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Old 27-06-07, 09:37 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 30th, '07

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In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.


Signed,


New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton































June 30th, 2007








BitTorrent Sites Safe Haven Under Threat
Ernesto

Leaseweb, the ISP of some of the largest BitTorrent sites like Torrentspy, BTjunkie and Demonoid was forced to take down everlasting.nu, a relatively small BitTorrent site. The outcome of the lawsuit initiated by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit Brein could spell trouble for some of the key players in the BitTorrent landscape.

In response to this decision several BitTorrent admins, who prefer not to be named, already announced that they have plans to leave Leaseweb. Others are setting up backup locations in case their site s are targeted. An admin of one of the bigger BitTorrent sites said:

“It looks like we’re not going to be very safe anymore on Leaseweb, we are putting backups in place on another location, just in case.”

This Thursday, the Amsterdam court concluded that everlasting.nu structurally facilitated copyright infringement by allowing their users to download copyrighted content via torrents hosted on their site.

Leaseweb’s lawyers argued that there was no evidence that these torrents really pointed to copyrighted works. They referred to the fact that rights holders often upload fake files themselves and that the name of a .torrent file is not sufficient to prove that copyrighted works are being distributed. Brein responded to this argument by stating that everlasting.nu then would be a very customer unfriendly BitTorrent site if this was the case, and the judge agreed with this.

At the end of the hearing the court decided that Leaseweb has to take down everlasting.nu and hand over the name and address of the owner. Additionally, Leaseweb is obliged to take down everlasting.nu, in case the site returns in the near future.

It still remains unclear what made the judge decide that everlasting is facilitating copyright infringement and how this will affect the position of all the other BitTorrent sites hosted by Leaseweb. The fact that everlasting has their own BitTorrent tracker was not used as an argument in the decision. So does this mean that hosting .torrent files is illegal now?

Brein sure thinks so, they already announced another lawsuit against Leaseweb to take down another BitTorrent site. At this point it is not sure whether this is one of the big players like Torrentspy, BTjunkie and Demonoid, or yet again a smaller BitTorrent site.
http://torrentfreak.com/torrent-site...-under-threat/





TorrentSpy Begins Weeding Out Copyright Content
Greg Sandoval

TorrentSpy, the torrent-file search engine accused by Hollywood of aiding copyright violators, plans to remove links from its search results to pirated content using a new filtering system.

FileRights is an automated filtering system created by some of TorrentSpy's founders, including Justin Bunnell, according to a statement released Monday. The technology uses "hash" values to automatically remove links to infringing works from search engines that subscribe to the service.

The move comes as TorrentSpy fights a lawsuit brought against it last year by the major film studios. TorrentSpy suffered a legal blow earlier this month when the judge hearing the case ordered the company to begin tracking user activity.

The privately held company has appealed the decision. Should it lose, Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy's attorney, has said the company would likely shut down access in the U.S. before giving up information about users.

In an interview, Rothken acknowledged that using hash marks to identify copyright content is not foolproof. If a file is altered then the system may not recognize it.

Filtering doesn't necessarily mean an end to the hostilities between Hollywood and the torrent search engines. In 2001, file-sharing system, Napster, launched a filtering system that failed to thwart illegal file sharing enough to satisfy the music industry or the courts. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel called their efforts, which according to some accounts only caught half of the illegal files being shared, "disgraceful." The judge eventually ordered Napster to stay shut down until it could block all infringing materials.

It should be noted that illegal file doesn't occur at TorrentSpy or the other torrent engines. People use these sites to locate torrent files that can be downloaded via the file-sharing program BitTorrent. In the lawsuit filed by the film industry in Feb. 2006, TorrentSpy is accused of being a powerful tool for those who pirate intellectual property.

FileRights works like most video filters. Copyright owners handover information about their films or TV shows and the system detects any files containing unauthorized copies. Links to those files are automatically removed.

Any copyright owner, Web site or search engine is welcome to subscribe to the service for free, according to the company's statement. According to Rothken, one of TorrentSpy's competitors, IsoHunt, has agreed to use the filtering system as well.

"With FileRights we used the community networking power of the Web to automate and aggregate the entire copyright filtration process," Bunnell said. "Torrentspy now uses the FileRights cooperative filtering process to filter search results on its popular search engine."
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9734127-7.html





BitTorrent Survival: The Way of the Hydra
enigmax

As more and more people hear about BitTorrent, each day the major sites get bigger, with more and more visitors, members, seeds and peers. Mainstream awareness of P2P is driving this new surge but with copyright and law enforcement agencies clamping down hard, some are considering tactics for survival.

The BitTorrent community is growing at an almost alarming rate, its popularity is surging and more people than ever before are discovering its wonders. The mighty Suprnova captured the imagination of millions around the world, giving huge momentum to this file-sharing phenomenon, collecting millions of daily hits before its demise.

Today, sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay are enjoying unprecedented levels of interest. Mininova served up 1 billion torrents in their first 2 years of operations, then stormed to 2 billion in just a further 6 months whilst capturing almost double the daily traffic of Suprnova in its prime.

The Pirate Bay almost needs no introduction, such is its size and comparable infamy. A jaw-dropping BitTorrent behemoth, gathering thousands of visitors each day who between them download 4 million torrents. Its vistors make 86 searches per second, its servers handle 1150 requests in the same timeframe and it tracks 50% of the world’s torrents.

That’s 50% of ALL public torrents. That is a dangerously high number of eggs in a basket that’s frequently coming under an attack of one form or another.

With the authorities always looking to take the biggest scalps to grab the headlines, sites such as LokiTorrent and EliteTorrents stood no chance, especially considering the huge financial implications of residing in the USA. Major BitTorrent site admins realized this and mainly moved their operations to the Netherlands, a location which is now looking less of a safe haven. The Dutch situation is of particular concern - there are dozens of strategically important torrent sites hosted there.

So what is the solution? brokep of The Pirate Bay has some thoughts that I happen to completely agree with.

“There are too few sites and trackers right now” he said, “things have been to concentrated to the big sites and that really sucks!”

Although it’s great initially for the mainstream to have visible big ‘brands’ such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova and TorrentSpy, it’s a precarious situation to have such a top heavy structure to the BitTorrent community. It’s great having a ‘multi-headed hydra’ but not so great when just one of those heads carries half of all the public torrents. This situation must be addressed. Resources need to be spread around in a manner which ensures that a few ‘big bombs’ are unable to dismantle major parts of the infrastructure.

There is a solution, as brokep says, “I really love the small specialized sites, I hope to see more of them. I would love to help out with starting up more, but it’s also important that we who already run sites do not start more of them.”

He’s right. The more sites like The Pirate Bay provide what the BitTorrent community want, the less likely it is that people will venture out on their own to create their own sites. In the current environment, the hydra needs thousands of heads which are resource-hungry to target, not just a dozen juicy fat ones which stay nice and still, with the authorities just waiting for a subtle change in, or interpretation of, the law. A change which is inevitable, in both Sweden and the Netherlands.

TorrentFreak asked the admin of a US-based tracker how they manage to stay alive, despite having 20,000 members. “People are too hung up on MPAA and RIAA content. There’s an enormous library of material out there which you can track and no-one bothers you. We’ve got over 4000 torrents and we’ve had just two or three informal takedown requests in the last couple of years. If people want to start a tracker, indexing non-RIAA/MPAA content and specializing in something else is a great way to start building a community, even when you’re hosted in the States”

brokep gets the last words. Very wise words;

“So public message to people - start up your own torrent sites, make the internet the hydra it is and needs to be. If there’s hundreds of sites, they can’t all be shut down. And well, if they shut down the few that are today, there will be hundreds of sites, I’m sure, but let’s start them before so we can spread the word of them easier.”
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-s...-of-the-hydra/





File-Sharing 'Graveyard' Still Filling Up
Greg Sandoval

To some, these were corporate executions, death by litigation.

LokiTorrent, Scour, SuperNova.org, Aimster and the original Napster were just a few of those sued out of existence, the victims of the entertainment industry's fear of technology, say the companies' supporters. Media execs say justice was done. Those companies profited from illegal file sharing, they say, and enabled others to pick the pockets of actors, musicians and other copyright owners.

Now a new battle is heating up. The search engine TorrentSpy is accused in a lawsuit filed last year by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) of allegedly helping users locate pirated movies online. As the site's parent company, Valence Media, tries to fend off a court order to hand over user information to the MPAA, TorrentSpy's operators say they would likely shut down in the U.S. before complying. In a move that is seen in some corners as a capitulation, TorrentSpy and competitor IsoHunt agreed this week to prevent their search engines from linking to copyrighted material.

Seven years after a judge ordered Napster to halt music swapping, online piracy continues to thrive. Some estimates hold that the large video and music files passing back and forth over the Internet chew up more than a third of the Web's bandwidth. Meanwhile, the movie industry is following in the footsteps of the record companies by waging prolonged legal battles.

The question is why?

"The Internet's graveyard is deep with companies that have been sued out of business by the entertainment industry," said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for the rights of Internet users. "I think the prevailing sense is that they are winning the battles but losing the war. Despite the lawsuits, there is more file sharing than ever."

Kori Bernards, an MPAA spokeswoman, said the organization doesn't reveal its strategy but she did outline the group's overall plan to deal with piracy.

"We are rooting out those who enable copyright infringement on the Internet," Bernards said. "We will continue to take such actions against sites that are profiting from the theft of other people's creative works...Our strategy is to go after people committing copyright theft on the Internet at all levels."

Copyright theft costs the film industry billions, according to the MPAA. In 2005, the top U.S. studios generated $23 billion in worldwide ticket sales but say they lost $2 billion, or 8 percent, to online piracy.

The lawsuits are little more than "scare tactics," declared Peter Sunde, one of the cofounders of The Pirate Bay, the Internet's largest trackers of BitTorrent files--the technology favored by many to transfer large amounts of data over the Web. Based in Sweden, The Pirate Bay's headquarters were raided by police last year after the U.S. government pressed Sweden to shut down the site. The efforts failed.

"The MPAA is using legal muscle to scare people but really they are the ones who are afraid," Sunde said. "They fear technology but technology always prevails."

Others suspect that the MPAA ambitions go beyond trying to frighten file sharers. Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy's attorney, who has argued numerous copyright cases against the entertainment industry, argues the MPAA appears to be attempting to extend its control over Internet copyright issues.

First they pursued Napster for hosting unauthorized music files on its servers but didn't stop there. They then went after Grokster and Streamcast, which produced software that was often used to pirate copyright content. (The courts ruled that the companies could not be held responsible for the criminal acts committed by users.) And now the studios are after TorrentSpy, which does not have any direct contact with copyright material.

"It's one thing for someone to be hosting illegal copyright works on their site," Rothken said, "but the MPAA is trying to hold TorrentSpy liable for search results that link to torrent files. Copyright files never even touch TorrentSpy--not in any way, shape or form."

Lawsuits can pay off
Regardless of the criticism, there are signs that litigation does pay dividends. The MPAA is winning important decisions in the courts. The most recent example came on May 29, when a U.S. magistrate judge ordered TorrentSpy to begin tracking user activity and then turn the data over to the MPAA.

TorrentSpy doesn't log such data, but the judge said because the information exists, even if for only a short while, on computer RAM, TorrentSpy was obligated to collect and then turn the information over to the MPAA as part of the discovery process--where parties in a lawsuit exchange information. TorrentSpy has appealed the decision.

This kind of court ruling could be a very useful tool for fighting piracy, according to Richard Charnley, an attorney who has represented Fox and ABC in copyright cases.

"I think being able to access the identities of end users will certainly go a long way to shutting down potential infringement," Charnley said.

And TorrentSpy's recent moves indicate that perhaps the scare tactics also work.

Pirate Bay's Sunde was highly critical of TorrentSpy and its co-founder Justin Bunnell for launching a filtering system. "First of all, Justin," wrote Sunde on his blog this week, "you know this is not going to work."
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He suggests that TorrentSpy is either trying to save itself by appeasing the film industry or attempting to dupe the MPAA and the courts into believing that filtering BitTorrent files can effectively stop illegal downloads. It can't, according to Sunde.

So where does this leave the film industry if TorrentSpy and its competitors can't come up with a technology fix and they can't be sued into submission?

EFF's von Lohmann urges the movie industry to exercise some patience. He points out that if the studios were successful in killing off the VCR back in the 1970s, they would never have reaped billions of dollars from movie rentals.

"Everybody forgets that when the VCR was first developed, most of the uses were infringing copyright," von Lohmann said. "There was no Blockbuster or legitimate way to rent movies back then. It's vital to leave room for innovation. You have to give technology a chance to develop into something."

Meanwhile, Charnley and von Lohmann agree the studios must offer a more attractive proposition than the one being dangled by file sharing. They essentially have to learn to compete with free downloads.

"Ironically, if the studios changed their business model, that would put Napster's progeny out of business," Charnley said. "If they offer something that's legal, easy to use and affordable…these sites are useless."
http://news.com.com/File-sharing+gra...3-6194001.html





Buona Notte

WinMX Bites the Dust
p2pnet.net news

Frontcode Technologies' WinMX, one of the most popular of the original indie p2p file sharing applications, was doing so well that it caught the jaundiced eye of Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG's RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).

Then, WinMX is down, p2pnet reported in September, 2005.

But not for long because a band of Italian enthusiasts came to the rescue and soon after, "Wrong," we said. "WinMX is back! And it's all thanks to Italy's P2PZone." WinMx in funzione. Ecco la soluzione !

Sadly, it's offline again and this time, it's unlikely there'll be a reprieve.

"Today I have closed down," posts King Macro, head of WinMXGroup Operations. He goes on >>>>

"This decision took a while to come to however eventually it was made to terminate operations as of today. Advanced notice was given to others to prepare for this however they chose not to act on this which has caused much panic, hence this announcement.

When frontcode decided to pull the plug on WinMX I took over operations from them and continued to keep WinMX running, and made some improvements along the way, however this has not been without hassle. At every step of the way there have been people constantly doing everything they can to work against me trying everything they can to make as much hassle as possible.

I have continued to put in my time and effort despite this because at the end of the day the winmx community was worth it. Lately however there has been nothing worth saving, the once great community has mostly fallen in to people arguing and fighting, and even the small pockets of the community I used to be able to go to for a bit of fun and to relax I now can't - if it's not someone complaining it's someone pestering for answers to something. It's quite simply not something I see any point in putting my effort in to saving any more.

In case anyone is wondering why I have come to this conclusion that it's not worth it, I suggest you read peoples reactions to this closedown. If you think it's selfish of me to want to spend my free time doing something I want to do instead of what you want me to do for you, and if you think it's selfish to want to spend what little spare money I have on myself instead of spending it all on you, then you are exactly the reason that this has happened. If however you think it's perfectly reasonable for me to do whatever I want to with my time, you are apparently in the minority."
http://p2pnet.net/story/12643





Privatunes: a Software that Anonymizes iTunes Plus Files
Nicolas Jondet

Ratatium.com, a French website specialized in technology news and software downloads, has just launched Privatunes, a free software that anonymizes DRM-free files bought on iTunes Plus. Last month’s revelations that the DRM-free files on iTunes Plus came with user's full name and account e-mail embedded in them had raised serious privacy concerns. Ratatium.com explains (in French) that Privatunes is aimed at guaranteeing the privacy of users but also their rights as consumers to freely share and trade the songs they have purchased. However, the claim that this software is perfectly legal will surely be tested.

When Apple and EMI decided to release DRM-free files on iTunes Plus last month, their decision was hailed as a breakthrough in digital music distribution. Freeing music from the controversial Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology was seen by many music lovers and technology enthusiasts as the way forward. However, on the day of their launch, those files generated controversy. Reports from Ars Technica and TUAW revealed that these DRM-free music files came with user's full name and account e-mail embedded in them, thus allowing Apple to track who and how those files were shared.

Ratatium.com, a French online news outlet and software download website, and Matoumba, another information site, have decided to go beyond the mere condemnation of what they consider as a serious breach of users’ privacy and consumer rights: they have launched Privatunes, a free software that anonymizes files bought on iTunes Plus.

The free software, which is currently only available for Microsoft, allows consumers to erase their name and e-mail addresses from their iTunes Plus files. The software, which can only anonymize one file at a time, also offers to make a backup of the original file.

This tool is presented as a means to safeguard, not only the privacy rights but also the consumer rights of the user, which iTunes Plus’ policy allegedly breaches. For Ratatium, digital property, like any other kind of property, should be freely transferable by its rightful owner. The purchaser of a digital album should be able to transfer it as easily and anonymously as a CD bought in a shop.

Ratatium also raises the following issue: a user might be contractually and/or statutorily entitled to copy a song for a family member. However, the user has very few means to control whether this file will be further shared by his family member with friends and friends of theirs. Yet, the fact that his personal details are embedded in the file could mean that he may be held liable if the file ends up on P2P networks.

Privatunes aims to help consumers avoid these risks and enforce their rights by erasing their personal details form the files. However, the claim made by Ratatium that such a service is perfectly legal will surely be tested.

In the meantime, Ratatium has promised an updated version of Privatunes which will be able to anonymize several files at a time and will be available on Mac and Linux.
http://french-law.net/index.php?opti...id=47&Itemid=1





RIAA Wants Agreements to Stay Secret
NewYorkCountryLawyer

The RIAA is opposing Ms. Lindor's request for discovery into the agreements among the record company competitors by which they have agreed to settle and prosecute their cases together, by which she seeks to support her Fourth Affirmative Defense alleging that "The plaintiffs, who are competitors, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and of public policy, by tying their copyrights to each other, collusively litigating and settling all cases together, and by entering into an unlawful agreement among themselves to prosecute and to dispose of all cases in accordance with a uniform agreement, and through common lawyers, thus overreaching the bounds and scope of whatever copyrights they might have. ...As such, they are guilty of misuse of their copyrights."
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/06/30/1259258.shtml





Major Labels Back File Sharing Service Qtrax
FMQB

Brilliant Technologies will soon announce plans to spin out Qtrax, an online record label and file sharing service. What's more, the service is reportedly backed by all four major labels, and it will offer between 20 million and 30 million copyrighted songs at its launch in October, according to the New York Post. The deal is expected to be formally announced today.

The plan is that Qtrax will serve as an online-only record label that will offer its music for free. It will generate revenue only through advertising and sponsorships. Qtrax also will offer a full complement of songs from the major labels - EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group - as well as live recordings and personal tracks stemming from users' own collections.

"Consumers clearly aren't willing to pay for music, but advertisers are the one group that still will," Brilliant Technologies CEO Allan Klepfisz told the Post, adding that Internet advertising is growing by 30 percent per year.

Qtrax's initial revenue projections range from a low of $20 million to a high of $175 million. Record labels will get an equal split of the advertising revenue in addition to royalty fees. The file sharing service also will be a publicly traded company, with shareholders in Brilliant Technologies owning 80 percent and 20 percent being offered to the public.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=429034





Hydra-Headed 'Storm' Attack Starts
Gregg Keizer

A new round of greeting-card spam that draws users to visit attack sites relies on a sophisticated multipronged, multiexploit strike force to infect machines, security professionals said late today.

Captured samples of the unsolicited e-mail have all borne the same subject line -- "You've received a postcard from a family member!" -- and contain links to a malicious Web site, where JavaScript determines whether the victim's browser has scripting enabled or turned off.

"If JavaScript is disabled, then they provide you a handy link to click on to exploit yourself," said an alert posted Thursday afternoon by SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC). Some users turn off scripting because it is a frequent attack vector; browsers with JavaScript enabled are simply fed a two-part package of downloader and malware.

The quick browser status exam in this attack is somewhat similar to one used in a different exploit tracked by Symantec Corp. since Tuesday, but the two are not connected, said Oliver Friedrichs, director of Symantec's security response group. "They're using two different tool kits, but they're both prime examples that exploits against browsers are more and more prevalent," he said.

Today's greeting-card gambit tries a trio of exploits, moving on to the second if the machine is not vulnerable to the first, then on to the third if necessary. The first is an exploit against a QuickTime vulnerability; the second is an attack on the popular WinZip compression utility; and the third, dubbed "the Hail Mary" by the ISC, is an exploit for the WebViewFolderIcon vulnerability in Windows that Microsoft Corp. patched last October.

The ISC said several antivirus vendors had tentatively pegged the executable file, which is offered to users whose browsers have JavaScript disabled, as a variation of the Storm Trojan horse, an aggressive piece of malware that has been hijacking computers to serve as attacker bots since early this year. According to the ISC's warning, computers already compromised by Storm -- a.k.a. Peacom -- are hosting the malware, and the attackers are rotating those machines' IP addresses in the spam they're sending.
"Every Storm-infected system is potentially capable of hosting the malware and sending the spam, but only a few will be used in any given run," said the alert, "depending on how many e-mails they want sent and how many Web hits they're expecting."

Hackers haven't abandoned the practice of attaching malware to e-mail, then counting on naive users to open the file, said Friedrichs. But malware-hosting sites are the trend. "It's much more difficult to send a full malicious file," he said, because of users' learned reluctance to open suspicious files and filtering and blocking tactics by security software.

"This is widespread, and leads the user to multiple IP addresses," said Shimon Gruper, vice president at Aladdin Knowledge Systems Inc., a security company known for its eSafe antivirus software. "There's not a single server, there are multiple exploits, [and the e-mail] has no attachments. This will be very difficult to detect."

Two days ago, a Symantec honeypot captured a similar Web site-hosted attack that had an arsenal of exploits at its disposal. That attack, however, featured an unusual, if rudimentary, browser detector that sniffed out whether the target computer is running Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) or Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox. If the attack detects IE, it feeds the machine a Windows animated cursor exploit. If it finds Firefox, however, the sites spit out a QuickTime exploit.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9025898





A Bit of History, Reborn in a Glass
Rob Willey

LAST October, John Deragon began tinkering with a recipe for Abbott’s bitters, a cocktail ingredient that has beguiled drinks fanatics for years. Over the next two months, Mr. Deragon, the chief technology officer of Waterfront Media, an online health and wellness company in Brooklyn, tweaked the formula drop by drop, using single-spice infusions known as tinctures. After about 18 test runs, he had a version he thought he could work with, and by March he was aging his second batch in a five-gallon rye whiskey barrel purchased from a distillery in upstate New York.

His plan now, he explained recently, is to extract a small portion every two weeks to track the evolving interplay of wood and spice. All told, he has amassed enough tasting notes and recipe adjustments to fill four medium-size Moleskine notebooks.

The only problem is that Mr. Deragon has never tasted real Abbott’s bitters. The brand dissolved in the early 1950s, the original recipe is lost, and securing bottles of it on eBay can require a level of attention at odds with productive membership in society. His effort is based largely on the kind of techniques and experimentation usually practiced in a laboratory, not a home bar.

While Mr. Deragon’s quest to recreate a historical footnote is extreme, it speaks to a heightened interest in bitters, the generic term for the concentrated infusions of roots, herbs, barks, spices and alcohol called for in too many classic drinks to name. (You can start with the martini, the Manhattan, the Old-Fashioned, the Sazerac, the Champagne cocktail, the Martinez ...)

“It’s almost like glue that holds a cocktail together,” said Philip Ward, the head bartender at Death & Co., in the East Village, where 17 of the 37 house drinks include bitters. “Add a dash, and the other three or four ingredients in the cocktail are in some way going to be able to relate with at least one or two things in the bitters.”

The challenge is figuring out which bitters form the strongest bond in a given drink. “I think that’s why bitters are so cool,” Mr. Ward said. “You don’t really know what they do. You just find out what they do by using them.”

As new brands and flavors of bitters emerge, the equation becomes more complicated. Last August, a German company called the Bitter Truth started a line of lemon, orange, and aromatic bitters. (Orange bitters are infused with orange peel and an assortment of spices. Aromatic bitters tend to be richer and more complex, with heavier doses of cinnamon, clove and anise.)

Earlier this year, Marlow & Sons, a restaurant and gourmet market in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, began selling house-made Abbott’s bitters (since sold out) and citrus bitters, and is now planning a run of peach bitters and another round of Abbott’s.

