.shtml

http://www.southgatearc.org/news/dec...adio_waves.htm





Hong Kong

P2P File-Sharing May be Criminalised

Controversial proposal would criminalize all unauthorised downloading, but officials say they are open to hearing different views
Vivienne Chow

People who make unauthorised downloads of copyrighted works from the internet could face criminal prosecution under a controversial proposal released yesterday.

The idea, revealed by Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology Joseph Wong Wing-ping, was swiftly condemned. Internet users urged fellow users to oppose the proposal, while internet service providers (ISPs) urged all internet users to vocally express their views about the proposal, one of several in a consultation paper.

The paper contains a further review of copyright protection issues raised by peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing programs. A government source denied that proposals in the paper were concessions to the demands of copyright holders. Criminalising unauthorised downloading was not the only option.

Mr Wong told a media briefing: "We hope to strike a good balance between copyright owners' interests, individual users' privacy and the free flow of information while maintaining comprehensive and efficient internet service.

"There is no connection between this document and the restriction of free flow of information. We are open to all suggestions and we will consider all views."

The consultation period began yesterday and end in April. Mr Wong said the period was longer than usual because "this is a complex exercise".

Of the six areas in the paper, the most controversial is to consider whether to make unauthorised downloading of copyrighted materials a criminal offence. Under current law, such downloading does not constitute a criminal offence.

The paper sets out three options -- criminalising all unauthorised downloading, making unauthorised downloading using P2P file-sharing a criminal offence, or criminalising unauthorised downloading that results in direct commercial advantage or is on a big scale.

The paper also examined the role of ISPs and how to help copyright owners take civil action. One suggestion was to provide a mechanism for copyright owners to compel ISPs to disclose their clients' information, instead of requiring copyright owners to take court orders. Another was to require ISPs to keep logs for at least two years.

Copyright holders welcomed the consultation. John Chong Ching, spokesman of the Hong Kong Film Industry Response Group, said it was unfair to make copyright owners spend an enormous amount of money pursuing civil court claims against illegal downloaders. "The suggestions are reasonable," he said.

Ricky Fung, Hong Kong head of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, said criminalising unauthorised downloading should be the last resort.

York Mok, chairman of the Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association said the suggestions were demanding. "Keeping logs will generate higher operation costs. Criminalising downloading might affect information traffic because it's hard for users to tell whether a file is copyrighted or not," he said.
http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/articl...parentid=59835





Australian Court Rules Against MP3 Link Site
Anne Broache

Linking to copyright music posted elsewhere online without permission can be illegal, an Australian appeals court ruled Monday.

The issue before a three-judge panel at the Federal Court of Australia was whether Stephen Cooper, a retired policeman who ran the now-defunct site MP3s4free.net, was legally allowed to post links to mostly copyright MP3 files hosted on other servers. Cooper does not appear to have hosted any copyright music on MP3s4free.net.

Upholding a single judge's ruling from last summer, the appeals panel agreed that linking runs afoul of Australia's copyright laws, handing a victory to Universal Music Australia and the other major labels that brought the suit in 2004.

"A principal purpose of the Web site was to enable infringing copies of the downloaded sound recordings to be made," Judge Susan Kenny wrote in her opinion. "The fact that the Web site also carried a warning that some downloading could be illegal did not lessen the force of the invitation."

Cooper, a resident of the state of Queensland, had argued that he had no power to prevent illegal copying because users could "automatically" add links to the site without his control. He likened his site to Google's search engine as a mechanism for pointing users to other sites--an analogy that one judge deemed "unhelpful," in part because Google was not designed exclusively to facilitate music downloads. The opinion also noted that even the search giant is not always free to link to everything it wishes.

Furthermore, Cooper's "deliberate choice" to set up the site in such a way that he couldn't restrict access to copyright files when he could have designed it otherwise rendered him guilty of authorizing copyright infringement, the judges said in a multipart opinion.

This is not the first time that linking to illicit material has been deemed illegal. In 2001, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled that a news organization could be prohibited from linking to software that can decrypt DVDs. "The injunction's linking prohibition validly regulates (2600 Magazine's) opportunity instantly to enable anyone anywhere to gain unauthorized access to copyrighted movies on DVDs," the appeals court said. A Dutch court in 1999 reached a similar conclusion.

The Australian judges also agreed with an earlier court ruling determining that E-Talk, the company that hosted the MP3s4free site, and Comcen Internet Services, E-Talk's parent company, had also broken the law because they did not do enough to stop Cooper from committing copyright violations.

"Rather than withdrawing hosting of Mr. Cooper's Web site, or otherwise placing pressure on Mr. Cooper to stop his Web site (from) being used for the predominant purpose of copyright infringements, E-Talk sought to achieve a commercial advantage from advertising on Mr. Cooper's Web site," Judge Catherine Branson wrote.

The court did overturn a guilty verdict against Comcen employee Chris Takoushis, saying there was no evidence to suggest that Takoushis had the authority to personally terminate Cooper's site--or compel his employer to do so.

Sabiene Heindl, general manager of an Australian company called Music Industry Piracy Investigations, hailed the court's decision as a victory for Australian record labels.

"Internet service providers have an important role in ensuring that wholesale music copyright infringement is not taking place on their networks, and this judgment sends a clear message to the industry that operators are at risk of being held liable if they are doing the wrong thing," Heindl said in a statement.

Attorneys for Cooper were not immediately available for comment.

As previously reported, Music Industry Piracy Investigations first suspected Cooper's site of piracy in December 2002 and raided his premises as part of a broader sweep of Internet file-sharing sites in 2004.

According to the Australian investigators, Cooper's site recorded a total of 191,296,511 hits to the site, with 7,081,899 unique visitors, between November 2002 and October 2003. During that same time, 1.97 terabytes of data were downloaded from the site.

CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report.
http://news.com.com/Australian+court...3-6144590.html





Direct Linking to Audio Webcasts Ruled Illegal
Nate Anderson

A recent Texas court decision is the first in the country to deal with some of the copyright questions that surround live webcasts. Robert Davis runs a web site called supercrosslive.com at which he allegedly streamed audio webcasts of live supercross races that belonged to SFX Motor Sports. SFX sued him back in February, claiming trademark infringement for redistributing the webcasts and for using the company's logos and track maps without permission.

In its complaint, SFX was upset about "the unauthorized linking of Defendants' Internet locations with the Websites of Plaintiff, its sponsors and sanctioning body" and the "unauthorized copying, reproducing and distributing" of audio broadcasts. SFX says that this violated its copyright to the material and also made it more difficult to secure sponsors.

The case is a confusing one, because no one seems entirely clear on their technology. SFX is obviously not upset that Davis links to their web site; they want more traffic. Davis, who defended himself using language that the judge called "generally defiant and full of inappropriate hyperbole," claims that he has never copied or re-streamed SFX content. The judge, in his opinion, rules that Davis' "live webcasts links" violate SFX copyrights, but also says that Davis has "copied SFX's copyrighted webcasts without authorization." What's going on?

What appears to have happened is that Davis was directly linking from his pages to the SFX webcast rather than to the SFX webpage (see an example) that gave access to the webcast. This meant that SFX could not display or sell advertising on the page. But Davis appears to have been correct when he claimed that he did not copy or redistribute the material, making this case one about the practice of "deep linking" to copyrighted content.

Davis countersued and told the judge that SFX "have come roaring into this federal court with the overwhelming force and the ethics, or lack thereof, of Genghis Khan." The judge was not impressed. He ruled in favor of SFX, finding that Davis' linkage was not "fair use" and that it could cause irreparable harm to SFX by limiting the company's right "to sell sponsorships or advertisements on its own website as the 'exclusive source' of the webcasts."

It's not at all clear why the lawsuit was even necessary. One of the reasons that such cases are rare is that it's a trivial matter to control access to your own material. Redirection, whitelists, and blacklists could all have been used to make sure that access to the webcast was only granted from SFX's site, and would certainly have been cheaper to set up.

The court order allows Davis to continue running his website, and it looks like he would be allowed to link to the SFX web page in question, rather than the actual website. Instead, Davis' site has been shut down and now shows only a list of links to court documents.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061222-8482.html





Music Industry Backs Off in Piracy Suit Against NY Mom
AP

The recording industry is giving up its lawsuit against Patti Santangelo, a New York mother of five who became the best-known defendant in the industry's battle against online music piracy.

However, two of her children are still being sued.

The five companies suing Santangelo, of Wappingers Falls, filed a motion Tuesday in U.S. federal court in White Plains asking Judge Colleen McMahon to dismiss the case. Their lead counsel, Richard Gabriel, wrote in court papers that the record companies still believe they could win damages against Santangelo but their preference was to "pursue [the] defendant's children."

Santangelo's lawyer, Jordan Glass, said the dismissal bid "shows defendants can stand up to powerful plaintiffs." He noted, however, that the companies were seeking a dismissal "without prejudice," meaning they could bring the action again, "so I'm not sure what that's worth."

The companies, co-ordinated by the Recording Industry Association of America, have sued more than 18,000 people, including many minors, accusing them of pirating music through file-sharing computer networks, most of which have been forced out of business. Typically, the industry tracked downloads to a computer address and learned the name of the computer owner from the internet service provider.

When Santangelo, 42, was sued last year, she said she had never downloaded music and was unaware of her children doing it. If children download, she said, file-sharing programs like Kazaa should be blamed, not the parents. The judge called her an "internet-illiterate parent, who does not know Kazaa from kazoo."

Santangelo refused to settle with the record companies, pleaded her case in newspapers and on national TV and became a heroine to defenders of internet freedom, who helped raise money for her defence.

Last month, the record companies filed lawsuits against Santangelo's 20-year-old daughter, Michelle, and 16-year-old son, Robert, saying they had downloaded and distributed more than 1,000 recordings.

The companies said that the daughter had acknowledged downloading songs on the family computer — which Glass denied — and that the son had been implicated in statements from his best friend.

The suit against the children seeks unspecified damages.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...-download.html





Judge Adopts Magistrate's Recommendations On Preclusion in Lindor, But Clarifies That RIAA Must Prove Defendant "Actually Shared" Files

In UMG v. Lindor, Judge David G. Trager has adopted the Report and Recommendations of Magistrate Judge Robert M. Levy in their entirety, rejecting the two changes in language that had been suggested by Ms. Lindor's attorneys, but held that plaintiffs will have the burden of proving at trial, by a preponderance of the evidence, that defendant actually shared copyrighted files:

Defendant ... objects to the passage "...that defendant actually shared sound files belonging to plaintiffs" because "the mere presence of a shared files folder on an individual's computer would not satisfy the requirements of 17 USC 106(3)." Objection to Report and Recommendation, at 1-2. The report and recommendation does not comment on whether or not the mere presence of a shared files folder satisfies 17 USC 106(3). Instead, it makes clear that plaintiffs will have the burden of proving actual sharing. Report and Recommendation, at 5 ("At trial, plaintiffs will have the burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that defendant did indeed infringe plaintiff’s copyrights by convincing the fact-finder, based on the evidence plaintiffs have gathered, that defendant actually shared sound files belonging to plaintiffs.") (emphasis added).(italics supplied)
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...gistrates.html





Major Record Labels Sue Russian Website

Sony BMG Music Entertainment and three other major record companies sued Russian music website Allofmp3.com for copyright infringement, asking a judge to order the site to stop distributing songs online.

Allofmp3.com's business "amounts to nothing more than a massive infringement," the labels said in a complaint in New York. The Recording Industry Assn. of America sued on behalf of labels owned by companies including Warner Music Group Corp., Vivendi and EMI Group.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...lines-business





In Brief

VimpelCom Signs Deal

MOSCOW: VimpelCom, the wireless operator that sponsored Madonna's first concert in Russia, signed an agreement with Universal Music Group to offer content like ring tones to subscribers in former Soviet countries.

The accord with Universal Music Russia, a unit of the world's largest music record company, comes as VimpelCom and its competitors, Mobile TeleSystems and MegaFon, look for new services in a saturated market.

VimpelCom also has an arrangement for content with Warner Music International. (Bloomberg)

Telekom Austria, the largest Austrian telephone operator, said it had agreed to acquire eTel, a phone company with operations in its home market and four East European countries, for €90 million, or $118 million, in cash. (Bloomberg)

Juniper Networks, a maker of equipment that directs internet traffic, said that it would record about $900 million in expenses dating to 1999 to reflect backdated stock options grants that were given to officials including the chief executive, Scott Kriens.


Les Blues

Rocker Loses Song Rights

The French rocker Johnny Hallyday on Wednesday lost the last round of a two-year battle against his former record company for control of his back catalogue.

The ruling by the Cour de Cassation, the highest French court, is a boon for the music industry, which feared the case could set a precedent for granting artists more rights.

Hallyday, whose real name is Jean- Philippe Smet, lost the appeal against an April 2005 court decision that refused him control of his master tapes recorded from 1961 to 2004.

The ruling means Universal Music Group will retain the rights to Hallyday's more than 1,000 songs even though they stopped working together in 2004.


Netherlands Will Drop Fees on Copyrights
AP

The Dutch government said Wednesday that it would exempt digital music players and hard-disk video recorders from copyright taxes, saying the levy, which compensates artists for unauthorized copying, forced many consumers to pay it twice.

The decision comes a week after the largest consumer electronics and computer makers in Europe threatened to sue the Netherlands and three other European countries after the European Commission dropped plans to compel them to cut the copyright fees.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/.../techbrief.php





An Ominous Milestone: 100 Million Data Leaks
Tom Zeller Jr.

ON Thursday, Kevin Poulsen, senior editor for Wired News, noted in his blog (blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/), a milestone in the number of records that have been compromised in data breaches since the ChoicePoint breach nearly two years ago:

“Rapid-fire announcements this week by U.C.L.A. (800,000 records) and Aetna (130,000) moved the total to the threshold, when Boeing revealed yesterday that a laptop recently stolen from an employee’s car contained names, Social Security numbers and other data on 382,000 current and former employees of the aerospace giant — bringing the total to a grim 100,152,801 records (as of this post).”

One might at least hope that the thief in the Boeing incident was simply after the laptop, rather than the data. And the Aetna case, well, that data was stored on backup tapes that were in a lockbox, which thieves lifted — along with DVD players, cash and other items —in a routine burglary.

But in the incident involving the University of California, Los Angeles, announced last Tuesday, there was really no question about the motive and the quarry. A hacker, or hackers, had been entering the restricted database — which contained the names, addresses, Social Security numbers and other private information of current and former students and faculty —for over a year before the breach was discovered.

A commenter at the Wired News blog, giving only the affirmative “yea” as a name, had this to say:

“I was a U.C.L.A. student that got my info lifted. I think it’s horrible not only that these companies are so sloppy and careless about our data but that we have such a weak link in the chain of our security. Congress has let companies use SSN in ways they were never meant to be used and now we are paying the price for it. Add a debt-happy culture to the mix and you have a truly toxic brew of misery if someone gets a hold of your SSN.”

As it turns out, educational institutions have a particularly acute problem when it comes to the nation’s leaky data issue.

A study by the Public Policy Institute for AARP last July, using data compiled by the Identity Theft Resource Center, determined that of the 90 million records reportedly compromised in various breaches between Jan. 1, 2005, and May 26, 2006, 43 percent were at educational institutions.

•

In fact, educational institutions were twice as likely to report suffering a breach as any other type of entity, with government, general businesses, financial service and healthcare companies pulling up behind.

“College and university databases are the ideal target for cyber criminals and unscrupulous insiders,” said Ron Ben-Natan, the chief technology officer of Guardium, a database security and monitoring company based in Waltham, Mass. “They store large volumes of high-value data on students and parents, including financial aid, alumni and credit card records.

“At the same time,” Mr. Ben-Natan continued, “these organizations need open networks to effectively support their faculty, students and corporate partners.”

But the bigger picture here may be that we are now slicing and dicing the niceties of data breaches against a running tally so large, that it has lost nearly any meaning at all.

Another commenter at the Wired News blog complained that the 100 million mark “is arbitrary and a significant underestimate because it does not include breaches before the ChoicePoint breach.”

He’s right, and he pointed to other tallies, like that maintained at attrition.org/dataloss, which keeps a global tally and reaches back as far as 2000. They put the number of records compromised at 136 million and counting.

But whether we’re at 100 million or 136 million or something on the order of the entire population of the United States, the question is, what does it matter?

Some have argued not much. “The threat of identity theft from data losses is being greatly exaggerated,” Fred H. Cate, the director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University in Bloomington, told this newspaper not long ago. “And that’s because a lot of people have fallen into the trap of equating data loss with identity theft.”

Whether or not that is true is open to debate, but what all this data loss does represent, however, is the potential for identity theft — one that will never go away. Sure, it’s a game of odds. There is only so much a crook can do with a few hundred thousand names and Social Security numbers. But once they are out there, they are out there for good. Names don’t change. Neither do Social Security numbers or dates of birth. And as long as it remains easy enough to fashion that trifecta into a car loan, a home, a credit card, work papers, that would seem to be a bit of a long-term problem.

Indeed, Julie Fergerson, a vice president at Debix, an identity protection firm, and a board member of the Merchant Risk Council, an antifraud trade group, says she has begun seeing premiums placed on “aged” data at some online black market sites where stolen consumer identity and account information is traded.

“At some point organized crime is going to get real organized and actually figure out what to do with the millions of identities and user accounts sitting on these thieves’ computers,” Ms. Fergerson said. “Right now, there is just too much data, and the criminals simply have not figured out a way to commit crimes against a million individuals all at once.”

•

For its part, Congress has failed, despite the introduction of numerous data security bills, to agree on any legislation. States have picked up some of the slack, passing many breach notification bills. And 18 states now permit citizens to freeze their credit lines, preventing would-be thieves from opening new accounts. Seven more states make the freeze available to citizens only after they have become victims of identity theft, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Meanwhile, the University of Colorado at Boulder announced on Friday that the names and Social Security numbers of 17,500 former students may have been exposed in an attack on a server. Those students will be receiving letters notifying them of the breach.

“When it comes to identity theft, there’s only one victim that counts — you. The rest are just numbers,” said Mr. Ben-Natan. “When it happens, it takes over your life, and you feel betrayed by the organization that didn’t protect you.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/te...gy/18link.html





Opera Browser Now Has Phishing Filter
AP

The latest version of the Opera Web browser incorporates a technology that warns users when they visit a fraudulent site.

Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox both included such a feature - called a phishing filter - in their new releases in October.

Like the others, Opera Software ASA's free Opera 9.1 browser displays a warning when visitors go to a site that may trick them into revealing passwords and other sensitive information. Opera's update was released Monday.

For the lists of bad sites, Opera is tapping into the PhishTank project from OpenDNS LLC. Users submit to PhishTank.com the messages they believe are scams, and others in the PhishTank community examine the message and the site to which it links and vote on whether it is or isn't a scam.

Opera has a sliver of the Web browsing market. According to WebSideStory, Internet Explorer leads with 88 percent of the U.S. share on computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system. Firefox is second at nearly 11 percent.

The Norwegian browser maker has made greater inroads on mobile phones.
http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/...ap3263779.html





Opera on the Green Machine
Håkon Wium Lie

On Friday, I received a call from Opera's accounting department. That normally means trouble. My warning lights starts flashing.

«There's a package for you waiting here. I'm looking for the invoice for customs purposes. Can I open it?»

«Sure», I said, hoping to quickly return to whatever I was doing.

«There's no invoice inside. Strange. The value has been declared to be 100 dollars»

«100 dollars?»

«Yes. There's a machine inside the package. It's cute. Green.»

«GREEN? A GREEN MACHINE? 100 DOLLARS?»

«Yes.»

«DON'T MOVE. DON'T LET ANYONE ELSE SEE IT. LOCK THE DOORS. I'LL BE RIGHT THERE!»


As the alert reader has figured out by now, the machine inside the box was a prototype of the $100 laptop from the OLPC project. Since then, I've kept the machine close to me, but lots of people around here have seen it. The Opera geeks gathered around it at the Friday night beer bash. Someone suggested testing to see if the machine could keep running in rough environments. For example, would the rubbery keyboard withstand beer? Better not try.