In March, Fee Brothers, a company in Rochester, N.Y., known for its extensive line of cocktail bitters, introduced a limited-edition aromatic bitters, aged for one year in old whiskey barrels. Last month Angostura Ltd. — better known as the company that makes the yellow-capped bitters found in seemingly every grocery store in America — unveiled its long-rumored orange bitters. And bitters aficionados can always browse the extensive selection, for $2 to $16, at LeNell’s, a wine and spirits shop in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

For some bartenders, the retail surge is not enough. Jim Meehan, a bartender at Gramercy Tavern and the beverage director at PDT, a new cocktail bar in the East Village, said he feels underserved by the current bitters market, which, depending on how hard one feels like looking, numbers more than a dozen products. He said he plans to age his own aromatic bitters in a used three-gallon bourbon barrel procured from Mr. Deragon.

At Vessel, in Seattle, the bar manager, Jamie Boudreau, starts his cherry bitters by combining separate bourbon- and rye-based infusions with a touch of honey-flavored vodka and the Italian digestif amaro. He then ages the bitters in an oak cask rinsed with shiraz, filters them, and packages them in small glass bottles bearing an old-fashioned-sounding word of caution: “Imbibing more than a few drops may cause man to see things as they are, rather than as they should be.”

The allure of antiquity might begin to explain the remarkable devotion that Abbott’s bitters inspire. Ted Haigh, a Los Angeles-based graphic designer and drinks writer and historian known to many as Dr. Cocktail, became intrigued with Abbott’s — which he describes as similar to Angostura but with a more pronounced flavor of clove, nutmeg and cinnamon, plus a hint of anise — in the early 1990s, when he lucked into several bottles from roughly 1933.

His curiosity led him to two descendants of the company’s founder; a copy of the first corporate minutes, circa 1907; a pilgrimage to the original Abbott’s production site in Baltimore; and a lengthy interview with the company’s final owner, who dissolved the brand in the early 1950s because of sagging popular interest in drinks with bitters. And yet: “To my knowledge,” he said in an e-mail, “not a soul has the original recipe anymore.”

Thanks in large part to the combined interest of Mr. Haigh and Robert Hess, a director at Microsoft in Seattle and the founder of drinkboy.com, a Web site devoted to cocktails, debate about the lost recipe has been simmering online for years. (Mr. Hess, who owns 10 original bottles of Abbott’s, and whose personal digital assistant contains upwards of 4,000 cocktail recipes, has made what he calls House Bitters since 2002.)

Last fall, the conversation vaulted ahead when Kevin J. Verspoor, a perfumer at Fragrance Resources in Clifton, N.J., and a relative newcomer to the drinkboy.com discussion boards, posted the results of a gas chromatograph test he conducted on an unopened, Prohibition-era bottle from Mr. Hess’s collection.

“He had things in there that I never would have guessed — like tonka beans,” said Mr. Deragon, who based his initial recipe largely on Mr. Verspoor’s findings. (Tonka beans, with a scent reminiscent of vanilla, contain the blood-thinning chemical coumarin, and were banned as an additive by the Food and Drug Administration in 1954.)

On a recent evening, Mr. Deragon was enjoying a cocktail at Death & Co. when Mr. Meehan dropped by with some Peruvian bitters that he’d heard were crucial for pisco sours. Mr. Deragon seemed skeptical.

“I don’t know,” he said, taking a deep whiff of the Peruvian bitters, which tasted like Kahlua. “I might be moving out of the bitters and on to the vermouths. I feel like the bitters market is already saturated in terms of people making their own. I’m going to move on to the next big thing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/dining/27bitt.html





Takes legal action even though her design and recipe were lifted from others

Chef Sues Over Intellectual Property (the Menu)
Pete Wells

Sometimes, Rebecca Charles wishes she were a little less influential.

She was, she asserts, the first chef in New York who took lobster rolls, fried clams and other sturdy utility players of New England seafood cookery and lifted them to all-star status on her menu. Since opening Pearl Oyster Bar in the West Village 10 years ago, she has ruefully watched the arrival of a string of restaurants she considers “knockoffs” of her own.

Yesterday she filed suit in Federal District Court in Manhattan against the latest and, she said, the most brazen of her imitators: Ed McFarland, chef and co-owner of Ed’s Lobster Bar in SoHo and her sous-chef at Pearl for six years.

The suit, which seeks unspecified financial damages from Mr. McFarland and the restaurant itself, charges that Ed’s Lobster Bar copies “each and every element” of Pearl Oyster Bar, including the white marble bar, the gray paint on the wainscoting, the chairs and bar stools with their wheat-straw backs, the packets of oyster crackers placed at each table setting and the dressing on the Caesar salad.

Mr. McFarland would not comment on the complaint, saying that he had not seen it yet. But he said that Ed’s Lobster Bar, which opened in March, was no imitator.

“I would say it’s a similar restaurant,” he said, “I would not say it’s a copy.”

Lawyers for Ms. Charles, 53, said that what Ed’s Lobster Bar had done amounted to theft of her intellectual property — the kind of claim more often seen in publishing and entertainment, or among giant restaurant chains protecting their brand.

In recent years, a handful of chefs and restaurateurs have invoked intellectual property concepts, including trademarks, patents and trade dress — the distinctive look and feel of a business — to defend their restaurants, their techniques and even their recipes, but most have stopped short of a courtroom. The Pearl Oyster Bar suit may be the most aggressive use of those concepts by the owner of a small restaurant. Some legal experts believe the number of cases will grow as chefs begin to think more like chief executives.

Charles Valauskas, a lawyer in Chicago who represents a number of restaurants and chefs in intellectual property matters, called their discovery of intellectual property law “long overdue” and attributed it to greater competition as well as the high cost of opening a restaurant.

“Now the stakes are so high,” he said. “The average restaurant can be millions of dollars. If I were an investor I’d want to do something to make sure my investment is protected.”

Ms. Charles’s investment was modest. She built Pearl Oyster Bar for about $120,000 — a cost that in today’s market qualifies as an early-bird special.

She acknowledged that Pearl was itself inspired by another narrow, unassuming place, Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco. But she said she had spent many months making hundreds of small decisions about her restaurant’s look, feel and menu.

Those decisions made the place her own, she said, and were colored by her history. The paint scheme, for instance, was meant to evoke the seascape along the Maine coast where she spent summers as a girl.

“My restaurant is a personal reflection of me, my experience, my family,” she said. “That restaurant is me.”

Mr. McFarland, she said, had unfairly profited from all the thought she had put into building Pearl. “To have that handed to you, so you don’t have to make those decisions — it’s unfair,” she said.

But the detail that seems to gnaw at her most is a $7 appetizer on Mr. McFarland’s menu: “Ed’s Caesar.”

She has never eaten it, but she and her lawyers claim it is made from her own Caesar salad recipe, which calls for a coddled egg and English muffin croutons.

She learned it from her mother, who extracted it decades ago from the chef at a long-gone Los Angeles restaurant. It became a kind of signature at Pearl. And although she taught Mr. McFarland how to make it, she said she had guarded the recipe more closely than some restaurateurs watch their wine cellars.

“When I taught him, I said, ‘You will never make this anywhere else,’ ” she insisted. According to lawyers for Ms. Charles, the Caesar salad recipe is a trade secret and Mr. McFarland had no more business taking it with him after he left than a Coca-Cola employee entrusted with the formula for Diet Coke.

Mr. McFarland called the allegation that he was a Caesar salad thief “a pretty ridiculous claim.”

“I have my own recipes for my items,” he said.

Asked to elaborate on the differences between his restaurant and Pearl, Mr. McFarland said: “I’d say it’s a lot more upscale than Pearl. A lot neater, a lot cleaner and a lot nicer looking.” Ed’s Lobster Bar incorporates novel features like a raw bar and a skylight, he said; as for the white marble bar, he said one could be seen in “every raw bar” in Boston, where he had done “additional homework in designing the dining room.”

Calling the lawsuit “a complete shock to me,” Mr. McFarland went on to say: “I just find it interesting that she’d want to draw attention to the fact that she’s bringing a lawsuit against me that’s just going to bring more business my way. I personally have nothing to be concerned about, in my opinion.”

Other chefs, however, are taking intellectual property rights seriously.

One of Mr. Valauskas’s clients, Homaro Cantu, has applied for patents on a number of his culinary inventions, like a method for printing pictures of food on flavored, edible paper. Mr. Cantu also makes his cooks sign a nondisclosure agreement before they so much as boil water at Moto, his restaurant in Chicago.

Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, said that this almost seemed an inevitable result of bringing lawyers into the kitchen. “The first thing a lawyer would say is have all your people sign nondisclosure agreements,” he said. “It’s a classic American marriage between food and law.”

Few chefs have followed Mr. Cantu’s footsteps all the way to the Patent and Trademark Office. One who did is David Burke, the chef at David Burke & Donatella, on the Upper East Side and other restaurants. He said he had trademarked a “swordfish chop” and “salmon pastrami” but no longer tried to defend those terms from copycats.

“You’ve got to chase people down if they use it. I got tired of it,” he said. But he said he still applied for trademarks on more recent innovations, like his bacon-flavored spray.

Many chefs are skeptical that intellectual property law conforms to their line of work. Tom Colicchio said that he had decided not to do anything about a sandwich shop that he considers a clone of his sandwich chain, ’Wichcraft. “There’s nothing you can do,” he said. “You can’t protect recipes, you can’t protect what a place looks like, it’s impossible.”

But Ms. Charles is willing to spend some time and money to prove her point. (She once sued the partner she opened Pearl with, Mary Redding, in an ownership dispute. Ms. Redding went on to open her own West Village seafood restaurant, Mary’s Fish Camp.)

Ms. Charles has come to think that if this case forces Ed’s Lobster Bar to change until it no longer resembles Pearl Oyster Bar, it could be the most influential thing she has ever done.

“I thought if I could have success with this lawsuit, that could be an important contribution,” she said. “If some guy in California is having problems, he could go to his lawyer and look at this case and say, ‘Maybe we can do something about it.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/nyregion/27pearl.html





Voilà! A Rat for All Seasonings
A. O. Scott

The moral of “Ratatouille” is delivered by a critic: a gaunt, unsmiling fellow named Anton Ego who composes his acidic notices in a coffin-shaped room and who speaks in the parched baritone of Peter O’Toole. “Not everyone can be a great artist,” Mr. Ego muses. “But a great artist can come from anywhere.”

Quite so. Written and directed by Brad Bird and displaying the usual meticulousness associated with the Pixar brand, “Ratatouille” is a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film. It provides the kind of deep, transporting pleasure, at once simple and sophisticated, that movies at their best have always promised.

Its sensibility, implicit in Mr. Ego’s aphorism, is both exuberantly democratic and unabashedly elitist, defending good taste and aesthetic accomplishment not as snobbish entitlements but as universal ideals. Like “The Incredibles,” Mr. Bird’s earlier film for Pixar, “Ratatouille” celebrates the passionate, sometimes aggressive pursuit of excellence, an impulse it also exemplifies.

The hero (and perhaps Mr. Bird’s alter ego) is Remy (Patton Oswalt), a young rat who lives somewhere in the French countryside and conceives a passion for fine cooking. Raised by garbage-eaters, he is drawn toward a more exalted notion of food by the sensitivity of his own palate and by the example of Auguste Gusteau (Brad Garrett), a famous chef who insists — more in the manner of Julia Child than of his real-life haute cuisine counterparts — that “anyone can cook.”

What Remy discovers is that anyone, including his uncultured brother, can be taught to appreciate intense and unusual flavors. (How to translate the reactions of the nose and tongue by means of sound and image is a more daunting challenge, one that the filmmakers, including Michael Giacchino, author of the marvelous musical score, meet with effortless ingenuity.) Remy’s budding culinary vocation sets him on a lonely course, separating him from his clannish, philistine family and sending him off, like so many young men from the provinces before him, to seek his fortune in Paris. That city, from cobblestones to rooftops, is brilliantly imagined by the animators.

And, as usual in a Pixar movie, a whole new realm of physical texture and sensory detail has been conquered for animation. “Finding Nemo” found warmth in the cold-blooded, scaly creatures of the deep; “Cars” brought inert metal to life. At first glance, “Ratatouille” may look less groundbreaking, since talking furry rodents are hardly a novelty in cartoons. But the innovations are nonetheless there, in the fine grain of every image: in the matted look of wet rat fur and the bright scratches in the patina of well-used copper pots, in the beads of moisture on the surface of cut vegetables and the sauce-stained fabric of cooks’ aprons.

Individually, the rats are appealing enough, but the sight of dozens of them swarming through pantries and kitchens is appropriately icky, and Mr. Bird acknowledges that interspecies understanding may have its limits.

Perhaps because animation, especially the modern computer-assisted variety, is the work of so many hands and the product of so much invested capital, we are used to identifying animated movies with their corporate authors: Disney, DreamWorks, Pixar and so on. But while the visual effects in “Ratatouille” show a recognizable company stamp, the sensibility that governs the story is unmistakably Mr. Bird’s. A veteran of “The Simpsons” and a journeyman writer for movies and television, he has emerged as an original and provocative voice in American filmmaking.

He is also, at least implicitly, a severe critic of the laziness and mediocrity that characterize so much popular culture. He criticizes partly by example, by avoiding the usual kid-movie clichés and demonstrating that a clear, accessible story can also be thoughtful and unpredictable. “Ratatouille” features no annoying sidekick and no obtrusive celebrity voice-work, and while Remy is cute, he can also be prickly, demanding and insecure.

Moreover, his basic moral conflict — between family obligation and individual ambition — is handled with unusual subtlety and complexity, so that the reassurances and resolutions of the movie’s end feel earned rather than predetermined.

And while the film buzzes with eye-pleasing action and incident — wild chases, hairbreadth escapes, the frenzied choreography of a busy kitchen — it does not try to overwhelm its audience with excessive noise and sensation. Instead Mr. Bird integrates story and spectacle with the light, sure touch that Vincente Minnelli brought to his best musicals and interweaves the tale of Remy’s career with beguiling subplots and curious characters.

Since no Parisian restaurant will let a rat work in its kitchen, Remy strikes a deal with a hapless low-level worker named Linguini (Lou Romano), who executes Remy’s recipes by means of an ingenious (and hilarious) form of under-the-toque puppetry. Linguini’s second mentor is Colette (Janeane Garofalo), a tough sous-chef who unwittingly becomes the rodent’s rival for Linguini’s allegiance. Even minor figures — assistant cooks, waiters, a hapless health inspector — show remarkable individuality.

At stake in “Ratatouille” is not only Remy’s ambition but also the hallowed legacy of Gusteau, whose ghost occasionally floats before Remy’s eyes and whose restaurant is in decline. Part of the problem is Gusteau’s successor, Skinner (Ian Holm), who is using the master’s name and reputation to market a line of mass-produced frozen dinners.

Against him, Remy and Mr. Bird take a stand in defense of an artisanal approach that values both tradition and individual talent: classic recipes renewed by bold, creative execution. The movie’s grand climax, and the source of its title, is the preparation of a rustic dish made of common vegetables — a dish made with ardor and inspiration and placed, as it happens, before a critic.

And what, faced with such a ratatouille, is a critic supposed to say? Sometimes the best response is the simplest. Sometimes “thank you” is enough.

RATATOUILLE

Opens today nationwide.

Directed by Brad Bird; written by Mr. Bird, based on a story by Jan Pinkava, Jim Capobianco and Mr. Bird; director of photography/lighting, Sharon Calahan; director of photography/camera, Robert Anderson; supervising animators, Dylan Brown and Mark Walsh; edited by Darren Holmes; music by Michael Giacchino; production designer, Harley Jessup; produced by Brad Lewis; released by Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios. Running time: 110 minutes. This film is rated G.

WITH THE VOICES OF: Patton Oswalt (Remy), Ian Holm (Skinner), Lou Romano (Linguini), Brian Dennehy (Django), Peter Sohn (Emile), Brad Garrett (Auguste Gusteau), Janeane Garofalo (Colette) and Peter O’Toole (Anton Ego).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2007/06/2...es/29rata.html





From December

FILM; For Disney, Something Old (and Short) Is New Again
Charles Solomon

MOVIEGOERS who have become inured to pre-show car ads and trivia quizzes may soon get something old enough to seem new: cartoon shorts.

After a hiatus of nearly 50 years, Walt Disney Studios is getting back into the business of producing short cartoons, starting with a Goofy vehicle next year. The studio has released a few shorts in recent years -- ''Destino,'' ''Lorenzo'' and ''The Little Match Girl'' -- but those were more artistic exercise than commercial endeavor. The new cartoons, by contrast, are an effort by a new leadership team from Pixar Animation Studios, now a Disney unit, to put the Burbank company back at the forefront of animation with a form it once pioneered.

''The impetus comes from John Lasseter, who takes the idea from Walt Disney and 100 years of film history,'' said Don Hahn, producer of ''The Lion King'' and ''The Little Match Girl,'' in a recent interview at his studio office. ''Shorts have always been a wellspring of techniques, ideas and young talent. It's exactly what Walt did, because it's a new studio now, with new talent coming up -- as it should. I think the shorts program can really grow this studio as it grew Pixar, as it grew Walt's studio.''

Although audiences today are more familiar with his feature films, Walt Disney's reputation was originally built on shorts. In the 1930s ''A Mickey Mouse Cartoon'' appeared on theater marquees with the titles of the features, and Disney won 10 Oscars for cartoon shorts between 1932 and 1942. He used the ''Silly Symphonies'' to train his artists as they geared up to create ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.'' But after World War II Disney phased out short cartoons because of rising production costs and the minimal amount theater owners would pay for them.

Mr. Hahn said the new shorts would be screened in theaters along with Disney films. ''You pay your 10 bucks to see a movie,'' he said, ''and you get a surprise you hadn't counted on.'' The new shorts will be done in traditional 2-D animation, computer graphics or a combination of the two media, depending on the story and the visual style.

This is not the first attempt at such a revival. Warner Brothers, for example, tried to bring back the classic Looney Tunes characters in new shorts in 2003, but they proved unsuccessful and most of them were never screened theatrically.

Chuck Williams, a veteran story artist who will produce the new films for Disney, said they do not have to become a profit center in order to perform a real commercial function.

''They allow you to develop new talent,'' Mr. Williams said in an interview at the Disney studios. ''Shorts are your farm team, where the new directors and art directors are going to come from. Instead of taking a chance on an $80 million feature with a first-time director, art director or head of story, you can spend a fraction of that on a short and see what they can do.''

It is not surprising that Mr. Lasseter is using short films to train and test the artists: he and his fellow Pixar animators spent almost 10 years making shorts, learning how to use computer graphics effectively before they made ''Toy Story'' and the string of hits that followed. Pixar continues to produce a cartoon short every year, and has won Oscars for the shorts ''Tin Toy,'' ''Geri's Game'' and ''For the Birds.''

Four new shorts are in development at Disney: ''The Ballad of Nessie,'' a stylized account of the origin of the Loch Ness monster; ''Golgo's Guest,'' about a meeting between a Russian frontier guard and an extraterrestrial; ''Prep and Landing,'' in which two inept elves ready a house for Santa's visit; and ''How to Install Your Home Theater,'' the return of Goofy's popular ''How to'' shorts of the '40s and '50s, in which a deadpan narrator explains how to play a sport or execute a task, while Goofy attempts to demonstrate -- with disastrous results. The new Goofy short is slated to go into production early next year.

The idea for ''Home Theater'' came from the experience Kevin Deters, one of its two directors, had buying a large-screen TV. ''For years I've been saying to my wife, let's get a nice, large TV, because I've been suffering with a 30-inch screen,'' he said. ''She finally acquiesced around the time of the Super Bowl. When we went shopping, we discovered the stores had 'Delivery in Time for the Big Game!' and similar promotions, some of which appear in the film.''

Over the years the studio has tried unsuccessfully to update the classic characters. Mr. Deters and his co-director, Stevie Wermers, for instance, unhappily recalled ''Disco Mickey,'' the 1979 album that suggested the trademark mouse could boogie like John Travolta. The cover featured Mickey in a white suit and open shirt, swinging his hips.

''You don't want to put Goofy on a skateboard,'' Mr. Deters said. ''There's no reason to attempt to make him hip and cool. Goofy isn't cool. He's the ultimate domesticated man, as the 'How to' shorts showed. I relate very well to him as the guy who's sort of a schlub on his couch.''

''How to Install Your Home Theater'' will be made with a fairly small crew: despite the triumph of computer animation, Disney still has a number of talented traditional animators who are eager to draw again.

''The Goofy short will be very funny, but we won't have to spend a lot of money and time on it, which won't diminish it one bit,'' Mr. Hahn said. ''Obviously there's a financial component to these films. We have to make them responsibly. But the big investment is for the long haul. We're saying we believe in new talent and new techniques, and they'll pay dividends in 10 to 20 years, just as we're reaping the benefits now from the investment we made 25 years ago, training John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton and Tim Burton and John Musker and Ron Clemmons.''

Disney also intends the new talent to reflect an increasingly diverse work force. For most of its 100-year history American animation has been the creation of male artists, a situation that is slowly changing.

''It's kind of shocking to realize that once the Goofy short gets made, I'll officially be the first woman director at Disney Feature Animation,'' Ms. Wermers said. ''Considering that probably more than 50 percent of the audience for the short will be female, because of moms taking the kids, there should be more female voices out there.''

Ms. Wermers is not alone in her sense that Mr. Lasseter and his fellow Pixar alumni are already having an impact.

''I feel Disney is a very different place than it was a year ago,'' said Chris Williams, a story artist who is developing ''Golgo's Guest'' and ''Prep and Landing,'' ''and the shorts program is just part of that. It's become a very exciting place to work.''

Correction: December 24, 2006, Sunday An article on Dec. 3 about new animated shorts from Walt Disney Studios referred incorrectly to the last time the studio produced such films. The company has made short cartoons in recent decades; it has not been nearly 50 years since the last one.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...AB0994DE404482





In Pursuit of Perfect TV Color, With L.E.D.’s and Lasers
Anne Eisenberg

HIGH-DEFINITION television sets grow ever more sophisticated, but the colors on many of the screens are still created the old-time way: with tubes or bulbs that give off white light that is filtered into primary colors and remixed.

Now, several manufacturers are replacing these bulbs with lasers and light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.’s. These lasers and L.E.D.’s do not beam white light, but rather its three basic building blocks: red, green and blue. Beams are emitted in a narrow band of wavelengths very close to those of single, pure colors, giving off the brilliant, saturated red of a blazing sunset or the shimmering, luminous blue of a rainbow.

Beam these three primary colors in varying intensities at the same spot on a television screen, and a palette of hues can be created in a wider range than in TVs without this technology.

The new lighting is already built into a handful of commercial TV sets. Last year, Samsung Electronics America, of Ridgefield Park, N.J., introduced its first TV with L.E.D.’s. This year, the company has added six more, all large-screen, high-definition models.

The L.E.D.’s within the sets, which are all rear-projection models, are made by Luminus Devices, of Woburn, Mass. They emit beams of red, green or blue light when current is passed through the semiconductor chips that house them. The L.E.D.’s are expected to last the lifetime of the TV, unlike the bulbs typically used in these rear-projection TVs, which must typically be replaced every few years at a cost of about $200 to $350.

Laser TVs, unlike L.E.D. models, are not yet on the commercial market, but several manufacturers have demonstrated them at trade shows. Frank DeMartin, vice president for marketing and product development at Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America in Irvine, Calif., said the company would show a large-screen laser TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next January. “It will spawn a new category for the premium end of the market,” he said.

The distinctive range of colors produced by lasers and L.E.D.’s may provide a competitive edge for rear-projection TVs, which have steadily lost market share to plasma and liquid crystal display models, said Paul Semenza, vice president for display research at iSuppli, a market research firm based in El Segundo, Calif.

ISuppli expects that 5.3 million rear-projection sets will be sold worldwide this year, making them the smallest segment of the TV market. In contrast, 74 million L.C.D. sets and 11 million plasma sets are projected to be sold, Mr. Semenza said.

Large-screen rear-projection TVs traditionally cost less than L.C.D. or plasma models with similar sizes of screens, but the rear-projection TVs are as much as 10 inches deeper.

“Consumers like thin,” Mr. Semenza said. “But innovation in color could stave off the competition.”

Consumers may also appreciate the longevity of L.E.D.’s and lasers in rear-projection TVs, compared with the bulbs they are replacing. Rear-projection sets are typically lit by high-pressure white-light mercury lamps. “After a year or two, the lamp goes out,” Mr. Semenza said. “You spend $3,000 on the TV and then have to buy a light bulb for $300.”

L.E.D.’s and lasers offer a more efficient design. “With light bulbs, you have violent high-voltage arcs across the metal electrodes,” he said. “Eventually the bulb fails because metal from the electrodes is knocked off.”

For the first Samsung model with L.E.D.’s, viewers paid a premium of $1,200 above the price of a similar model with standard lighting, said Dan Schinasi, senior marketing manager for HDTV product planning at Samsung. “This year the premium dropped to $300,” he said, “and as the year goes on, we’re hopeful the premiums will shrink even more.”

The L.E.D.’s are in sets with screens of 50 inches (Model HL-T5087S, $2,299); 56 inches (HL-T5687S, $2,599), and 61 inches (HL-T6187S, $2,999), among others.

The sets use Luminus PhlatLight-brand L.E.D.’s. The red, blue, and green beams illuminate a Texas Instruments digital light processing chip where the image is created. This is a more direct method than starting with a white light source and filtering it into primary colors for recombination, said Chris Chinnock, president of Insight Media, a market research firm in Norwalk, Conn.

“You start with pure spectral colors and mix them very efficiently,” he said.

Lasers promise an even wider range of colors than L.E.D.’s, Mr. Chinnock said. “The lasers produce extremely saturated colors — the red is very red.” In contrast, he said, the red in many displays has a lot of orange in it. Because of that limitation, it is harder to show the range of shades that the eye can see, for example, between red and orange.

LASER light may also help rear-projection sets become thinner. “You can create some different architectures in how the light is folded and managed inside the TV,” Mr. Chinnock said, “so that you could potentially get a rear-projection laser TV that’s 6 to 8 inches deep.”

One of the lasers widely demonstrated at trade shows is made by Novalux, based in Sunnyvale, Calif. “The lasers will be able to give more than 90 percent of the color range that our eyes can see,” said Jean-Michel Pelaprat, chief executive of Novalux. “That’s not available from plasma displays and L.C.D.’s, whose color gamut reaches only 40 percent and 35 percent, respectively.”

L.C.D. televisions, too, may soon be affected by the new light sources, Mr. Chinnock of Insight Media said. The next step may be to eliminate the cold cathode fluorescent lamps that illuminate the sets from the back.

“The idea is to replace these lamps with a laser or L.E.D. light source in the back, and get much better color saturation,” he said.

Mr. Schinasi of Samsung said the company was interested in lasers as a light source but was sticking with L.E.D.’s for now. “The L.E.D.’s are getting at least 30 percent brightness boosts every year,” he said. “If that continues, we might not need lasers even for the 67-inch and 72-inch screens.”

Mr. DeMartin of Mitsubishi said he was holding out for lasers. “The bottom line is that the L.E.D.’s can’t reproduce some of the truly deep greens and reds as well as the laser,” he said. “The laser can do this better.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/bu...y/24novel.html





A Brave New World for TV? Virtually
Dave Itzkoff

IF you can find him, Vincent Tibbett is precisely the sort of well-connected cultural liaison any emerging filmmaker should want to know. An employee of the Sundance Channel, he is as easily recognizable for his shaggy haircut and assertively casual attire as he is for the crowds of aspiring artists who follow him around, hoping to chat him up about cinematic trends, get him to evaluate their movies or simply score his e-mail address.

But if Mr. Tibbett seems a bit harder to pin down for a lunch date than the average in-demand tastemaker, that’s because he doesn’t exist on our plane of reality. He is an electronic avatar found only in Second Life, the popular online virtual community.
Just six months old, Mr. Tibbett is one experiment in the Sundance Channel’s larger exploration of Internet-based virtual reality, a sort of canary down the mine shaft of a new technology that may or may not take hold among mainstream audiences.

And he is not alone. In the last year broadcast networks, cable channels and television content providers have all set up camp in virtual communities, where they hope that viewers who have forsaken television for computer screens might rediscover their programming online. Some outlets, like Showtime and Sundance, are establishing themselves in existing worlds; others, like MTV, are creating their own. Either way, if the wildest dreams of some very excited technology developers come true, virtual reality might finally be the medium that unites the passive experience of watching television with the interactive potential of the Web.

If that happens, the television industry — which has not been particularly speedy in adapting to the Internet revolution — sees an opportunity not only to recover lost ground from online competitors but also to take a lead, and in so doing create an entirely new environment in which to influence and sell to its audience.

“You want to be in this because you know, as a content provider, that this is where the future is going,” said Quincy Smith, the president of CBS Interactive. “I don’t look at it as science fiction. I look at it as the future of communication.”

For decades ambitious programmers and designers have sought to establish virtual worlds like the one put forth in Neal Stephenson’s influential 1992 novel, “Snow Crash,” which imagines computer users interacting in a simulated three-dimensional world called the Metaverse. But only in recent years, as graphics-accelerator cards and broadband Internet connections have grown more affordable and ubiquitous, has it become possible even to approximate such an experience.

IN Second Life (secondlife.com), visitors to the Sundance Channel area can watch full-length feature films in a three-dimensional screening room or take part in an environmental forum; fans of Showtime’s drama “The L Word” can meet the avatars of the show’s stars and design their own floats for a virtual gay pride parade. In MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach (at vmtv.com) inhabitants can shop at digital versions of Emporio Optic and Laguna Surf and Sport or, at the click of a mouse, arrive in a virtual version of “The Hills,” where they can then join the party at an electronic replica of the Los Angeles nightclub Area.

Pre-teenage viewers have a virtual playground to call their own too: Nicktropolis (nick.com/nicktropolis). Nickelodeon’s two-dimensional community allows children (with parents’ permission) to play virtual basketball, watch Nickelodeon shows, douse themselves in digital green slime and chat with SpongeBob SquarePants.

To a generation that has grown up with multiplayer online role-playing games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft, the interfaces of environments like Second Life and Virtual Laguna Beach will seem familiar: Users create for themselves a personalized three-dimensional representative called an avatar and are then set loose to explore the world and connect with other avatars.

But it’s not just video game players who are signing up for virtual communities. Virtual Laguna Beach, introduced in the fall of 2006, claims nearly 890,000 registered users, primarily in the their teens or early 20s; Nicktropolis, which started in January, claims almost four million registered users, with a core audience between 6 and 14 years old; and the Sundance Channel’s Second Life content attracts users between 25 and 54. (The average age of the more than 6.9 million inhabitants on Second Life is 32.)

As broadcasters and media companies have entered virtual spaces, among the earliest content they have provided residents has been, not surprisingly, television programming, which inhabitants can watch on two-dimensional movie and television screens that appear throughout the world. “It’s obvious, but it gets fun,” said Sibley Verbeck, the chief executive of the Electric Sheep Company, which creates programs and content for virtual worlds. “It starts being a more social experience.”

As an example Mr. Verbeck pointed to a Second Life island his company created for Major League Baseball last summer where users could mingle during the All-Star Game and watch the home run derby. “People who came to mlb.com and watched online stayed for about, on average, 19 minutes,” Mr. Verbeck said. “Whereas the people who came into Second Life, mainly to talk to each other and be in a crowd, they stayed for an average of two hours.”

At minimum broadcasters want a presence in these virtual worlds because they know that significant numbers of their viewers are already visiting them. “We have to take our content to the community,” Mr. Smith of CBS said. “We have to take it where the users are already.”

Additionally television programmers see the games and social activities within their online communities as an opportunity for viewers — whether they are designing and selling their own fashion lines on Virtual Laguna Beach or building and wrecking cars on Virtual Pimp My Ride — to continue to engage with their brands long after the shows themselves are over.

But the television companies aren’t the only entities creating content for these worlds. In open virtual communities like Second Life, which allow users access to the underlying computer code from which their universe is built, anyone who is sufficiently handy with 3-D graphics programs is free to design amusement park rides, pirate galleons or anything else that can be dreamed up, and to incorporate them into the environment.

The proprietors of these worlds say this freedom has profoundly altered the way their users experience the medium of television. “Television has created a public opinion that we are mostly consumers and not very creative,” said Philip Rosedale, the founder and chief executive of Linden Lab, whose company started Second Life in 2003. “But that’s simply an artifact of the technology of television. If people are given the ability to co-create, to make something using the pieces and parts of media, they will do it.”

Already philosophical fissures have developed between the start-up companies offering open and unrestricted virtual worlds and the media giants that provide more closely moderated experiences.

Naturally, the people behind Second Life maintain that there is no such thing as too much autonomy. “We’re free and crazy and chaotic,” Mr. Rosedale said. “They’re too controlled.”

And the designers of MTV’s virtual spaces say that people prefer some rules and some guidance. “You just need to have the right blend,” said Michael K. Wilson, the chief executive officer of Makena Technologies, which helped to create MTV’s virtual properties and operates There, an independent virtual community (there.com). “You can’t make a comfortable world if at any time you could be accosted by somebody that was naked.”

There is at least one additional benefit that the media companies derive from their controlled environment. Just as real-world corporations like Reebok and American Apparel have established virtual stores in Second Life, so too has MTV courted advertisers to its online universe. PepsiCo, for example, set up soda machines in Virtual Laguna Beach from which avatars could purchase and drink cans of digital cola.

And in return MTV can provide its sponsors with excruciatingly precise measurements of advertising data. For example, if a real-world athletics company builds a simulated shoe store in Virtual Laguna Beach, MTV can measure how many users stopped to look at the store, how many of those users went inside the store, how many users bought a particular pair of virtual sneakers, and then how many of those users ordered the same sneakers for themselves in real life.

“It’s scary actually,” said Jeff Yapp, an executive vice president of program enterprises for MTV Networks’ music group. “It’s almost Google on steroids.”

FOR the media giants who missed out on the benefits of landscape-shifting online properties like MySpace and YouTube, virtual reality may be most valuable as a medium that can offer the combined benefits of a social-networking Web site and a video-sharing Web site, and might one day surpass both those technologies. (Tellingly, MTV developed its virtual worlds in a project code-named Leapfrog.)

“Suddenly, more than ever, these media companies are ready to innovate,” Mr. Verbeck said. “They’re trying to transform themselves into companies that can evolve with new technology.”

And some particularly evangelical advocates of virtual reality foresee major evolutions occurring in less than a decade. “The entertainment experience that people have in 10 years will be substantially interactive,” Mr. Rosedale said. “The argument that television will remain the dominant way we all use discretionary time, that is nonsense. That is over.”

But other veterans of virtual-reality development are skeptical about the technology’s potential for mass appeal. For more than 20 years F. Randall Farmer, a strategic analyst at Yahoo, has worked on numerous online communities, from Lucasfilm’s Habitat, a rudimentary 1980s-era attempt at virtual reality, to current offerings like Second Life and The Sims Online. He also contributes to a blog called Habitat Chronicles (fudco.com/habitat), where he frequently airs his doubts about virtual reality’s suitability to replace the existing World Wide Web.

“It’s not going to change the fact that the best way for me to interact with my bank today is a Web site where it tells me my balance, and I push this button called transfer, and type in a number, and it moves between the two accounts,” Mr. Farmer said in a telephone interview.

Still, Mr. Farmer said virtual reality could help programmers strengthen viewer loyalty to their shows through more limited interactive experiences. “I’m thinking more like an adjunct episode to a mystery-detective show,” he said, “where you and your friends can go in and play the major characters in ‘CSI,’ and you solve the mystery together. But those are very constrained experiences.”

Before that can happen, the virtual-world-building business has some real-life obstacles to confront. Its creators acknowledge that they need to make their worlds more user-friendly and their avatars easier to design.

And they expect to see a boom-and-bust cycle, much like in the earliest days of the Web, after which only a few providers of virtual-reality communities will survive. MTV Networks is already building another virtual community of interconnected music clubs modeled on downtown Manhattan, called Virtual Lower East Side (vles.com). CBS has contemplated the idea of creating a virtual world based on the “Star Trek” franchise.

In theory there is no reason that monolithic corporations with the resources and the technological know-how — a Time Warner or an NBC Universal — could not be among those left standing. But as the past history of the Internet suggests, it is rarely the company with the most money that rises to become the leader in an emerging field.

“There is no chance that a traditional media company can build this,” said Mr. Smith of CBS, whose network recently participated in a $7 million dollar investment in Electric Sheep. “It’s just as much about technology as it is about understanding a mass audience, and it’s naïve to assume we can just go out and build it.”

In the meantime some optimistic players in the virtual arena say that broadcast television and virtual reality need not cannibalize each other, and might someday learn to work together.

“Virtual worlds, when they’re done well, they’re taking people who watch 20 hours of television a week and turning them into people who spend 30 hours a week in the virtual world,” Mr. Verbeck said. “I’ve never been involved with a technology where you can make people say ‘Aha!’ so consistently.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/ar...on/24itzk.html





Neuros’ Open Set-Top-Box
Steve O'Hear

Media streaming boxes such as the AppleTV, XBox 360, PS3, and products from Netgear, do a varying job of bridging the gap between the PC and television, as well as in some cases, delivering Internet content directly into the living room. But all are closed systems. The result of which is that users are left trying to hack these devices against the wishes of manufacturers (see our post ‘When will Steve Jobs open up the AppleTV?‘) or have to make-do with whatever official features are implemented. Bucking this trend, Neuros is taking a wholly different approach, and has open-sourced the firmware for it’s Neuros OSD media-center, meaning that anybody is free to write add-ons that extend the device’s functionality.

The Neuros OSD is a versatile box that can act as a Digital Video Recorder capable of recording from virtually any source (cable or satellite TV, DVD, DVR/TiVoTM, VCR, game console, camcorder, etc), as well as stream and share video, music and photos between various devices including home entertainment centers, PCs and portables such as laptops, iPods, smartphones, and the PSP.

Open letter to developers

As already stated, the key differentiator of Neuros’ strategy is that the company actively supports developers who want to ‘hack’ the device to create new features. Last April, in an effort to cash in on publicity surrounding the AppleTV, Neuros wrote an open letter to those that had already begun hacking Apple’s set-top-box.

“We have watched with great interest as you have begun to hack the AppleTV, and we applaud your skill and willingness to make your CE devices play new formats, adopt new functionality, and have more capacity. With the quality of the people in your group, there is no doubt you will accomplish a great deal with this device – whether its creator wants you to or not…

Unlike other manufacturers who typically ignore or may even try to suppress or undermine your contributions, we at Neuros rely on them. Your contributions can get quickly incorporated in our official releases, and you will have a say in the creation of future generations of our devices and the ability to work side by side with our internal engineering team.”

YouTube access — the first of many open-source efforts

The big news this week from Neuros HQ was that — thanks to the open-source community’s efforts — users are now able to search and browse the entire YouTube catalog directly from the device. The first version of YouTube support is, understandably, a bit rough around the edges, and has been released early in an effort to get feedback from users. Improvements in the pipeline include a better interface, and added functionality such as sharing and subscriptions.

Neuros says that this is the first of many new features we can expect to be added to the device, thanks to the way in which the company is working in conjunction with the open-source community.
http://www.last100.com/2007/06/28/ne...n-set-top-box/





Activist Organization Responsible for 99% of FCC Complaints
Ken Fisher

Yesterday, Gene Jockey let the Ars Soap Box know about a report that I think many of you will find interesting. You may recall that the past few years have been banner years for the FCC, at least in terms of censorship, imposing fines, and warning networks about their proposed television content. You may have also heard that in recent years complaints about TV have gone through the roof, from a mere 350 complaints in 2000 to a whopping 240,000 in 2003, and potentially even more this year. It has long been through that the advent of reality TV and the onset of "loose morals" in TV have pushed conservatives over the edge. And you know what, it's true. The problem is that, unfortunately, these massive numbers all boil down to one politically motivated group with an axe to grind. Hold on to your hat, folks.

According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003—99.8 percent—were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group. This year, the trend has continued, and perhaps intensified. Through early October, 99.9 percent of indecency complaints—aside from those concerning the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl halftime show broadcast on CBS— were brought by the PTC, according to the FCC analysis dated Oct. 1.

The FCC has insisted that the quantity of reports is not weighed when addressing complaints, but this is somewhat contradicted by the fact that the FCC only responds to complaints, as they do not actively monitor what's on TV. As such, the quantity of reports is key, because things are being reported that normally were not, and that puts the FCC on the trail of investigation.

Of course, the FCC still argues that if there has been no foul, then there's nothing to worry about. The problem, of course, is that the the number of complaints has been used to calculate and justify fines for borderline issues, as with Fox's doomed (and idiotic) Married by America.

For example, the agency on Oct. 12, in proposing fines of nearly $1.2 million against Fox Broadcasting and its affiliates, said it received 159 complaints against Married by America, which featured strippers partly obscured by pixilation. But when asked, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau said it could find only 90 complaints from 23 individuals... And Fox, in a filing last Friday, told the FCC that it should rescind the proposed fines, in part because the low number of complaints fell far short of indicating that community standards had been violated. “All but four of the complaints were identical…and only one complainant professed even to have watched the program,” Fox said.

So, the number clearly does matter, because it is used a as justification for fines, they are used to determine which issues to pursue, and they are centrally coordinated to the extent that many of the complainants have not actually even viewed the material in question.

What's clear is that the FCC needs to account for this centrally organized spamming of complaints. The Parents Television Council takes as one of its aims the generation of fake complaints, and this must be addressed. For example, the PTC maintains a list of the worst shows on TV each week, replete with reports on the shows' content that's hardly objective. Is it a surprise that people then complain about a show they've never even watched? The FCC has responded, in part, by counting identical complaints as just one set of complaints. This doesn't make make the activists happy, however.

The PTC today called for a Congressional investigation of the FCC because they, oh the horror!, don't accept automatically generated spam complaints as totally legit, trustworthy complaints.

"We are calling for a Congressional investigation of the FCC over its accounting practices. While we're pleased that the FCC has calculated that PTC members have filed an overwhelming majority of indecency complaints in the last two years, the FCC's count is utterly deceptive," said L. Brent Bozell, president of the PTC.

The deception they charge, in part, is relating to the FCC's claim that the majority of these complaints come from the PTC rather than other "family-oriented" groups. They would like more groups to get credit also, which I suppose qualifies as deception only if you want to avoid the appearance of not actually representing grassroots efforts.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20041207-4442.html





The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip
Randall Stross

ONCE upon a time, the most valuable secret formula in American business was Coca-Cola’s. Today, it’s Google’s master algorithm.

In the search business, however, there’s no rival to play the role of Pepsi. Yahoo is the closest but still a distant No. 2, and Google earns more profits in a single quarter than Yahoo does in a year. This may have had a bearing on the recent departure of Yahoo’s chief technology officer, its chief operating officer and, last week, its chief executive. Microsoft, an even more distant No. 3 in the search competition, can’t keep up with Google, even with $28 billion of cash in its pockets at the end of March.

The fumbling of Google’s largest challengers, however, has not dampened the enthusiasm of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists for entering the search game. The combination of low start-up costs and potentially huge profit makes it seem a reasonable bet.

Developing a search algorithm can be accomplished by very small teams. It was a team of two — Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google — who developed a new and improved search algorithm. They beat out Alta Vista, whose search engine was developed by seven people at the Digital Equipment Corporation.

Profit margins in the search business are mind-boggling, and cannot be obtained in other segments of the technology world. Google’s net profit margin last year was 29 percent. Amazon’s was 1.8 percent — yes, that is a “1” followed by a decimal point. Which business would you rather be in?

Even gathering the crumbs of business left behind by Google could generate a lofty market capitalization. Don Dodge, a Microsoft manager who works outside of the company’s search group, made this argument in a post on his personal blog last month: “Why 1% of Search Market Share Is Worth Over $1 Billion.” Mr. Dodge reasoned that 1 percent of the 7.3 billion searches performed in the United States in March, multiplied by 12 cents in advertising revenue per search, would yield annualized revenue of $105 million. Assuming a market cap that is 10 times revenue, his arithmetic leads to a billion-dollar company.

Here is another attraction: Any company that offers a superior search service would be able to poach the customers of everyone else. No long-term contracts keep Google users in place. In addition, even though each search engine conducts a search in its own way, users do the same thing — typing in a word or a phrase — no matter which service they are using. Therefore, no daunting learning curve will frighten customers who are considering moving to another search engine.

Engines like Hakia, Accoona and Powerset are trying to grab market share by writing a more sophisticated algorithm. A growing number of entrepreneurs are placing their bets, however, on a hybrid system that puts humans back into the search equation. They are grouped under a newly coined rubric, “social search,” and it is becoming a crowded field.

Newcomers like Squidoo, Sproose and NosyJoe offer search results based on submissions or votes by users. Bessed also relies on users to suggest the best Web pages for a topic, but then has editors refine them. ChaCha gives customers the opportunity to have an online chat with a human being who can provide search assistance.

Sometimes a small variation on an existing idea is enough to make it stand out. In October 2006, when Bessed began its search service with the manually edited results pages, it had only two editors and covered just a few hundred search terms suggested randomly by users.

Last month, another company, Mahalo (Hawaiian for “thank you”), inaugurated a search service with manually edited results. It started with several advantages: venture capital backing, 30 editors, systematic focus on the most commonly requested search terms, and the added idea of supplying Google’s search results for any search not covered by its own best-of-the-best lists.

Mahalo now has pre-prepared pages for 5,000 terms related to entertainment, travel, health, technology and other subject areas. The company plans to expand its coverage to 10,000 terms by year-end, and eventually to provide results for one-third of the most common search terms.

The company is financed by Sequoia Capital, which knows something about the search business: It was an early backer of both Yahoo and Google. Sequoia, like other Silicon Valley venture capital firms, offers experienced entrepreneurs an office and salary to figure out an idea for a new start-up. It was while he was an entrepreneur in residence that Jason Calacanis had the inspiration for Mahalo. Mr. Calacanis, 36, published The Silicon Alley Reporter in the mid-1990s and went on to be a co-founder of Weblogs, a federation of blogging sites that was sold to AOL in 2005 for about $25 million. He took up residence at Sequoia in December 2006, founded Mahalo and gathered two rounds of financing, including backing from the News Corporation.

At the end of May, Mr. Calacanis unveiled Mahalo at the D: All Things Digital conference sponsored by The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Calacanis said he has enough financing to provide five years of experimentation and refinements, but he has not disclosed the amounts.

A hand-built Mahalo search-results page has one conspicuous advantage over Google’s: grouping into subthemes, which make a page of links much easier to scan and to find items of particular interest. For example, Mahalo’s page about Paris Hilton, the site’s top search subject last week, arranges the recommended links into clusters including news, photos, gossip, satire and humor. The use of subject categories also eliminates the need to provide, as Google does, two-line text excerpts from the listed sites to provide clues about the site’s contents.

The Mahalo page about Ms. Hilton lists more than 80 sites. Each takes up only one line; grouped by subtheme, they are easier to skim than the 12 sites that fill the entire first page of Google’s search results.

All of the links listed in Mahalo send the user to Web pages that contain genuine content, not sales pitches in disguise. By using its own editors as the final arbiters of what goes in, Mahalo cuts off access in its listings to Web sites that confuse a search engine’s algorithm with advertorials that commingle advertisements with noncommercial information. To those in the trade, outsmarting the algorithm is called “search engine optimization.” For the rest of us, it produces Web pages littered with spam.

Last week, Mr. Calacanis tried to illustrate how spam has infested some top results on Google. After running searches for “low-carb diets,” “Lasik” and “lingerie” at Google and at Mahalo, he compared the results. The exercise succeeded in exposing a few examples of Web sites ranked highly in Google’s results that contained advertorials or content apparently scraped from higher-quality sites.

Google contends that its search engine relies on humans and machines. Matt Cutts, a software engineer who heads Google’s Webspam team, said users who place links on their own Web pages pointing to other sites provide the raw information about valued sites that is incorporated into Google’s PageRank algorithm. How best to utilize that information requires continuing work by human engineers. “Algorithms don’t leap out of Google like Athena from the head of Zeus,” Mr. Cutts said.

True, but one could argue that at Google the machine has the final say. Once the query is fed into the “engine,” the results are presented without manual adjustment. At Mahalo and other “human powered” sites, the machine performs a first cut at the search in advance of a user’s request, and the results are then winnowed and shaped by human editors, then stored, a process that Mr. Calacanis terms “editorialized search.”

HUMAN-POWERED search may be able to cover a wide swath of queries if it can draw on the enthusiasm of contributors who have made Wikipedia a phenomenon of huge scale. Mahalo just began a “Mahalo Greenhouse” service that enlists users who are passionate about a particular subject to write a page of search results for $10 to $15. Submissions must pass the scrutiny of the site’s full-time editors before posting.