Invariably, the machine gets attention. It attracts people more than any other unit I've seen. (Only Wii comes close.) People want to see it, touch it, and feel it. They want to know why the USB ports are placed where they are (on both sides of the screen), how the SD card can be inserted (the SD port is under the screen), and where the crank is. The crank, meant to generate power to run the machine, was part of an early design. It has been replaced with a foot pedal which is still under construction. However, it seems that people somehow got emotionally attached to the hand crank and want it back.

Once the machine is turned on, a Linux boot sequence appears. Red Hat is one of the sponsors and the machine comes with a tuned version of Fedora. New boot images are published regularly, and the first thing to do was to install the latest build. All of this is documented at the project's Wiki. The next thing to do was to find a shell. The magical key combination is Alt-Shift-F11. However, the keys don't have function numbers and finding F11 requires counting. When you get it right, a shell appears and you can start typing. Typing would have been easier if my hands were smaller. That's a feature, not a bug.

For me, the next thing to do was to install Opera. This is also the reason why the OLPC people are kind enough to send us an early prototype: we want to make sure the machine has a choice of good browsers. The browser is easily the most important application on the machine. In fact, a modern browser is more than an application — it could be the platform onto which OLPC applications are built, like Opera Platform is for mobile phones. OLPC has decided to only include open source software on the machine. I have discussed this issue at length with Nicholas, Walter and Mako. At Opera, we think that what really counts is open standards. It's less important what runs inside the box as long as what crosses the wire is standards-compliant. They argue that, in an education project, students must be allowed to peek inside the box. That's nice, I say, but if Opera makes the difference between a usable or an unusable machine, perhaps you will reconsider?

Getting Opera to run was quite simple. The statically linked rpm package of Opera 9.10 downloads and installs easily. Only the static version will run out of the box, as the box doesn't have Qt on it. Seeing Opera run on the OLPC for first time was a revelation — no browser has ever been more beautiful. The resolution of the screen is stunning (200dpi) and Opera makes the most of the embedded DejaVu fonts. At the moment, we are struggling with a problem that seems to be caused by Opera. When visiting sites that use JavaScript heavily, the machine freezes intermittently. We're also trying out various builds of Opera on the machine. Qt is cute, but it comes at a price (in MBs, that is). We'll be playing with a non-Qt version and measuring performance in the time to come. Also, on our todo list is making an OLPC skin.

I also installed Prince, a web-to-PDF-through-CSS converter (disclosure: I'm a director in the company). The Prince6 alpha installed flawlessly, started up with prince -s wiki.css http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home, thus fetching a the web page and combining it with a local style sheet. The resulting PDF file has footnotes and all. Nice achievement for a small machine!

Needless to say, I'm a great fan of the OLPC project. The altruistic nature of the project is compelling. Giving children in the third world access to information through a durable machine without paying the MS-tax is all good. However, I want no less for my own children. Many kids in the first world will ask their parents for laptops this Christmas. Should their wish be granted? Will they be better off with $1000 (including MS-tax) laptop? I think not — we should give them $100 laptops instead, like the children of Massachusetts have been promised. At a global level, kids in rich and poor countries would be using the same machine. At a local level, the children of rich and poor parents would be using the same machine. As such, the machine will be an equalizer. And our kids will be spared a bleak future in the MS-Office tar pit.
http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/olpc/





Opera on the OLPC!
Claudio Santambrogio

"Ohhh, it's SMALL!"
"It's - OHH - so GREEN!"
"HOW CUTE!"

Since Håkon came over to our desktop offices with the OLPC we just received, it got really busy: everybody wants to see it, to touch it, to play with it. Invariably, it catches everybody's fantasy and curiosity. And everybody's enthusiasm: it's really great fun!

Opera runs beautifully on it. The machine is not really the fastest, but Opera' performance is excellent - the browsing experience is beautifully smooth: all sites load fine and quickly, and even complex DHTML pages with heavy animations do not suffer - and you will not miss anything you can enjoy in the desktop version, no need to settle for less. In fact, we currently simply are running the static intel-linux desktop build on it: Opera scales very well on slower machines. We are planning to also play with non-Qt desktop versions on the machine, and test and compare performance results - after all, we want to make sure users will have the choice of good browsers. Keep in mind that the additional RAM that now has been added mainly to allow the bundled browser to run, will be removed again.

Multiple tabs, mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, zoom-in on any page and never be afraid to get any horizontal scrollbars, low memory footprint… it all works perfectly - except for when it comes to a very odd and nasty JavaScript freezer that pulls the whole machine down with it…

Well, I guess debugging that will be our Christmas gift for this year And it's great fun browsing the web on the machine! Stay tuned!
http://my.opera.com/csant/blog/2006/...ra-on-the-olpc





'Headless Opera' Puts Police on Alert
George Jahn

Audience members at Monday's Deutsche Oper production of Mozart's ''Idomeneo'' will be kindly asked to empty their pockets of all metal objects. And they should be prepared to leave -- quickly -- in case of a bomb alert.

The Austrian musical genius born 250 years ago was noted for an impish sense of humor and some directors take huge liberties with their interpretations of operas. But the security measures for the performance, which include electronic screening of opera goers and evacuation precautions, are not part of the plot.

It's a case of art meeting religious sensibility -- and a decision that the show must go on, despite concerns that the production, featuring the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad, could prompt violence.

Mozart might wonder what the heads of Islam's founder, along with those of Jesus, Buddha and the Greek god of the seas, Poseidon, are doing in his opera. They are the brainchild of the director Hans Neuenfels, whose production first premiered three years ago. While some critics found the twist trite back then, it aroused little attention outside the opera world.

But that was before a Danish newspaper cartoon of Muhammad led to Muslim riots worldwide -- and before comments by German-born Pope Benedict XVI further inflamed sensibilities in the Islamic world, just as the Neuenfels production was to be revived.

Such fears initially led the opera house to cancel plans to revive the production, but a city proud of its openness, tolerance and artistic verve was aghast.

While some Muslim leaders praised the decision, even Kenan Kolat, the leader of Germany's Turkish community, equated it with a step ''back in the Middle Ages.'' Chancellor Angela Merkel warned against ''self-censorship out of fear,'' and Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble -- in charge of police -- described it as ''crazy.''

So the show is back, though only after a last-minute scramble after the four props were either mislaid or stolen by pranksters. New ones were made.

Still, the performance comes with procedures that for some will make the experience more like clearing airport security than a night at the opera.

Staff are setting up electronic scanner gates at entrances, said opera spokesman Alexander Busche. A memo from Berlin police tells employees what to do in case of a bomb threat, and officers will be present in force -- although low-key, so as not to intrude on what all hope will be nothing more than a musical and visual experience.

''We are ready for any eventuality,'' said police spokesman Berhard Schodrowski.

Kolat, the head of Germany's Turkish community, has said he plans to attend, as has Schaeuble, the interior minister. Ali Kizilkaya, head of Germany's Islamic Council, whose presence would have done much to defuse potential tensions, will not be there.

Instead of an opera where Muhammad and Christ are beheaded, ''I ... would hope for a debate in society about whether everything should be allowed for the sake of art,'' he said, in indirect criticism of the decision to stage the production.

Another German Muslim leader, Aiman Mazyek, also said he would not attend, saying the purpose of opera was ''not to mix religion, art and politics.''

Also missing will be director Neuenfels, creator of the heads-scene and a talented but notorious ''Problemkind'' -- problem-child -- of the German cultural scene. But his absence is more a case of sending an artistic message and less of making a political statement.

Under present management, Deutsche Oper revivals of his productions ''are crap,'' Neuenfels said. He has insisted his staging not be altered, saying the scene where the king of Crete presents the severed heads represents his protest against ''any form of organized religion or its founders.''

Despite such a scathing dismissal from its creator, the controversy has focused international interest on the production -- a potentially welcome development for a house that competes for audience against two other opera companies in the German capital and is usually is no more than two-thirds full.

But tickets were still available just a few days before the performance.

''This is one of Mozart's less-known operas,'' said Busche of the relative lack of interest. As for the controversy around the severed heads, Berliners ''are just not so into sensationalism.''

------

Associated Press Writers Melissa Eddy and Holger Mehling contributed to this report.
http://www.localnewsleader.com/brock...lnews&id=35599





White House Tightens Publishing Rules for USGS Scientists
John Heilprin

The Bush administration is clamping down on scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, who study everything from caribou mating to global warming, subjecting them to controls on research that might go against official policy.

New rules require screening of all facts and interpretations by agency scientists. The rules apply to all scientific papers and other public documents, even minor reports or prepared talks, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Top officials at the Interior Department's scientific arm say the rules only standardize what scientists must do to ensure the quality of their work and give a heads-up to the agency's public relations staff.

“This is not about stifling or suppressing our science, or politicizing our science in any way,'' Barbara Wainman, the agency's director of communications, said Wednesday. “I don't have approval authority. What it was designed to do is to improve our product flow.''

Some agency scientists, who until now have felt free from any political interference, worry that the objectivity of their work could be compromised.

“I feel as though we've got someone looking over our shoulder at every damn thing we do. And to me that's a very scary thing. I worry that it borders on censorship,'' said Jim Estes, an internationally recognized marine biologist who works for the geological unit. “The explanation was that this was intended to ensure the highest possible quality research,'' said Estes, a researcher at the agency for more than 30 years. “But to me it feels like they're doing this to keep us under their thumbs. It seems like they're afraid of science. Our findings could be embarrassing to the administration.''

The new requirements state that the USGS's communications office must be “alerted about information products containing high-visibility topics or topics of a policy-sensitive nature.''

The agency's director, Mark Myers, and its communications office also must be told — prior to any submission for publication — “of findings or data that may be especially newsworthy, have an impact on government policy, or contradict previous public understanding to ensure that proper officials are notified and that communication strategies are developed.''

Patrick Leahy, USGS's head of geology and its acting director until September, said Wednesday that the new procedures would improve scientists' accountability and “harmonize'' the review process. He said they are intended to maintain scientists' neutrality.

“Our scientific staff is second to none,'' he said. “This notion of scientific gotcha is something we do not want to participate in. That does not mean to avoid contentious issues.''

The changes amount to an overhaul of commonly accepted procedures for all scientists, not just those in government, based on anonymous peer reviews. In that process, scientists critique each other's findings to determine whether they deserve to be published.

From now on, USGS supervisors will demand to see the comments of outside peer reviewers' as well any exchanges between the scientists who are seeking to publish their findings and the reviewers.

The Bush administration, as well as the Clinton administration before it, has been criticized over scientific integrity issues. In 2002, the USGS was forced to reverse course after warning that oil and gas drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would harm the Porcupine caribou herd. One week later a new report followed, this time saying the caribou would not be affected.
http://www.livescience.com/forcesofn...screening.html





“I own the pipes.”

Not yet you don’t.

FCC Commish’s Reservations on Voting in AT&T-BellSouth Merger Cheer Net Neutrality Advocates
Russell Shaw

Turns out that FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell won't vote on the AT&T-BellSouth merger.

I have to tell you I am surprised. In the last six years, we haven't seen all that many Republicans buck the "free market" mantra enthusiastically championed by the GOP. And it is not common that regulators from either party would continue to hold their ground in the face of regulatory counsel's approval for them to vote on thorny issues such as the merger in question.

He has been intensively lobbied to do so by FCC Chair Kevin Martin. Citing a legal opinion from the FCC's counsel, Martin said that despite McDowell's fears that casting a vote would prove a conflict of interest with Martin's previous representation of a merger opponent, doing so would be OK.

"In all candor, however, I had expected a memorandum making a strong and clear case for my participation," McDowell said in a statement (which is I guess what you do in statements- say something). "Instead, the Authorization Memo is hesitant, does not acknowledge crucial facts and analyses, and concludes by framing this matter as an ethical coin-toss frozen in mid-air. The document does not provide me with confidence or comfort."

Right now, Gigi Sohn of public-interest group Public Knowledge sounds quite celebratory. She had hoped McDowell would delay his vote until more "enforceable" net neutrality language was written into the merger agreement. Writing in Public Knowledge's blog, Sohn called her post a "happy holiday gift."

Terming the news "a happy holiday gift," Public Knowledge's Gigi Sohn wrote in the organization's blog that McDowell's decision "leaves the FCC deadlocked at 2-2 and essentially forces Chairman Martin to compromise with Commissioners Copps and Adelstein, who want more conditions on the merger, including enforceable net neutrality."

Net neutrality- a sore subject for Ed Whitacre. That Ed Whitacre,CEO of AT&T. The same AT&T whose acquisition of BellSouth McDowell is uncomfortable with voting on.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?p=1368





Goodbye VHS, Farewell Fair Use

Listen to this commentary

As VHS tapes and VCRs head the way of Betamax and phonographs, commentator Bill Hammack warns that the right to fair use is in danger of disappearing right along with them.

MARK AUSTIN THOMAS: 2006 might be remembered as the year the VHS videotape format suffered a fatal blow: Major studios have stopped releasing their movies on VHS. This happened after DVD sales of prerecorded movies surpassed VHS cassettes for the first time three years ago. Commentator and engineer Bill Hammack says we might be losing more than a recording format. We might be losing our culture.
BILL HAMMACK: Back in the 1980s, the Supreme Court ruled VCR makers couldn't be held liable for copyright infringement.

That gave consumers the right to make personal copies of TV shows and movies using a VCR.

The new digital media that are erasing the VHS format are also erasing our rights.

A few years ago, a Judge issued a catch-22 ruling: Yes, she said, we can copy commercial DVDs too. But no one can sell the software to do that.

In effect, that lets a content producer, the copyright owner, code their own intellectual property law into the DVD.

What's wrong with what? I mean surely only criminals would like to copy, right?

Well, wait a minute.

The U.S. has a long history of fair use: You have the right to cut out and frame a New Yorker cartoon. Or photocopy a newspaper article.

Fair use also catalyzes innovation and allows us to talk about ourselves, to create culture.

Take an artist of the future. He or she might want to make a statement using a bit of video or sound in a creative work.

But as all media — even books — become digital, every embodiment of thought or imagination becomes subject to commercial control.

DVDs use a technology called Digital Rights Management that allow producers to control when and where you watch.

They can specify whether you view a movie once or 100 times, and they can even restrict the devices you can play it on.

The slow demise of VHS tape risks the literary and intellectual canon of the coming century becoming locked into a digital vault accessible only to a few.

As our country moves forward to regulate digital copying, I urge us all to bear in mind T.S. Eliot's famous saying. "Good poets borrow; great poets steal."

THOMAS: Bill Hammack teaches chemical engineering at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/s...200612192.html





Mobile Content Server – Summer ‘07



BluOnyx

You are fashionable, you are smart, you are hip, you care to share with friends at the coffee table, with family in town, with a colleague across the globe.
WebBlurb

Features:

· About the size of a credit card
· Slightly thicker than the Motorola Razr™
· Independent of a PC
· Move content to it from cell phone, camera or PC
· Connect using Bluetooth, SD card, USB and Wifi
· Display your content on cell phone, TV and PC
· Send your content over the cell network, internet, home/corporate LAN
· Broadcast the same or different content on the BluOnyx to Multiple phones at the same time
· Your Content From Anywhere - Enjoyed Everywhere

Now your Pictures, emails, files, video and music can be right there when you want them. You can view them on the cell phone, TV or PC screen. All that High Def pictures and video can be moved using the SD slot on the BluOnyx. Music, Video and Documents can be played or viewed on your cell phone. Put the BluOnyx on the home network and you can drag and drop content to it then pick it up and go.

The Digital Campfire™ Content Server

Sitting around a coffee table with friends or a conference table with colleagues, The BluOnyx can Broadcast the same or different files at the same time, streaming video to some, sending audio to others and sending files to another person. You get the idea. It is cozy around the campfire.
http://www.bluonyx.com/bluonyx.cfm#

Applications With Portable Media Players

MP3 , AAC music files as well as mpeg or avi files or any media file format for that matter can be loaded unto the BluOnyx. The BluOnyx can then serve those files to the Portable Media Players extending the flexibility of those Portable Media Players.

Most Media Players do not have wireless connectivity. The BluOnyx extends the reach of the owner to get access to new music or video over the cell network or over the internet via wifi.

Once that new music is loaded unto the BluOnyx, it can be served up to any target device which can then decode and play that music or video.

The BluOnyx is file type and Digital Rights Management agnostic. DRM is managed by the source and target devices with the BluOnyx simply serving up the content for the user to enjoy.
http://bluonyx.agere.com/blog/entry....670E28B19026FE





Report: Patent Law Stifles Drug Innovation
ACS

A report by the General Accounting Office concludes that current patent law discourages drug companies from developing new drugs by allowing them to make excessive profits through minor changes to existing pharmaceuticals. While pharmaceutical research and development expenses have increased by 147% since 1993, applications for approval of "new molecular entity" (NME) drugs, or drugs which differ significantly from others already on the market, have risen only 7%. According to the report, the majority of newly developed medicines are so-called "me-too" drugs, which are substantially similar to existing drugs, are less risky than NMEs drugs to develop, and which "offer little in the way of therapeutic breakthroughs."

Under existing patent law, these "me-too" drugs can receive new patents separate from the already existing drugs they are based on, allowing drug companies to make substantial profits without signficantly enhancing the quality of drugs available on the market. According to the report, "the ability of drug manufacturers to easily obtain patents for minor changes to products, or to receive patent exclusivity for new uses of existing products, have reduced incentives to develop new drugs."

Commenting on the report, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) said that existing patent law allows drug companies to drive up their profits at the expense of patients needing innovative treatments. "The findings in this new GAO report," said Senator Durbin, "raise serious questions about the pharmaceutical industry claims that there is a connection between new drug development and the soaring price of drugs already on the market. Most troubling is the notion that pharmaceutical industry profits are coming at the expense of consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer new drugs."

In his own statement on the GAO report, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) touted a bill he has co-sponsored with Senator Mike Enzi, which would provide grants to scientists focused on developing innovative drugs.
http://www.acsblog.org/ip-and-tech-l...nnovation.html





Inadvertent Pirates to Pay Microsoft Millions
Colin Barker

Microsoft has claimed an important victory in its battle against software piracy.

The company says it has secured a multimillion-dollar settlement against a disc-copying company allegedly responsible for 20,000 unauthorized copies of Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server.

Microsoft did not reveal how much money it recouped from MPO Group, which replicates DVDs and CDs in France, Spain, Thailand and Ireland. The settlement was reached following an investigation into the company's disc-manufacturing facility in Thailand.

The year-long probe revealed that the pirate was a third party claiming to have a license to replicate a certain number of discs annually. It also revealed that MPO's Thai subsidiary had incorrectly accepted that the third party's so-called license was genuine.

"In fact, no such license existed, and Microsoft does not license its software to be reproduced and distributed in this way," Microsoft said in a statement. Once the fraud was revealed, MPO fully cooperated with Microsoft and law enforcement officials, according to the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant.

"We appreciate the steps MPO has taken to tighten their security procedures to prevent a recurrence of this type of wholesale counterfeiting of Microsoft software and to help track down all those responsible for distributing the counterfeits," said Frank Holland, Microsoft vice president of operations.

Replication companies are often hired by software companies reluctant to take on the job of duplicating millions of discs themselves.

MPO is one of the largest companies of its type in Europe. Its Ireland operation manufactures only CDs, while the others make DVDs as well. According to the company's internal figures, it replicated 225 million DVDs and 295 million CDs in the year ending in August 2006. Seventy million CDs were replicated in Ireland.
http://news.com.com/Inadvertent+pira...3-6145021.html





Hackers Selling Vista Zero-Day Exploit
Ryan Naraine

Underground hackers are hawking zero-day exploits for Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system at $50,000 a pop, according to computer security researchers at Trend Micro.

The Windows Vista exploit—which has not been independently verified—was just one of many zero-days available for sale at an auction-style marketplace infiltrated by the Tokyo-based anti-virus vendor.

In an interview with eWEEK, Trend Micro's chief technology officer, Raimund Genes, said prices for exploits for unpatched code execution flaws are in the $20,000 to $30,000 range, depending on the popularity of the software and the reliability of the attack code.

Bots and Trojan downloaders that typically hijack Windows machines for use in spam-spewing botnets were being sold for about $5,000, Genes said.

For advice on how to secure your network and applications, as well as the latest security news, visit Ziff Davis Internet's Security IT Hub.

The Trend Micro discovery highlights the true financial value of software vulnerability information and serves as further confirmation that a lucrative underground market exists for exploit code targeting unpatched flaws.

Back in December 2005, researchers at Kaspersky Lab in Moscow found evidence that the exploit code used in the WMF (Windows Metafile) attack was being peddled by Russian hacker groups for $4,000.

However, according to Genes, the typical price of a destructive exploit has increased dramatically, driving an underground market that could exceed the value of the legitimate security software business.

"I think the malware industry is making more money than the anti-malware industry," Genes said.

Trend Micro's researchers also found the underground marketplace saturated with personal data stolen in phishing attacks and virtual currency hijacked from online gamers.

Genes said the average prices for credit card and bank log-in data can vary dramatically, depending on the bank's brand and the way the data is mapped to names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and physical addresses.

A custom Trojan capable of stealing online account information can be bought for between $1,000 and $5,000, while a botnet-building piece of malware can cost between $5,000 and $20,000, Genes said.

Credit card numbers with valid PINs are sold for $500 each, while billing data that includes an account number, physical address, Social Security number, home address and birth date can be found for between $80 and $300.

The auction marketplace is also selling driver's licenses for $150, birth certificates for $150, Social Security cards for $100, and credit card numbers with security code and expiration date for between $7 and $25.

PayPal or eBay account credentials are available for $7, Genes said.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2073611,00.asp





BadVista.org: FSF Launches Campaign Against Microsoft Vista
John Sullivan

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today launched BadVista.org, a campaign with a twofold mission of exposing the harms inflicted on computer users by the new Microsoft Windows Vista and promoting free software alternatives that respect users' security and privacy rights.

“Vista is an upsell masquerading as an upgrade. It is an overall regression when you look at the most important aspect of owning and using a computer: your control over what it does. Obviously MS Windows is already proprietary and very restrictive, and well worth rejecting. But the new 'features' in Vista are a Trojan Horse to smuggle in even more restrictions. We'll be focusing attention on detailing how they work, how to resist them, and why people should care”, said FSF program administrator John Sullivan.

The campaign will organize supporters into effective and unusual actions drawing attention to this daylight theft of computer users' rights, aggregate news stories cutting through the Vista marketing propaganda, and provide a user-friendly gateway to the adoption of free software operating systems like gNewSense (http://www.gnewsense.org).

Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF said, “Whilst Microsoft embarks upon its largest ever product launch, its marketing dollars will be spent in an effort to fool the media and user community about the goals of Vista. Our campaign will ask the important questions. Can you set yourself or your company free? Can you ever be free from Microsoft? As with our campaign against Digital Restrictions Management, we aim to demonstrate that technologists can be social activists, because we know the harm that Vista will cause”.

Among other harms, BadVista.org will focus on the danger posed by Treacherous Computing in Vista. Commonly called Trusted Computing in the industry, it is an attempt to turn computers from machines controlled by their user into machines that monitor their user and refuse to operate in ways that manufacturers don't authorize.

Supporters can sign up to receive more information and participate in the campaign at http://badvista.org.
http://badvista.fsf.org/





Zune Doesn't Shake iPod's Market Lead

Microsoft MP3 player has decent 1st month
Troy Wolverton

Microsoft's Zune had a decent debut last month, but Apple Computer's iPods continued to dominate the MP3 market, according to new data from market research firm NPD Group released this week.

Although Microsoft didn't release the Zune until more than halfway through November, the company was the second-leading manufacturer of hard disk drive-based media players, capturing 9 percent of the U.S. retail market, according to NPD. Including both flash memory and hard disk drive players, Microsoft came in fourth, with 1.9 percent of the market.

The company's much-hyped entree into the MP3 player market appeared to have little affect on industry leader Apple. Although Apple's share of the hard drive market fell to 82.7 percent from 86.8 percent a year ago, its share of the overall market came in at 62.2 percent, essentially even with the 63 percent it posted a year ago.

SanDisk was No. 2 with 18.4 percent of the overall market, up from 17.5 percent last year.

Revamped versions of the flash-based iPod nano and iPod shuffle boosted Apple's overall results. Sales of the shuffle doubled year over year in November, while those of the nano grew 37 percent.

``All in all, that's a pretty good performance,'' said Stephen Baker, an analyst with Reston, Va.-based NPD.

Apple has dominated sales of MP3 players almost since it entered the market five years ago. In contrast, there are already questions about how sustainable Microsoft's Zune sales will be. NPD's own weekly data had Microsoft falling from the No. 2 vendor of MP3 players in its first week to No. 5 in its second week.

On Amazon.com, one of the leading vendors of electronics products online, the Zune has become a distant also-ran behind the iPod and other MP3 players. The black Zune -- the top selling model -- was recently ranked No. 47 among the bestselling electronics products on Amazon. At the same time Apple's black 30GB iPod -- the Zune's direct competitor -- was ranked No. 1.

The Zune even trailed Creative's rival 30GB Zen Vision, which was ranked No. 27.

And there are indications that Microsoft may have misread the market. The company is offering a dull brown version of the Zune in part to stand out from the competition and because it got favorable reviews in its pre-market research. But according to NPD, the brown Zune accounts for just 19 percent of all the Zunes sold, about the same amount as the white model. The black model accounts for about 63 percent of all sold.

That dynamic plays out on Amazon as well, where the brown model is ranked no. 192 and the white no. 312.

Microsoft expressed little concern about the sales. Jason Reindorp, director of product marketing for Zune, said, ``We are happy with the position Zune currently holds in the market, and are on track to meet our sales projection of 1 million units by end of the fiscal year.''
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twinci...y/16263552.htm





ePassports 'At Risk' from Cloning
David Reid

The ePassport is one of the many measures pursued by the United States and governments internationally after the horror of 11 September.

It will, we are promised, keep the unwanted and dangerous outside our borders, while streamlining entry for those welcome to come and visit.

But as the implementation of the scheme gets underway it is becoming clear that there could be serious problems with it.

With the old passport, we knew where we stood. If you lost it you knew you had lost it, but with the new, machine readable passports the story is very different.

When you take a digital photo the image is, in effect, a code, which means that however many prints you make they are all exactly the same.

Five-Minute Replica

So when Lukas Grunwald and Christian Bottger realised they could clone the new ePassport they were pretty sure it would be identical to the original, and undetectable. So how did they do it?

The chip inside the ePassport is a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip of the type poised to replace the barcode in supermarkets.

The good thing about RFID chips is that they emit radio signals that can be read at a short distance by an electronic reader.

But this is also the bad thing about them because, as Lukas demonstrated to me, he can easily download the data from his passport using an RFID reader he got for 200 Euros on eBay.

Lukas is less forthcoming about where he got what is called the Golden Reader Tool, it is the software used by border police and it allows him to read the chip on his ePassport, including the photo.

Now for the clever bit. Thanks to a software he himself has developed, called RFdump, he downloads the passport's data onto his computer and then onto a blank chip.

Using a standard off-the-shelf component you can just buy at a component store you can have a cloned ePassport in less than five minutes.

Security Risks

When the cloned ePassport is read and compared to the original one it behaves exactly the same.

The UK Home Office however dismissed the ability to get hold of the information on the chip.

A spokesman said: "It is hard to see why anyone would want to access the information on the chip.

"Other than the photograph, which could be obtained easily by other means, they would gain no information that they did not already have - so the whole exercise would be pointless: the only information stored on the ePassport chip is the basic information you can see on the personal details page."

The spokesman said the chip was one part of the security features of the ePassport.

He said: "Being able to copy this does not mean that the passport can be forged or imitated for illegal or unauthorised use.

"British ePassports are designed in such a way as to make chip substitution virtually impossible and the security features of the passport render the forgery of the complete document impractical."

According to Lukas Grunwald of the consulting company DN-Systems an ePassport holder is more at risk from someone trying to steal their data.

"Nearly every country issuing this passport has a few security experts who are yelling at the top of their lungs and trying to shout out: 'This is not secure. This is not a good idea to use this technology'".

DN-Systems' Christian Böttger also believes the system was set up in a hurry.

"It is much too complicated. It is in places done the wrong way round - reading data first, parsing data, interpreting data, then verifying whether it is right.

"There are lots of technical flaws in it and there are things that have just been forgotten, so it is basically not doing what it is supposed to do. It is supposed to get a higher security level. It is not," he said.

Danger

Researchers working within the Future of Identity in the Information Society (FIDIS) network say European governments have forced a document on its citizens that dramatically decreases security and increases the risk of identity theft.

RFID chips can be read at a short distance and tracked without their owner's knowledge, while the key to unlocking the passport's chip consists of details actually printed on the passport itself.

It is almost like writing your pin number on the back of your cashpoint card.

"The basic access control mechanism works based on information like the number of the passport, the name of the passport holder, the date of birth and then other data which are simply readable by anyone who looks on the passport," said Professor Kai Rannenberg of Frankfurt University.

"If you have that information and put the respective software into the reader, the reader can overcome the basic access control of the passport."

The experts say it is not too late to roll back and rethink the ePassport.

If not, the danger is obvious - that a scheme, the declared aim of which is to increase our security, could well do the exact opposite.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ne/6182207.stm





Hardware review

HD Video Playback: H.264 Blu-ray on the PC
Derek Wilson

In November, we published our first article featuring Blu-ray content. While we focused more on the capability of the cards we tested to play digital content protected with HDCP, we did take a preliminary look at hardware accelerated high definition video playback with the movie Click.

Our first glimpse of the processing power required to play HD content on the PC gave us a very good indication that Blu-ray movies using MPEG-2 should have no problem on a modern system, even without GPU acceleration. The Core 2 Duo E6300 is easily capable of playing back 50-60 Mbps MPEG-2 video at 1080p. Adding a GPU to the mix did make an impact, but the small boost in performance just wasn't necessary.

Today we will turn the tables around and look at what happens when H.264/MPEG-4 AVC meets Blu-ray on the PC. This combination is much more demanding than MPEG-2 encoded Blu-ray movies, as H.264 is capable of much higher compression at better quality which requires more processing power.

Before we get to our results, it is important to talk a bit about playback of HD media on the PC. BD and HDDVD movies are copy protected with AACS which uses HDCP to encrypt and decrypt the video signal when it's sent over a digital connection. In order to view one of these movies on an HDTV over either a DVI or HDMI connection, an HDCP enabled video card is required.

All video cards that have an HDMI connection on them should support HDCP, but the story is different with DVI. Only recently have manufacturers started including the encryption keys required for HDCP. Licensing these keys costs hardware makers money, and the inclusion of HDCP functionality hasn't been seen as a good investment until recently (as Blu-ray and HDDVD players are finally available for the PC). While NVIDIA and ATI are both saying that most (if not all) of the cards available based on products released within the last few months will include the required hardware support, the final decision is still in the hands of the graphics card maker.

It is important to make it clear that HDCP graphics cards are only required to watch protected HD content over a digital connection. Until movie studios decide to enable the ICT (Image Constraint Token), HD movies will be watchable at full resolution over an analog connection. While analog video will work for many current users, it won't be a long term solution.

Now that we've recapped what we know about watching HD content on the PC, lets take a look at why things will be a little different now that H.264/MPEG-4 AVC encoded movies are here.

Almost anything can be done in a faster, more compact, or higher quality way. Sometimes there are tradeoffs to be made, and sometimes one way of doing things is just better than another. It has been quite some time since studios began distributing movies encoded in MPEG-2 stored on DVDs. Now that we have some new physical media entering the market, we will also see more efficient codecs enter the playing field as well.

H.264 is another name for a subset of MPEG-4 called MPEG-4 Part 10, or AVC (for Advanced Video Coding). This codec is a big step beyond MPEG-2 in terms of how heavily video of a given quality can be compressed. There are quite a few factors that make H.264 a better vehicle for video, but these are a little beyond the scope of this article. For now we will focus on the impact of H.264 and why it's a better option than MPEG-2.

The major benefit of H.264 over MPEG-2 is its small file size due to high compression. High resolution video can be stored in much less space. This is very useful because even though BDs can be 25 or 50 GB, high quality high resolution video is not small. The higher the compression we have, the higher the quality of video that will fill up a disk. Alternately, with high compression we also have extra room for the all important bonus features and extra content that we expect with any good DVD today.

Higher image quality is also inherent in H.264 due to some of the improved features of the codec. Variable block size motion compensation, better handling of interlaced video, in-loop deblocking, and better subpixel accuracy all contribute to a better overall image quality. Alternately, studios can use the image quality advantages to lower bitrate even more, as compression artifacts don't show up as readily.

With all these advantages, there is one downside to H.264: decoding the video takes much more work than with MPEG-2. High powered, dedicated H.264 decoding hardware is required in standalone BD and HDDVD players, as a generic processor just isn't enough to handle the work load. This is understandable as we have to make a tradeoff between file size/bitrate and the amount of work a CPU needs to do to reproduce the video, and H.264 produces very small files.

The large file size vs. heavy compression issue is actually fairly intuitive. Imagine completely uncompressed video where every pixel of every frame is stored in memory. The only thing we need to do to display the video is to send the data to the TV. This requires almost no processing but very high file size and bandwidth from the storage media. As a reference point, uncompressed 24-bit 1080p content at 24fps (the standard frame rate for movies) would require a whopping 1.19 Gbps of bandwidth and a 90 minute movie would need about 750GB of storage. Obviously, some form of compression is absolutely required.

When storing less data through compression, the CPU must do work to fill in the blanks before sending the video out to a display. With our previous Blu-ray test movie Click (which used MPEG-2), we saw bitrates of 50-60 Mbps throughout our test (representing somewhere between a 20:1 and 24:1 compression rate). Moving to X-Men: The Last Stand, most of our test is at about 20 Mbps, though we do see a very short spike that hits over 40 Mbps (somewhere around a 60:1 compression rate). We would need to compare the same section of one movie encoded in both MPEG-2 and H.264 in order to speak directly to the differences between the two, but for now we will generally see at least half the bitrate with H.264 that we get with MPEG-2. We also see a much lower CPU utilization with MPEG-2 because it doesn't compress the video as much as H.264.

If we focus on our high compression codec, we'll see that higher bitrates with H.264 mean more work for the CPU. When complex scenes occur, more data is required to generate a proper image. The CPU still needs to process all this data in the same way it would with a less complex scene, and we end up seeing higher processor utilization.

The encoding process takes more work as well, and we've been told that this is part of the reason we haven't seen many H.264 BD movies before now. When getting a movie ready for sale, studios will encode it many times and have people to view every frame of video and make sure nothing needs to be cleaned up. Every time a problem is found, the entire movie must be encoded again. It takes significantly more time to do this with H.264 than with MPEG-2. Fortunately, it seems that studios are making the sacrifices they need to make in order to bring a better experience to the end user.

To sum up, while MPEG-2 is relatively easy to decode, H.264 enables smaller files with better image quality. On the down side, the time it takes to encode a movie using H.264 is much higher than required for MPEG-2, and the processing power needed to decode H.264 without dropping frames can be very large. Without GPU acceleration, not even an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 can play X-Men: The Last Stand without dropping frames.

Before we get to the test, we'll leave you with a short list of H.264 Blu-ray titles. While we don't have the bitrate information for all of these, we chose X-Men: The Last Stand because it listed 18 Mbps video (higher than some of the others) and has some fairly complex special effects.

Blu-ray H.264 Movies:

Behind Enemy Lines
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
X-Men: The Last Stand
Speed
Glory Road
Gone in 60 Seconds
Eight Below
The Great Raid

As we previously indicated, we need to use at least a Core 2 Duo E6400 in order to avoid dropping frames while testing graphics card decode acceleration under X-Men: The Last Stand. As we also wanted an accurate picture of how much GPU decode acceleration really helps, we needed to use a CPU powerful enough to avoid dropping frames even under the most stressful load without GPU assistance. Thus we chose the Core 2 Duo X6800 for our tests. Using this processor, we can more accurately see how each graphics card compares to the others and how much each graphics card is able to assist the CPU.

We tested CPU utilization by using perfmon to record data while we viewed a section of X-Men: The Last Stand. The bookmark feature really helped out, allowing us to easily jump to the specific scene we wanted to test in Chapter 18. In this scene, the Golden Gate is being torn apart and people are running everywhere. This is one of the most stressful scenes in the movie, reaching a bitrate of over 41 Mbps at one point.

Unfortunately, we haven't found a feature in PowerDVD or another utility that will allow us to count dropped frames. This means we can't really compare what happens to the video quality when the CPU is running at 100%. In lieu of dropped frames, we will need to stick with CPU overhead as our performance metric.

For reference we recorded average and maximum CPU overhead while playing back our benchmark clip with no GPU acceleration enabled.

Here is the rest of our test system:

Performance Test Configuration
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo X6800
Motherboard(s): ASUS P5B Deluxe
Chipset(s): Intel P965
Chipset Drivers: Intel 7.2.2.1007 (Intel)
Hard Disk: Seagate 7200.7 160GB SATA
Memory: Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 4-4-4-12 (1GB x 2)
Video Cards: Various
Video Drivers: ATI Catalyst 6.11
NVIDIA ForceWare 93.71
NVIDIA ForceWare 97.02
Desktop Resolution: 1920x1080 - 32-bit @ 60Hz
OS: Windows XP Professional SP2

The first benchmark we will see compares the CPU utilization of our X6800 when paired with each one of our graphics cards. While we didn't test multiple variations of each card this time, we did test the reference clock speeds for each type. Based on our initial HDCP roundup, we can say that overclocked versions of these NVIDIA cards will see better CPU utilization. ATI hardware doesn't seem to benefit from higher clock speeds. We have also included CPU utilization for the X6800 without any help from the GPU for reference.

The leaders of the pack are the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 series cards. While the 7 Series hardware doesn't do as well, we can see that clock speed does affect video decode acceleration with these cards. It is unclear whether this will continue to be a factor with the 8 Series, as the results for the 8800 GTX and GTS don't show a difference.

ATI hardware is very consistent, but just doesn't improve performance as much as NVIDIA hardware. This is different than what our MPEG-2 tests indicated. We do still see a marked improvement over our unassisted decode performance test, which is good news for ATI hardware owners.

The second test we ran explores different CPUs performance with X-Men 3 decoding. We used NVIDIA's 8800 GTX and ATI's X1950 XTX in order to determine a best and worse case scenario for each processor. The following data isn't based on average CPU utilization, but on maximum CPU utilization. This will give us an indication of whether or not any frames have been dropped. If CPU utilization never hits 100%, we should always have smooth video. The analog to max CPU utilization in game testing is minimum framerate: both tell us the worst case scenario.

While only the E6700 and X6800 are capable of decoding our H.264 movie without help, we can confirm that GPU decode acceleration will allow us to use a slower CPU in order to watch HD content on our PC. The X1950 XTX clearly doesn't help as much as the 8800 GTX, but both make a big difference.

We've been hearing for quite some time now that Blu-ray and HDDVD movies could prove to be too much for today's desktop microprocessors; today we finally have the proof. X-Men: The Last Stand encoded using the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile at 1080p requires more processing power to decode than affordable dual core CPUs can handle. We are at a point where GPU decode acceleration is essentially required with all but the highest end processors in order to achieve an acceptable level of quality while watching HD content on the PC.