Even Google is interested in exploring “human powered” search. “I don’t think we’re ideologically bound to only computers, only algorithms,” Mr. Cutts said. In fact, he said, Google has combed through its own Web pages to remove all references to “automatic ranking” to prepare for the possibility of relying on user feedback to improve search results or other approaches that are more directly “human powered” than the algorithm.

Mr. Calacanis says Mahalo is not engaged in a battle of humans versus machines. He described his company as the embodiment of humans with machines, “John Henry and the steam hammer versus the steam hammer alone.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/bu...ey/24digi.html





When Computers Attack
John Schwartz

ANYONE who follows technology or military affairs has heard the predictions for more than a decade. Cyberwar is coming. Although the long-announced, long-awaited computer-based conflict has yet to occur, the forecast grows more ominous with every telling: an onslaught is brought by a warring nation, backed by its brains and computing resources; banks and other businesses in the enemy states are destroyed; governments grind to a halt; telephones disconnect; the microchip-controlled Tickle Me Elmos will be transformed into unstoppable killing machines.

No, that last item is not part of the scenario, mostly because those microprocessor-controlled toys aren’t connected to the Internet through the industrial remote-control technologies known as Scada systems, for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. The technology allows remote monitoring and control of operations like manufacturing production lines and civil works projects like dams. So security experts envision terrorists at a keyboard remotely shutting down factory floors or opening a dam’s floodgates to devastate cities downstream.

But how bad would a cyberwar really be — especially when compared with the blood-and-guts genuine article? And is there really a chance it would happen at all?

Whatever the answer, governments are readying themselves for the Big One.

China, security experts believe, has long probed United States networks. According to a 2007 Defense Department annual report to Congress, China’s military has invested heavily in electronic countermeasures and defenses against attack, and concepts like “computer network attack, computer network defense and computer network exploitation.”

According to the report, the Chinese Army sees computer network operations “as critical to achieving ‘electromagnetic dominance’ ” — whatever that is — early in a conflict.

The United States is arming up, as well. Robert Elder, commander of the Air Force Cyberspace Command, told reporters in Washington at a recent breakfast that his newly formed command, which defends military data, communications and control networks, is learning how to disable an opponent’s computer networks and crash its databases.

“We want to go in and knock them out in the first round,” he said, as reported on Military.com.

An all-out cyberconflict could “could have huge impacts,” said Danny McPherson, an expert with Arbor Networks. Hacking into industrial control systems, he said, could be “a very real threat.”

Attacks on the Internet itself, say, through what are known as root-name servers, which play a role in connecting Internet users with Web sites, could cause widespread problems, said Paul Kurtz, the chief operating officer of Safe Harbor, a security consultancy. And having so many nations with a finger on the digital button, of course, raises the prospect of a cyberconflict caused by a misidentified attacker or a simple glitch.

Still, instead of thinking in terms of the industry’s repeated warnings of a “digital Pearl Harbor,” Mr. McPherson said, “I think cyberwarfare will be far more subtle,” in that “certain parts of the system won’t work, or it will be that we can’t trust information we’re looking at.”

Whatever form cyberwar might take, most experts have concluded that what happened in Estonia earlier this month was not an example.

The cyberattacks in Estonia were apparently sparked by tensions over the country’s plan to remove Soviet-era war memorials. Estonian officials initially blamed Russia for the attacks, suggesting that its state-run computer networks blocked online access to banks and government offices.

The Kremlin denied the accusations. And Estonian officials ultimately accepted the idea that perhaps this attack was the work of tech-savvy activists, or “hactivists,” who have been mounting similar attacks against just about everyone for several years.

Still, many in the security community and the news media initially treated the digital attacks against Estonia’s computer networks as the coming of a long-anticipated new chapter in the history of conflict — when, in fact, the technologies and techniques used in the attacks were hardly new, nor were they the kind of thing that only a powerful government would have in its digital armamentarium.

The force of the attack appears to have come from armies of “zombie” computers infected with software that makes them available for manipulation and remote command. These “bot-nets” are more commonly used for illicit activities like committing online fraud and sending spam, said James Andrew Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The main method of attack in Estonia — through what is known as a digital denial of service — doesn’t disable computers from within, but simply stacks up so much digital debris at the entryway that legitimate visitors, like bank customers, can’t get in.

That is not the same as disabling a computer from the inside, Mr. Lewis stressed. “The idea that Estonia was brought to its knees — that’s when we have to stop sniffing glue,” he said.

In fact, an attack would have borne real risks for Russia, or any aggressor nation, said Ross Stapleton-Gray, a security consultant in Berkeley, Calif. “The downside consequence of getting caught doing something more could well be a military escalation,” he said.

That’s too great a risk for a government to want to engage in what amounts to high-tech harassment, Mr. Lewis said. “The Russians are not dumb,” he said.

Even if an Internet-based conflict does eventually break out, and the dueling microchips do their worst, it would have a fundamentally different effect from flesh-and-blood fighting, said Andrew MacPherson, research assistant professor of justice studies at the University of New Hampshire. “If you have a porcelain vase and drop it — it’s very difficult to put it back together,” he said. “A cyberattack, maybe it’s more like a sheet that can be torn and it can be sewed back together.”

That is why Kevin Poulsen, a writer on security issues at Wired News, said that he had difficulty envisioning the threat that others see from an overseas attack by electrons and photons alone. “They unleash their deadly viruses and then they land on the beaches and sweep across our country without resistance because we’re rebooting our P.C.’s?” he asked.

In fact, the United States has prepared for cyberattacks incidentally, through our day-to-day exposure to crashes, glitches, viruses and meltdowns. There are very few places where a computer is so central that everything crashes to a halt if the machine goes on the blink.

Russian space engineers struggled to fix crashing computers aboard the International Space Station that help keep the orbiting laboratory oriented properly in space — if they hadn’t been fixed, the station might have had to be abandoned, at least temporarily.

Down on earth, by comparison, this correspondent found himself near the Kennedy Space Center in a convenience store without cash and with the credit card network unavailable. “The satellite’s down,” the clerk said. “It’s the rain.” And so the purchase of jerky and soda had to wait. At the center’s visitor complex, a sales clerk dealt with the same problem by pulling out paper sales slips.

People, after all, are not computers. When something goes wrong, we do not crash. Instead, we find another way: we improvise; we fix. We pull out the slips.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/...ness/cyber.php





As Street Art Goes Commercial, a Resistance Raises a Real Stink
Colin Moynihan

The covert campaign targeting street art began about seven months ago, with blobs of paint that appeared overnight, obscuring murals and wheat-pasted art on walls in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. Arcane messages were pasted at the sites, but it was difficult to ask for an explanation. The author was never identified.

Then in November, during a panel discussion on women and graffiti that included a street artist called Swoon, a figure wearing a hooded sweatshirt flung a sheaf of fliers using similar language from a balcony overlooking an auditorium at the Brooklyn Museum. Swoon was among those whose work had previously been struck by paint, and some couldn’t help wondering whether the person who threw the fliers was also the Splasher, as the perpetrator of the paint attacks had come to be known.

Web sites, magazines and newspaper articles reported about the splatterings. Some wondered about the motivation and identity of those responsible, but the Splasher — or Splashers — remained anonymous.

The most recent episodes came this month, in two incidents involving what seemed to be stink bombs lobbed at shows of street artists on the Lower East Side and Dumbo. And some in the art world believe the identify of the Splasher may have been revealed. Last Thursday night James Cooper, 24, was arrested at the Dumbo show after witnesses accused him of attempting to ignite a homemade incendiary device in a metal coffee canister.

Mr. Cooper was charged with third-degree arson, reckless endangerment, placing a false bomb, criminal possession of a weapon, harassment and disorderly conduct. He was arraigned and released on his own recognizance, a spokesman for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office said.

That show featured works by Shepard Fairey, who had been one of the prominent targets of the street splatterings. Mr. Fairey said there wasn’t yet enough evidence to tie Mr. Cooper definitively to the paint blobs, but acknowledged apparent parallels.“Maybe the stink bomb thing was their way of being disruptive without using paint and while penetrating a more controlled atmosphere,” he said.

Two days after Mr. Cooper’s arrest, a group of people showed up at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in Chelsea, where a reception was being held for Mr. Fairey. Without identifying themselves, they distributed copies of a 16-page tabloid with the title “If we did it this is how it would’ve happened,” with a cover photograph of an image created by Mr. Fairey defaced with paint.

Inside were reproductions of the communiqués that were pasted next to the sites of many paint attacks and appeared to draw inspiration from the writings by the Situationists, a group of political and artistic agitators formed in the 1950s, and a 1960s anarchist group called Black Mask.

In often bombastic language those fliers condemned the commercialization of art and included statements saying that the wheat paste used to affix the fliers had been mixed with shards of glass. An essay in the paper given out at the gallery scoffed at those who had difficulty understanding the fliers and added footnotes clarifying parts of them. One footnote stated that the tabloids had been dusted with anthrax.

In a series of essays and in text that appeared under the headline “Interview With Myself” the anonymous authors said that the splashings were committed not by an individual but by a group of men and women, and offered some explanation of their motives.

The authors wrote that street art was “a bourgeoisie-sponsored rebellion” that helped pave the way for gentrification, and called it “utterly impotent politically and fantastically lucrative for everyone involved.”

The writings also criticized people prominent in the world of street art, including Mr. Fairey and Swoon, the art collectives Faile and Visual Resistance, and Marc and Sara Schiller, who run a Web site about street art called the Wooster collective (woostercollective.com).

“There is a very strong viewpoint there, and there’s an element of interest I can’t deny,” Mr. Schiller said. Still, he said, “I don’t agree with the perspective and I don’t think the assumptions are accurate.”

Previous incidents of agitprop were described, and the authors claimed responsibility for assailing a mural in Williamsburg by the reclusive British artist known as Banksy, and for hurling paint at a billboard advertising sneakers on Lafayette Street made by an artist called Neckface. Because the authors are unidentified, it isn’t known for sure whether they are indeed the Splashers. An e-mail address was published in the paper but a message sent by a reporter to that address on Tuesday night went unanswered.

The distribution of the paper at the gallery and its mailing to two Web sites that write about street art has stirred speculation, but many artists remain focused on Mr. Cooper, who so far is the only person who has been publicly identified as having a possible connection to the art attacks.

In a brief interview on Tuesday morning conducted near his home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Mr. Cooper declined to discuss details of his case but said that he was not guilty of wrongdoing and that he was not the Splasher.

Still, Jonathan LeVine, a gallery owner who was at the Dumbo show, insisted that Mr. Cooper was one of two men seen trying to light a device and who fled when approached.

“One of the two people came back and guys I know grabbed him,” Mr. LeVine said. “The two people were together by all accounts.”

The man who was grabbed was Mr. Cooper. He waited, crouched in a corner of the 6,600 square-foot space, as some of the 14 security guards hired for the event stood nearby. Then the police arrived and arrested him.

The man who was said by witnesses to be with Mr. Cooper made it out of the show. But people involved in street art said that detectives are searching for a second suspect and are also inquiring about the newspaper.

Although the paint splashings have been viewed with a mixture of aggravation and amusement, Mr. LeVine said that the attempt to light an incendiary device during a crowded art show was foolish and reckless.

“They could’ve killed someone,” he said. “It’s not O.K. to jeopardize people’s lives.”

The earlier suspected stink bomb attack took place June 7 when a show in an exhibition space on Chrystie Street displaying work by a two-man street art collective called Faile was disrupted by a noxious odor that witnesses said smelled like sulphur. Firefighters arrived, said a member of Faile, and said that somebody had called in a report of a gas leak.

“This kind of thing is silly,” said the Faile member, who declined to give his name. “They’re hiding themselves so you can’t have a discussion with them.”

Perhaps the street artists will eventually have a chance to confront their antagonists directly. One of the last pages of the newspaper published by the self-proclaimed Splashers sounded a note that could be interpreted as ominous, or optimistic, depending on your point of view.

“Don’t worry,” it read. “You’ll be hearing from us again.”

Al Baker contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/ar...gn/28stin.html





Stax Turns 50 With Plenty of Soul to Spare
Tamara Conniff

Would-be stars come out in droves to audition for "American Idol" in hopes that they can be molded and helped into fame -- taught how to sing better, how to dress, how to perform. Thankfully, nonfabricated artistry is alive and well in Memphis. Stax's 50th anniversary celebration last weekend proved that soul music of the past, present and future will remain authentic and above all true to the gritty Memphis sound.

Concord Music Group, which has revived and recently relaunched the label, paid homage to Stax's history during a celebration at the Orpheum in downtown Memphis that was chock-full of stellar performances. Isaac Hayes was greeted with a standing ovation, and some women wept when he performed the theme from "Shaft." In honor of Stax icon Otis Redding, his sons, Dexter and Otis III, carried on the legacy: Dexter's rendition of "Try a Little Tenderness" evoked the spirit of his father, as did Otis III's performance of "Hard to Handle." Also on hand to perform were Stax hitmakers Booker T. & the MGs, Eddie Floyd, William Bell, Mavis Staples, Mable John and the Soul Children. Also impressive were performances by new Stax artists intent on carrying on the tradition, including neo-soul diva Angie Stone and Dallas newcomer N'dambi.

The event was hosted by "Idol" judge Randy Jackson and rap legend Chuck D. When Jackson was asked whether the next "Idol" season would have more of a soul flavor, Jackson could not help but gush that he hoped so, adding of the music, "This is amazing."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...77d6e96f92e283





Is the CD Becoming Obsolete?
Clint DeBoer

Can the CD Situation be Fixed?

Glancing at a report on Forbes.com this morning, there was an article showing that CD sales are expected to be down 20% 2008 (slightly higher than the 15% drop initially predicted). Why such a drop? Well, there has been a recorded drop of 18% so far in 2007 and the trend seems to be steady and indicative of future trending.

But what's really happening?

A couple things are to "blame". For one, there seems to be a case of shrinking floor space as sales decline. This will likely get worse as stores heavily monitor what items are making money and carefully guard real-estate in their stores, making adjustments to compensate for industry trends and swings. If sales continue to shift online, look for the physical presence of CDs to drop. This will also have an interesting chicken -and-egg effect that extends beyond shrinking sales and reduced floor space... Music Studios will be even MORE inclined to stick with their bubble-gum and "sure thing" artists, reducing the choice in music and furthering the stale choices already proliferating the industry. As a result, independent labels will likely continue to thrive (moreso perhaps) and pick up steam, though much of this in online music sales.

Compare this with new information released by Apple on Friday stating that iTunes is now the third largest music retailer in the country - this according to stats from the first quarter of 2007. iTunes has 9.8% of the retail music marketshare with Wal-mart taking 15.8% and Best Buy 13.8%. That's a LOT of music sales.

In contrast, and to give you a perspective of the change, Amazon.com has a 6.7% share while Target has around 6.6%. iTunes compared its sales to physical store purchases by converting every 12 single downloads as a single album sale. That seems more than fair and gives you an idea of how effective online music is becoming as a compelling alternative to physical sales - at least for people who listen to their music more on the go than in the home. And that's a majority of consumers these days. As automakers respond to the iPod revolution with MP3-compatible players and external docks and connections for MP3 players, even the CD's largest consumer - the commuter - is looking at different options. The market is getting very very competitive and the face of the industry is in the middle of a clear change.

While overall music sales is expected to drop by about 9% in both 2007 and 2008, what's truly happening (according to this report) is a gradual shift away from physical media to downloadable formats. What this indicates, so far, is that US sales of digital music will be growing at an estimated rate of 28% in 2008, however physical sales will drop even further, resulting in a net overall decline.
http://www.audioholics.com/news/indu...-obsolete.html





An iPod Has Global Value. Ask the (Many) Countries That Make It.
Hal R. Varian

Who makes the Apple iPod? Here’s a hint: It is not Apple. The company outsources the entire manufacture of the device to a number of Asian enterprises, among them Asustek, Inventec Appliances and Foxconn.

But this list of companies isn’t a satisfactory answer either: They only do final assembly. What about the 451 parts that go into the iPod? Where are they made and by whom?

Three researchers at the University of California, Irvine — Greg Linden, Kenneth L. Kraemer and Jason Dedrick — applied some investigative cost accounting to this question, using a report from Portelligent Inc. that examined all the parts that went into the iPod.

Their study, sponsored by the Sloan Foundation, offers a fascinating illustration of the complexity of the global economy, and how difficult it is to understand that complexity by using only conventional trade statistics.

The retail value of the 30-gigabyte video iPod that the authors examined was $299. The most expensive component in it was the hard drive, which was manufactured by Toshiba and costs about $73. The next most costly components were the display module (about $20), the video/multimedia processor chip ($8) and the controller chip ($5). They estimated that the final assembly, done in China, cost only about $4 a unit.

One approach to tracing supply chain geography might be to attribute the cost of each component to the country of origin of its maker. So $73 of the cost of the iPod would be attributed to Japan since Toshiba is a Japanese company, and the $13 cost of the two chips would be attributed to the United States, since the suppliers, Broadcom and PortalPlayer, are American companies, and so on.

But this method hides some of the most important details. Toshiba may be a Japanese company, but it makes most of its hard drives in the Philippines and China. So perhaps we should also allocate part of the cost of that hard drive to one of those countries. The same problem arises regarding the Broadcom chips, with most of them manufactured in Taiwan. So how can one distribute the costs of the iPod components across the countries where they are manufactured in a meaningful way?

To answer this question, let us look at the production process as a sequence of steps, each possibly performed by a different company operating in a different country. At each step, inputs like computer chips and a bare circuit board are converted into outputs like an assembled circuit board. The difference between the cost of the inputs and the value of the outputs is the “value added” at that step, which can then be attributed to the country where that value was added.

The profit margin on generic parts like nuts and bolts is very low, since these items are produced in intensely competitive industries and can be manufactured anywhere. Hence, they add little to the final value of the iPod. More specialized parts, like the hard drives and controller chips, have much higher value added.

According to the authors’ estimates, the $73 Toshiba hard drive in the iPod contains about $54 in parts and labor. So the value that Toshiba added to the hard drive was $19 plus its own direct labor costs. This $19 is attributed to Japan since Toshiba is a Japanese company.

Continuing in this way, the researchers examined the major components of the iPod and tried to calculate the value added at different stages of the production process and then assigned that value added to the country where the value was created. This isn’t an easy task, but even based on their initial examination, it is quite clear that the largest share of the value added in the iPod goes to enterprises in the United States, particularly for units sold here.

The researchers estimated that $163 of the iPod’s $299 retail value in the United States was captured by American companies and workers, breaking it down to $75 for distribution and retail costs, $80 to Apple, and $8 to various domestic component makers. Japan contributed about $26 to the value added (mostly via the Toshiba disk drive), while Korea contributed less than $1.

The unaccounted-for parts and labor costs involved in making the iPod came to about $110. The authors hope to assign those labor costs to the appropriate countries, but as the hard drive example illustrates, that’s not so easy to do.

This value added calculation illustrates the futility of summarizing such a complex manufacturing process by using conventional trade statistics. Even though Chinese workers contribute only about 1 percent of the value of the iPod, the export of a finished iPod to the United States directly contributes about $150 to our bilateral trade deficit with the Chinese.

Ultimately, there is no simple answer to who makes the iPod or where it is made. The iPod, like many other products, is made in several countries by dozens of companies, with each stage of production contributing a different amount to the final value.

The real value of the iPod doesn’t lie in its parts or even in putting those parts together. The bulk of the iPod’s value is in the conception and design of the iPod. That is why Apple gets $80 for each of these video iPods it sells, which is by far the largest piece of value added in the entire supply chain.

Those clever folks at Apple figured out how to combine 451 mostly generic parts into a valuable product. They may not make the iPod, but they created it. In the end, that’s what really matters.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/bu...s/28scene.html





Blockbuster to Shutter 282 Stores This Year
Paul Bond

Blockbuster, which closed 290 stores in the U.S. last year, said Thursday that it will shutter another 282 this year.

The news comes in the same week that Blockbuster ended its legal dispute with Netflix, settling their lawsuit without going to trial and without disclosing any details.

Blockbuster has been waging a successful war against Netflix, recently growing its online service faster than Netflix has been able to grow, though the latter still is the larger with 6.8 million subscribers, more than twice Blockbuster's count.

The latest battle had Blockbuster cutting the price of its two-at-a-time DVD service to $13.99 three weeks ago; Netflix mirrored that move Thursday.

Blockbuster also said this week that it plans to better balance subscriber growth with profitability, which analysts take to mean that a price increase for its flagship three-at-a-time Total Access DVD service is on the way, which could boost Netflix as well. For its comparable service, Netflix charges $17.99, a buck more than Blockbuster, though Blockbuster subscribers may exchange DVDs at stores, an option Netflix cannot match on its own because it owns no stores.

"While Netflix still lacks short-term catalysts, given the lack of visibility into the timing and magnitude of a price hike for Total Access, we expect the competitive environment to improve by year end, which should allow subscriber growth to reaccelerate," Jefferies & Co. analyst Youssef Squali said.

The flurry of activity at the companies this week has so far been interpreted as a small plus for Netflix and a negative for Blockbuster. Netflix shares are up fractionally on the week, while Blockbuster has fallen 6.1%. But shares of Movie Gallery -- second to Blockbuster in the number of stores it operates but with no online service -- have so far fallen 10.2% this week.

Blockbuster has about 5,000 stores in the U.S. and 3,000 outside of the country. Spokesman Randy Hargrove said that when 290 stores closed last year, 25% of the revenue from those was transferred to nearby Blockbuster stores, and he expects similar numbers this time.

"We've always closed and opened stores, we're just closing more and not opening new ones," he said. "We have always predicted consolidation in the industry."

Hargrove said that even while stepping up store closures, 70% of the nation is no more than a 10-minute drive from a Blockbuster. He also said the company expects not to lose many of its 47,000 U.S. employees because of the closures.

Hargrove said the company is shooting for profitability with its online service sometime next year, and soon-to-come moderations to Total Access "won't just focus on price."

Blockbuster and Netflix did not disclose the terms of their legal settlement this week, except for Blockbuster saying that it would not impact its financial performance. Netflix sued Blockbuster 14 months ago for patent infringement, and Blockbuster had countersued claiming that Netflix was trying to stifle competition.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/index.jsp





Congress Set to Issue Virtual Taxation Report in August
Daniel Terdiman

For months, the community of virtual world publishers, players and economists has been holding its breath, waiting for the U.S. Congress to issue its report on the potential taxation of virtual goods.

Well, we don't have to wait much longer.

Dan Miller, a senior economist with the Congress' Joint Economic Committee, told CNET News.com on Friday that he expects the committee to issue its report during the upcoming Congressional recess next month.

What that report will say is unknown, as the committee has kept entirely quiet about its thoughts.

However, it's clear that something will happen.

"Given growth rates of 10 to 15 percent a month, the question is when, not if, Congress and IRS start paying attention to these issues," Miller, who is a fan of virtual worlds and economies, told CNET News.com in December. "So it is incumbent on us to set the terms and the debate so we have a shaped tax policy toward virtual worlds and virtual economies in a favorable way."

Meanwhile, a lot is riding on the outcome. If Congress signals it intends to start taxing in-world commerce, that could create huge problems for publishers who may have to figure out efficient ways to track all such trades. If Congress goes the other way, many people will feel that it is just punting and that it will still only be a matter of time before some major government decides to step in.
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9733848-7.html





Analysis: DRM May be Why Microsoft Flip-Flopped on Vista Virtualization
Eric Lai

Conspiracy theorists may link Microsoft Corp.'s abrupt decision late Tuesday not to remove restrictions on consumers virtualizing its Vista operating system to a Department of Justice agreement announced the same day or to a desire to jerk Intel Mac users around.

But the actual reason may be found in three little letters: DRM.

Vista's new digital rights management features enable movies or music files to be password-protected or made accessible only to authorized users for opening, viewing or changing.

Whether most users would call DRM a feature, however, is questionable. A close cousin to DRM technology, known as Windows Rights Management Services (which in turn is part of a larger category of technologies called Enterprise Digital Rights Management, or ERM), can help business users password-protect key documents and files, or assign the ability to open them only to trusted co-workers. But DRM's main purpose seems to be to help the Warner Bros. and Sony Musics of the world keep consumers from sharing movies and music. The entertainment industry claims that almost all blocked sharing is illegal; digital rights watchdogs argue that legitimate consumer uses are also blocked by such technology.

DRM is capable of blocking both overt piracy -- distributing movies via BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks -- as well as other common scenarios that most consumers do not consider piracy, such as moving legally acquired music files from their desktop PCs to their notebook computers.

"It's like when you batten down the hatches on a ship in a storm," said Aram Sinnreich, an analyst at Radar Research in Los Angeles. "Vista wants to batten down every software or multimedia bit so that they don't go somewhere the creator doesn't want it to go."

Versions out of control?

The problem is that virtualization, by accident, appears to break most of Vista's DRM and antipiracy schemes.

Virtualization software -- think VMware Inc.'s VMplayer, Microsoft's Virtual PC or Parallels Inc.'s Parallels Desktop -- allow computer users to boot one operating system but run a second one as a "guest" at the same time.

That can allow a user who has booted Windows Vista to load XP-only applications in a guest XP operating system, also known as a virtual machine (VM). Or it can let a user with an Intel Mac boot up the OS X operating system but also run Windows Vista or XP applications at the same time.

Microsoft's original plan was to announce on Tuesday changes to the contracts, known as end-user licensing agreements (EULA), for its Vista Home Basic and Home Premium editions. Those changes would permit buyers who use those editions to create VMs. The change was purely to the EULA; there is no technical limitation preventing knowledgeable users from virtualizing retail versions of Home Basic or Home Premium.

Microsoft allows only full retail versions of Vista Business or Vista Ultimate (as well as Vista Enterprise for big corporations) to run as virtual guests of a host PC. Vista Business and Ultimate cost $299 and $399, respectively. The simple change in Microsoft's license for the two cheaper editions -- Home Basic Edition and Home Premium Edition cost $199 and $239, respectively -- would have saved customers at least $60 and up to $200.

In addition, Microsoft planned to permit the use of DRM, IRM (Information Rights Management) and Vista's storage encryption technology, BitLocker, in a VM for any version of Vista.

Besides boosting flagging perceptions of Microsoft's overall virtualization strategy, the move would have made Vista virtualization much more attractive to a key and growing segment -- Intel Mac owners who want to run Windows software.

But at the last moment, Microsoft did a 360. Its explanation was terse: "Microsoft has reassessed the Windows virtualization policy and decided that we will maintain the original policy announced last Fall," said a spokesman in an e-mailed statement.

A perfect picture (of cross-purposes)

When a user creates a VM, the virtualization software takes a snapshot of the PC's hardware and then creates an exact copy of how that works in memory, according to DeGroot.

This ability to perfectly simulate the way the original PC ran (albeit more slowly than the original) is why VMs are such a useful tool. But a VM, once created, can be copied hundreds or thousands of times and ported over to radically different PCs without triggering the antipiracy and DRM schemes of most software or multimedia files, including Vista's. Those schemes raise red flags only if they realize they've been moved to another computer, DeGroot said.

Analysts say what probably happened behind the scenes is that Microsoft or one of its media partners decided at the last moment that encouraging consumers to use virtualization would, at least symbolically, be at odds with its attempts to enforce DRM.

"Microsoft doesn't want the music labels, TV networks and movie studios to come back to them and say that you are enabling this ability to move content around," said Mike McGuire, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

Microsoft has more at stake than other high-tech firms, McGuire said, what with its partnerships with NBC, its Xbox gaming platform, its Media Center PCs and even its Zune music player.

"It's a very fine line that Redmond has to walk," McGuire said. "They have to answer to these companies if they want to have any hope of making the PC and their software the de facto usage model for multimedia."

The problem is that even if Microsoft -- and U.S. law -- insist it is still illegal to use virtualization to enable the sharing of software or movies or music, its antipiracy technology is powerless to stop it.

"It's absurd to expect that something demanded by a EULA is followed when technology and common practice permit otherwise," Sinnreich said. "Microsoft is banking on ongoing consumer naivete and goodwill. There will be a backlash against DRM in some not-so-distant future."

Would anyone have bothered?

Will encouraging consumer virtualization result in a major uptick in piracy? Not anytime soon, say analysts.

One of the main obstacles is the massive size of VMs. Because they include the operating system, the simulated hardware, as well as the software and/or multimedia files, VMs can easily run in the tens of gigabytes, making them hard to exchange over the Internet. But DeGroot says that problem can be partly overcome with .zip and compression tools -- some, ironically, even supplied by Microsoft itself.

"It's the kind of idea that is out there among the enthusiast community for file sharing and remixing, but it's not part of the standard arsenal for the average college student," Sinnreich said.

Gartner's McGuire agrees: "Unless virtualization is more convenient and reliable than P2P, then no one is going to go to the trouble."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...pageNu mber=1





Hmm

Violence in Video Games
Avinash

A friend pushed me in the direction of a couple of interesting statistics. Since Doom was released in 1993, violent crimes in the United States have to 40% of what they used to be. Coincidence? Possibly, yes. However, the year Quake and Duke Nukem 3D were released, violent crimes fell by 4%, and a further 2% when Grand Theft Auto was released.

I don’t take that as mere coincidence. A simple Google search brings up countless articles citing experiments and analysis on how a child’s mind gets affected by the violence and gore in video games. Here’s an excerpt from one I particularly liked:

Studies measuring emotional responses to playing violent video games (compared with emotional responses to non-violent games) have shown that violent games increase aggressive emotions. Adolescents themselves often seem to recognize this. When asked to name the “bad things” about computer games, many students reported that they make people more moody and aggressive (Griffiths & Hunt, 1998). In this study, students who were more “addicted” to video games were significantly more likely to be in a bad mood before, during, and after play than were non-addicted students.

Is this the critics of the video game industry’s dirty little secret? An interesting analogy is the United States national drinking age, known to be higher than most countries in the world. Why? It’s easy to justify based on the fairly blatant statistics: in 2005, the total of people killed in alcohol related car accidents has fallen 32% since 1984 (the year the National Minimum Drinking Age Act was passed). While I realize the opposition to the act is strong and convincing (I believe it should be 18), it is difficult for the government to argue against such strong statistics. If Jack Thompson were to provide me with such strong statistics, maybe I would be inclined to agree with him a little more.

Understand that I do take all statistics with a grain of salt–I haven’t looked into the methods of collecting data, the reliability of my sources’ source etc., but it raises interesting questions nonetheless. Why do critics of video game violence focus on this so much? The devastation of a child’s mind is one of the major talking points of most of these studies. I personally feel the authors who write the reports should be working somewhere else: there seems to be a great use of emotive language to compel mothers and people like Jack Thompson to stop people from having fun.

Let’s talk about the kids for a moment. Or not: the average game player is 33 years old, and the average game buyer is 40 years old. In computer games, 93% of gamers are over the age of 18. Console gamers follow closely at 83%. The source has a great list of interesting statistics–I don’t want to list every one–which are well worth a read.

I’m not saying that the 7% of gamers under the age of 18 (87% of whom get their parents’ permission to play those games anyway) aren’t important enough that they don’t deserve the respect of being looked after, but it seems to be that the whole critics movement is based around blowing their analyzes way out of proportion. Social critic J. C. Herz puts it brilliantly:

That’s what we do in America: glorify autonomous individualists. What else would we possibly glorify? The autonomous collective? One can only imagine the kind of arcade game that would pass muster with the leather-elbow-patch set (leap over the running dogs of capitalism, liberate the oppressed proletariat, and accumulate enough petition power to defeat the evil Murdoch). (Herz, Joystick Nation, 1997).

At the end of the day, (as the Virginia Tech. shootings taught us), some people are just messed up in the head. I think it’s a bigger leap to say that a criminal’s behavior is the cause of playing violent video games than to say that Doom started a shift in the climate of the United States (and probably the world over) in reducing violent crimes.

What do you think?
http://www.avinashv.net/2007/06/23/v...n-video-games/





Report: Video Game Spending to Surpass Music Spending This Year
Jacqui Cheng

The video gaming industry is poised to overtake the music industry in the US, with global spending on video games surpassing music spending as soon as this year, according to consulting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers. PwC released the data in its annual "Global Entertainment and Media Outlook" report covering 2007 through 2011, which outlines expected growth in the entertainment, film, music, and video game industries, among others.

The information not only reflects the gaming industry's strong trajectory, but also serves as a painful reminder that the music industry continues to suffer. EMI recently reported, however, that sales of its DRM-free songs and albums have been good since the launch of iTunes Plus, with CD sales of those same albums dropping during that time. If the gains made by selling DRM-free music online outpace the losses from CD sales, EMI's decision to go DRM-free will prove to be a good one and the rest of the industry may follow suit.

The rising penetration of broadband combined with consoles with online capabilities, wireless phones capable of downloading games, and technologically advanced consoles are credited with driving the video game industry's strong growth. PwC says that the gaming industry will see a compound annual growth rate of 9.1 percent between 2007 and 2011, resulting in a $48.9 billion global video game market in 2011, up from $37.5 billion this year.

The US market will grow much more slowly than that, though, going from $10.4 billion to $12.5 billion over the same period (a 6.7 percent CAGR). PwC says that Asia will see the greatest growth during that time and see the largest amount of spending, topping out at $18.8 billion in 2011 with a CAGR of 10 percent.T he report also makes note that global spending on console and handheld games will go up from $6.5 billion in 2006 to $7.9 in 2011.

PwC sees in-game advertising as a prime area for growth. While in-game advertising generated $80 million in 2006, the firm estimates that it could grow as high as $950 million in 2011. PwC's Marcel Fenez noted, however, that the $950 million estimate could in fact be a conservative one and that growth in the area could produce even larger revenues in the future due to the changing audience of the gaming industry.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...this-year.html





Reviled Broadcast Treaty Dies at WIPO
Nate Anderson

After a long and bloody struggle, the WIPO Broadcast Treaty appears to be dead.

Delegates from around the world have been meeting this week at WIPO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland for their second (and supposedly last) round of consultations on the treaty since last year's General Assembly meeting. The plan was to hold two sessions in order to iron out differences between countries and then proceed to a Diplomatic Conference late in 2007 if consensus could be reached. But consensus was nowhere in sight, and negotiations now appear to be at an end. There will be no treaty.

The Broadcast Treaty was an attempt to give global broadcasters the tools they needed to stop the theft of their signals, but initial versions of the treaty (which has been under discussion for a decade) adopted a controversial "rights-based" approach. Under a rights-based treaty, broadcasters would receive new intellectual property rights over their signals, and consumer advocates worried that this could put an end to some things currently allowed under "fair use." Even the US Senate had reservations about the plan.

Here's the issue: if NBC broadcasts a Creative Commons-licensed video, it could be illegal for users to record and redistribute that particular broadcast because NBC would own the rights to the signal. The video could still be gleaned from online sources or directly from the producer, of course, but it could make the situation more difficult than it is now (NBC currently has rights only to content that it owns, not to its signal). Some of the wilder claims made by opponents of the treaty suggested that broadcasters could somehow "lock up" public domain content simply by showing it, but this wasn't accurate.

This rights-based approach generated plenty of legitimate controversy, though, and last year's WIPO General Assembly meeting chose to adopt a "signal theft" approach that would not create any new intellectual property rights. Despite that endorsement, debate over what form the treaty should take has been raging in the committee charged with drafting it, and last night, the US and others threw in the towel.

Public Knowledge, Intellectual Property Watch, and the Associated Press all have coverage of the breakdown. Unless something dramatic happens today, the planned Diplomatic Conference will not take place and no treaty will be signed.

That should come as welcome news to the consumer advocates who signed a letter this week urging countries to kill the treaty. The EFF, Public Knowledge, the International Federation of Library Associations, and others said that "WIPO should not be creating new economic rights for broadcasters and they should certainly not be creating such new economic rights for cable companies or the companies that aggregate content on cable channels, since the public already has to pay to receive such information through subscription services. There is no shortage of existing laws that make cable piracy illegal."

Further discussions will be held today on the future of the treaty, though it appears that countries are simply too far apart to come to any agreement.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...s-at-wipo.html





New Blu-Ray Discs to Expand Copy Protection, Bypass AACS Troubles
Scott M. Fulton, III

With a minimum of fanfare, the licensing body for the developers of a supplemental copy protection technology exclusively for Blu-ray Disc announced its initial specification for BD+ - which supporters had hoped would be available early last year - is finally ready for licensing to developers. 20th Century-Fox appears to be the first to board the bandwagon, having obtained a license for its developers to write for a virtual machine that will be embedded in future BD-ROM player devices.

One of the original sticking points between studios and technologists over high-definition disc formats concerned a provision of Advanced Access Copy System (AACS) copy protection that enables content providers to revoke a player's ability to decrypt new discs' content if the integrity of that content is found to be compromised for that player - in other words, if someone has hacked into the access keys and has posted them online, enabling others to copy the content.

While most everyone involved in the original high-def negotiations agreed that AACS' concepts of the "clearing house" for online activation of content and its media key distribution structure were necessary, its revocation ability was a key bone of contention. So the group that would eventually form the Blu-ray Disc Association presented a three-part alternative to AACS copy protection alone - the scheme backed by the DVD Forum, which supports HD DVD.

This scheme would buffer AACS by adding BD-ROM Mark technology, which stores access keys using a secret physical location scheme rather than within a logical file (that technology is already ready to go), and something called BD+. Once studied as an alternative to AACS altogether, BD+ relies on an embedded, programmable virtual machine that gives studios the option of creating title-specific security functions - mechanisms specific maybe even to just one movie.

Because BD+ could have been an alternative to AACS, studios and technology companies including Hewlett-Packard were told that it could override certain unwanted provisions. For example, it could enable a BD-ROM player whose rights were officially and technically revoked through the AACS system, to play a specific movie anyway.

It's part of what Blu-ray proponents call renewability, and they describe it in either of two ways: One way enables a movie disc whose PC-based media player or whose playback console has been compromised, perhaps maliciously, to deploy code that will actually patch the media player, undoing a hack.

The second way involves what HP described last year as a "repair sequence" that could not only undo the revocation of privileges for one movie, but perhaps repair a revoked player with patches that enable it to qualify for re-emergence into the community of accepted BD decoders.

Whether that feature remains in the final specification, however, may have been thrown in doubt by this statement from a technology licensing firm that contributes to Blu-ray: "BD+ Content Code is 'non-persistent,' meaning it secures only the playback of the content contained on its disc and is deleted when the disc is ejected. The player is then returned to the state it was in prior to the disc being inserted."

The ability for a player to crawl back from revocation might have been a feature that would have tipped the scales in Blu-ray's favor in 2006. BD+ was obviously delayed by an extraordinary length of time, but then again, so was AACS' own revocation ability anyway, so the damage to Blu-ray's reputation may not be that great. Advocates and supporters of the format have admitted holding off on excessive initial purchases of Blu-ray content, knowing that more capable BD+ endowed versions would eventually be in the works.

But the Web site of BD+'s official licensing arm isn't saying much about what was and what was not retained in the final specification - its FAQ page is actually empty, leading to an even more frequently asked question, "Is this format actually ready?"

Blockbuster's decision Monday to expand its selections in many of its retail outlets to feature Blu-ray titles and not HD DVD may have given Blu-ray the edge, at least for now, in its standing among consumers. BD+ could potentially give Blu-ray a similar edge over HD DVD technologically, if its supporting studios and manufacturers play their hand properly. On the other hand, BD+'s unique copy protection capability could make Blu-ray a unique target for engineers seeking to crack its codes; and if they succeed, HD DVD advocates may be waiting with thumbs in their ears and tongues extended.
http://www.betanews.com/article/New_...les/1182546669





Online Video Recorders Stoke New Piracy Concerns
Daisuke Wakabayashi

It took Brian Baker only five minutes to persuade a major U.S. television network that it needed his company's technology to protect their programs from Web pirates.

Using software easily found on the Internet, Baker, chief executive of Widevine Technologies, recorded a video clip stream from that network's Web site, stripped out the commercials and sent the company back the altered video.

The network executive's reaction? "Wow, we need protection now!" Baker recalled. "Major television operators are seeing their offerings re-posted on the Internet, often times with the advertising stripped out."

Media companies fear that video recording software will facilitate piracy and rob them of lucrative advertising revenue just as they are making more TV shows, movies and video available online.

Stream rippers, or software that records any online video and downloads it onto a computer hard drive, can be bought on the Internet these days for under $100. The technology is expected to move into the mainstream with the introduction of several new video players in the coming months.

"This is an application and development of great concern," said a major U.S. network executive, who declined to be identified. "This is a dramatic move in the wrong direction."

Media conglomerate Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against Google and its video sharing site YouTube demonstrates the lengths copyright owners will go to maintain ultimate control over where their entertainment ends up.

Three new recording video players are expected out before the end of 2007, with each company pursuing a different strategy.

RealNetworks' new media player, which will be available for public testing next week, allows users to record video streams with one click. It prevents a user from downloading video embedded with digital rights management, but it does not prevent the recording of all copyrighted content.

"The technology we built is a utility, it's a tool. The VCR or TiVo doesn't really understand where the stuff is coming from," said Jeff Chasen, a vice president at RealNetworks. "It's really up to the consumer."

RealNetworks and other media player makers see the software as a way for consumers to create a library of content they can view at a time that is convenient for them.

But media companies fear it could become a tool for pirates to widely distribute their entertainment and make money from it at their expense.

TiVo for the Internet

Internet video start-up Veoh Networks unveiled a new product called VeohTV, a digital video recorder (DVR) for the Internet that can find and store material from nearly every site on the Web including the major networks.

Veoh contends that it does not violate copyright laws and records videos with commercials contained. Analysts said major networks may take legal action to prevent the company from showing their copyrighted content next to ads sold by Veoh.

Adobe Systems' new media player downloads video for offline viewing. Adobe, a leader with its flash video format, wants to hand over more control to media companies, allowing firms to serve ads and track video usage.

Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said the media companies' reservations about the streaming video recorders demonstrates a lack of understanding. Smart companies will embrace, not shun, the technology, he said.

"Ad-supported video is the way that the Internet video world is going to explode. The question is how far will you let your content go in order to increase your advertising revenue," said McQuivey.

Seattle-based Widevine, which has or is close to deals with all the major U.S. networks, said its video protection technology is the answer for media companies.

Widevine, a survivor of the dot-com bust, encrypts digital content so that if the company's algorithm detects a user recording the material off the portal, it will stop the video stream.

The key, according to Widevine's Baker, is that the company's digital rights management technology ensures that commercials will not be tampered with.

"Without the protection, you can bypass the advertisers," said Baker. "From a business perspective, preserving the integrity of the advertising is crucial."
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...070622?src=cms





USA Today: Internet Hurting Adult DVD Sales
Eddie Adams

A USA Today story published Wednesday reported that a downturn in adult DVD sales primarily is due to a proliferation of cheaper, more immediately accessible adult material on the Internet.

"The exodus to porn viewing online has been accelerated by more broadband users shunning DVDs and pay-per-view TV in favor of PC screens. Changes in viewing habits have forced industry heavyweights to dramatically alter how they deliver content," the article noted, based on comments made by Dennis McAlpine, managing director of media researcher McAlpine Associates.

Comments from adult studios such as Vivid Entertainment, SexZ Pictures, Hustler, and Extreme Associates are included in the report. Vivid, Hustler, and Extreme all are "rushing to offer movies on the Internet before they are available on DVD," according to USA Today writer Jon Swartz.

Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid, told the paper he believes – based on his company's sales experiences – DVDs largely will be replaced by Internet content. "Three years ago, 80 percent of [Vivid's] revenue came from DVD sales. Now, it's 40 percent," the article noted.

Echoing a comment reported May 21at AVNOnline.com, Extreme Chief Executive Officer Rob Black told USA Today, "DVDs are dead. The Web is where things are happening."

The USA Today report follows a similar June 2 article in the New York Times.
http://www.avn.com/index_cache.php?P...tent_ID=289826





Waxman Probes P2P Services
Brooks Boliek

One of Congress' most dogged investigators and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is training his sights on peer-to-peer services.

Industry sources said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has grown concerned over government, personal and corporate data that has become available to hackers as consumers use P2P services to get such content as music and movies.

"What drives people to these sites are the movies and music," one entertainment industry source said. "But when they get there, they open up their computers to lots of inadvertent sharing of government and personal data."

Waxman sent letters to LimeWire CEO Mark Gorton and StreamCast Networks CEO Michael Weiss asking them to explain what steps they've taken to ensure that users of the P2P services don't open up their computers to abuse.

The letters, the first steps in the investigation by Waxman's committee, come two years after copyright holders won a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court that found the Grokster P2P service illegally induced people to violate copyright laws.

While P2P services have faded from the news and congressional scrutiny, LimeWire and StreamCast are being sued for copyright infringement by the record labels.

Waxman appears to want to delve into reports that such sensitive data as loan applications, bank statements, credit reporting agency records, user ID and password lists and tax returns get inadvertently "shared" with millions of people. There also have been reports of sensitive government information being distributed through P2P.

While the trade group P2P United adopted a code of conduct designed to prevent inadvertent file-sharing, the lawmaker seems to be concerned about its effectiveness.

"Inadvertent file-sharing may still be a significant problem," Waxman wrote. "On March 5, 2007, the United States Patent and Trademark Office released a report indicating that inadvertent file-sharing continued to threaten individual privacy and national security."

A committee aide said that Waxman's interest goes back at least to 2003, when a staff report on the issue was released. "It's really remarkable, the potential risks posed by these kinds of things," the aide said.

LimeWire said the company is ready to help explain what is going on with P2P.

"We have the greatest respect for Congressman Waxman and we look at the letter as an invitation to speak," the company said. "There is a lot of misconceptions about P2P networks that needs to be cleared up."

StreamCast declined comment.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...c0a726f52c082e





Tanya Andersen Sues RIAA and SafeNet (f/k/a MediaSentry) for Malicious Prosecution
Groklaw

You probably want to read this complaint just posted on Recording Industry vs. the People, Andersen v. Atlantic et al. I think we may be watching history being made before our eyes. The worm is turning.

Tanya Andersen, the plaintiff here, is the single mother in Oregon that the RIAA prosecuted for the last couple of years and then "on the eve of summary judgment" dropped the lawsuit with prejudice. Her counterclaims remain and are restated here and supplemented. It will soon be joined into a single case. So, what started as Atlantic v. Andersen has now turned around, and it is now Andersen v. Atlantic and the defendants are the music companies making up the RIAA -- Atlantic, Priority Records, Capitol Records, UMG and BMG -- the RIAA itself, the Settlement Support Center, and SafeNet, formerly known as MediaSentry. She is asserting claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the RICO Act, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act.

Update: So many of you asked about copyright misuse, and what the consequences can be, I found a paper for you to read, "Competition Law and Copyright Misuse" by John Cross and Peter Yu. Here's the paragraph I think you are looking for:
The independent doctrine of copyright misuse ... focuses on whether the owner attempts to avoid some limit imposed by copyright law.... Rather than criminal penalties or treble damages under U.S. antitrust law, the sole “penalty” for copyright misuse is the inability to sue the affected party for infringement. That penalty applies only with respect to the particular licensee bound by the provision, and exists only for so long as the misuse continues.

Her complaint states the following, in part:
1.2 On August 26, 2005, while Tanya Andersen and her 8 year-old daughter were sitting down to dinner a legal process server knocked on her door. When she answered the door, she was served with a lawsuit filed by RIAA-controlled music distribution companies in a federal court. Ms. Andersen was shocked, afraid, and very distressed. The lawsuit falsely claimed that she owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to these companies as penalties for copyright infringement. Ms. Andersen knew that she was completely innocent of the charges against her. She answered the false claims and asserted counterclaims seeking damages. During discovery, Ms. Andersen learned that the lawsuit filed against her was based solely upon an illegal, flawed and negligent investigation. Almost two years later, on the even of summary judgment, the lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice. Ms. Andersen's counterclaims continue in that case. Those counterclaims are restated here as direct claims. New claims are also set forth here against the former plaintiffs in that action and against new additional parties....

2.1 Tanya Andersen pursues this action to recover compensation for the significant damages these defendants directly caused her. She also seeks punitive damages, statutory penalties, litigation fees and expenses, and declaratory relief....

5.2 Defendant MediaSentry is in the business of conducting personally invasive private investigations of private citizens in many states in the U.S. for the RIAA and its controlled member companies. ...