NVIDIA hardware performs better under our current set of drivers and the beta build of PowerDVD we are using, but exactly how well GeForce 7 Series hardware handles the decode process is more dependant on the type of card being used than ATI. In general, higher performance NVIDIA cards do better at decoding our H.264 Blu-ray content. The 7950 GX2 doesn't perform on par with the rest of the high end NVIDIA cards as SLI doesn't help with video decode. With the exception of the X1600 Pro, each of the ATI cards we tested affected performance almost exactly the same.

While there isn't much more to say about performance right now, we do need to consider that we are working with an early release of our player software, and ATI and NVIDIA are always improving their driver support for video decode acceleration. While we can't count on seeing improved performance in the future on current hardware, it is always nice to know that the possibility exists. We will continue to track performance with future player and driver updates.

But no matter what we see in the future, NVIDIA has done an excellent job with the 8800 series. G80 based cards will definitely lead the way in HD video decode performance, making it possible to stick with a cheaper CPU and still get a good experience. Of course, nothing about playing HD content on the PC is cheap right now, especially if we are talking about using an 8800 in conjunction with our Blu-ray drive.

For those who don't have the money to build a computer around Blu-ray or HDDVD, a standalone player is the other option. We tested our Samsung player with X-Men: The Last Stand to see if it could handle the demands of an H.264 movie (as any good CE player should). We were happy to see that the Samsung box didn't seem to have any problems playing our movie.

As for recommendations, based on our testing, we would not suggest anything less than an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 for use in a system designed to play HD content. The E6400 may work well enough, but not even the 8800 GTX can guarantee zero dropped frames on the E6300. ATI owners will want to lean more towards an E6700 processor, but can get away with the E6600 in a pinch. But keep in mind that X-Men: The Last Stand is only one of the first H.264 movies to come out. We may see content that is more difficult to decode in the future, and faster processors are definitely a good place to pad your performance to ensure a quality HD experience on the PC.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2886





Hollywood Hopes to Have Answer to Internet Piracy at Its Fingertips
Stephen Foley

Hollywood is evaluating proposals for a "digital fingerprint" that it can implant into online films in order to make it impossible for purchasers to share them with other internet users.

Discussions with technology companies come as the film industry braces for the development of a string of new movie-download sites that could transform the business, and which many fear could unleash a torrent of internet piracy.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has quietly asked a number of established and start-up tech companies for proposals to help forestall a big increase in peer-to-peer file sharing. It believes fingerprinting technology is necessary if studios are to agree to let more of their films go on sale as digital downloads.

Hollywood is desperate to avoid the fate of the music industry, which saw widespread file-sharing eat into sales of CDs, turning a generation of internet users on to the idea that music is free.

It has been encouraged by innovative partnerships with formerly renegade technology companies such as Guba, whose website allows users to search for content on peer-to-peer networks. Earlier this year, Guba agreed to filter out copyrighted material by marking it with a digital fingerprint. The electronics giant Philips and a little Silicon Valley firm, Audible Magic, are among those that have fingerprinting technologies that could be used by websites, college networks and internet service providers to filter out illegal content. The MPAA is currently evaluating some early proposals.

Importantly, the plan would give Hollywood control over the anti-piracy technologies used to protect its content. The studios are desperate to avoid ceding power to Apple, whose own digital rights management technology for music downloads means songs purchased from iTunes can only be played using Apple software or on its ubiquitous iPod. As a result, Apple has been able to dictate prices.

So far, only Disney - on whose board Apple's chief executive, Steve Jobs, sits - has agreed to let iTunes sell its movies; other studios have preferred to license a limited number of films to online stores. Clickstar, part-owned by the actor Morgan Freeman, set up shop on Friday, selling titles including The Da Vinci Code and Superman Returns.

Kori Bernards, a spokesman for the MPAA, said developing new anti-piracy technologies was only one part of the industry's strategy for preventing illegal downloading from becoming widespread. "We have a multi-pronged strategy involving law enforcement efforts against individuals and folks running servers, [and we have] public education and a push for new legislation to protect copyrights," she said. "And all the studios are already doing a lot to provide legal alternatives and to find out how people want to watch movies. Someday, you are going to be able to see a movie on a spoon."

An ABI Research survey revealed that only 5 per cent of broadband internet users have paid to download an entire film so far, but that the numbers who have downloaded an entire film for free over a file-sharing network is only slightly higher. The industry argues that it need not rush since there are still few ways for viewers to watch internet downloads on their televisions with an acceptable sound and picture quality, and this will give DVDs the edge for the time being.

So far, the industry is mostly concerned about online distribution of yet-to-be-released material, including films still showing in cinemas. Camcorder recordings of blockbusters such as Casino Royale, the latest James Bond movie, are already widely available online and on pirate DVDs. The MPAA estimates that studios lost $2.3bn worldwide to internet piracy alone in 2005.

David Price, the head of the anti-piracy team at Envisional, a UK company that tracks illegal downloads for most of the big Hollywood studios, said: "It is certainly possible to get most movies for free, and a lot of people are doing it, but what the industry can do is make it as difficult as possible for the casual downloader, and at the same time make it easier to download films legally."
http://news.independent.co.uk/busine...cle2081543.ece





YouTube Pledges to Protect Copyrights in Japan
AFP

Popular video-sharing website YouTube has agreed to take measures against copyright infringement in Japan but an industry group here said it was not entirely satisfied.

The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers had filed a complaint with YouTube, which was bought in October by Internet giant Google.

In response, YouTube Chief Executive Chad Hurley and Chief Technical Officer Steve Chen said they were ready to post a notice in Japanese on its website warning that users should not upload copyrighted content, the Japanese media group said Wednesday.

It also promised to "make an effort" to more strictly identify individual users and delete video files posted without permission of copyright holders, it said.

"Although we have not finished our conclusion yet, they don't appear to be meeting our request 100 percent," an official at the authors group said, adding that some of the answers lacked concrete measures.

"And our ultimate demand is to ask YouTube to introduce a preliminary system to delete copyrighted clips before they are uploaded," said the official, who asked not to be named.

YouTube said it planned to send a delegation to Japan to hold further discussions with the group, which will hold an emergency meeting on Friday to evaluate YouTube's reply, the official said.

"We may inform YouTube about our reply to their answers after Friday's meeting," the official said.

YouTube was founded in February 2005 and has quickly become the web's hottest site for swapping video content. The company says that people watch more than 70 million videos on the site each day.

The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers groups 23 media companies and organizations, including Japan's public television network NHK.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061220...pyrightyoutube





ZING!!!

Siemens Says Sets Network Speed Record

Germany's Siemens AG has set a new speed record for electrical processing of data through a fiber-optic cable, it said on Wednesday, opening the possibility of cheaper Internet and data networks.

Siemens said in a statement it had processed data using exclusively electrical means at 107 gigabits per second -- roughly two full DVDs per second -- and sent it over a single optical fiber channel in a 100 mile-long (161-kilometre) U.S. network, the first time outside of a laboratory.

Online games, music and video downloads are generating increasing amounts of Internet traffic, creating a need for ever faster and affordable transmission.

The test, 2.5 times faster than a previous maximum transmission performance per channel, was done in cooperation with Germany's Micram Microelectronic, the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications and Eindhoven Technical University of the Netherlands.

Siemens said the advantage of its method of using electrical processing only was that it removed the need to split signals into multiple, lower data-rate signals to avoid bottlenecks -- which makes transmission slower and more expensive.

"Such a system would be particularly interesting for the future 100-gigabit Ethernet on which the telecommunication providers are currently working," Siemens said.

Ethernet networking technology powers the vast majority of local computer networks, such as corporate networks, but is increasingly important for larger networks, due to its flexibility, as the technology becomes cheaper.

Siemens said it expected the first products based on the prototype could be on the market within a few years.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061220/...ns_ethernet_dc





Electricity-Saving Nanotech Start-Up to Move to The UK
Andrew Murray-Watson

A start-up nanotech company, which has secured $250m (£130m) in funding commitments and promises to significantly cut the world's energy usage, is to set up its global headquarters in the UK.

AirNatech, which has developed a technology to cut electricity usage in heating, ventilation and air conditioning units by at least 50 per cent, is establishing itself in Cambridge.

The company's backers claim that AirNatech could have a market capitalisation of more than $1bn by the end of next year and will create more than 100 high-skilled jobs in the UK.

AirNatech was created from the merger of UK-based AirNacon and NIL Technology of Denmark and is backed by Bridgehead Group, a US boutique investment bank.

The company decided to move to the UK after meetings with officials from the UK Trade and Investment's Global Entrepreneur Programme, a body set up by the Government to attract hi-tech companies to this country.

AirNatech's nanotechnology works by making heat exchangers, such as those found in air conditioning units, significantly more efficient. The company claims that its specially engineered copper is 40 times more effective at transferring heat than conventional materials.

The technology was originally created by Dr J H Lee, a former Nasa scientist who helped develop the powerless cooling technology in the US space shuttle.

Eric van der Kleij, the British government's senior global dealmaker, said: "We believe that emerging technologies that work towards conserving energy should be supported by government. The harnessing of these complementary technologies which are being acquired by AirNatech will act as a catalyst towards commercialisation."

According to recently published data, for every dollar spent in the US on electricity, 50 cents goes on powering heating systems and refrigeration and air conditioning units.
http://news.independent.co.uk/busine...cle2081541.ece





Norway Can Solve the Global Energy Crisis

Accelerator driven nuclear reactors based on Thorium may present a solution to the global energy crisis and could help ease political tension globally. Norway could play a key role in this development.

This is the opinion of Mr. Egil Lillestol, professor at the Institute of Physics and Technology, University of Bergen. The past year he has spent much of his effort and time convincing the Norwegian public and authorities that nuclear reactors based on Thorium could be the answer to the major energy challenges the world is facing.

The professor from the University of Bergen believes that a Thorium power plant is much safer and more efficient than traditional nuclear power reactors:

•There is no danger of a melt-down like the Chernobyl reactor
•It produces minimal radioactive waste
•It can burn Plutonium waste from traditional nuclear reactors with additional energy output
•It is not suitable for the production of weapon grade materials
•The energy contained in one kilogram of Thorium equals that of four thousand tons coal
•The global Thorium reserves could cover the world’s energy needs for thousands of years
•Norway has an estimated 180 000 tons of Thorium which based on the current price of oil is equivalent to 250 thousand billion US$, or 1000 times the Norwegian oil fund.

It was the Italian Nobel Laureate, Carlo Rubbia, who came up with the idea of this project which Professor Lillestol wants Norway to initiate. Estimates of energy gains and waste transmutation have been verified in several experiments, which in turn have been checked by the IAEA. What is now needed is the building of a prototype. This will take about 15 years to build and cost approximately 550 M€. It is expected that several countries and institutions will contribute with money as well as know-how if the prototype is realized as an international collaborative effort.

- The current energy crisis dictates us to save energy. Alternatives to the use of fossil fuels must be developed as soon as possible, with direct conversion of solar heat and nuclear power as the only viable options. As an energy nation with large Thorium reserves, Norway has a special responsibility to push the development of an accelerator driven reactor based on Thorium. Within an international project group, Norway should take the lead in the financing, projecting and building of the first prototype of such a reactor inside an international co-operation, says Professor Egil Lillestol
http://www.innovations-report.com/ht...ort-71533.html





A quick look at AMD's 65nm Athlon 64 X2 processors

Energy Efficiency and Overclocking Headroom Explored
Scott Wasson

AMD HAS BEEN PROMISING for some time to deliver chips made on its 65nm fabrication process by the end of 2006. The year's end is perilously close, but a small package arrived at Damage Labs last week bearing evidence of AMD's success: a pair of 65nm Athlon 64 X2 processors. Looks like they've just made it in under the wire. In fact, Athlon 64 X2 processors built in this 65nm process are filtering out into the market now.

Process shrinks often bring with them some nice benefits, because smaller chips tend to require less voltage, consume less power, and generate less heat. They also sometimes allow more headroom for clock frequency increases. The question is: how is AMD doing on these fronts? What benefits does its 65nm process bring to the Athlon 64 X2? Let's have a look.

The Athlon 64 X2 at 65nm: Less of the same
First things first: the Athlon 64 X2's conversion to 65nm is a die shrink and not much more than that. AMD says these chips ought to perform just like their counterparts at 90nm, so one shouldn't expect any notable performance improvements. The company does have microarchitectural improvements planned for its so-called "K8L" design, which is expected to debut around the middle of next year.

Between now and then, AMD will reap two main benefits from this conversion. First, the chips themselves are smaller, down from 183mm² at 90nm to 126mm² at 65nm. The 65nm and 90nm versions share the same estimated transistor count of 153.8 million. Second, these processors are manufactured exclusively at AMD's Fab 36 facility using 300mm wafers. These wafers have 2.25 times the area of the 200mm wafers produced at AMD's adjacent Fab 30 facility. Taken together, the smaller chips and larger wafers should make for much lower per-chip production costs, provided AMD is able to get good yields out of its 65nm process. That cost savings is especially crucial because Intel has had multiple fabs producing 65nm chips on 300mm wafers for quite some time now.


A pair of 65nm Athlon 64 X2 processors
The two 65nm Athlon 64 X2 processors we received for testing are the 4800+ and 5000+ models, both intended for Socket AM2 motherboards. Although nothing much has changed in terms of CPU performance at 65nm, the transition gives AMD an opening to jack with its CPU model numbers, and of course, it didn't let the opportunity pass without action. These processors have the ability to support half-step multipliers, so clock frequencies can now be controlled in 100MHz increments. Combine this ability with AMD's apparent determination to kill off or at least significantly reduce the number of Athlon 64 X2 processors with 1MB of L2 cache per core, and you have a recipe for a substantially revised set of model numbers. The new lineup of Athlon 64 X2 models at 65nm looks like so:

Model Clock speed L2 cache
(per core) TDP Price
Athlon 64 X2 4000+ 2.1GHz 512KB 65 W $169
Athlon 64 X2 4400+ 2.3GHz 512KB 65 W $214
Athlon 64 X2 4800+ 2.5GHz 512KB 65 W $271
Athlon 64 X2 5000+ 2.6GHz 512KB 65 W $301

Before it was canceled, AMD offered an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (at 90nm) with 1MB of L2 cache per core and a 2.4GHz clock speed. Now, the 4800+ model number is back, inhabited by a 2.5GHz processor with 512K of L2 cache per core. Cache size and clock frequency don't always affect performance in the same way, or equally, but I doubt most folks will lose any sleep over these differences.

Notice that all of the Athlon 64 X2 chips at 65nm have a thermal design power (TDP) rating of 65W, down from 89W for standard-issue Athlon 64 X2s at 90nm. The range of recommended core voltages is also lower, from 1.30-1.35V at 90nm to 1.25-1.35V at 65nm. Due to the lower TDP rating, these processors get the same "Energy Efficient" label that AMD previously reserved for specially manufactured 90nm parts. So the full, official name of the 5000+ CPU we're testing is "Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Energy Efficient," burdened with four last names like a second-generation feminist. (What was that, Mr. Snerdley?) Fortunately, none of the 65W Energy Efficient models carry a premium any longer, so the 65nm parts are priced identically to their 89W/90nm counterparts.

A trio of late 90-nano additions, too
We'd be remiss not to point out the addition of a few new 90nm models to the Athlon 64 lineup, as well. AMD has stealthily slipped these into its product mix, just below the Athlon 64 FX-62 and just above the 5000+. They are:

Model Clock speed L2 cache
(per core) TDP Price
Athlon 64 X2 5600+ 2.8GHz 1MB 89 W $505
Athlon 64 X2 5400+ 2.8GHz 512KB 89 W $485
Athlon 64 X2 5200+ 2.6GHz 1MB 89 W $403

Yes, you're looking at two new Athlon 64 X2 models with 1MB of L2 cache per core. I won't pretend to understand AMD's strategy here, which seems to involve confusing the customer, then conquering him. The most confusing model of the bunch may be the 5600+, which shares the same cache config and clock speed as the Athlon 64 FX-62, but lacks the FX-62's unlocked upper multiplier. The 5600+, though, has an 89W TDP, while the FX-62's is 125W. And the 5600+ costs over $200 less than the FX-62. Go figure.

Unfortunately, we don't have any samples of the 5600+, 5400+, or 5200+ for testing, so that will have to wait for another day.
http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q4...m/index.x?pg=1





Chick Lit, the Sequel: Yummy Mummy
Lizzie Skurnick

EARLIER this year, an icon of youthful abandon — bubbly, blond, a perpetual adolescent — left the grove of girlhood and gave birth to a baby boy. No, not Britney Spears. The puckish heroine Bridget Jones, whose fictional diary of the urban dating life was a best seller a decade ago, and whose recent journey to the delivery room has been serialized in The Independent in Britain.

Now that even an avatar of youth has reached this milestone of adulthood, it raises the question whether chick lit, the genre that Bridget’s creator, Helen Fielding, all but invented, will finally grow up.

The answer appears to be yes. In 2006, new books by a host of writers associated with chick lit — Laura Zigman, Jane Green, Emily Giffin and Sue Margolis, among others — featured heroines with babies, former 20-something singles who had settled down with Mr. Right and swapped their stilettos for Bugaboo strollers. Similar tales are scheduled to appear in 2007, including “Shopaholic and Baby” by Sophie Kinsella, “Momzillas” by Jill Kargman and “The Infidelity Pact” by Carrie Karasyov.

Although many female authors aren’t happy about it, the term “mom lit” is used in book reviews and on blogs to describe fiction in which the experience of motherhood, perceived with something of the same rueful spirit with which Bridget and her sisters regarded men, is the central drama.

Stacy Creamer, the editor of the “The Devil Wears Prada,” a chick-lit milestone, and of the forthcoming “Momzillas,” said that, based on submissions she receives, there’s “a huge rise in the amount of books by stay-at-home moms writing fiction and nonfiction about that experience.”

Women have always written about motherhood, of course. Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Sue Miller’s “The Good Mother” and Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” are a few classic examples. But many of the books described as mom lit seem indebted to the themes and tone of chick lit.

They are written in the wry voices of a generation of women who came of age after feminism, and they have a newly competitive, higher-end set of woes: $10,000 pacifier consultants, nanny-swiping and Harvard-like nursery school applications. Also present is chick-lit’s familiar cast of characters: the single best friend, the dutiful boyfriend (now husband) and a seductive other man who threatens to upset the apple cart.

Why the sudden interest in what happens after happily ever after? One reason is that authors are becoming mothers themselves. “The writers who used to do chick lit are aging up,” Ms. Creamer said.

And society’s view of the maternal years is changing. From the television soap “Desperate Housewives,” in which managing play dates and sewing costumes for the school play take a back seat to engaging in steamy affairs, to Us Weekly’s obsessive investigations into celebrities’ “baby bumps,” motherhood is suddenly sexy.

And if anything defined chick lit, it was sex appeal. Mom lit’s prevailing aesthetic is Carrie Bradshaw, with a carriage. The cover of “Momzillas” will feature a wind-swept beauty in peep-toe spikes and a polka-dot dress, pushing a stroller with a diaper bag slung over her bare shoulder.

Ms. Kargman, the book’s author, whose previous popular fiction includes “The Right Address” (written with Carrie Karasyov), said that she is writing in the “era of the yummy mummy.”

“They don’t feel like crusty over-the-hill J. C. Penney moms with the tapestry vest,” she said of her readers — and, presumably, her characters.

Chick lit, a publishing genre whose runaway success spawned sub-genres like Christian chick lit and teen chick lit, is now seen to have run its course in the marketplace. Laura Zigman, who once worked in publishing, and who wrote the dating-and-mating sendup “Animal Husbandry,” said, “I think publishers are so hungry for a trend, once it became clear there is, the publisher tries to seize on that and make a niche — then people write into that niche.”

Two best sellers from 2002 may presage success for the new mom lit: “The Nanny Diaries,” which lampoons the rarefied world of Upper East Side parenting, and “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” about a well-off working mom’s attempts to balance bake sales and hedge funds, are considered to have nudged chick lit into the nursery.

If anything, mom lit may be late to the party. There has been a proliferation of nonfiction books in recent years about the contradictions and challenges of contemporary motherhood, including “Perfect Madness” by Judith Warner and “The Mommy Myth” by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels. So-called momoirs, first-person accounts exploding some of the sentimentality about motherhood, include Andrea J. Buchanan’s “Mother Shock” and Muffy Mead-Ferro’s “Confessions of a Slacker Mom.” The Internet also teems with mommy blogs in which women chronicle the daily (or even hourly) tribulations of motherhood; Heather B. Armstrong’s blog, dooce.com, one of the most popular, receives a million unique visitors a month.

The term chick lit made many writers, and some readers, angry. Female authors became concerned that books that critics acknowledged as more literary weren’t differentiated from funny, lighthearted romps about shoes, weight and being stood up by men. Now some express a similar concern about mom lit enfolding anything mother-related in the bookstore. If “The Good Mother” had been written now, “it might be lumped into mommy lit,” said Cathi Hanauer, the editor of “The Bitch in the House,” and more recently the author of the novel “Sweet Ruin,” in which a mother’s depression over an infant’s death lifts when she meets a handsome neighbor.

If authors of mom lit are united in anything, it’s a universal dislike for the term. Some authors say it is sexist, preventing writers from being taken seriously by lumping them together.

Jennifer Weiner, the best-selling author of “In Her Shoes,” resents that women writing domestic dramas are categorized in ways that male writers aren’t. “My feeling about my own work is, I could be writing ‘The Aeneid’ and they would still have to call it chick lit or mommy lit or menopausal old hag lit.” She paused. “Crone lit — is that what’s coming next?”

Some authors worry that the term mom lit, like chick lit or chick flicks, is used to refer not just to the sex of the author or the book’s subject matter, but to the intended audience. This, they say, could be a turn-off to prospective readers who aren’t moms. Ms. Zigman, whose novel “Piece of Work” has been called mom lit in several reviews, says, “When there’s a baby’s butt on the cover, you expect that.”

Still, she thinks the term devalues her work. “It’s a little defeating to be thrown into a pot of mommy lit as if nobody except women my age or my grouping would be interested,” she said.

But many in the publishing industry find mom lit a convenient term. When it comes to talking to bookstore marketers and the book-buying public, “You’ve got a very short amount of time to express what the book is,” said Ms. Creamer, the editor. “If there’s any kind of shorthand that can help sell it and help define it, both the people selling and pitching it will be grateful for those categorizations. But it’s a shame when those categorizations become a little bit of a prison, too.”

Once they get mom lit’s pink-cover treatment — which even some of the more literary books about motherhood do — authors say that they kiss the chance of a serious critical reception goodbye. And some of them voice a frustration over the ability of male authors to avoid being pigeonholed. “Jonathan Franzen wrote a beautiful novel about family, a domestic drama,” said Ayelet Waldman, the author of “Love and Other Pursuits,” referring to “The Corrections.” “Nobody called that dad lit.”

“Little Children,” a novel whose themes are touchstones of mom lit — adultery, competitive parenting — was praised in reviews as a great suburban novel. Its author, Tom Perrotta, has been compared to Chekhov in reviews. “If Tom Perrotta had been Tina,” Ms. Weiner asked, “would they have put a pink cover on that book?”

Ms. Hanauer reluctantly acknowledged that mom lit’s built-in audience can be a plus. “As much as I cringe at a label like mommy lit, if that’s going to get people to pick it up, it’s fine,” she said.

It’s still unknown whether mom lit will be as popular as chick lit. Will women —who buy most fiction — relate to books that, on the one hand, hit all too close to home in their chronicling of the travails of motherhood and, on the other, can be infuriatingly focused on shopping and possessions?

Mommy bloggers are some of the category’s biggest detractors. They bemoan the books’ collective fantasy of motherhood, their concentration on the woes of young, well-off mothers.

“Why aren’t mom-lit books about the frumpy Pentecostal supermarket checker in Omaha with the truck-driving husband?” asks a post on

citymama .com. “Or the Methodist sheriff’s deputy in Cheyenne with a schoolteacher husband and five kids all living in a trailer? Or the pagan midwife in Seattle with the lesbian natural foods chef partner and their blended family with kids from previous marriages?”

Ms. Armstrong of dooce.com isn’t impressed with the literary quality of mom lit. “A lot of it reads like someone sat around in a marketing meeting and said, ‘What can we sell to this generation of mothers?’ ” she said in an interview. She, like other bloggers, contends that the real exploration of contemporary American motherhood is being done by mommy blogs — not mom lit. Ms. Armstrong is editing a collection of essays about motherhood, and Alice Bradley, who blogs at finslippy.typepad.com, has signed with an agent.

But plenty of mom-lit authors are unapologetic. They admit that they are writing for a stressed-out army of diaper changers who may not have the time or inclination to read the Great American Novel, at least until the kids are potty-trained. Ms. Waldman, the author of a series of mystery novels, said her books are “meant to be read with all the attention you can muster while breast-feeding.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/fashion/17MomLit.html





Fired Editor’s Remarks Said to Have Provoked Murdoch
Julie Bosman and Richard Siklos

Rupert Murdoch personally ordered the dismissal of Judith Regan, the publisher of a widely criticized O. J. Simpson book, after he heard reports of a heated conversation Ms. Regan had with a company lawyer on Friday that included comments that were deemed anti-Semitic, according to two people familiar with the News Corporation’s account of the firing.

Mark Jackson, a lawyer with HarperCollins, a division of the News Corporation that includes Ms. Regan’s imprint, reported the alleged comments from a phone conversation with Ms. Regan to Jane Friedman, HarperCollins’s president and chief executive.

“And then Jane called Rupert and Rupert said he won’t tolerate that kind of behavior,” said one of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Despite the success Ms. Regan brought Mr. Murdoch’s publishing business since he established her imprint in 1994, their relationship had soured in recent weeks as she became involved in a controversy involving the Simpson book and companion television special she had championed.

After some Fox affiliates declined to broadcast the special, the company pulled the project, which featured Mr. Simpson hypothesizing about how he would have murdered his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald L. Goldman.

“You don’t do this in a perfect world because she makes a lot of money,” the person said of Ms. Regan’s dismissal, adding that Mr. Murdoch did not put the blame for the Simpson controversy solely on Ms. Regan.

Several efforts to reach Ms. Regan since her dismissal, including new attempts since the accusations of anti-Semitism surfaced, were unsuccessful.

A News Corporation spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. Murdoch, who had also approved the Simpson project, has not spoken to Ms. Regan since before the imbroglio it provoked but authorized Ms. Friedman to dismiss her, saying her slurs were the final straw after other recent episodes of what were deemed improper behavior, according to one of the people familiar with the News Corporation’s account.

Ms. Regan’s previous successes at the company seemed in sync with Mr. Murdoch’s penchant for pushing the boundaries of public taste and shaking up the media establishment.

The conversation with Mr. Jackson on Friday afternoon was described by sources as heated and confrontational, even for the famously forceful Ms. Regan. Ms. Regan’s alleged comments, which came in the midst of a tense conversation in which she berated Mr. Jackson, were directed at him and Ms. Friedman, who are Jewish, as well as toward other Jews, one of the sources said.

That source would not say specifically what Ms. Regan is alleged to have said, but characterized the comments as offensive and inappropriate, but not a hateful tirade. Still, the source said, it was enough to prompt Mr. Murdoch to dismiss her.

Ms. Friedman, known to have had a testy relationship with Ms. Regan, called Mr. Murdoch in the late afternoon in New York to discuss Ms. Regan’s behavior just as he was preparing to play host to the News Corporation’s annual holiday party for employees from across the company’s subsidiaries, which include the Fox television network, Fox News Channel, The New York Post, the 20th Century Fox film studio and the Web site MySpace.com.

Later that day, at the ReganBooks offices on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, a stunned Ms. Regan was confronted by security guards who arrived with boxes and ordered her to leave, according to an account by a HarperCollins executive that was confirmed by another person familiar with the situation.

“This came completely out of the blue,” one executive said. “She was completely taken by surprise.”

It was an abrupt decision that ended a tumultuous few weeks for Ms. Regan. She had publicly defended herself from what she called the “backstabbers at HarperCollins” during the taping of her Sirius Satellite Radio show on Thursday, according to the industry blog GalleyCat. And within the company, she had become convinced that there were “people trying to take her down,” said a person familiar with the situation.

On Saturday, HarperCollins released a statement announcing that the Regan imprint would continue under Cal Morgan, Ms. Regan’s longtime editorial director.

Ms. Regan was known for her sharp instincts and even sharper elbows, attributes that had served her well in her ascent from cub reporter at The National Enquirer to publisher of her own imprint under HarperCollins.

Although her empire was built on celebrity tell-alls like Drew Barrymore’s “Little Girl Lost” and by bringing the porn star Jenna Jameson and the professional wrestler Mick Foley to the best-seller lists, Ms. Regan also published several highly respected books, including “The Zero” by Jess Walter, a National Book Award finalist this year. She also published political books by writers like Arianna Huffington and Peggy Noonan.

Last year, Mr. Murdoch allowed Ms. Regan to move her operations to Los Angeles, part of a strategy to build synergy between the publishing world and Hollywood. And it seemed to be working well, until the recent Simpson fiasco and a subsequent, though lesser, controversy over a novel about Mickey Mantle that purported to tell tales of drunkenness and sexual promiscuity in the late Yankee slugger’s own voice.

At the heart of the problem, though, was what many executives said was a tense relationship between Ms. Regan and Ms. Friedman, her boss.

“They always had a difficult relationship,” said one executive at a rival publishing house. “I don’t think Jane was ever happy with Judith. You have two very considerable egos.”

While Ms. Regan was rapidly losing credibility over the Simpson book, Ms. Friedman was enjoying a particularly bright moment in the spotlight. She had stayed silent during the Simpson controversy, never speaking to the press.

Last week, Ms. Friedman was named the Publishers Weekly Person of the Year, an honor within the industry. In the article about the award, Ms. Friedman was praised for managing to “distance the company from the book without openly confronting one of her publishers.”

Longtime publishing executives traded in speculation about Ms. Regan’s fate over the weekend, dismissing the idea that there was another company that would give her as much creative and financial autonomy as the News Corporation did.

“I think right this minute people are saying, She’s a pariah and we don’t want her,” said Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly. “But I’ve seen enough of publishing to say that that will change.”

Some thought Ms. Regan might opt for Hollywood, her home of less than two years.

“She’ll certainly have another life in entertainment,” said Laurence J. Kirshbaum, a literary agent and the former head of the Time Warner Book Group. “I think she will rise from these ashes and find another place.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/bu...a/18regan.html





This Time, Judith Regan Did It
David Carr

When the News Corporation killed Judith Regan’s multimedia rollout of O. J. Simpson’s “hypothetical confession,” Rupert Murdoch called the project “ill-conceived.”

The phrase he should have used was “ill-received.”

The “If I Did It” book and television package was shelved not because it was in bad taste or because it was bad for the culture at large, but because it was bad for business. The News Corporation, after all, was riding with Ms. Regan every step of the way as she bolted together the multiplatform deal for “If I Did It.” It was only after an outcry that included two dozen Fox affiliates that the HarperCollins project was junked.

And now Ms. Regan’s career at the News Corporation is in the same trash bin. Why now?

No one woke up Friday morning and discovered that Ms. Regan had bad, if lucrative, taste. But when her O. J. Simpson deal went south, she refused to go away quietly even though Mr. Murdoch had already taken a bullet, then continued to complain that she was being undermined long after the story had quieted down.

The News Corporation had profited handsomely from Ms. Regan’s tendency to shoot from the hip, but when she started firing inside the corral, well then, that was another matter.

If she did it, here’s how: Ms. Regan first responded to public opprobrium over the Simpson project with an unhinged eight-page defense of her interview. And then, after the plug was pulled on Nov. 21, she failed to accept the decision. (When Mr. Murdoch says something is dead, put away the paddles and pull up the hearse.)

Instead she railed against HarperCollins, the News Corporation book division that owns her ReganBooks imprint, while taping her Sirius Satellite Radio show, according to Ron Hogan, an editor at GalleyCat, which is a book-oriented blog. And finally, she made offensive remarks in a phone call to one of the company’s lawyers on Friday, according to a report in The Los Angeles Times.

“I think someone looked a little bit down the road and saw train wrecks everywhere,” said a HarperCollins executive who declined attribution because the case might end up in litigation.

That someone was Jane Friedman, the head of HarperCollins, who gave Ms. Regan the gate last Friday night in a two-sentence statement. It was made in a hurry — there were no expressed accommodations for the authors and 40 employees of the ReganBooks imprint — which suggests that the decision was made in a hurry, as well. (The company said on Saturday that the division will continue operations under Cal Morgan, the editorial director of ReganBooks.)

None of this was part of the plan when Ms. Regan moved her hugely successful publishing operation to Los Angeles this year. In announcing the move, she suggested she was switching to the left coast to form a literary salon of sorts, seeking out interesting folks from the entertainment and publishing worlds to form a kind of “cultural center.”

In therapeutic circles, her move to Los Angeles is called a geographic cure. A person up against the consequences of bad decisions and bad judgment — her affair with Bernard B. Kerik, the disgraced former police commissioner and ReganBooks author, was made all the more interesting to the media when it emerged that she was one of two women on the side — decides to switch ZIP codes for a fresh start.

Instead, she found O.J.

Ms. Regan’s strategic shift to California put her more closely in touch with an entertainment culture that was of a piece with her approach to publishing. Her big television project, after all, was “Growing Up Gotti.” Those who found “If I Did It” to be a patently offensive title need only remember that she also published the very successful “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.” (It might have been subtitled, “Making do with vacant eyes, stage moans, and anonymous co-stars.”)

But then, Ms. Regan has actually been in the celebrity business her whole career, with her ability to sell the tatty and salacious elements of contemporary culture. She formed those skills as a reporter for The National Enquirer, but in a world where many office workers spend their days surfing for a shot of Britney Spears sans panties, that work history was a credential, not a knock.

Ms. Regan always lived her public life as if it were one big MySpace page, which she filled with outrageous personal and professional behavior and intemperate words. Part of it seemed like shtick, but she seemed to cross a line bordering on mania after her motives in interviewing Mr. Simpson were questioned.

First, she issued a statement that compared her own alleged victimization as a battered woman with that of the murdered Nicole Brown Simpson. “The men who lied and cheated and beat me — they were all there in the room. And the people who denied it, they were there, too.” (It sounded a little crowded in there.)

Instead of saying sorry about that, Ms. Regan went ballistic in a statement that read like an autopsy on an open deadly wound. Her nonapology apology approached absurdity, a biblical Act of Contrition written (at times) in the voice of a young girl.

“I made the decision to publish this book, and to sit face to face with the killer, because I wanted him, and the men who broke my heart and your hearts, to tell the truth, to confess their sins, to do penance and to amend their lives. Amen.”

Ms. Regan then reflected on her time with Mr. Simpson: “Thought process disorder. No empathy. Malignant narcissism,” she wrote as if she had been looking in a mirror, not conducting an interview.

Her decisions made quick enemies of almost everyone, including some of her colleagues at the News Corporation. To his credit, Bill O’Reilly (a man who knows a thing or two about riding out bad press) called the Simpson project “simply indefensible.” Even Geraldo Rivera’s journalistic principles were offended.

She might survive those two but, in 2006, Mr. Murdoch is another matter. He has done a fine job recently of repositioning himself as media baron who is both a friend of Hillary Rodham Clinton and yet again a pioneer in the evolving media space. One of the cardinal rules in business is to protect the king, but after the Simpson affair, he found himself dragged into the muck of his tabloid past.

In The Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten invoked that past, assailing the “predatory Australian-born media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who has devoted his life to making money by making sure that news and entertainment are as coarse and vulgar as can be imagined in as many places as possible.” That kind of public reframing, combined with Ms. Friedman’s antipathy for a renegade West Coast office, made Ms. Regan’s firing a matter of when, not if.

Ms. Regan will change addresses, but not disappear. The best-seller list in any given week attests to the fact that she has a talent for identifying and filling consumer needs. And it is the job of media corporations to satisfy the market without regard to taste or rectitude. That’s no altogether a bad thing. We wouldn’t have “The Simpsons” — another News Corporation product — without it.

But stars, even the biggest-earning ones, become expendable when they begin to embarrass someone besides themselves. Just ask Tom Cruise.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/bu...ia/18carr.html





Simpson Sued Again, Over Book Proceeds
Sharon Waxman

The ghosts of the trial of the century — last century — came haunting on Tuesday, when Fred Goldman, the father of the murder victim Ronald L. Goldman, sued O. J. Simpson in a California court for fraud, alleging that a recent book and television deal were structured to cheat Mr. Goldman out of damages owed him from a civil judgment.

In the lawsuit Mr. Goldman alleges that Mr. Simpson was advanced about $1 million for a book and a television interview exploring how he might hypothetically have killed his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in 1994. Mr. Simpson was acquitted of the murders in a 1995 criminal trial, but lost a civil judgment in 1997 for wrongful death.

The new lawsuit alleges that Mr. Simpson was paid for the book and TV deal through a shell corporation, Lorraine Brooke, a name taken from his two children’s middle names, “the purpose of which is to enable Simpson to avoid paying creditors.”

The lawsuit comes just days after Judith Regan, the project’s champion, was abruptly fired by HarperCollins. Her imprint within the company was to publish the Simpson book, “If I Did It,” and she had conducted the television interview. The firing followed a heated telephone conversation between Ms. Regan and a top HarperCollins lawyer in which company officials said she made remarks they considered anti-Semitic.

Since winning his civil judgment, Mr. Goldman has been unable to collect his $19 million portion of the $33.5 million jury award. Mr. Goldman’s share, according to the new lawsuit, has now accrued to more than $38 million. Mr. Simpson moved from Los Angeles to Florida, where under local law his home could not be seized by debtors, and has continued to receive his National Football League pension, which is also protected.

Reached at his home in Arizona Mr. Goldman said he was still enraged by the idea that Mr. Simpson had avoided responsibility for the jury award. “How else can it be said?” said Mr. Goldman. “He has a significant judgment against him. He’s made every effort to avoid that judgment, and as far as we’re concerned he’s doing it in a manner that’s clearly fraudulent.”

Mr. Goldman was chief among those protesting Mr. Simpson’s book and television projects as offensive. Both were canceled last month by the News Corporation, the parent of the publisher HarperCollins and of the Fox television network, which was going to broadcast the interview.

Although the projects were canceled, the lawsuit alleged that Mr. Simpson had already been paid, and would receive a large sum even “in the event that the book deal was aborted.”

In comments made after his book project became public, Mr. Simpson said that money from it would go to his children. But Jonathan Polak, a lawyer for Mr. Goldman, said that Mr. Simpson had no intention of using the money for his children and that News Corporation should have known that. “This whole book deal has smelled from the beginning, not just for its content, but for the way it had been set up to completely circumvent the Goldmans’ rights,” Mr. Polak said in an interview.

According to the lawsuit, Lorraine Brooke was created by Leonardo Starke, a lawyer for Mr. Simpson. Attempts to reach Mr. Starke in Miami were not successful, and calls to Mr. Simpson’s spokesman, Yale L. Galanter, were not returned.

Lawyers for Mr. Goldman said their suit would ultimately include HarperCollins, News Corporation and Ms. Regan as defendants. “Our theory is that Judith Regan knew of the judgment, therefore News Corp. had knowledge of it, and that the only way they could get O. J. to do the deal is if it put money in O. J.’s pocket,” Mr. Polak said. “So they sat down and figured out a deal how to get the money to O. J. and the Goldmans wouldn’t get any of the benefit.”

A spokesman for News Corporation confirmed that Mr. Simpson was not expected to repay the $800,000 he had already been given for the projects, and that the company had previously told Mr. Polak that it “would cooperate with him through the legal process to ensure justice is done in this matter.”