5.3 Pursuant to a secret agreement, the RIAA, its controlled member companies and MediaSentry conspired to develop a massive threat and litigation enterprise targeting private citizens across the United States....

That's just up to page 5 of the 34 pages. When the defendants answer, I'll post that as well, so you can hear both sides. But I knew you would be interested, because when the SCO saga began, SCO executives pointed to the RIAA as a model they felt worthy of imitation, IIRC. Why yes, yes they did. Here's one example, Darl McBride at the SCO 1Q conference call on March 3, 2004, the day SCO announced it was going after Linux end users like the RIAA was going after P2P downloaders. The analogy was not apt, but it's what he chose, because he saw similarities, he said:
Use of copyrighted material without permission is prohibited under copyright law and can carry significant monetary damages. I reference these actions as elements of SCO's enforcement initiatives and to underscore SCO's commitment to vigorously protect and enforce our intellectual property, our System V code, our contract rights, and our copyrights. With representation of Boies, Schiller & Flexner and their associated firms, we have now taken the significant next step in the process of enforcing our contract rights and copyrights through legal action against end users.

We believe that there are important similarities between our recently legal actions against end users and those actions that have taken place in the recording industry. It wasn't until RIAA ultimately launched a series of lawsuits against end user copyright violators that the community-at-large became fully educated regarding the liabilities associated with using copyrighted materials without providing remuneration to the copyright owner. We believe that the legal actions we have taken and will continue to take will have a similar impact on end users of UNIX and Linux. We anticipate that there are many end users who have not considered the ramifications of the unlicensed use of SCO copyrighted technology and that an increasing number of companies will now take appropriate action to license SCO's intellectual property.

His prediction didn't come true, of course. His mean dream either. And recently, SCO told the court in the Novell case that even if they win against Novell as to copyright ownership, SCOsource is dead. One difference between SCO and the RIAA is that the RIAA at least really owns the copyrights.

The thing about litigation is this: both sides need to "consider the ramifications" before they leap off the diving board into the pool. I never support copyright infringement, as you know. But as it turned out in the case of SCO, there wasn't any that I've seen on the horizon for as far as the eye can see, and I climbed as high up the main mast as I could get for the very best view. I see nothing. I never will say you should go against the law or violate anyone's copyright. But the copyright owners have laws to obey as well, and now we will see how that side of the coin looks in a court of law.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?s...70625162738896





The Record Industry's Decline

Record Sales are Tanking, and There's no Hope in Sight: How it all Went Wrong
Brian Hiatt and Evan Serpick

For the music industry, it was a rare bit of good news: Linkin Park's new album sold 623,000 copies in its first week this May -- the strongest debut of the year. But it wasn't nearly enough. That same month, the band's record company, Warner Music Group, announced that it would lay off 400 people, and its stock price lingered at fifty-eight percent of its peak from last June.

Overall CD sales have plummeted sixteen percent for the year so far -- and that's after seven years of near-constant erosion. In the face of widespread piracy, consumers' growing preference for low-profit-margin digital singles over albums, and other woes, the record business has plunged into a historic decline.

The major labels are struggling to reinvent their business models, even as some wonder whether it's too late. "The record business is over," says music attorney Peter Paterno, who represents Metallica and Dr. Dre. "The labels have wonderful assets -- they just can't make any money off them." One senior music-industry source who requested anonymity went further: "Here we have a business that's dying. There won't be any major labels pretty soon."

In 2000, U.S. consumers bought 785.1 million albums; last year, they bought 588.2 million (a figure that includes both CDs and downloaded albums), according to Nielsen SoundScan. In 2000, the ten top-selling albums in the U.S. sold a combined 60 million copies; in 2006, the top ten sold just 25 million. Digital sales are growing -- fans bought 582 million digital singles last year, up sixty-five percent from 2005, and purchased $600 million worth of ringtones -- but the new revenue sources aren't making up for the shortfall.

More than 5,000 record-company employees have been laid off since 2000. The number of major labels dropped from five to four when Sony Music Entertainment and BMG Entertainment merged in 2004 -- and two of the remaining companies, EMI and Warner, have flirted with their own merger for years.

About 2,700 record stores have closed across the country since 2003, according to the research group Almighty Institute of Music Retail. Last year the eighty-nine-store Tower Records chain, which represented 2.5 percent of overall retail sales, went out of business, and Musicland, which operated more than 800 stores under the Sam Goody brand, among others, filed for bankruptcy. Around sixty-five percent of all music sales now take place in big-box stores such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy, which carry fewer titles than specialty stores and put less effort behind promoting new artists.

Just a few years ago, many industry executives thought their problems could be solved by bigger hits. "There wasn't anything a good hit couldn't fix for these guys," says a source who worked closely with top executives earlier this decade. "They felt like things were bad and getting worse, but I'm not sure they had the bandwidth to figure out how to fix it. Now, very few of those people are still heads of the companies."

More record executives now seem to understand that their problems are structural: The Internet appears to be the most consequential technological shift for the business of selling music since the 1920s, when phonograph records replaced sheet music as the industry's profit center. "We have to collectively understand that times have changed," says Lyor Cohen, CEO of Warner Music Group USA. In June, Warner announced a deal with the Web site Lala.com that will allow consumers to stream much of its catalog for free, in hopes that they will then pay for downloads. It's the latest of recent major-label moves that would have been unthinkable a few years back:

In May, one of the four majors, EMI, began allowing the iTunes Music Store to sell its catalog without the copy protection that labels have insisted upon for years.

When YouTube started showing music videos without permission, all four of the labels made licensing deals instead of suing for copyright violations.

To the dismay of some artists and managers, labels are insisting on deals for many artists in which the companies get a portion of touring, merchandising, product sponsorships and other non-recorded-music sources of income.

So who killed the record industry as we knew it? "The record companies have created this situation themselves," says Simon Wright, CEO of Virgin Entertainment Group, which operates Virgin Megastores. While there are factors outside of the labels' control -- from the rise of the Internet to the popularity of video games and DVDs -- many in the industry see the last seven years as a series of botched opportunities. And among the biggest, they say, was the labels' failure to address online piracy at the beginning by making peace with the first file-sharing service, Napster. "They left billions and billions of dollars on the table by suing Napster -- that was the moment that the labels killed themselves," says Jeff Kwatinetz, CEO of management company the Firm. "The record business had an unbelievable opportunity there. They were all using the same service. It was as if everybody was listening to the same radio station. Then Napster shut down, and all those 30 or 40 million people went to other [file-sharing services]."

It all could have been different: Seven years ago, the music industry's top executives gathered for secret talks with Napster CEO Hank Barry. At a July 15th, 2000, meeting, the execs -- including the CEO of Universal's parent company, Edgar Bronfman Jr.; Sony Corp. head Nobuyuki Idei; and Bertelsmann chief Thomas Middelhof -- sat in a hotel in Sun Valley, Idaho, with Barry and told him that they wanted to strike licensing deals with Napster. "Mr. Idei started the meeting," recalls Barry, now a director in the law firm Howard Rice. "He was talking about how Napster was something the customers wanted."

The idea was to let Napster's 38 million users keep downloading for a monthly subscription fee -- roughly $10 -- with revenues split between the service and the labels. But ultimately, despite a public offer of $1 billion from Napster, the companies never reached a settlement. "The record companies needed to jump off a cliff, and they couldn't bring themselves to jump," says Hilary Rosen, who was then CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. "A lot of people say, 'The labels were dinosaurs and idiots, and what was the matter with them?' But they had retailers telling them, 'You better not sell anything online cheaper than in a store,' and they had artists saying, 'Don't screw up my Wal-Mart sales.' " Adds Jim Guerinot, who manages Nine Inch Nails and Gwen Stefani, "Innovation meant cannibalizing their core business."

Even worse, the record companies waited almost two years after Napster's July 2nd, 2001, shutdown before licensing a user-friendly legal alternative to unauthorized file-sharing services: Apple's iTunes Music Store, which launched in the spring of 2003. Before that, labels started their own subscription services: PressPlay, which initially offered only Sony, Universal and EMI music, and MusicNet, which had only EMI, Warner and BMG music. The services failed. They were expensive, allowed little or no CD burning and didn't work with many MP3 players then on the market.

Rosen and others see that 2001-03 period as disastrous for the business. "That's when we lost the users," Rosen says. "Peer-to-peer took hold. That's when we went from music having real value in people's minds to music having no economic value, just emotional value."

In the fall of 2003, the RIAA filed its first copyright-infringement lawsuits against file sharers. They've since sued more than 20,000 music fans. The RIAA maintains that the lawsuits are meant to spread the word that unauthorized downloading can have consequences. "It isn't being done on a punitive basis," says RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol. But file-sharing isn't going away -- there was a 4.4 percent increase in the number of peer-to-peer users in 2006, with about a billion tracks downloaded illegally per month, according to research group BigChampagne.

Despite the industry's woes, people are listening to at least as much music as ever. Consumers have bought more than 100 million iPods since their November 2001 introduction, and the touring business is thriving, earning a record $437 million last year. And according to research organization NPD Group, listenership to recorded music -- whether from CDs, downloads, video games, satellite radio, terrestrial radio, online streams or other sources -- has increased since 2002. The problem the business faces is how to turn that interest into money. "How is it that the people that make the product of music are going bankrupt, while the use of the product is skyrocketing?" asks the Firm's Kwatinetz. "The model is wrong."

Kwatinetz sees other, leaner kinds of companies -- from management firms like his own, which now doubles as a record label, to outsiders such as Starbucks -- stepping in. Paul McCartney recently abandoned his longtime relationship with EMI Records to sign with Starbucks' fledgling Hear Music. Video-game giant Electronic Arts also started a label, exploiting the promotional value of its games, and the newly revived CBS Records will sell music featured in CBS TV shows.

Licensing music to video games, movies, TV shows and online subscription services is becoming an increasing source of revenue."We expect to be a brand licensing organization," says Cohen of Warner, which in May started a new division, Den of Thieves, devoted to producing TV shows and other video content from its music properties. And the record companies are looking to increase their takes in the booming music publishing business, which collects songwriting royalties from radio play and other sources. The performance-rights organization ASCAP reported a record $785 million in revenue in 2006, a five percent increase from 2005. Revenues are up "across the board," according to Martin Bandier, CEO of Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which controls the Beatles' publishing. "Music publishing will become a more important part of the business," he says. "If I worked for a record company, I'd be pulling my hair out. The recorded-music business is in total confusion, looking for a way out."

Nearly every corner of the record industry is feeling the pain. "A great American sector has been damaged enormously," says the RIAA's Bainwol, who blames piracy, "from songwriters to backup musicians to people who work at labels. The number of bands signed to labels has been compromised in a pretty severe fashion, roughly a third."

Times are hard for record-company employees. "People feel threatened," says Rosen. "Their friends are getting laid off left and right." Adam Shore, general manager of the then-Atlantic Records-affiliated Vice Records, told Rolling Stone in January that his colleagues are having an "existential crisis." "We have great records, but we're less sure than ever that people are going to buy them," he says. "There's a sense around here of losing faith."

Additional reporting by Steve Knopper and Nicole Frehsée
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto...ustrys_decline





The Fall of the Record Business: What Next?
Evan Serpick

Theory 1: Ad-Supported Music
Yahoo! Music General Manager Ian Rogers says all music will be free - paid for by ads - and any song by any artist will be accessible from anywhere in the world.

"I can imagine a future where you just consume a hell of a lot of music - just hit 'play' on any player, and hear music. There's an ad experience there, and we'll pay the labels a percentage of that ad revenue. All devices will be connected to a network and we can find anything we want and hit 'play' without connecting our device to our computer and dragging a physical file over. People are going to have the expectation that they can get to anything whenever they want to."

Theory 2: Peer-to-Peer Goes Legit
Eric Garland, CEO of digital-music research firm Big Champagne, says people will pay a monthly surcharge on their cable bill to download an unlimited supply of tunes.

"Tens of billions of songs are downloaded for free by people all over the world, representing a huge market - not in changing their behavior, but in creating businesses around that fact. People that provide access to networks are the logical place for payments to be administered: Today you pay your cable company, not only for bits and bites, but for services like HBO or a tier of basic cable. It's in everyone's interest to administer payment there, with royalty payments made from pools of money collected based on stat rates or voluntary rates. You'll have Time Warners and Comcasts and Verizons working with content companies to convert these marketplaces without trying to change customer behavior."

Theory 3: Endless Access Points for Music
David Pakman, President and CEO of the indie-minded download site eMusic, says the more outlets there are to buy music, the fewer people will turn to piracy.

"The future of the music industry is bright. The old way, you'd buy a CD because you heard it on the radio. Now we have 20 different ways to go out and sample new music, whether it's blogs, downloads, ring tones, full-length mobile downloads, Internet radio, personalized subscription radio, or on-demand on your cable box. Those will continue to proliferate. It's important to offer music for sale everywhere. Selling more music is the way to monetize it and compete with piracy."

Theory 4: Labels Change Their Stripes
Rob Glaser, the head of Real Networks and Rhapsody, predicts that labels will operate more as managers, earning most of their profits from licensing, touring, and merchandise.

"The notion of a company that is only in the business of selling recorded music is an artifact of the physical world. In the next year or two, as physical growth continues to lag, the labels' pain will just get so great, they'll move to a more rational approach: The smarter way for music companies to work as venture capitalists, where they help to support bands through recording contracts, tour support, licensing, helping them artistically, essentially as business partners. If the artists succeed, the labels succeed. In a digital world that's the only way to align the interest between the label and the artists and it's been surprising to me how slowly the industry has been to embrace it."

Theory 5: Consumers Become Retailers
Terry McBride, founder and CEO of Nettwerk Music Group, says social networking will be integrated with commerce.

"We'll be looking at a space where the consumer is the retailer. Within a text message, an email or an IM, I can say, 'Listen to the new Avril single,' you click on her name, you hear it, you like it, you hit pound-four, and you instantly bought it, but you bought it from me. And maybe it's for twenty-five cents, and maybe five of that twenty-five cents goes in my PayPal account, the rest of it goes through a payment system to the copyright holders. You've got your price point down to where it's not worth the effort of going online to find it, and you really tap into the social nature of how social groups work."
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto...ness_what_next





Music Industry Attacks Sunday Newspaper's Free Prince CD
Katie Allen

The eagerly awaited new album by Prince is being launched as a free CD with a national Sunday newspaper in a move that has drawn widespread criticism from music retailers.

The Mail on Sunday revealed yesterday that the 10-track Planet Earth CD will be available with an "imminent" edition, making it the first place in the world to get the album. Planet Earth will go on sale on July 24.

"It's all about giving music for the masses and he believes in spreading the music he produces to as many people as possible," said Mail on Sunday managing director Stephen Miron. "This is the biggest innovation in newspaper promotions in recent times."

The paper, which sells more than 2m copies a week, will be ramping up its print run in anticipation of a huge spike in circulation but would not reveal how much the deal with Prince would cost.

One music store executive described the plan as "madness" while others said it was a huge insult to an industry battling fierce competition from supermarkets and online stores. Prince's label has cut its ties with the album in the UK to try to appease music stores.

The Entertainment Retailers Association said the giveaway "beggars belief". "It would be an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career," ERA co-chairman Paul Quirk told a music conference. "It would be yet another example of the damaging covermount culture which is destroying any perception of value around recorded music.

"The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday."

High street music giant HMV was similarly scathing about the plans. Speaking before rumours of a giveaway were confirmed, HMV chief executive Simon Fox said: "I think it would be absolutely nuts. I can't believe the music industry would do it to itself. I simply can't believe it would happen; it would be absolute madness."

Prince, whose Purple Rain sold more than 11m copies, also plans to give away a free copy of his latest album with tickets for his forthcoming concerts in London. The singer had signed a global deal for the promotion and distribution of Planet Earth in partnership with Columbia Records, a division of music company Sony BMG. A spokesman for the group said last night that the UK arm of Sony BMG had withdrawn from Prince's global deal and would not distribute the album to UK stores.
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2114557,00.html





On the Web, EMI to Offer More Choices
Robert Levine

Music blogs and social networking sites like MySpace are playing an increasingly important part in record companies’ marketing plans. Now they will also be able to sell songs from a major label that will play on the iPod from Apple.

EMI Music and Snocap are to announce today that Snocap will sell the label’s music in its MyStores, online shops that can be added to various sites on the Internet. Snocap’s MyStores would be placed on the Web sites of EMI artists like Korn, Suzanne Vega and Yellowcard, as well as on artists’ MySpace pages. Fans would also be able to place MyStores “widgets” on their own sites and MySpace pages, although Snocap would still control sales.

“It’s almost like you’re giving the label a vending machine,” Snocap’s chief executive, Rusty Rueff, said. “They can fill it up and people can take it and put it as many places as they want. This allows the artists and the fans to have a chance to engage in commerce on the most popular music sites, like MySpace.”

The price will be $1.30 a song for high-quality MP3 files that will work on any digital media player, including the iPod. Until now, Snocap had been selling independent label songs as well as Warner Music Group material in a format that did not work on the iPod.

Since MyStores can be added to a variety of Web pages, they will offer fans more places to shop for music. Over the last few years, as CD sales have fallen, music chains like Tower Records have closed, which has in turn fueled further declines. Snocap also planned to sell music at a variety of different price points, a feature the major labels want, but cannot get, from Apple’s iTunes store.

“My whole mantra has been, you have to make it easy for people to buy music,” said Barney Wragg, the head of EMI’s worldwide digital division. “You don’t have to have one big store which everyone has to come to; you can take this store and put it into pages all over the place.”

Snocap’s MyStores would also make it possible for customers to buy music where and when they first hear it. Since MySpace and various artists’ Web sites have become popular places to sample music in streaming audio, labels hope that fans will make more impulse buys.

In a survey by the analyst firm Jupiter Research, 20 percent of adults who were online identified themselves as impulse music buyers.

“MySpace has a big audience, which is interested in music, and a lot of people are listening to music on the site,” said David Card, a Jupiter Research analyst. “So if MyStores can deliver a graceful experience, I think they have a decent shot of being a big deal.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/te...y/29music.html





Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth: Prepare for the Shared Software Tidal Wave
Todd R. Weiss

"I was poor. I was desperate. I wanted to be on this bandwagon of this Internet thing, and I wanted to find a business that wouldn't require large amounts of bandwidth or large amounts of capital. The key was Linux. It was Linux that let me connect to the Net so I could start soaking up this knowledge," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux.

Barracuda Networks' high-end, low-cost Spam Firewalls and Web Filters are trusted by over 40,000 customers worldwide – including IBM®, NASA and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security – to stop spam, spyware, viruses and other security threats. Shouldn't you? Request a free evaluation unit today.

Mark Shuttleworth made news in 2002 when he fulfilled a lifelong ambition and became the first South African to travel into space, paying US$20 million to be a civilian cosmonaut on an eight-day flight aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft .

In 2004, he founded Ubuntu Linux to bring the operating system to people around the world. He is also the founder of HBD Venture Capital and the nonprofit Shuttleworth Foundation.

Question: You have pumped more than $10 million of your own money into the continuing development of Ubuntu Linux, and you have been on a personal campaign to bring a free, easy-to-use and reliable Linux to the masses around the world. Why?

Answer: In college, I was struggling to get my own personal computer hooked up to the university network. Then someone gave me a stack of Slackware Linux discs, and [i] found myself just enthralled by the breadth and depth of the tools that were available from Linux, even in those very early days.

It's like going from living in the desert to walking into an all-you-can-eat buffet. I went on to turn that interest in the Internet into a small business called Thawte (in 1995), which sold digital certificates that I created, initially at least, with cryptographic software that was available under an open source license.

Q: How did you think of getting into such a business back In 1995, just as the Internet was becoming a household word?

A: I was poor. I was desperate. I wanted to be on this bandwagon of this Internet thing, and I wanted to find a business that wouldn't require large amounts of bandwidth or large amounts of capital.

The key was Linux. It was Linux that let me connect to the Net so I could start soaking up this knowledge. It was Linux that let me put servers down in a company with an employee count of one, and to have servers in three countries and administer them all remotely over slow dial-up lines. You could only do that with Linux.

I sold that business in 1999, right at the top of the Internet bubble. That then gave me the opportunity to sit back and ask myself: What are the things in life that I would like to be a part of? You know, life is short.

One thing was to explore space and be a part of that adventure. I went and I did that. And the other thought was to be a part of this experience of free software, which had been beneficial to me -- bringing that to a much wider audience. And that's the genesis of Ubuntu.

Q: Ubuntu Linux has come a long way In just three years. How far are you from the dream of Linux for the masses?

A: Well, we certainly have been part of the process of making Linux more widely accepted and interesting and useful. Part of that has been fortunate timing. The Linux community itself around 2004 decided it was an interesting problem. The Linux kernel guys were feeling like they had proven that they could make the kernel stable and reliable and robust, and the next challenge was the desktop. So we've benefited by entering the scene right at the same time as everybody else was getting interested in that.

Q: Here in the U.S., Ubuntu has been getting attention for its desktop operating system. What's the strategy for Ubuntu in the corporate marketplace with its server OS version?

A: Of course, it will take time to build up a complete portfolio of certification. But many organizations have taken the first step, which is deploying Ubuntu on a server somewhere -- even if that's just an internal affair, such as a high-performance computing testbed and evaluation pool, places where they feel they can take some risks or places where they don't depend so much on third-party certifications.

So, for instance, people who are deploying things like LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stacks love Ubuntu because it has everything they need. We've seen very rapid adoption there. It will take time, obviously, to have people deploying it in the heart of their networks and underneath their database servers, because we have to build the relationships with those [software] vendors. That's not quite the work of a lifetime, but it's certainly a multiyear exercise.

Q: What kind of response have you been getting from traditional IT vendors?

A: It surprised people. You know, any surprise is a bad surprise for people who are in as long and intense a game as those big companies have been playing in the marketplace. I think we've shaken things up a little bit in a market that was seen to be well established and predictable, so it will take time for those companies to take a view on how they feel about the changes that we're bringing about.

Q: What do you think of the Apple OS and hardware? Are they the standard of quality for open source and Ubuntu in terms of matching their ease of use and eloquence of design?

A: In many cases, Apple has set the pace. I can think of cases where it's free software that has set the pace. The Mozilla Firefox browser is a great example of what happens when you get a small team that has good raw materials and they just relentlessly focus on making something that's a joy to use. It's a combination of simplicity and extensibility that gives you the ability to produce something that is both easy to use for a first-time user and powerful for someone who sits in front of a browser every day, all day.

Q: What do you think is the next big thing in Linux where Ubuntu can make even more waves?

A: We think that virtualization is one of the most exciting things happening in Linux today, and we're trying to incorporate the most exciting and mature technologies cleanly into Ubuntu.

Q: What are you most passionate about in your work?

A: Tidal waves. I'm fascinated by things that sweep through society and then change everything that they touch in different ways. The Internet itself was the first big tidal wave that I could actually witness. I guess I also saw desktop computing as a kid, but I didn't really have much of a perspective on it. But watching the Internet sweep through society, changing the way my mother worked, changing the way businesses worked, changing the way people designed products and so on, has been amazing. I wanted a project there that was right on the cutting edge of it.

Free software is part of a broader phenomenon, which is a shift toward recognizing the value of shared work. Historically, shared stuff had a very bad name. The reputation was that people always abused shared things, and in the physical world, something that is shared and abused becomes worthless. In the digital world, I think we have the inverse effect, where something that is shared can become more valuable than something that is closely held, as long as it is both shared and contributed to by everybody who is sharing in it.

That's a fascinating concept, and I think it's going to touch many industries. Software is the first. To be part of that is entirely another tidal wave.
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/57946.html





Google Threatens to Close Gmail Germany Over Privacy Concerns

According to spiegel.de (german), Google is threatening to close down the german version of it’s popular gmail service if the german Bundestag passes it’s new internet surveillance law. According to googles german privacy representative, Peter Fleischer, the new law would be a severe blow against privacy and would go against Googles practice of also offering anonymous e-mail accounts.

If the Bundesregierung has it’s way, then starting 2008, any connection data concerning the internet, phone calls (With position data when cell phones are used), SMS etc. of any german citizen will be saved for 6 months, anonymizing services like Tor will be made illegal.