Bert Fields, a lawyer for Ms. Regan, said he did not see any legal grounds for implicating his client or HarperCollins in the matter. Ms. Regan “feels great sympathy for the Goldman and Brown families, but they have no claim against her,” he said. “She believed the money was going to a trust for his children.”

For nearly a decade Mr. Goldman has been frustrated in his attempts to collect on his jury award from Mr. Simpson. In September Mr. Polak filed a motion requesting the right to seize Mr. Simpson’s publicity related revenues, from things like personal appearances and autograph signings. The motion was denied and is on appeal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/books/20simp.html





New Name for Harry Potter Book Released
Alex Lang

Fans will have to play game to figure out new name.

J.K. Rowling came up with a title for the final installment of the Harry Potter series, but fans will have to go to her website and play a game to figure it out.

Rowling’s U.S. publisher, Scholastic Inc., released a brief statement announcing the name, but offered no other details about the book, according to the Associated Press. Rowling is still working on the book.

"I'm now writing scenes that have been planned, in some cases, for a dozen years or even more. I don't think anyone who has not been in a similar situation can possibly know how this feels: I am alternately elated and overwrought. I both want, and don't want, to finish this book (don't worry, I will)," she wrote on her website, according to the AP.

In order to figure out the name of the book, fans need to go to jkrowling.com and click on the eraser. Visitors will then be taken to a room with a window, door, and mirror, the AP reported.

In the mirror, you'll see a hallway. Click on the farthest doorknob and look for the Christmas tree, according to the wire service. Then click on the center of the door next to the mirror and a wreath appears. Then click on the top of the mirror and you'll see a garland.

Look for a cobweb next to the door. Click on it, and it will disappear. Now, look at the chimes in the window.

Click on the second chime to the right, and hold it down. The chime will turn into the key, which opens the door. Click on the wrapped gift behind the door, then click on it again and figure out the title yourself by playing a game of hangman.
http://thecelebritycafe.com/features/8536.html





Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing

4th International Workshop, AP2PC 2005, Utrecht, Netherlands, July 25, 2005, Revised and Invited Papers
Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science , Vol. 4118
Sublibrary: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
Despotovic, Zoran; Joseph, Sam; Sartori, Claudio (Eds.)
2006, XIV, 173 p., Softcover
ISBN-10: 3-540-49025-6
ISBN-13: 978-3-540-49025-8

Online orders shipping within 2-3 days.
42,00 €

About this book

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2005, held in Utrecht, Netherlands, on July 25th, 2005, in the context of the 4th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, AAMAS 2005.

The 13 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions; they are fully revised to incorporate reviewers' comments and discussions at the workshop. The volume is organized in topical sections on trust and reputation, P2P infrastructure, semantic infrastructure, as well as community and mobile applications.
http://www.springer.com/east/home?SG...22-173710951-0





Google Book-Scanning Efforts Spark Debate
Michael Liedtke

Already facing a legal challenge for alleged copyright infringement, Google Inc.'s crusade to build a digital library has triggered a philosophical debate with an alternative project promising better online access to the world's books, art and historical documents.

The latest tensions revolve around Google's insistence on chaining the digital content to its Internet-leading search engine and the nine major libraries that have aligned themselves with the Mountain View-based company.

A splinter group called the Open Content Alliance favors a less restrictive approach to prevent mankind's accumulated knowledge from being controlled by a commercial entity, even if it's a company like Google that has embraced "Don't Be Evil" as its creed.

"You are talking about the fruits of our civilization and culture. You want to keep it open and certainly don't want any company to enclose it," said Doron Weber, program director of public understanding of science and technology for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The New York-based foundation on Wednesday will announce a $1 million grant to the Internet Archive, a leader in the Open Content Alliance, to help pay for digital copies of collections owned by the Boston Public Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The works to be scanned include the personal library of John Adams, the nation's second president, and thousands of images from the Metropolitan Museum.

The Sloan grant also will be used to scan a collection of anti-slavery material provided by the John Hopkins University Libraries and documents about the Gold Rush from a library at the University of California at Berkeley.

The deal represents a coup for Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, a strident critic of the controls that Google has imposed on its book-scanning initiative.

"They don't want the books to appear in anyone else's search engine but their own, which is a little peculiar for a company that says its mission is to make information universally accessible," Kahle said.

Google's restrictions on its digital book copies stem in part from the company's decision to scan copyrighted material without explicit permission. Google wants to ensure only small excerpts from the copyrighted material appear online _ snippets that the company believes fall under "fair use" protections of U.S. law.

A group of authors and publishers nevertheless have sued Google for copyright infringement in a year-old case that is slowly wending its way through federal court.

In contrast, the Open Content Alliance won't scan copyrighted content unless it receives the permission of the copyright owner. Most of the roughly 100,000 books that the alliance has scanned so far are works whose copyrights have expired.

Google hasn't said how many digital copies it has made since announcing its ambitious project two years ago. The company will only acknowledge that it is scanning more than 3,000 books per day _ a rate that translates into more than 1 million annually. Google also is footing a bill expected to exceed $100 million make the digital copies _ a commitment that appeals to many libraries.

The non-copyrighted material in Google's search engine can be downloaded and printed out _ a feature that the company believes mirrors the goals of the Open Content Alliance.

Although the Open Content Alliance depends on the Internet Archive to host its digital copies, other search engines are being encouraged to index the material too.

Both Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which run the two largest search engines behind Google, belong to the alliance. The group has more than 60 members, consisting mostly of libraries and universities.

None of Google's contracts prevent participating libraries from making separate scanning arrangements with other organizations, said company spokeswoman Megan Lamb.

"We encourage the digitization of more books by more organizations," Lamb said. "It's good for readers, publishers, authors and libraries."

The motives behind Google's own book-scanning initiative aren't entirely altruistic. The company wants to stock its search engine with unique material to give people more reasons to visit its Web site, the hub of an advertising network that generated most of its $2 billion profit through the first nine months of this year.

Despite its ongoing support for the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft earlier this month launched a book-scanning project to compete with Google. Like Google, Microsoft won't allow its digital copies to be indexed by other search engines.

While Kahle says he was disappointed by Microsoft's recent move, he remains more worried about Google's book-scanning initiative because it has gathered so much attention and support.

All but one of the libraries contributing content to Google so far are part of universities. They are: Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford, California, Virginia, Wisconsin-Madison, and Complutense of Madrid. The New York Public Library also is relying on Google to scan some of its books.

The University of California, which also belongs to the Open Content Alliance, has no regrets about allowing Google to scan at least 2.5 million of the books in its libraries. "We felt like we could get more from being a partner with Google than by not being a partner," said university spokeswoman Jennifer Colvin.

But some of the participating libraries may have second thoughts if Google's system isn't set up to recognize some of their digital copies, said Gregory Crane, a Tufts University professor who is currently studying the difficulty accessing some digital content.

For instance, Tufts worries Google's optical reader won't recognize some books written in classical Greek. If the same problem were to crop up with a digital book in the Open Content Alliance, Crane thinks it will be more easily addressed because the group is allowing outside access to the material.

Google "may end up aiming for the lowest common denominator and not be able to do anything really deep" with the digital books, Crane said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...000213_pf.html





Old Model Versus a Speedster
Richard Siklos and Bill Carter

When YouTube emerged as one of the Internet’s most popular Web sites last year, many TV executives dismissed it as a flash in the pan — and a largely illegal one at that. But after Google agreed to pay $1.65 billion for YouTube in October, they adopted a radically different stance: suddenly they wanted to take it on.

Now, a handful of giant media companies, like NBC Universal, the News Corporation, Viacom and possibly CBS, are close to announcing a new Web site that will feature some of their best-known television programming and other clips in an attempt to build a business for distributing video on the Internet to rival YouTube. The new business could be announced as soon as this week.

Whether or not the new venture goes ahead — and such a collaboration among these companies would be nearly unprecedented — the flurry of activity around its creation underscores the complex and high-stakes dance that media companies are having with new online outlets for their wares, and the potent combination of Google and YouTube in particular.

Executives from the companies have been in intense negotiations over the ownership and management structure of the new entity — which is as yet unnamed — and the talks could continue until the end of the year or fall apart entirely.

“They really want to do it,” one executive briefed on the talks said of the partners involved. However, this executive predicted, doubting the ability of the competitors to play well together: “Ten minutes after they do it they’ll want to kill themselves.”

None of the companies involved would comment for the record, and several executives familiar with the discussions, citing their sensitivity, spoke on condition of anonymity. The site would be supported by advertising and feature shows and clips from each of the participating companies, and encourage viewers to contribute their own videos and other material.

Such a site would face huge obstacles. All the partners in the venture are wary of anything that looks like an industry consortium — especially one that risks looking flat-footed or backward in the face of nimbler technology upstarts.

Despite the outpouring of homespun video clips loaded onto and viewed from YouTube, many media executives and advertisers believe that traditional media fare — like clips from Comedy Central or the Conan O’Brien show — will attract the bulk of advertising revenue as the market develops.

“The revenue will be concentrated on the 10 percent of content that you and I would have heard of,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst who follows Google for RBC Capital Markets said. “If Google/Youtube doesn’t have the first 10 percent, then I’m not sure they’d have an advertising model.”

But each partner in the proposed YouTube competitor brings its own agendas and potential conflicts. For instance, the News Corporation also owns both the Fox television network and the popular MySpace social networking Web site.

Several people involved in the proposed venture said that the News Corporation’s desire to protect its MySpace asset from losing its audience to YouTube was a big driver behind the group. However, any ties to MySpace could present a point of friction with Viacom, whose MTV competes with it online.

Any role to be played by CBS would also potentially be complicated. The company is having separate negotiations with Google relating to a service it is introducing aimed at selling radio advertising. According to one executive briefed on the matter, Google could buy a large amount of radio inventory in CBS Radio, the nation’s second-biggest radio group, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars of guaranteed revenue for CBS.

In forging closer ties to Google, CBS might see less merit in joining with its big media rivals in the new venture. Also, some of the other partners in the venture do not believe CBS’ video assets are as critical to making the site a success.

The idea for the consortium sprang from the conviction by executives at NBC and the News Corporation in particular that new avenues of revenue had to be opened up beyond the dominant sources that include network and cable television outlets and DVD sales. Its chief architects were Peter A. Chernin, the president of the News Corporation and David M. Zaslav, who oversaw NBC Universal’s cable networks and was last month named chief executive of Discovery Communications.

Behind the idea was the understanding that the most popular modes of distributing video via the Internet were not bringing the TV networks much income. For instance, the iTunes music and video success pioneered by Apple Computer has led to several million downloads of videos but has not been highly lucrative for the media companies after paying various rights holders.

And when YouTube suddenly emerged as the most popular site for viewing video of any kind on the Internet — people now watch 100 million clips a day on it — TV executives were alarmed that they were receiving nothing from what was essentially a new kind of network. Although clips on YouTube and most video clip sites are limited to a few minutes, new technologies could soon make it possible to view hourlong dramas or movies through them.

“Content owners needed more bites of the apple,” one executive involved said.

When YouTube was acquired by Google, some media executives openly questioned the legality of YouTube while entering negotiations to license their content to the site. When the idea of the big media consortium was initially conceived, there was some discussion of those companies removing all their content entirely from YouTube. But that drastic action is no longer under consideration, both because it might turn YouTube fans against the networks, and perhaps because it would have raised antitrust issues.

As it stands now, YouTube deletes any network program clips that are posted on its site when it receives a written request to do so, and Google has been in negotiations to persuade the media companies that its advanced advertising technology would make it worthwhile for them to keep their videos on the YouTube network once business models for video fully develop.

So far, YouTube has forged some early licensing arrangements with CBS and the music companies Warner Music Group, SonyBMG and Universal Music Group.

Among its efforts to develop business models, YouTube is incorporating advertising spots into videos only after the clip rather than before, and Google believes its technology for matching relevant ads to Internet searches and other Web content can be applied to video.

One issue still being worked out is whether the new business would not only feature the participants’ shows online but would serve as a sort of agency to license them as a group to other online distributors like YouTube, MSN or Yahoo.

NBC Universal and Fox wanted Viacom in the deal urgently because that company had troves of content aimed at young audiences, from the music and reality shows of VH1 and MTV, to the popular comedy shows on Comedy Central like “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.” (Content from the children’s entertainment channel Nickelodeon is not to be included in the deal.) Viacom also owns the Paramount movie studio.

In a twist on the Google media company maneuvers, Viacom has a separate nascent venture with Google, in which Google distributes video clips from MTV and other channels across the Internet to any Web site that might like to carry them with advertising.

All along the executives at Fox and NBC who were driving the deal anticipated countermoves by Google — and indeed the executive involved in the talks said Google has hinted of offers to the participants, some of which might generate a fast infusion of several hundred million dollars.

Mr. Rohan estimated Google would be willing to pay from $100 million to $150 million to each of the media companies to license their content, although it was unclear whether it would pay less knowing that those companies might start a rival.

Google has been known to guarantee revenue to partners in search ventures, and Mr. Rohan said it might do the same for CBS and other radio companies in order to get its radio business off the ground. But one executive briefed on the YouTube talks said the company is resistant to paying license fees for inclusion on the site. A Google spokesman declined to comment.

Google has consistently portrayed itself as a friend and partner to media companies. But its acquisition of YouTube was tricky because of the potential legal issues the company could face from those same partners for copyrights violations.

“I think people have been trying to figure out: ‘Do we take a check from Google, or do we create our own game?’ ” said another executive who has been in the negotiations said. “But that Google check comes only once. The other option is to create something that is capable of becoming a big asset and controlling our own game.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/te...18youtube.html





Google Steps More Boldly Into PayPal’s Territory
Miguel Helft

Steven Grossberg, who sells video games online from his home in Wellington, Fla., recently sent an enticing offer to 20,000 customers: $10 off any purchase over $30 using a new payment service, Google Checkout.

Traffic on his site more than tripled, and best of all, he said, Google picked up the tab for the promotion.

“I think it’s fantastic,” he said. “I’m selling the product. Google is getting tons of customers to sign up for Checkout. Customers are happy because they are getting a monster deal.”

And Google is not charging merchants any processing fees through the end of 2007.

As a result, getting customers to use Checkout will increase profits, Mr. Grossberg said.

So starting next year, he plans to take some of the money he spends to list items on eBay and try a new marketing strategy: placing ads alongside Google’s search results.

That is exactly what Google wants to hear.

When Google introduced Checkout in June, it was seen as a formidable rival to PayPal, eBay’s online payment service. And with Google aggressively promoting Checkout during the holiday season and beyond, its use with some merchants has already surpassed PayPal’s.

But Google’s plan for Checkout has always been about more than online payments. The service is a calculated effort to expand Google’s base of advertisers, which provide the bulk of the company’s revenues.

And Google has made a substantial financial commitment to the service’s success. Goldman Sachs estimates that Checkout promotions will cost Google about $20 million in the current quarter.

The campaign to promote Checkout also says something else about Google: As rivals Yahoo and Microsoft are working on getting the basics right in their search and advertising systems, Google is racing ahead to consolidate its lead.

“I believe that Google’s advantage is widening with time and this is one example,” said Scott Devitt, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus & Company. “Checkout could be a game changer, and the competitors are doing nothing of the sort.”

Unlike PayPal, a full-fledged payment system that can be used to transfer money between individuals and can draw funds directly from bank accounts, Checkout merely offers users an easy way to use their credit cards. Checkout users enter their credit card information, shipping and billing address into Google’s system. Then, they can pay with Checkout at participating stores without having to enter their personal information again and again.

Google says thousands of merchants are using the service. That is dwarfed by PayPal, which has millions of merchants and 123 million users around the world. In the most recent quarter, PayPal processed $9.1 billion in transactions, up 37 percent from a year earlier. While most of those were payments between eBay buyers and sellers, the number of PayPal transactions outside eBay rose 59 percent, to $3.3 billion.

Google has not released figures on the number of Checkout users. Still, there are signs that with the heavy promotions, the service is making significant inroads.

GSI Commerce, a company that runs about 60 online stores, including toysrus.com, levis.com and timberland.com, said that one in five holiday sales at its partners’ stores through the end of November were completed with payment systems other than credit cards, which include PayPal, a service called BillMeLater and Checkout. Of the three, “Google is the biggest by far,” said Michael Rubin, chief executive of GSI Commerce.

At StarbucksStore.com, Checkout transactions topped PayPal transactions by about a third, said Tracy Randall, president of Cooking.com, which operates StarbucksStore.com.

Checkout’s gains have not necessarily heralded a PayPal decline. A Goldman Sachs report this week said that based on conversations with various merchants, Checkout appeared to be making gains against traditional payment options and that PayPal’s share of online transactions was also growing.

Regardless, it is clear that the promotions have played an important role in Checkout’s quick adoption.

When Google introduced Checkout in June, it charged merchants 20 cents plus 2 percent of the purchase price for every transaction. (PayPal charges 1.9 percent to 2.9 percent plus 30 cents a transaction, while credit companies typically charge about 1.95 percent and 30 cents for every purchase.)

Yet, to lure merchants to its advertising system, Google offered them $10 worth of free transaction processing for every $1 in advertising they spent on Google.

But Google recently got more aggressive. On Nov. 8, it waived transaction fees for all merchants, regardless of whether or not they were Google advertisers, through the end of the year. Then, on Nov. 27, it began offering Checkout users $10 off $30 purchases at many e-commerce sites and, in some cases, $20 off $50 orders. And on Dec. 5, it announced that transaction processing would remain free to merchants through the end of 2007.

In other words, Google plans to lose money on every Checkout transaction for more than a year. Yet the company believes it will be worth it.

“It’s a way to incentivize more merchants to join our network,” said Benjamin Ling, a product manager for Checkout. “We want everyone who sells online to be a Google advertiser.”

The incentives offered by Google could benefit merchants and the company in several ways, according to online marketing experts.

Consider first that the ads of stores who accept Checkout are highlighted with an icon — a Checkout shopping cart. That increases the likelihood that users will click on those ads, which creates revenue for Google. What’s more, once users click on an ad, the availability of Checkout makes it more likely that they’ll complete a transaction.

In other words, Checkout generates more sales leads for online retailers — what online advertisers call click-through rates — and more of those leads turn into actual sales.

But the system offers merchants ancillary benefits, said Scot Wingo, the chief executive of ChannelAdvisor.com, an e-commerce services company that helps independent store owners sell on multiple online marketplaces, including eBay, Amazon and their own Web sites.

Google ranks ads based on a secret algorithm that combines factors like the price advertisers are willing to pay and the click-through rate of a particular ad. The idea is that ads that are clicked most frequently are those that users find more relevant.

So by having a Checkout icon that increases click-through rates, over time advertisers will have to pay less to get the same ranking for their ads. Or, they could pay the same amount for more ads with better placement, Mr. Wingo said.

“When you factor all of these together, it can have a pretty significant impact on your economics as a retailer,” Mr. Wingo said, adding that many merchants are likely to plow any savings back into Google.

There are other ways in which Google could benefit from Checkout, according to analysts. Checkout gives Google detailed knowledge of its users’ buying habits, which the company could use to customize the delivery of ads or search results to specific users.

And the system could make it easier for Google to develop a new advertising model in which advertisers pay only when a user completes a transaction, rather than every time a user clicks on an ad. This model, known as “pay-per-action,” could bring additional revenue to Google.

Mr. Ling said Google had no plans to tie search results to buying habits or to use Checkout to move to a cost-per-action ad model. But he added: “If there is a service that is of value to consumers, we will consider it.”

Not everything has been smooth sailing for Checkout. In the middle of the holiday shopping season, the electronics merchant J & R suspended the use of Checkout, telling customers that it was experiencing delays in processing orders due to the popularity of the system. And Ms. Randall, of Cooking.com, said there had been some “operational issues” with Checkout at StarbucksStore.com, but that Google had worked quickly to resolve them.

Google acknowledged the problems. “We have experienced some growing pains,” said Douglas Merrill, a vice president of engineering at Google who is responsible for Checkout. “Whenever we find issues, we drop everything else to fix them.”

That is in part why laptopsforless .com, a retailer in Anaheim, Calif., chose to expand payment options by implementing PayPal first, said Jeff Gardner, vice president for marketing and e-commerce. “We feel like we want to wait until the bugs are worked out before jumping into it,” he said about Checkout. But come next year, he added, “it is our intent to offer our customers both.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/te...0checkout.html





I Like Ur Art: Saatchi Creates an Online Hangout for Artists
Carol Vogel

Julie Ann Travis , 23, a graduate student at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, is curious to see what her peers are up to and to share some of her latest work. So recently she posted a self-portrait in which her head is buried in a pile of dirt at Stuart (saatchi-gallery.co.uk/stuart), the latest addition to a recently redesigned Web site for the Saatchi Gallery in London.

The brainchild of the London-based advertising magnate and collector Charles Saatchi, this social networking outlet — a kind of MySpace knockoff for artists — is causing something of a sensation, boosting traffic at the gallery’s Web site overall to more than three million hits a day.

In May Mr. Saatchi, famed for spotting young unknowns and turning them into art-world superstars, created a section on his Web site for artists of all ages to post their work at no charge. It is called Your Gallery, and now boasts contributions by about 20,700 artists, including 2,000 pieces of video art.

Everything there is for sale, with neither the buyer nor the seller paying a cent to any dealer or other middleman. About 800 new artists have been signing up each week.

And since Stuart (shorthand for “student art”) went online last month, some 1,300 students (including 450 in the United States) have created Web pages there. No one vets the quality or style of the art.

With dealers and collectors scouring student shows for undiscovered talent and students hunting for dealers to represent them, Mr. Saatchi has tapped a vein that can’t stop gushing. If Stuart gains anything like the cachet of MySpace, it has the potential to morph from a nonprofit venture into a gold mine for Mr. Saatchi.

For now, he said, he is simply enjoying the role of spectator. “When I launched the site, I took the view that the best thing was to leave it alone for the first year and purposely not buy anything, because I didn’t want to compromise what the site was supposed to do: appeal to a wide group of students,” he said.

His office, meanwhile, is fielding e-mail messages and calls from dealers, museum curators and directors, and collectors around the world who have discovered new work at the site and want to meet some of the artists in their studios. (Of the 20,700 or so artists at Your Gallery, roughly 6,000 are from Britain and 6,000 from the United States, with the rest scattered across the world.)

But for students visiting Stuart, the main attraction for now is linking up with their peers.

In addition to lists of her favorite artists, books, films and television shows, Ms. Travis has posted the name of a new friend on her page at Stuart: Erhan Ozturk, a photography student at T. C. Maltepe University in Istanbul whose work she viewed at the site.

“I don’t know him,” Ms. Travis said, although they have conversed electronically. And while she doesn’t love his art, she said, “I think it’s pretty interesting.” (New friends tend to reciprocate: Mr. Ozturk lists Ms. Travis on his Web page, and with a simple click, visitors viewing his work can connect to hers.)

Some students hear of Stuart by word of mouth from friends, and some through their schools, many of which were alerted to the site by Mr. Saatchi’s office. In addition to a free Web page, each student has the opportunity to share ideas, inspiration and advice on a discussion board, an arena that can forge new friendships and foster exposure on expanding lists of friends.

The site’s Web masters have ensured that creating a personal page is as easy as singing up for an e-mail account. After supplying a name, gender, school, college, country and e-mail address, each student must post at least one image.

“Electronically is the way we tend to communicate these days,” said Denise Parsons, 39, a student at the San Francisco Art Institute who has a page on Stuart. “Being an artist is a solo endeavor, and this is a safe way to see what others are doing.”

Mr. Saatchi said he was startled by the rapid response, which had driven home how “students very much need to talk to other students about their work.”

As one of the first people to exhibit the work of unknown British artists (and now stars) like Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Rachel Whiteread and Chris Ofili, Mr. Saatchi is a natural magnet for students who hope that someday they too will be discovered by a kingmaker.

With Mr. Saatchi’s willingness to take on emerging artists (although some fault his propensity for selling off their work as soon as they get hot), many students dream of one day being shown in his new gallery, a 50,000-square-foot space on Kings Road in the Chelsea section of London that is scheduled to open next summer. Until then Mr. Saatchi is without a gallery, having closed his former site on the South Bank of the Thames in 2005.

The Saatchi name gives the Web site “a certain cachet and legitimacy,” said David W. Halsell, a 39-year-old installation, video and performance artist who is a student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Mr. Saatchi said he seized on the idea for remaking his overall Web site, www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk, “because I haven’t got my gallery to play with.” With the site’s revamp in May, it began with an online daily magazine and blog offering art news and reviews, an interactive forum in which visitors debate art issues, a chat room for art enthusiasts and a page where children can create and display art.

Stuart grew naturally out of and Mr. Saatchi’s voracious appetite for the new. “I’m glued,” he said. “I spend hours a day looking at students’ work on the site.”

He said he was thinking seriously about allotting rotating space in his new gallery to artists discovered at Your Gallery and Stuart. “There’s something thrilling about seeing the work of young artists for the first time even before their school shows,” he said.

The diverse offerings have caught the eye of contemporary-art experts like Olivier Varenne, director of the Museum of Old and New Art being established in Tasmania, the island state of Australia. He recently contacted the Saatchi Gallery by e-mail. “I am always looking for new talent,” he wrote, and since then he has arranged studio visits with four artists whose work he finds interesting.

In addition to linking artists with new friends and dealers, the site has in some cases enabled artists to reconnect with their old schools. Tori Murphy, a 26-year-old student at Kingston University in Surrey, England, who has heard from a gallery in Dublin and one in London, said she had been contacted by Repton, her old boarding school, which ended up buying a painting for nearly $1,400.

“I’ve done a couple of commissions, but this is my first sale,” Ms. Murphy said. Yet what she likes best about Stuart is not so much the commercial rewards as the ability to gain access to other students and their work.

“Before we were very limited to our school,” she said. “This is the first time I have had the chance to see what’s happening all over the world.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/ar...gn/18saat.html





Wages of Pop (the Little Girls Understand)
Kelefa Sanneh

It was Friday night, and it was time for the 2006 Jingle Ball, the annual pop variety show presented by Z100 (100.3 FM), the Clear Channel property that calls itself New York’s No. 1 Hit Music Station. Madison Square Garden was filled with screaming kids, stone-face parents and — almost unnecessary, but not quite — performers whose excitement level was somewhere in between.

The good news about playing Jingle Ball: It means you’re a pop star. The bad news about playing Jingle Ball: This is what it means to be a pop star.

Or a midlevel pop star anyway. On Friday night many of the year’s biggest names — Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Nickelback — were nowhere to be seen. Instead the line-up included Rihanna, Evanescence, the Pussycat Dolls, the Killers and Nelly Furtado. In this room Nick Lachey (a former member both of the boy band 98 Degrees and, more important, of the Jessica Simpson household) seemed like a big deal.

To some parents the whole affair must have seemed laughably rinky-dink, with its breathless radio personalities and celebrities in training. (Like JoJo, who will be 16 on Wednesday, doing a tame imitation of a fierce diva.) Have pop stars really shrunk, along with their sales figures? Or do they just seem smaller once you graduate from fan to chaperone?

In any case Mr. Lachey’s five-song set earned louder screams than any other, partly because he seemed truly happy to be there. He didn’t pretend he had somewhere better to be. (Perhaps because he didn’t.) So he raised his eyebrows and sank to his knees, singing power ballads about lost love to a largely preteenage audience. Maybe young listeners take to relationship songs in reverse order: first the break-up songs (because there’s not too much gushy stuff), then the love songs (because there’s not too much icky sex stuff), then the getting-together songs (because there’s plenty of both). Evanescence went to the other extreme. Amy Lee, the lead singer, announced, “We’re going to do something completely different from everyone else tonight — and rock as hard as we can.” She did her part, bending over and pumping her fist, and sometimes twirling while her band bashed out pleasingly purple goth-rock hits like “Going Under” and “Call Me When You’re Sober.” (Sadly, during the Killer’s uneven set, Brandon Flowers, the famously combative lead singer, declined to interpret Ms. Lee’s announcement as a provocation.)

Ms. Furtado brought out the producer Timbaland, which made sense; he helped her reinvent herself as an eccentric electro-pop hitmaker. Near the end of the summer smash “Promiscuous” he conducted the band onstage, turning the musicians on and off like a D.J. fiddling with a record.

Ms. Furtado’s set felt like a headline performance (she sang three songs then gave herself an encore, the only one of the night), but it wasn’t. That honor went to the co-ed Mexican sextet RBD, whose members quickly learned a lesson about headlining the Jingle Ball: It means many more people hear your first song than your last one.

Despite the success of “Promiscuous,” Ms. Furtado wasn’t the night’s top-selling act; her excellent 2006 album, “Loose” (Geffen), is only now working its way toward one million sold. Surely it means something that the two Jingle Ball acts whose most recent albums have sold the most (so far) were also the two most faceless.

The Fray, a purposefully inoffensive band from Denver, has moved more than 1.3 million copies of “How to Save a Life” (Sony BMG), though band members probably could have walked the Garden’s aisles unmobbed. Then again the fans on Friday night didn’t spend much time looking at the guys onstage; they were too busy singing along.

The Pussycat Dolls, on the other hand, are somehow famous without actually being famous: everyone knows the brand, but who can identify the members? (Exhaustive research shed a little light on the matter: one of them seems to be named Nicole.) No matter: the debut Pussycat Dolls album has sold more than 2.3 million copies. And if, during Friday’s sometimes messy set, the six Dolls — or is it seven? five? — seemed as if they were merely putting in time at work, maybe it was because they already knew a lesson that some of their counterparts were still learning: In 2006 this is what it means to be a (not quite A list) pop star.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/ar...ic/18jing.html





Censured PBS Bunny Returns, Briefly
Dennis Gaffney

What happens to a children’s public television show after it has been attacked by the secretary of education, pilloried by conservatives, then abandoned by its underwriters? In the case of “Postcards From Buster,” it manages to return, belatedly but unbowed, for a second season.

“We were proud of ‘Postcards From Buster,’ and we [/i]are proud of ‘Postcards From Buster,’ ” said Brigid Sullivan, vice president for children’s programming at WGBH, the Boston PBS station that produces the show. “It’s a children’s show dealing with diversity by showing real kids in real-life situations. That’s not being done by anyone else.”

In “Postcards From Buster” documentary footage of children from different cultures is combined with animation of Buster and his friends. This season includes only 10 episodes, which began in November and will run through February, a far cry from the 40 produced for the show’s first season.

Children first came to know Buster Baxter, the animated bunny who is the show’s star, as the best friend of Arthur, the animated aardvark who is the title character of another PBS series. But most adults probably first heard of Buster in January 2005, midway into the show’s first season, when word got out that an episode about maple sugaring, called “Sugartime!,” would feature children in a Vermont family with two moms.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings attacked the episode in a letter to Pat Mitchell, the former PBS president, dated Jan. 25, 2005. “Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the life-styles portrayed in this episode,” she wrote. The same day PBS removed “Sugartime!” from its lineup. In the days that followed, the American Family Association, a major Christian conservative organization, orchestrated a campaign of more than 150,000 e-mail messages and letters to Ms. Spellings supporting her position, said Ed Vitagliano, a spokesman for the association.

WGBH responded by independently offering “Sugartime!” to each PBS station. It said that 57 of 349 stations broadcast the episode in March 2005, making it available to more than half of PBS viewers. But the “Sugartime!” controversy made finding funds for a second season difficult.

“All the traditional funding sources backed away,” said Jeanne Jordan, the series producer for the second season of “Postcards.” The Education Department’s Ready-to-Learn program, which had largely financed the first season of “Postcards” with $5 million through PBS, rewrote its grant to eliminate the call for cultural diversity, and PBS did not pursue that grant for Season 2. Neither the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is controlled by Congress and provided funds for Season 1, nor the traditional corporate sponsors of PBS children’s programming would underwrite the show.

The producers, musicians, editors and writers of “Buster” were let go from the show for almost a year; under normal circumstances the second season would have begun in fall 2005. That fall PBS decided to provide most of the money needed for a season of 10 shows.

“We’re very committed to ‘Buster,’ ” said Stephanie Aaronson, a PBS spokeswoman. “Buster is a popular character. Kids love him. We feel there’s not enough programs for the early elementary-age set, and we like the mix of animation and live action.”

With PBS on board other underwriters, among them the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and the Annenberg Foundation, pitched in. WGBH also found about a half-dozen nontraditional donors, like the Gill Foundation and the Small Change Foundation, which support gay and lesbian causes.

Perhaps surprisingly, this season continues to deal with hot-button issues. In an episode being shown today, Buster visits Fort Leonard Wood, an Army post in Missouri, to meet the family of a father who is stationed in Iraq. On Jan. 29 Buster will learn about the Mexican border, traveling with children to Tijuana from San Diego to meet their pen pals. And in the last show of the season, scheduled for Feb. 19, Buster revisits some children from the first season, whose homes in Louisiana were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Pierre Valette, one of the executive producers of “Postcards,” said that the show managed to approach even intensely political topics, like the war in Iraq and the aftereffects of Katrina, in an apolitical manner. Buster does this, he said, by looking at the world through a child’s eyes.

In the episode from Fort Leonard Wood, for example, Buster must be shown where Iraq is on a globe, and he worries about being asked to do push-ups.

A main purpose of the episode, Ms. Jordan, the producer, said, is to reveal what life on a military base is like, especially for a family that has a member serving in a war. Erin Munoz, a 10-year-old featured in the show, never expresses her opinions about the war. Neither does her mother, Cheri Munoz, or the other adults who were filmed.

In one sequence the cameras catch a phone call from Erin’s dad, Steve, who at the time had been in Iraq for only a week. “We’re happy to talk to him,” Mrs. Munoz tells Buster afterward, “but then we’re sad ’cause we remember we miss him.”

Mrs. Munoz, who watched the episode in a preview screened at the Army base, said she believed it was important for others to see what her family was experiencing. “If you’re a military family, it will give you an opportunity to discuss how you may feel, especially if someone is deployed,” she said. “If you’re not a military family, you can see how you might feel to be in this situation.”

Next season producers are planning to do three specials, sending Buster to Africa, the Middle East and China. Ms. Sullivan of WGBH said the hope was that his travels abroad would attract international supporters, who weren’t interested in providing funds for the first two seasons, which focused on American children.

“The strategy is to aim high,” Ms. Sullivan said. “And if you do the right thing, the money will come. And eventually the controversy fades.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/ar...on/18bust.html





Bloggers Must Disclose Sponsored Posts
Anick Jesdanun

A company that helps advertisers connect with bloggers willing to write about their products for payment will now require disclosures amid criticism and a regulatory threat.

Before this week, advertisers were barred by PayPerPost Inc. from telling bloggers they can't disclose the sponsorship, but bloggers were able to decide on their own whether or not to do so. Under the new policy, bloggers must disclose that they are accepting payment, either in the write-up or in a general disclosure policy on the blogger's Web journal.

"Ever since we launched, there's been a lot of controversy about disclosure," said Ted Murphy, PayPerPost's chief executive.

Besides other bloggers questioning the ethics of receiving payments without disclosure, the Federal Trade Commission said in a Dec. 7 staff opinion that failure to disclose could, in some cases, violate consumer-protection laws on deception. The FTC did not single out PayPerPost or say whether it would launch any investigation.

David Sifry, founder of the blog search site Technorati, praised PayPerPost's move.

"Overall, this is an encouraging and long-awaited change," he said. "I think that people have learned that without trust, all posts become suspect. ... By encouraging honesty and transparency in sponsored posts, PayPerPost adds (some) clarity to the waters they muddied when they launched six months ago."

PayPerPost lets advertisers tell bloggers about word-of-mouth marketing opportunities such as a new gadget or shoe. Advertisers set a price of $5 or more per post, and willing bloggers respond. The better the price, the more quickly spots fill up. The Orlando, Fla., company brokers the payments.

Bloggers are free to trash products or write neutral reviews, but advertisers can specify whether they pay only for positive write-ups.

Advertisers include News Corp.'s Speed Channel and OfficeMax Inc., Murphy said.

PayPerPost may lose some advertisers with its new policy but believes the transparency will be better in the long term, Murphy said.

"Your bigger advertisers, clients that we really want to go after, the Fortune 500, the Fortune 1000, we saw they were requiring disclosure anyway," he said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061220/...og_disclosures





Digg Continues to Battle Phony Stories
Greg Sandoval

Digg continues to crack down on users who plant phony stories on behalf of marketers, recently deleting a user who posted a story about a company that offered to compensate him.

The news aggregate site, which allows users to play editor and decide the value of a news story, deleted the user account belonging to Karim Yergaliyev, one of Digg's top-rated users. Digg spokesman David Fonkalsrud, who confirmed that Yergaliyev was booted from the site for violating the company's terms of service, said Yergaliyev was reinstated days after he acknowledged the infraction, apologized and promised never to do it again.

"I receive two or three offers (from marketers) a week to promote some product or service," Yergaliyev, 19, said in an interview with CNET News.com. "I never do it, but the week JetNumbers asked me I met this girl and I was really happy with life. I wanted to help anybody."

JetNumbers provides virtual local phone numbers in more than 30 countries. Nathan Schorr, JetNumbers' business development manager, said that when he first approached Yergaliyev, who is known at Digg as "Supernova17," he mentioned that his company was willing to compensate the teen financially and give him free phone minutes using JetNumbers' system. Schorr said Yergaliyev turned down the cash.

Marketers are attempting to "artificially" boost the profile of their companies at the expense of Digg, Jay Adelson, the company's CEO, said in an interview earlier this month.

At Digg, which unveiled a new look on Monday, readers vote on a story's worth. Those who like a story hit a "digg" button and those who like it less hit "bury it." The most popular stories appear on the front page. Phony stories, worries the company, could conceivably erode Digg's credibility.

The company has employed a list of tactics to combat the planting of paid-for stories, such as removing accounts.

Schorr maintains that he inadvertently broke Digg's rules. He had heard little about the company prior to sending the e-mail offer to Yergaliyev. He did have enough knowledge to seek out the top 30 or so Digg users and pitch them the same offer he extended to Yergaliyev. Yergaliyev said he was the only one who responded. "I guess I was the only one to fall into the trap," he said.

Schorr, for his part, said he "never meant to bribe anybody. We don't have a lot of money as a company. We thought the best and cheapest way to promote our company was word of mouth. We contacted other blogs to see if they wanted to try our product and if they liked the product we thought they could write about it."
http://news.com.com/Digg+continues+t...l?tag=nefd.top





Stuffing the Electronic Ballot Box
Dan Mitchell

IT was just a matter of time before marketers would try to game the system at Digg.com. The site allows users to post links to mostly technology-oriented news items to be voted on (or “dugg”) by other users. Those items with more Diggs get more prominent placement on the site. The idea is that what your peers find interesting, you will also find interesting.

When marketers and spammers try to manipulate the rankings to promote a company, product or Web site, the system breaks down.

CNet News.com reported this week that Karim Yergaliyev, 19, one of the top 30 “diggers,” whose stories get the most diggs from fellow users, agreed to a barter transaction from a marketer, Nathan Schorr, the business development manager for JetNumbers. In exchange for free service, Mr. Yergaliyev acknowledged, he planted an article about JetNumbers, which provides “virtual” telephone numbers (news.com).

“I never do it,” Mr. Yergaliyev told News.com, “but the week JetNumbers asked me, I met this girl and I was really happy with life. I wanted to help anybody.”

Mr. Schorr said it was all an honest mistake on his part: he didn’t know the rules. News.com notes that he “did have enough knowledge to seek out the top 30 or so Digg users and pitch them the same offer.”

News.com also reported this month that there were companies in the business of gaming sites like Digg and Reddit. Neil Patel, chief technology officer of the Internet marketing firm ACS, told News.com that companies charge as much as $15,000 to get content up on Digg.