Personally, I applaud google for joining the protest against this absurd piece of fear-inspired legislation. A big corporation standing up against this might get some politicians to actually have a look at and think about the issue instead of just passing it through, “Cause it’s to defeat the terrorists!”.
http://halcy.de/past/2007/6/23/googl...o_close_gmail/





'Citizen Journalism' Battles the Chinese Censors
AFP

In the strictly controlled media world of communist China, "citizen journalism" is beating a way through censorship, breaking taboos and offering a pressure valve for social tensions.

In one striking example this month, the Internet was largely responsible for breaking open a slave scandal in two Chinese provinces that some local authorities had been complicit in.

A letter posted on the Internet by 400 parents of children working as slaves in brickyards was the trigger for the national press to finally report on the scandal that some rights groups say had been going on for years.

The parents' Internet posting was part of a growing phenomenon for marginalised people in China who can not otherwise have their complaints addressed by the traditional, government-controlled press.

"The phenomenon of 'citizen journalism' suddenly arrived several years ago," said Beijing-based dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was one of the student leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests.

"Since the appearance of blogs in particular, every blog is a new platform for the spread of information."

He cited the example of a couple in the southwestern city of Chongqing who became known as the "Stubborn Nails" in April because they refused to leave their home until they received adequate compensation from the property developer who wanted them out.

They quickly became household names in China -- and symbols of resistance against greedy land developers and corrupt local authorities -- mainly thanks to Internet postings.

"That case was first revealed through blogs," Liu said.

Also in Chongqing, parts of the city were this month set on fire following the beating of flower sellers by the "chengguan", city police charged with "cleaning up" the city's roads.

Witnesses to the beatings had appealed to local television journalists, but nothing was broadcast.

The incident only became known outside the city thanks to photos and stories published on the Internet, sparking anger among China's netizens.

"It's fascism," said one, while another mocked: "The inhabitants of Chongqing are truly naive, the Chinese media is all controlled by the Communist Party, they decide what people know."

Several days later, another blunder by the "chengguan" -- this time in Zhengzhou in central Henan province, again targeted at a street seller -- provoked further riots.

The image of protesters surrounding a police car, captured by a mobile phone, made its way round the world, after being posted on Chinese movie sharing site Tudou, then reposted on YouTube.

Elsewhere across China, protesters often seek to post photos or videos of unrest on the Internet to counter the versions from the state-run press and local authorities, who usually downplay or deny the events.

Recognising the threat of China's growing online community, Chinese President Hu Jintao called in January for the Internet to be "purified", and the government has since launched a number of online crackdowns.

"The department of propaganda has sent out regulations to try and control the opinions being spread on the Internet, but every citizen has the right to criticise or to take part in public affairs on the Internet," said Zhu Dake, a professor at Shanghai Tongji University.

"The government has to accept the criticisms of the people, it can no longer react crudely like in the past."

Julien Pain, who monitors Internet freedom issues for Reporters Without Borders, is less optimistic.

"One cannot truly say that the Internet in China is becoming more and more free, because at the same time as the development of citizen journalists, the government finds ways of blocking or censoring content," Pain said.

Reporters Without Borders, which labels the Chinese government an "enemy of the Internet," says about 50 cyber dissidents are currently behind bars in China.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1





In Food Safety Crackdown, China Closes 180 Plants
David Barboza

After weeks of insisting that food here is largely safe, regulators in China said Tuesday that they had recently closed 180 food plants and that inspectors had uncovered more than 23,000 food safety violations.

The nationwide crackdown, which began in December, also found that many small food makers were using industrial chemicals, dyes and other illegal ingredients in making a range of food products, everything from candy to seafood.

The announcement came as part of a sweeping overhaul of this country’s food safety regulations in the aftermath of a series of international food scares involving Chinese exports.

The country’s exports of contaminated vegetable protein earlier this year triggered one of the largest pet food recalls in American history.

Tainted food ingredients also leached into American meat and fish supplies, and other problem foods, such as tainted fish, have turned up in Europe and other parts of Asia.

China has strongly denied that its food exports are hazardous and has seemingly retaliated in recent weeks by seizing American and European imports.

Earlier this week, China said it had impounded two shipments of food from the United States because the orange pulp and apricots contained “excessive amounts of bacteria and mould.”

And earlier this year, regulators blocked imports of Evian water from France, saying bacteria levels in the water exceeded national standards.

Still, the government has moved aggressively in recent months to enforce the nation’s food safety regulations and to crack down on fake and counterfeit foods.

But Tuesday’s announcement, which appeared on the web site of the country’s top quality watchdog, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, has added fuel to concerns about rampant fraud in the food industry here.

Regulators said 33,000 law enforcement officials combed the nation and turned up illegal food making dens, counterfeit bottled water, fake soy sauce, banned food additives and illegal meat processing plants.

“These are not isolated cases,” Han Yi, director of the administration’s quality control and inspection department told the state-run media.

China Daily, the nation’s English language newspaper, said industrial chemicals, including dyes, mineral oils, paraffin wax, formaldehyde and malachite green, had been found in everything from candy, pickles and biscuits to seafood.

Regulators said they also learned that sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid were being used to process shark fin and ox tendon.

These industrial chemicals are often toxic or corrosive and can be used in everything from drain cleaners, detergent and fertilizer to surfboard wax.

These types of findings have become all too common in China. For instance, in 2005, officials in south China found a company repackaging food waste and shipping it to 10 other regions. And just last week, officials said a company in Anhui province, not far from Shanghai, was selling a two-year-old rice dumpling mix as fresh, according to the state-controlled media.

Experts here say the problem is that the country’s food regulations are not being enforced and small businessmen feel they need to go to extraordinary lengths to make a profit.

Corruption and bribery have also infected the food and drug industry here.

The former head of the nation’s food and drug watchdog was recently sentenced to death for accepting bribes and approving the licensing of substandard drugs. And now, a Ministry of Agriculture official is on trial in Beijing for accepting bribes in exchange for endorsing food products.

But not all the problems stem from corruption or malfeasance. A.T. Kearney issued a report this week saying one cause of food safety problems is a lack of cold storage and logistics systems.

The consulting firm said China needs to invest about $100 billion over the next 10 years to upgrade its logistics and cold storage capabilities and to implement new standards.

In China, the study said, there are only about 30,000 cold storage trucks. In the U.S., there are about 280,000.

“In the entire supply chain there’s no common standard or world class standard,” said Zhang Bing, who helped prepare the study. “There are a lot of things contributing to the food safety problem. There are companies putting chemicals into food. But there’s also a lot of spoilage.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/wo...-China.html?hp





F.D.A. Issues Alert on Chinese Seafood
Andrew Martin

The Food and Drug Administration today issued an alert challenging imports of five major types of farm-raised seafood from China, including shrimp and catfish, because testing found recurrent contamination from carcinogens and antibiotics.

The alert means that the fish will be allowed for sale in the United States only if testing proves that it is free of those substances.

While the federal agency stopped short of an outright ban, the alert is nonetheless hugely significant because China is a major source of imported seafood in the United States, accounting for 21 percent of total imports.

The United States imports 81 percent of the seafood that is consumed here.

“There’s been a continued pattern of violation with no signs of abatement,” said David Acheson, the F.D.A.’s assistant commissioner for food safety. He insisted that there was no imminent danger to human health, but that prolonged consumption could cause health problems.

The other varieties affected by the ban are eel, basa, which is related to catfish, and dace, which is related to carp.

The seafood alert is the latest and perhaps broadest indictment yet against Chinese products, which have come under increasing scrutiny in recent months after pet food, toothpaste, toy trains and tires have been found to be contaminated or defective in some way.

China is the world’s leading producer of farm-raised fish. Its shipments to the United States were valued at $1.9 billion in 2006, a 193 percent increase from 2001, according to the Department of Agriculture. The biggest American imports from China are shrimp, tilapia, scallops, cod and pollock, federal statistics show.

The move by the F.D.A. comes after several Southern states have already blocked the sale of Chinese seafood contaminants. Now, Chinese catfish can be sold only if it passes testing that proves it has no contaminants.

The state of Alabama announced its ban after testing found 14 of 20 samples contained fluoroquinolones, a type of antibiotic banned by the F.D.A. Mississippi officials found that 18 of 26 samples of Chinese catfish were contaminated with fluoroquinolones.
“We are saying all Chinese seafood that comes in here has to be tested prior to sale,” said Bob Odom, Louisiana’s agriculture and forestry commissioner. “The simple reason for that is we found a lot of it that is contaminated.”

The problems with Chinese seafood are evident in a database of products that the FDA stops at the border. In May, for instance, the F.D.A. turned away 165 shipments from China, 49 of which were seafood.

Monkfish was rejected for being filthy. Frozen catfish nuggets were turned away because they contained veterinary drugs. Tilapia fillets were contaminated with salmonella.

The problems were even worse in April, when 257 shipments from China were rejected, including 68 of seafood. Frozen eel contained pesticides, frozen channel catfish had salmonella and frozen yellowfin steaks were filthy, the records show.

In a report on the F.D.A.’s oversight released in May, Food and Water Watch, a Washington-based nonprofit organization, found that more than 60 percent of the seafood that was rejected at the border by the F.D.A. came from China.

The report also found that the percentage of seafood shipments that were pulled out for laboratory analysis declined in recent years, from .88 percent in 2003 to .59 percent in 2006, the report found. Over all, about 2 percent of seafood import shipments between 2003 and 2006 received either a sensory examination for color and smell or a more detailed laboratory analysis.

Of the seafood that was refused at the border, filth was the top reason and salmonella was second, with shrimp accounting for about half of those, the report found.

Of the shipments rejected for veterinary drug residues in 2006, 63 percent were from China, the report found. Vietnam had the second most rejections for veterinary drug residue, 11 percent.

The Government Accountability Office has also criticized the F.D.A.’s oversight of seafood imports. In a 2004 report, the G.A.O. determined that the seafood inspection program had improved from 2001, when the agency concluded that the seafood inspection program did not sufficiently protect consumers.

But the G.A.O. also found that the F.D.A. still had considerable room for improvement.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/bu...sh-web.html?hp





Chinese Tire Recall to Start Monday

New Jersey tire importer will begin replacing defective tires, but only until they run out of money.

The company that imported Chinese tires at the center of a recall demand by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will recall the tires and replace them until the company, Foreign Tire Sales (FTS), has run out of funds.

A lawyer for FTS said the company will begin the notifying owners of the tires on Monday and will continue the recall until the company has run out of money.

Once the company has replaced as many of the tires as it can, the company will have to declare bankruptcy.

Lawrence Levigne, the attorney representing the New Jersey-based distributor of the imported tires, estimated that the company has enough funds to replace about 10 percent of the 450,000 tires that may be defective.

The tires, made by China-based Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber Co., have an insufficient or missing gum strip, a rubber feature that helps prevent steel belts inside the tire from separating or from damaging the rubber.

FTS alerted NHTSA to the problem in an official document filed in June. NHTSA responded by ordering a recall. Failure to recall the tires could result in fines for the importer, NHTSA reminded in a letter faxed to the company yesterday.

"At the risk of putting ourselves out of business, this company did the right thing and we reported [the problem]," said Levigne, who faults NHTSA for not doing more to help the company correct the problem.

In statements made to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, Hangzhou Zhongce has denied that the tires are defective.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/27/auto...e_tire_recall/





Wider Sale Seen for Toothpaste Tainted in China
Walt Bogdanich

After federal health officials discovered last month that tainted Chinese toothpaste had entered the United States, they warned that it would most likely be found in discount stores.

In fact, the toothpaste has been distributed much more widely. Roughly 900,000 tubes containing a poison used in some antifreeze products have turned up in hospitals for the mentally ill, prisons, juvenile detention centers and even some hospitals serving the general population.

The toothpaste was handed out in dozens of state institutions, mostly in Georgia but also in North Carolina, according to state officials. Hospitals in South Carolina and Florida also reported receiving Chinese-made toothpaste, and a major national pharmaceutical distributor said it was recalling tainted Chinese toothpaste.

The Food and Drug Administration has advised consumers to discard all Chinese-made toothpaste, regardless of the brand.

State officials in Georgia and North Carolina said all the tainted tubes were being replaced with brands made outside China. The officials said there had been no reports of illnesses caused by the toothpaste.

Officials of the Food and Drug Administration said toothpaste with even small amounts of the bad ingredient, diethylene glycol, a syrupy poison, had a “low but meaningful risk of toxicity and injury” for children and people with kidney or liver disease.

“This stuff does not belong in toothpaste, period,” a spokesman for the drug agency, Doug Arbesfeld, said. “No Chinese toothpaste has come into the country since the end of May.”

Since the Panamanian government found Chinese toothpaste with diethylene glycol in May, countries from Latin America to West Africa to Japan have seized the toothpaste.

Panama last year inadvertently mixed the poison made in China into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine, killing at least 100 people, prosecutors there said.

Diethylene glycol is often used in Chinese toothpaste in place of its more expensive chemical cousin glycerin. Chinese regulators have said that toothpaste with small amounts of diethylene glycol is not harmful and that international concern is unjustified.

After the drug agency expressed concern about tainted toothpaste, the Georgia Department of Administrative Services checked to see whether Chinese toothpaste was being used by the state. The department found it in 83 prisons, 4 mental health centers and 4 juvenile detention centers, said Rick Beal, contracts manager for the department.

Mr. Beal said officials confiscated 5,877 remaining cases, each with 144 tubes, of the Springfresh brand. Tests showed the toothpaste had a diethylene glycol concentration of about 5 percent, he said.

The state bought the toothpaste for about 9 cents a tube in 2002. Mr. Beal said he did not know how many tubes had been used.

There are no reports of harm resulting from the toothpaste, bought from a distributor, American Amenities in Seattle.

“We do not know who their manufacturer from China was,” Mr. Beal said.

A lawyer for American Amenities, Jesse Lyon, said it had recalled all suspect shipments of the product and had decided to stop importing Chinese toothpaste. Mr. Lyon said he believed that American Amenities had about 30 institutional customers, with Georgia being the largest.

A spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Corrections, George Dudley, said his agency estimated that it bought 22,000 tubes of Pacific brand Chinese toothpaste with a small amount of diethylene glycol from Pacific Care Products in San Francisco.

Pacific Care did not respond to a request for comment, but an executive wrote to North Carolina officials that the toothpaste came from Amercare Products, also in Seattle. A spokeswoman for Amercare declined to comment.

Chinese toothpaste containing “trace amounts” of diethylene glycol has also been recalled from healthcare institutions by McKesson, a major pharmaceutical distributor and health services company, said a spokesman, James Larkin.

Mr. Larkin said although this particular brand, McKesson EverFRESH, was not on the drug agency’s list of contaminated toothpaste, McKesson asked a laboratory to test it. When small amounts of diethylene glycol turned up, the company recalled the product, he said.

“We went back through our records, and every customer that ever bought the product was contacted,” Mr. Larkin said.

He added that on short notice he could not determine how many customers had bought the product.

One institution that did was Florida Hospital Waterman, a 200-bed institution in Tavares, Fla.

“We pulled that product,” Bonnie Zimmerman of the hospital said.

Ms. Zimmerman said that the toothpaste that replaced it also came from China and it had “trace amounts” of diethylene glycol. It, too, was removed, she said.

In South Carolina, four hospitals in the Greenville Hospital System also removed Chinese toothpaste, even though its distributor said it did not have diethylene glycol, said John Mateka, executive director of materials management for the group.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/us/28tooth.html?hp





Viewing American Class Divisions Through Facebook and MySpace
Danah Boyd

Over the last six months, I've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Who goes where gets kinda sticky... probably because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.

I want to take a moment to make a meta point here. I have been traipsing through the country talking to teens and I've been seeing this transition for the past 6-9 months but I'm having a hard time putting into words. Americans aren't so good at talking about class and I'm definitely feeling that discomfort. It's sticky, it's uncomfortable, and to top it off, we don't have the language for marking class in a meaningful way. So this piece is intentionally descriptive, but in being so, it's also hugely problematic. I don't have the language to get at what I want to say, but I decided it needed to be said anyhow. I wish I could just put numbers in front of it all and be done with it, but instead, I'm going to face the stickiness and see if I can get my thoughts across. Hopefully it works.

For the academics reading this, I want to highlight that this is not an academic article. It is not trying to be. It is based on my observations in the field, but I'm not trying to situate or theorize what is going on. I've chosen terms meant to convey impressions, but I know that they are not precise uses of these terms. Hopefully, one day, I can get the words together to actually write an academic article about this topic, but I felt as though this is too important of an issue to sit on while I find the words. So I wrote it knowing that it would piss many off. The academic side of me feels extremely guilty about this; the activist side of me finds it too critical to go unacknowledged.


Enter the competition

When MySpace launched in 2003, it was primarily used by 20/30-somethings (just like Friendster before it). The bands began populating the site by early 2004 and throughout 2004, the average age slowly declined. It wasn't until late 2004 that teens really started appearing en masse on MySpace and 2005 was the year that MySpace became the "in thing" for teens.

Facebook launched in 2004 as a Harvard-only site. It slowly expanded to welcome people with .edu accounts from a variety of different universities. In mid-2005, Facebook opened its doors to high school students, but it wasn't that easy to get an account because you needed to be invited. As a result, those who were in college tended to invite those high school students that they liked. Facebook was strongly framed as the "cool" thing that college students did. So, if you want to go to college (and particularly a top college), you wanted to get on Facebook badly. Even before high school networks were possible, the moment seniors were accepted to a college, they started hounding the college sysadmins for their .edu account. The message was clear: college was about Facebook.

For all of 2005 and most of 2006, MySpace was the cool thing for high school teens and Facebook was the cool thing for college students. This is not to say that MySpace was solely high school or Facebook solely college, but there was a dominating age division that played out in the cultural sphere.

When Facebook opened to everyone last September, it became relatively easy for any high school student to join (and then they simply had to get permission to join their high school network). This meant that many more high school teens did join, much to the chagrin and horror of college students who had already begun writing about their lack of interest in having HS students on "their" site. Still, even with the rise of high school students, Facebook was framed as being about college. This was what was in the press. This was what college students said. Facebook is what the college kids did. Not surprisingly, college-bound high schoolers desperately wanted in.

In addition to the college framing, the press coverage of MySpace as dangerous and sketchy alienated "good" kids. Facebook seemed to provide an ideal alternative. Parents weren't nearly as terrified of Facebook because it seemed "safe" thanks to the network-driven structure. (Of course, I've seen more half-naked, drink-carrying high school students on Facebook than on MySpace, but we won't go there.)

As this past school year progressed, the division around usage became clearer. In trying to look at it, I realized that it was primarily about class.

Socio-economic divisions

In sociology, Nalini Kotamraju has argued that constructing arguments around "class" is extremely difficult in the United States. Terms like "working class" and "middle class" and "upper class" get all muddled quickly. She argues that class divisions in the United States have more to do with lifestyle and social stratification than with income. In other words, all of my anti-capitalist college friends who work in cafes and read Engels are not working class just because they make $14K a year and have no benefits. Class divisions in the United States have more to do with social networks (the real ones, not FB/MS), social capital, cultural capital, and attitudes than income. Not surprisingly, other demographics typically discussed in class terms are also a part of this lifestyle division. Social networks are strongly connected to geography, race, and religion; these are also huge factors in lifestyle divisions and thus "class."

I'm not doing justice to her arguments but it makes sense. My friends who are making $14K in cafes are not of the same class as the immigrant janitor in Oakland just because the share the same income bracket. Their lives are quite different. Unfortunately, with this framing, there aren't really good labels to demarcate the class divisions that do exist. For this reason, I will attempt to delineate what we see on social network sites in stereotypical, descriptive terms meant to evoke an image.

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

In order to demarcate these two groups, let's call the first group of teens "hegemonic teens" and the second group "subaltern teens." (Yes, I know that these words have academic and political valence. I couldn't find a good set of terms so feel free to suggest alternate labels.) These terms are sloppy at best because the division isn't clear, but it should at least give us terms with which to talk about the two groups.

The division is cleanest in communities where the predator panic hit before MySpace became popular. In much of the midwest, teens heard about Facebook and MySpace at the same time. They were told that MySpace was bad while Facebook was key for college students seeking to make friends at college. I go into schools where the school is split between the Facebook users and the MySpace users. On the coasts and in big cities, things are more murky than elsewhere. MySpace became popular through the bands and fans dynamic before the predator panic kicked in. It's popularity on the coasts and in the cities predated Facebook's launch in high schools. Many hegemonic teens are still using MySpace because of their connections to participants who joined in the early days, yet they too are switching and tend to maintain accounts on both. For the hegemonic teens in the midwest, there wasn't a MySpace to switch from so the "switch" is happening much faster. None of the teens are really switching from Facebook to MySpace, although there are some hegemonic teens who choose to check out MySpace to see what happens there even though their friends are mostly on Facebook.

Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and "so middle school." They prefer the "clean" look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is "so lame." What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as "glitzy" or "bling" or "fly" (or what my generation would call "phat") by subaltern teens. Terms like "bling" come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I'm sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but aesthetics are more than simply the "eye of the beholder" - they are culturally narrated and replicated. That "clean" or "modern" look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I'm drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

I should note here that aesthetics do divide MySpace users. The look and feel that is acceptable amongst average Latino users is quite different from what you see the subculturally-identified outcasts using. Amongst the emo teens, there's a push for simple black/white/grey backgrounds and simplistic layouts. While I'm using the term "subaltern teens" to lump together non-hegemonic teens, the lifestyle divisions amongst the subalterns are quite visible on MySpace through the aesthetic choices of the backgrounds. The aesthetics issue is also one of the forces that drives some longer-term users away from MySpace.

While teens on Facebook all know about MySpace, not all MySpace users have heard of Facebook. In particular, subaltern teens who go to school exclusively with other subaltern teens are not likely to have heard of it. Subaltern teens who go to more mixed-class schools see Facebook as "what the good kids do" or "what the preps do." They have various labels for these hegemonic teens but they know the division, even if they don't have words for it. Likewise, in these types of schools, the hegemonic teens see MySpace as "where the bad kids go." "Good" and "bad" seem to be the dominant language used to divide hegemonic and subaltern teens in mixed-class environments. At the same time, most schools aren't actually that mixed.

To a certain degree, the lack of familiarity amongst certain subaltern kids is not surprising. Teens from poorer backgrounds who are on MySpace are less likely to know people who go to universities. They are more likely to know people who are older than them, but most of their older friends, cousins, and co-workers are on MySpace. It's the cool working class thing and it's the dominant SNS at community colleges. These teens are more likely to be interested in activities like shows and clubs and they find out about them through MySpace. The subaltern teens who are better identified as "outsiders" in a hegemonic community tend to be very aware of Facebook. Their choice to use MySpace instead of Facebook is a rejection of the hegemonic values (and a lack of desire to hang out with the preps and jocks even online).

Class divisions in military use

A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because the division in the military reflects the division in high schools. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook. Facebook is extremely popular in the military, but it's not the SNS of choice for 18-year old soldiers, a group that is primarily from poorer, less educated communities. They are using MySpace. The officers, many of whom have already received college training, are using Facebook. The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military. I can't help but wonder if the reason for this goes beyond the purported concerns that those in the military are leaking information or spending too much time online or soaking up too much bandwidth with their MySpace usage.

MySpace is the primary way that young soldiers communicate with their peers. When I first started tracking soldiers' MySpace profiles, I had to take a long deep breath. Many of them were extremely pro-war, pro-guns, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, pro-killing, and xenophobic as hell. Over the last year, I've watched more and more profiles emerge from soldiers who aren't quite sure what they are doing in Iraq. I don't have the data to confirm whether or not a significant shift has occurred but it was one of those observations that just made me think. And then the ban happened. I can't help but wonder if part of the goal is to cut off communication between current soldiers and the group that the military hopes to recruit. Many young soldiers' profiles aren't public so it's not about making a bad public impression. That said, young soldiers tend to have reasonably large networks because they tend to accept friend requests of anyone that they knew back home which means that they're connecting to almost everyone from their high school. Many of these familiar strangers write comments supporting them. But what happens if the soldiers start to question why they're in Iraq? And if this is witnessed by high school students from working class communities who the Army intends to recruit?

Thoughts and meta thoughts

I have been reticent about writing about this dynamic even though I've been tracking it for a good six months now. I don't have the language for what I'm seeing and I'm concerned about how it's going to be interpreted. I can just see the logic: if society's "good" kids are going to Facebook and the "bad" kids are going to MySpace, clearly MySpace is the devil, right? ::shudder:: It's so not that easy. Given a lack of language for talking about this, my choice of "hegemonic" and "subaltern" was intended to at least insinuate a different way of looking at this split.