Dueling Videos

A short video produced by the advocacy group Public Knowledge, available on YouTube, has won plaudits for its clear, concise explanation of “net neutrality:” the effort to prevent Internet service providers from offering “tiered service” to content providers, which critics say will make Web sites that pay extra more accessible than those that don’t. “This is a great explanation of net neutrality,” one YouTube user wrote. “I finally get it!” The video is so straightforward, in fact, that it might be called dull.

Another video, also on YouTube, is much better produced, complete with nerve-shaking music and a voiceover straight out of a political ad. But it never explains what net neutrality is — it merely describes it as “mumbo jumbo,” vaguely asserts that it’s “bad for consumers,” and takes a few potshots at Google (which favors net neutrality).

This second video, we learn from the tiny type at the end, was paid for by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (youtube.com).

Pursue the Children Patti Santangelo became something of a cause célèbre for recording-industry overzealousness over the last year. The mother of five faced a lawsuit by five big music companies represented by the Recording Industry Association of America, which accused her of illicitly downloading music. She has always insisted that she’s not guilty, and indeed didn’t quite know at first what downloading even was.

The music companies have dropped their lawsuit against her, though their lawyer, Richard Gabriel, wrote in court papers that they would probably have won. Instead, he wrote that the companies will “pursue defendant’s children.” The case against Ms. Santangelo’s daughter, 16, and son, 20, will continue (ecommercetimes.com).

Browser Wars Redux

According to W3Counter, the various flavors of the Firefox Web browser now make up about a quarter of the market, compared with about 65 percent for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The remaining 10 percent is split among browsers like Opera and Safari, which is just for Mac users (w3counter.com).

Lost in Translation Most people have heard about the trouble that General Motors had trying to sell the Chevrolet Nova in Spanish-speaking countries. The company learned too late that “No va” means “it doesn’t go” in Spanish. But it turns out there are plenty of other examples, as enumerated in Moronland.net’s “Top 13 Worst Slogan Translations Ever.” For example, the American dairy industry tried to export its “Got Milk?” slogan to Mexico and ended up asking Mexicans “Are you Lactating?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/te.../23online.html





NY Times Bans Microsoft Analysts from Microsoft Stories
Ashlee Vance

The New York Times continues to perplex with its analyst-quoting policy. Rather than having analysts declare their ties to clients, the paper would prefer to quote analysts that have no experience with a client - a protocol which seems to undermine the very point of citing analysts.

The Register this week started pushing (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12...alyst_nytimes/) the Times to explain its quoting stance after noticing that Rob Enderle - the most quoted technology analyst on the planet - had been blocked from commenting on companies with which he has a financial relationship. The ban against Enderle appeared odd, given that Times reporters continue to cite analysts from larger firms who also have financial relationships with the companies discussed.

Times spokeswoman Abbe Serphos explained:

To maintain impartiality in its coverage, The Times tries to avoid quoting analysts who have an obvious business relationship with a company on, say, new products of that company.

Ideally, the analysts should be from a firm that does not have that company as a client. If the analyst is one of many in a large firm that does have the company as a client, the analyst quoted should not be one directly involved with that company's products.

A couple of things in that statement stand out.

For one, the paper only tries not to quote analysts who have business ties to a vendor. It's missing a firm policy.

Secondly, the flimsy policy prohibits reporters from querying those analysts that would seem to know their subjects best. In a story about Microsoft, a reporter should apparently quote an analyst who covers LSI Logic or orange juice makers, not one who covers Microsoft.

A better policy might insist that the Times disclose the ties between an analyst and a vendor, leaving the reader to make the credibility judgement.

As it stands, objective Times reporters must not form opinions about the companies they cover and must then quote analysts who don't cover the companies for opinions. That seems more like praying for accuracy than pursuing it.

The funny - or sad - thing is that the paper doesn't come close to following its own advice.

Just days after banning Enderle from discussing Microsoft because he has Microsoft as a client, the Times quoted Gartner analyst Michael Silver and AMR Research analyst Jim Murphy in a story about Microsoft's Windows and Office software.

If the paper would prefer not to quote an analyst who has experience with a client, it did a poor job. Silver is Gartner's vice president in charge of client computing. Microsoft happens to do lots of business with Gartner and also happens to have a client-software monopoly. We're guessing that Silver knows Microsoft's products well and has direct involvement with the company.

And, sure enough, he appears a number of times on Microsoft's own site (http://search.microsoft.com/results....-US&FORM=QBME1) and thousands of times in stories (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...ft&btnG=Search) about Microsoft.

Jim Murphy - wait for it - covers (http://www.amrresearch.com/Content/V...?pmillid=20030) Microsoft too and is even more prolific (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...ft&btnG=Search) than Silver.

Both analysts, however, should hang their heads in shame because Enderle has ten times (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...ft&btnG=Search) the Microsoft opining skills.

Since the Times can't follow its own policy, it should come as no surprise that other publications have shunned the Gray Lady as a standards setter. Rob Enderle this week made it into 51 stories (http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr...-8&sa=N&tab=wn) - and counting - about Microsoft. ComputerWorld, InformationWeek, PC World, MarketWatch and InternetNews.com all quoted the analyst without ever touching on his relationship with Microsoft.

We can't quite tell why financial analysts have to disclose their ties to vendors, while technology analysts don't.

Part of the problem stems from the reticence of companies such as IDC and Gartner to reveal their clients. That should make everyone nervous, but it doesn't. So called objective technology publications keep publishing material bought by vendors without telling you this. They're also too lazy or scared to ignore the likes of Gartner and IDC until the firms change their disclosure rules.

As it turns out, there's a cottage industry devoted to Rob Enderle, where Linux zealots fire off (http://twiki.iwethey.org/twiki/bin/v...rleFlackLetter) this form letter to editors whenever Enderle appears talking about Microsoft. Perhaps the Linux crowd could put its fabled collective mind toward creating letters for all the major analysts. Lord knows, the Times could use some help.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/15/nytimes_ms_ban/





Vista Wins on Looks. As for Lacks ...
David Pogue

After five years of starts, stops, executive shuffling, feature rethinks and delays, Windows Vista is finally complete. It’s available to corporations already, and starting Jan. 30, it’s what you’ll get on any new PC. Its programmers, who probably haven’t seen their families in months, will have an especially merry Christmas this year.

So after five years, how is Windows Vista? Microsoft’s description, which you’ll soon be seeing in millions of dollars’ worth of advertising, is “Clear, Confident, Connected.” But a more truthful motto would be “Looks, Locks, Lacks.”

Looks

Windows Vista is beautiful. Microsoft has never taken elegance so seriously before. Discreet eye candy is partly responsible. Windows and menus cast subtle shadows. A new typeface gives the whole affair a fresh, modern feeling. Subtle animations liven up the proceedings.

If the description so far makes Vista sound a lot like the Macintosh, well, you’re right. You get the feeling that Microsoft’s managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, “Copy that.”

Here are some of the grace notes that will remind you of similar ones on the Mac: A list of favorite PC locations appears at the left side of every Explorer window, which you can customize just by dragging folders in or out. You now expand or collapse lists of folders by clicking little flippy triangles. When you’re dragging icons to copy them, a cursor “badge” appears that indicates how many you’re moving. The Minimize, Maximize and Close buttons glow when your cursor passes over them. There’s now a keystroke (Alt+up arrow) to open the current folder’s parent window, the one that contains it.

Some of the big-ticket Vista features and programs are eerily familiar, too. The biggest one is Instant Search, a text box at the bottom of the Start menu. As you type here, the Start menu turns into a list of every file, folder, program and e-mail message that contains your search phrase, regardless of names or folder locations. It’s a powerful, routine-changing tool, especially when you seek a program that would otherwise require burrowing through nested folders in the All Programs menu.

A similar Search box appears at the top of every desktop (Explorer) window, for ease in plucking some document out of that more limited haystack.

New programs include the Sidebar, a floating layer of single-purpose programs called gadgets ( Apple called them widgets) like a weather reporter, stock tracker, currency converter, and so on; Photo Gallery, a deliciously simple shoebox for digital photos; the bare-bones DVD Maker, for designing scene-selection menus for home-burned video DVDs; and Chess Titans, whose photorealistic board can be rotated in three-dimensional space.

Flip 3-D, which presents all open windows in all programs as cards in a floating deck, seems to be modeled on Mac OS X’s Exposé feature — minus the ability to see all the windows simultaneously. You have to flip through the “cards” to find the one you want.

Now, before the hate-mail tsunami begins, it’s important to note that Apple has itself borrowed feature ideas on occasion, even from Windows. But never this broadly, boldly or blatantly. There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives’ ears to power the Polar Express.

Even so, brazen as it was, the heist was largely successful. Vista is infinitely more pleasant to use than its predecessors. There’s more logic to its folder structure and naming scheme. Things are easier to find. Fewer steps are required to perform common tasks, especially when it comes to networking.

And besides, not all of the new goodies fell from the Apple tree. The new grouping, stacking and filtering options give you efficient new ways to parse the masses of files in a window. If you have a spare U.S.B. flash drive, your PC can use it as extra main memory for a tiny speed boost. Windows Speech Recognition isn’t as accurate as, say, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, but it’s beautifully designed and much better than previous Microsoft attempts.

Laptop luggers will love the clever new Sleep mode. It combines the best of the old Standby mode (everything stays in memory so it’s ready to go when you reopen the lid) and the old Hibernate mode (after several hours, Windows commits all this to the hard drive to save battery power).

And then there’s Presentation Mode, the answer to a million PowerPoint pitchers’ prayers: it prevents your laptop from doing anything embarrassing during your boardroom presentation. It won’t go to sleep, display a screen saver, pop up dialog boxes or play any beeps. It can even automatically change your desktop wallpaper to something uncontroversial, so your bosses won’t unexpectedly glimpse the HotBikiniBabes.com photo that you usually use.

Locks

The visual and feature upgrades are nice, but for Microsoft, security was an even more important goal. As well it should be; Internet nastiness like viruses and spyware were sapping the fun out of Windows PCs.

The list of internal fortifications could fill a stack of white papers (and does), and the technical language could put the Energizer bunny to sleep. But examples include Service Hardening, which prevents background programs from tampering with essential system files, and address-space randomization, which makes it impossible for viruses to find important software bits in predictable places.

Other security-suite components are more visible. The much improved Internet Explorer 7 (also available for Windows XP) alerts you when you’re visiting one of those fake bank or eBay Web sites (called phishing scams). Windows Defender protects your PC from spyware. Parental Controls lets you, the saintly parent, dictate what Web sites your children can visit, which people they correspond with online, and even what times of day they can use the machine.

Then there’s User Account Control, an intrusive dialog box that pops up whenever you try to install a program or adjust a PC-wide setting, requesting that you confirm the change by entering your password. This will strike most people as an unnecessary nuisance, and you can turn it off. But it’s actually one of Vista’s most important new protection features; when the day comes that a virus is making changes to your PC, and not you, you’ll know about it.

Lacks

Various Microsoft divisions split up the duties of writing the 50 million lines of Vista code, and they didn’t always share the same vision. The most visible areas received the most attention, but many darker, less visited corners weren’t visited by the Microsoft Makeover fairy at all.

As a result, Vista has something of a multiple-personality disorder. Links for common tasks sometimes appear at the left side of a window, sometimes the right and sometimes across the top. In wizards (step-by-step “interview” screens), the Back button is sometimes at the lower-left corner of the dialog box, sometimes at the upper-left. Microsoft has hidden the traditional menu bar in some programs (you can summon it by tapping the Alt key), but not in others.

Here and there, you’ll find some jaw-dropping misfires, too. For example, Photo Gallery can play slide shows — but if you want music too, Microsoft cheerfully suggests that you first switch into another program and start some music playing there.

Windows finally comes with a prominent backup program. That’s great, except that you can specify only which categories of things to back up (pictures, e-mail, and so on), not which specific files or folders.

And then there’s that Sidebar, the floating layer of mini-programs. If you close one of the gadgets, you lose its contents forever: your notes in the Post-it Notes gadget, your stock portfolio in the Stocks gadget, and so on. You couldn’t save them if you wanted to. How could Microsoft have missed that one.

Some useful XP features have simply been removed. NetMeeting, a program for collaborating across a network, has been replaced by a Vista-only program called Meeting Space — which lacks its predecessor’s voice- and video-chat features.

And WordPad, the built-in word processor, can no longer open Microsoft Word files. That, evidently, is a ham-handed attempt to force you into buying Microsoft Office. (Let’s hope the masses realize that they have a free alternative at docs.google.com.)

What to Do

Windows Vista is not, as the Web’s chorus of caustic critics claim, little more than a warmed-over Windows XP. Its more intelligent navigation and more powerful file-manipulation tools provide you with greater efficiency from Day 1. And while the more secure plumbing doesn’t guarantee a virus-free future, it will certainly make life more difficult for the sociopaths of the Internet.

That’s not to say, however, that Vista is worth standing in line for on Jan. 30. Moving to Vista means hunting for updated drivers for your printer, audio card and so on, not to mention troubleshooting incompatible programs. It also means some relearning, thanks to features that Microsoft has moved, removed or rejiggered.

Microsoft isn’t helping the confusion issue by releasing Vista in five versions, each with different features: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise and Ultimate. For example, the latter three offer Complete PC, a feature that backs up your entire computer, programs and all; Home Premium and Ultimate offer Media Center, which plays music, videos and photos on your TV. You practically need an operating system just to choose an operating system.

The prices range from $100 (for an upgrade version of Home Basic) to $400 (for the full version of Ultimate). Most people will probably wind up paying $160, the price to upgrade to the Home Premium edition from an earlier version of Windows. (Avoid Home Basic, which is too stripped-down to be worthwhile.) For a fee, you’ll be able to upgrade from one edition to another.

Of course, none of this factors in the price of the new PC you’ll probably need. Vista requires a fairly modern PC, and unless you have a powerful graphics card, some of its most useful new features turn themselves off. You can download the free Vista Upgrade Advisor from Microsoft’s Web site to see if your PC will be able to handle Vista.

According to a SoftChoice survey, in fact, only 6 percent of existing corporate PCs have enough muscle to run all of Vista’s goodies. No wonder Microsoft expects that only about 5 percent of PC users will upgrade their existing computers to Vista.

Online, there’s much talk of Vista’s place in the universe. Is it too little, too late? Does the Mac’s uptick in market share threaten the dominance of Windows? Does Web-based software make operating systems obsolete?

None of the above. Windows isn’t going anywhere, the landscape won’t be changing anytime soon, and the corporate world will still buy it 500 copies at a time.

In other words, it doesn’t matter what you (or tech reviewers) think of Windows Vista; sooner or later, it’s what most people will have on their PCs. In that light, it’s fortunate that Vista is better looking, better designed and better insulated against the annoyances of the Internet. At the very least, it’s well equipped to pull the world’s PCs along for the next five years — or whenever the next version of Windows drops down the chimney.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/te...anted=all&_r=1





Retailers Profit from Unused Gift Cards
AP

Shoppers across America have millions of gift cards tucked away in envelopes, drawers and wallets. And some of the nation's largest retailers are profiting as a result.

"It can be fun to get them, but then I forget about them," said Deborah Cabaret, 46, who has hundreds of dollars worth of unused cards. "Or I walk into the store, I look around, I don't know what I want, and I leave."

Last winter, Best Buy Co. reported a $43 million gain in fiscal 2006 from cards that hadn't been used in two or more years. Limited Brands Inc. recorded $30 million in 2005 revenue because of unredeemed cards.

Even so, this holiday season is likely to see record sales of gift cards. The National Retail Federation, a trade group, estimates that shoppers will buy $24.8 billion worth of cards, up 34 percent from last year.

More places offer gift cards these days, including drugstores, jewelers, spas and even supermarkets. Shoppers are buying cards with higher dollar values, and more stores are packaging the cards with accessories to make them look less like plastic money.

About 6 percent, or $4.8 billion, of this year's gift cards will go unused, estimated Laura Lane, vice president of unclaimed property services for Keane Co., a compliance and risk management consulting firm.

Consumer Reports put the figure even higher, estimating that 19 percent of those who received cards last year had not used them because the cards were lost or expired.

"It can add up to significant dollars," Lane said. "I think the message to consumers is: use it or regift it."

Some gift cards get spent faster than others. Supermarkets and gas stations have close to 100 percent redemption rates, said Bob Skiba, who runs the gift card division of Ceridian Corp.'s Comdata gift card division, based in Louisville, Ky.

"You don't have to buy a sweater every day, but you do have to eat and fill up your car," Skiba said.

Retailers say they would rather see customers use the cards.

"They have money in their pockets that's pointed to our store," said John Fleming, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s marketing chief and a former Target Corp. executive.

In addition, a retailer can't report revenue from a gift card when it is sold. The revenue is recognized as the card is used or after it has gone a long time without being used.

Research shows that most consumers will spend more than the card is worth, using their own money to make up the difference.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061218/..._ge/gift_cards





Person of the Year: You

Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.
Lev Grossman

The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...9514%2C00.html





Now It's Your Turn
Richard Stengel

The other day I listened to a reader named Tom, age 59, make a pitch for the American Voter as TIME's Person of the Year. Tom wasn't sitting in my office but was home in Stamford, Conn., where he recorded his video and uploaded it to YouTube. In fact, Tom was answering my own video, which I'd posted on YouTube a couple of weeks earlier, asking for people to submit nominations for Person of the Year. Within a few days, it had tens of thousands of page views and dozens of video submissions and comments. The people who sent in nominations were from Australia and Paris and Duluth, and their suggestions included Sacha Baron Cohen, Donald Rumsfeld, Al Gore and many, many votes for the YouTube guys.

This response was the living example of the idea of our 2006 Person of the Year: that individuals are changing the nature of the information age, that the creators and consumers of user-generated content are transforming art and politics and commerce, that they are the engaged citizens of a new digital democracy. From user-generated images of Baghdad strife and the London Underground bombing to the macaca moment that might have altered the midterm elections to the hundreds of thousands of individual outpourings of hope and poetry and self-absorption, this new global nervous system is changing the way we perceive the world. And the consequences of it all are both hard to know and impossible to overestimate.

There are lots of people in my line of work who believe that this phenomenon is dangerous because it undermines the traditional authority of media institutions like TIME. Some have called it an "amateur hour." And it often is. But America was founded by amateurs. The framers were professional lawyers and military men and bankers, but they were amateur politicians, and that's the way they thought it should be. Thomas Paine was in effect the first blogger, and Ben Franklin was essentially loading his persona into the MySpace of the 18th century, Poor Richard's Almanack. The new media age of Web 2.0 is threatening only if you believe that an excess of democracy is the road to anarchy. I don't.

Journalists once had the exclusive province of taking people to places they'd never been. But now a mother in Baghdad with a videophone can let you see a roadside bombing, or a patron in a nightclub can show you a racist rant by a famous comedian. These blogs and videos bring events to the rest of us in ways that are often more immediate and authentic than traditional media. These new techniques, I believe, will only enhance what we do as journalists and challenge us to do it in even more innovative ways.

We chose to put a mirror on the cover because it literally reflects the idea that you, not we, are transforming the information age. The 2006 Person of the Year issue—the largest one Time has ever printed—marks the first time we've put reflective Mylar on the cover. When we found a supplier in Minnesota, we made the company sign a confidentiality agreement before placing an order for 6,965,000 pieces. That's a lot of Mylar. The elegant cover was designed by our peerless art director, Arthur Hochstein, and the incredible logistics of printing and distributing this issue were ably coordinated by our director of operations, Brooke Twyford, and director of editorial operations, Rick Prue. The Person of the Year package, as well as People Who Mattered, was masterfully overseen by deputy managing editor Steve Koepp. Designing a cover with a Mylar window does create one unanticipated challenge: How do you display it online when there's no one standing in front of it? If you go to Time.com, you'll see an animated version of the cover in which the window is stocked with a rotating display of reader-submitted photos. Maybe you'll see yourself.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...570743,00.html