The division around MySpace and Facebook is just another way in which technology is mirroring societal values. Embedded in that is a challenge to a lot of our assumptions about who does what. The "good" kids are doing more "bad" things than we are willing to acknowledge (because they're the pride and joy of upwardly mobile parents). And, guess what? They're doing those same bad things online and offline. At the same time, the language and style of the "bad" kids offends most upwardly mobile adults. We see this offline as well. I've always been fascinated watching adults walk to the other side of the street when a group of black kids sporting hip-hop style approach. The aesthetics alone offend and most privileged folks project the worst ideas onto any who don that style. When I see a divide like this, I worry because it reproduced the idea that the "good" kids are good and that Facebook participation is good.

Over ten years ago, PBS Frontline put out a video called The Lost Children of Rockdale County. The film certainly has its issues but it does a brilliant job of capturing how, given complete boredom and a desire for validation, many of the "good" kids will engage in some of the most shocking behaviors... and their parents are typically unaware. By and large, I've found that parents try to curtail such activities by restricting youth even more. This doesn't stop the desire for attention and thus the behaviors continue, but they get pushed further underground and parents become less in-touch with their "good" kids.

While I think it's important to acknowledge that some of the "good" kids aren't that good, I don't want to imply that the inverse is true. Many of them are. But many of the subaltern teens that I talk with have their heads on much tighter than the hegemonic teens. The hegemonic teens do know how to put on a show for most adults (making it more fun for me to interview them and try to work through the walls that they initially offer me). As a society, we have strong class divisions and we project these values onto our kids. MySpace and Facebook seem to be showcasing this division quite well. My hope in writing this out is to point out that many of our assumptions are problematic and the internet often reinforces our views instead of challenging them.

People often ask me if I'm worried about teens today. The answer is yes, but it's not because of social network sites. With the hegemonic teens, I'm very worried about the stress that they're under, the lack of mobility and healthy opportunities for play and socialization, and the hyper-scheduling and surveillance. I'm worried about their unrealistic expectations for becoming rich and famous, their lack of worth ethic after being pampered for so long, and the lack of opportunities that many of them have to even be economically stable let alone better off than their parents. I'm worried about how locking teens indoors coupled with a fast food/junk food advertising machine has resulted in a decrease in health levels across the board which will just get messy as they are increasingly unable to afford health insurance. When it comes to ostracized teens, I'm worried about the reasons why society has ostracized them and how they will react to ongoing criticism from hegemonic peers. I cringe every time I hear of another Columbine, another Virgina Tech, another site of horror when an outcast teen lashes back at the hegemonic values of society.

I worry about the lack of opportunities available to poor teens from uneducated backgrounds. I'm worried about how Wal-Mart Nation has destroyed many of the opportunities for meaningful working class labor as these youth enter the workforce. I'm worried about what a prolonged war will mean for them. I'm worried about how they've been told that to succeed, they must be a famous musician or sports player. I'm worried about how gangs provide the only meaningful sense of community that many of these teens will ever know.

Given the state of what I see in all sorts of neighborhoods, I'm amazed at how well teens are coping and I think that technology has a lot to do with that. Teens are using social network sites to build community and connect with their peers. They are creating publics for socialization. And through it, they are showcasing all of the good, bad, and ugly of today's teen life. Much of it isn't pretty, but it ain't pretty offline either. Still, it makes my heart warm when I see something creative or engaged or reflective. There is good out there too.

It breaks my heart to watch a class divide play out in the technology. I shouldn't be surprised - when orkut grew popular in India, the caste system was formalized within the system by the users. But there's something so strange about watching a generation splice themselves in two based on class divisions or lifestyles or whatever you want to call these socio-structural divisions.

In the 70s, Paul Willis analyzed British working class youth and he wrote a book called Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. He argued that working class teens will reject hegemonic values because it's the only way to continue to be a part of the community that they live in. In other words, if you don't know that you will succeed if you make a run at jumping class, don't bother - you'll lose all of your friends and community in the process. His analysis has such strong resonance in American society today. I just wish I knew how to fix it.

I clearly don't have the language to comfortably talk about what's going on, but I think that this issue is important and needs to be considered. I feel as though the implications are huge. Marketers have already figured this out - they know who to market to where. Policy creators have figured this out - they know how to control different populations based on where they are networking. Have social workers figured it out? Or educators? What does it mean that our culture of fear has further divided a generation? What does it mean that, in a society where we can't talk about class, we can see it play out online? And what does it mean in a digital world where no one's supposed to know you're a dog, we can guess your class background based on the tools you use?

Anyhow, I don't know where to go with this, but I wanted to get it out there. So here it is. MySpace and Facebook are new representations of the class divide in American youth. Le sigh.

Methodolological notes

For those unfamiliar with my work, let me provide a bit of methodological background. I have been engaged in ethnographic research on social network sites since February 2003 when I began studying the practices that emerged on Friendster. I followed the launch and early adoption of numerous social network sites, including Tribe.net, LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Dodgeball, and Orkut. In late 2004, I decided to move away from studying social network sites to studying youth culture just in time for youth to flock to MySpace.

The practice of 'ethnography' is hard to describe in a bounded form, but ethnography is basically about living and breathing a particular culture, its practices, and its individuals. There are some countables. For example, I have analyzed over 10,000 MySpace profiles, clocked over 2000 hours surfing and observing what happens on MySpace, and formally interviewed 90 teens in 7 states with a variety of different backgrounds and demographics. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. I ride buses to observe teens; I hang out at fast food joints and malls. I talk to parents, teachers, marketers, politicians, pastors, and technology creators. I read, I observe, I document.

One of the biggest problems with studying youth culture is that it's a moving target, constantly shifting based on a variety of social and cultural forces. While I had been keeping an eye on Facebook simply because of my long-term interest in social network sites, I had to really start taking it seriously in the fall of 2006 when teens started telling me about how they were leaving MySpace to join Facebook or joining Facebook as their first social network site.

While social network sites are in vogue, not everyone uses them. When PEW collected data in December 2005, it found that 55% of American teens 12-17 admitted to having a SNS profile in front of their parents. 70% of girls 15-17. These numbers are low, but we don't know how low. In the field, I have found that everyone knows about them and has an opinion of them. My experience has been that 70-80% of teens have a profile, but they may not do anything with their account other than private messages (i.e. glorified email). The percentage who are truly active is more like 50. Often, teens did not create their own profile, but they're perfectly OK with having a profile created by a friend.

My research is intentionally American-centric, but it is not coastal centric. I have done formal interviews in California, Washington, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts. When I do this, I do not capture parents' income but I do get parents' education level and job. In each of these communities, I have spent time roaming the streets and talking informally with people of all ages. I have analyzed profiles from all 50 states (and DC and Puerto Rico). I use the high school data from these profiles and juxtapose them with federal information on high school voucher numbers to get a sense of the SES of the school. I have spent time in cities, suburbs, small towns, and some rural regions. There are weaknesses to my data collection. I have spent too little time in rural environments and too little time in the deep south. How I find teens to formally interview varies based on region, but it is not completely random. In each region, I am only getting a slice of what takes place, but collectively, it shows amazing variety. The MySpace profiles that I analyze are random. I do not have access to Facebook profiles, although I have spent an excessive amount of time browsing high schools to see what kind of numbers show up, even if I can't see the actual profiles. Again, none of this is perfect, but it helps me paint a qualitative portrait of what's going on.
http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html





How to Have Fun With Your Iron Moutain Guy!
Michael R. Farnum

Want to know how to have fun with the Iron Mountain person that picks up your tapes? Here's a funny story (at least I think it is funny).

In my last job we used Iron Mountain to pick up our backup tapes. Except for a few weeks, the same guy picked up our tapes from the first day I setup the service over four years ago. So we were pretty familiar with him, and he knew everyone at the front desk where we left the tapes (in case you are wondering, the front desk was a secure place, with a locked door and windows surrounding the desk).

There was a restroom on the opposite side of the hall from the front desk, and it was the closest restroom to my office, so I frequented the area quite a bit (what can I say... I drink a lot of water). Anyway, I happened to be in the restroom one day, and the our Iron Mountain guy came in carrying the case that held our backup tapes. Being a hygenic fellow, he set the tapes down away from all the stalls (but not too far away from him), then proceeded to do his business (I didn't realize that this was kind of embarrassing when I started writing it).

He did not see me when he came into the restroom, and he didn't look up when I started washing my hands (again, a little embarrassing). Here's where he made his mistake. The sink was between him and where he set down the tape case. So when I finished washing my hands, I quickly knelt down and grabbed the tape case as I was exiting the bathroom. I stepped to the side of the door and calmly waited to see what would happen.

Well, in about 5 seconds he came running out of the restroom with an expression that was a mixture of worry, rage, and confusion. He caught sight of me quickly, standing there with my best evil grin on my face. I started laughing, and the relief was evident. Of course, he was a little aggravted, and obviously his cleanliness was overridden by his job duties, because he had to go back in and wash his hands (I kept the case until he was finished). When he came back out, he was a lot calmer. But you could see that he was rethinking his process. I never comfirmed it, but I am pretty sure from that day forward he went to the restroom BEFORE he picked up our tapes.
http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/5765





Ridgefield Woman Wins Robotics Award
Susan Tuz

Bala Krishnamurthy, who won an international award for technology development, talks about her career in robotics.

RIDGEFIELD, CONN. -- Her years as a pioneer in the field of electric and hydraulic industrial robotics have earned resident Bala Krishnamurthy an award from the Robotic Industry Association.

Krishnamurthy is the first woman to receive the Joseph Engelberger Robotics Award for Technology Development since the international award's inception in 1977.

"Dad always told me to never say I couldn't do something because I'm a woman," Krishnamurthy said. "He always told me I could do anything my two brothers could do.

"I just wish he was still around to see me receive the award," she related. "He would have been so proud."

The award was bestowed on her June 13 at the International Symposium on Robotics.

"The RIA broke the glass ceiling this year, and Bala's receipt of the award is very well deserved," said Joseph Engelberger, for whom the award is named.

"Bala developed software for the HelpMate Robot that is used at Danbury and other hospitals around the country," Engelberger said. "Even today, there isn't any navigation system in robotics as strong as the one she wrote."

For over 25 years, Krishnamurthy has designed and developed a range of software in programming languages, network systems and related technologies that have contributed to the growth of robotics.

Her early years in robotics were spent at Unimation Incorporated in Danbury. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, she led the team that developed software that allows completely autonomous courier robots to navigate through hospitals and a 3-D range sensor for robots at HelpMate Robotics Incorporated.

"When I started working in robotics, all we had was robot arms that were bolted to the floor. That was 1979," Krishnamurthy recalled.

"Those arms were used in the welding of car parts on production lines and moving large pallets," she explained. "That's where robots started out."

Born in India, Krishnamurthy came to the United States in 1968 as a young bride of 18. She went to college in India for two years and went on to earn her bachelor of arts in mathematics from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

In 1973, she applied at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey to earn a master of arts degree in applied mathematics and a masters in science in computer science.

"I applied for a fellowship at Stevens and was told women don't finish their studies," Krishnamurthy related. "They were reluctant to award it to me. But I persuaded them.

"Then I became pregnant with my first child and had to take a break in my studies," she said. "It was embarrassing. But I went back and completed my advanced degrees."

Five years later, Krishnamurthy entered into an agreement to work for Unimation for less than the software development job was advertised for. Having not worked for five years while she cared for her two children, she got into Unimation by offering to take the lower pay.

"That was 1979. By 1986, I had almost quadrupled my salary," Krishnamurthy said. "It was a good move."

At Unimation, Krishnamurthy helped develop a robotic arm that could sort candy and place individual candy pieces in boxes for sale.

In 1986, she changed companies going to work for TRC (Transition Research Operations). There she helped develop a robot that scrubbed floors in industrial and school settings. Those robots were used at Bethel Middle School.

"I was excited," she said. "I had helped build a robot that moved around in the floor space you and I walk in," moving past arm robots like those used in car manufacturing.

For this breakthrough, Krishnamurthy had developed programs that could not only navigate in 3-D space but could avoid running into things in that floor space.

She worked on projects in navigation for robots that were used to move between barrels of radioactive waste testing the air for any leaks of waste in nuclear power plants.

Perhaps her most advanced design was that of the HelpMate, the robot used in hospitals to run errands to free up nurses' time.

"Bala used vision, ultrasound, navigation programs in the HelpMate," Engelberger said. "It is able to ride the elevator by itself. It is programed with a floor map of the entire hospital and can get through cluttered hospital halls. It runs the errands of going to, say, the pharmacy, letting nurses stay with their patients where they belong."

The HelpMate robot, which looks like a large refrigerator, works with people. It communicates -- telling you it's about to move, if its way is blocked, and calling for an elevator. It has a screen for nurses to program items that are needed so the robot can run errands.

By 1997, Krishnamurthy founded her own robotics consulting company, Aeolean Inc., in Danbury. She has produced more than a dozen technical articles and reports and was a member of NASA's Office of Exploration Systems research proposal review panel for Human and Robotic Technology in 2004.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/st...&source=tabbox





Lighting a Fire Under Hard Drives
Phil Berardelli

In the race to make computers more powerful, magnets may be out and lasers may be in. Ultra-rapid pulses of polarized light fired from lasers, new tests show, can outperform conventional magnetic data writers by as much as two orders of magnitude. The technology could form the foundation of a new generation of computers that link lasers to their hard drives.

Long gone are the days when computers were required only to make mathematical calculations. Even modest desktop models are now expected to handle streaming audio and video from multiple Web sites simultaneously, for example. Those functions require huge amounts of data to be transferred quickly to and from the hard drive. But current data-processing systems, which use magnets to write and read the binary code that constitutes computer language, can only work so fast. Some users' needs have begun to bump up against the limitations of this technology. If computers are to become faster, they'll require a different data-transfer system, and the awesome promise of quantum computing remains years away.

Researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands think they've found another candidate. In laboratory experiments, they used laser light to write data to a magnetic hard drive at very high speeds. The technique works because the photons transmitted by the laser actually carry angular momentum, allowing them to interact with the hard drive. Also, each laser pulse heats a tiny space on the disk just enough to make changing its polarity--thereby storing a bit of data--a little easier. The key is reversing the polarity of the laser pulses, which can produce the equivalent of either a 1 or a 0 of binary code on the disk storage medium.

The researchers managed to transfer data at intervals of about 40 femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second, about 100 times faster than conventional magnetic transfers, the researchers report in a paper accepted for publication by Physical Review Letters. One drawback is that the footprint of the laser pulse on the disk is about 5 microns wide, which is considerably larger than the footprint produced by existing data-transfer systems. But physics doctoral candidate and co-author Daniel Stanciu says the team is working on improvements in the technology that should reduce the footprint's size to about 10 nanometers, and he expects to see a working prototype within a decade.

"This is one of the most exciting stories in magnetics," says physicist Julius Hohlfeld of Seagate Research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Lots of other researchers have tried to employ polarized laser light to write data, he says, but everyone failed because the magnetic alloys they used for the storage medium did not work. But the disk made of gadolinium, iron, and cobalt that Stanciu's team used has succeeded. The next challenge, Hohlfeld says, will be to find a relatively cheap laser technology that can fire pulses lasting less than 100 femtoseconds.
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi...ull/2007/628/3





Five Ideas That Will Reinvent Modern Computing
Cade Metz and Jamie Bsales

What's in the works at the leading high-tech research labs? Some awfully cool stuff—to say the least. This spring, we checked in on five of our favorites—Bell Labs, HP Labs, IBM Research, Microsoft Research, and the granddaddy of them all: the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the former Xerox facility that spawned Ethernet, laser printing , the GUI operating system, and so much more.

These research powerhouses have gone through a fair number of changes in recent years—PARC is now a completely independent operation—but they continue to push the outside of the high-tech envelope. Here, we profile a particularly clever project from each one, showcasing five ideas that reinvent everything from pointing devices to artificial intelligence. Some could bear fruit in a matter of months. Others might need years. But all will pique your interest. — next: IMAX At Home

IMAX at Home
You thought LAN parties were fun? Get ready for the projector party. At HP Labs, Nelson Chang and Niranjan Damera-Venkata have spent the past few years developing a technology that reinvents the notion of a home theater. With Pluribus, you can build a cineplex-quality image using a handful of ordinary, $1,000 PC projectors—in less time than it takes to pop the popcorn.

For a mere $12,000, you could build a home theater that stands up to the $100,000 image at local movie houses. Better yet, you could throw a projector party. Twelve friends show up with 12 off-the-shelf projectors, and suddenly you've got a wall-size image none of you could hope to produce on your own. And this mega-display is good for more than just movies. It might be even better for 3D games.

Chang and Damera-Venkata describe their project as "cluster computing for projectors." In much the same way a cluster pools the resources of multiple PCs, duplicating the effect of a supercomputer, Pluribus pools the resources of multiple projectors. "We can take several less-expensive projectors and create a super-projector," says Chang. "Automatically accounting for differences between each device, it builds a single, stable image."

Pluribus can seamlessly "tile" images from multiple projectors, fitting them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Or it can superimpose images from multiple projectors, putting one atop the other. This vastly improves resolution, sharpness, brightness, contrast, and more, but it also gives you redundancy. If one projector breaks, you still have your full image. The real trick with Pluribus, however, is that it builds these über-images so quickly. You needn't spend hours adjusting the physical position of your projectors. You simply plop them down, plug them in, and point them in the general direction you'd like them to point. Pluribus does the rest, in minutes.

The system consists of an ordinary PC workstation, a camera, and some ingenious C code. In essence, the camera grabs a snapshot of the many images streaming from your projectors and feeds that snapshot back to the software. The software then adjusts each image so they all fit together, using Chang and Venkata's algorithms—mathematical models that stretch the limits of modern computer science. "People didn't think it could be done," Damera-Venkata says.

A gaming PC with dueling graphics cards can line up 12 projectors in as little as 5 minutes, producing a 16-by-9 foot image with 4,096-by-2,304 resolution. But the system can scale up to even larger images. As you add more PCs, you could, in theory, add as many projectors as you like. A true home theater is closer than you think. — next: The Midair Mouse

The Midair Mouse
Your brand-new wireless mouse? That solves only half the problem. Sure, you're untethered, free to drive your PC from afar. But you still need a flat surface. You may be camped out on the couch or curled up in bed, but you're never more than half an arm's length from an end table or a lap desk.

Soap goes one step further: It works in midair. With this new-age pointing device, now under development at Microsoft Research, you can navigate your PC using nothing but a bare hand. You can lose the end table and the lap desk. You can even lose the couch and the bed, driving your machine while walking across the room. It's a bit like the Wii remote—only more accurate and far easier to use.

Dreamed up by Patrick Baudisch, part of Microsoft's adaptive systems and interaction research group and an affiliate professor of computer science at the University of Washington, Soap is essentially a wireless optical mouse surrounded by a fabric hull. Think of it as a beanbag with some hardware inside. As you push the fabric back and forth, across the face of the mouse, the cursor moves on your PC display.

It's called Soap because it spins in your hand like a wet bar of soap in the shower. "Basically, it's a mouse and a mouse pad in the same device," Baudisch says. "But instead of moving your mouse over your mouse pad, you move your mouse pad over your mouse."

Baudisch built his original prototype using an optical mouse he found lying around the lab and a few household items he picked up from a local RiteAid. He simply pried open his pointing device, pulled out the innards, and remounted them inside an empty bottle of hand sanitizer. Yes, an empty bottle of hand sanitizer—something that was transparent and would easily rotate inside his fabric hull. Once he pulled the hull around the bottle—and slipped some lubricant between the two—he had a mouse that worked in midair.

Because the bottle moves independently of the hull, the mouse can sense relative motion, much as it does when dragged across a tabletop. "The optical sensor looks outward, so it can see the fabric moving," Baudish continues, "and that's all the input you need." It's such a simple idea, but the results are astounding.

Soap is so accurate that you can use it to play a high-speed first-person shooter. At this year's Computer/Human Interaction (CHI) conference in San Jose, California, Baudisch played his favorite games standing up, in open space, without a tabletop in sight. The only restriction was that he couldn't rotate upward (that is, he couldn't make his 3D character do a back flip).

Baudisch plans to add that extra degree of movement, and he hopes to eliminate the lubricant inside the hull—a feature less than conducive to mass production. But his Soap prototype works today, and it has the potential to give PC users a whole new level of physical freedom.

"You get the same functionality of a mouse," Baudisch says. "And it works with any PC or display—whether it's a pocket display or a wall display. The difference is that you can use it in the living room. Or in the classroom. Or even on the subway." — next: The Perfect Machine

The Perfect Machine
Yes, we're still waiting for a full-fledged quantum computer—a machine that uses the mind-bending principles of quantum physics to achieve processing speeds even today's supercomputers have no hope of reaching. But at Bell Labs, there's a new quantum computing project in the works, a method that could finally make this long-held dream a reality. "We're still 10 to 20 years away from a quantum computer," says Bells Labs' Steven Simon. "But we're getting closer and closer."

First proposed in the early eighties by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, the quantum computer is an idea that defies common sense. Whereas today's computers obey the classical physics that govern our everyday lives, a quantum computer relies on the seemingly magical physics associated with very small particles, such as atoms.

With a classical computer, transistors store bits of information, and each bit has a value of either 1 or 0. Turn a transistor on, for instance, and it represents a 1. Turn it off and it holds a 0. With a quantum computer, the classical bit gives way to something called a quantum bit, or qubit. A qubit is stored not in a transistor or some other classical system, but in a quantum system, such as the spin of an atom's nucleus. An "up" spin might indicate a 1, and a "down" spin might indicate a 0.

The trick is that, thanks to the superposition principle of quantum mechanics, a quantum system can exist in multiple states at the same time. At any given moment, the spin of a nucleus can be both up and down, holding values of both a 1 and a 0. Put two qubits together and they can hold four values simultaneously (00, 01, 10, and 11). That makes a quantum computer exponentially faster than the classical model—fast enough, for instance, to crack today's most secure encryption algorithms.

But there's a problem. When a quantum system interacts with the classical world, it decoheres: It loses its ability to exist simultaneously in multiple states, collapsing into a single state. This means that when you read a group of qubits, they become classical bits, capable of holding only a single value.

Over the past decade, researchers have proposed several ways of getting around this problem, and some have actually built quantum computers—on a very small scale. But we've yet to see one that does more than basic calculations. Bell Labs has long been a leader in quantum computing research, and today, along with Microsoft Research and a few other labs across the country, it's working on a brand-new method that could finally make the breakthrough. Bell calls it "topological quantum computing."

In the simplest of terms, Bell researchers are tying quantum systems into knots. "In very exotic circumstances, such as very low temperature and high magnetic field, we're essentially grabbing onto the particles and moving them around each other, forming knots in what we call the space-time path," Simon explains. "If you can form the right knot, you can do the right quantum computation."

In short, these knots are a great way of solving the decoherence problem. With a topological quantum computer, your information corresponds to the topology of the knot you make, and these topologies aren't as easily disturbed as ordinary quantum systems. Will this method work? That's yet to be seen. But it certainly has potential. "Even though this approach is well behind the others—no one has even built a single qubit—many believe that it will eventually come out in front. Unlike the others, it avoids decoherence." — next: Extreme Peer-to-Peer

Extreme Peer-to-Peer
In 1543, Nicolas Copernicus forever changed the way we view the cosmos. He put the Sun at the center of things—not the Earth. Today, at the famed Palo Alto Research Center, Van Jacobson hopes to lead a similar revolution, one that forever changes the way we view PC networking. He aims to put the data at the center of things—not the server.

Jacobson likes to tell a story about a video that NBC posted to the Web during the 2006 Winter Olympics. The video showed U.S. skier Bode Miller as he was famously disqualified during the Alpine combined event, and within seconds of its posting, there was severe congestion on the router downstream from NBC's servers. At that moment, the router held 6,000 copies of the same video. Six thousand people had made 6,000 individual TCP/IP connections to the same server, and the network had no way of knowing that most of those connections were redundant. It couldn't understand that the 6,000 videos were identical. It couldn't do anything to relieve the congestion.

The classic point-to-point networking model is fundamentally flawed. Today, if you want a piece of data from the network, you almost always need a direct connection to the data's original source—the server. That's true even if the data has already been downloaded to a device that's much closer. So often, tapping into a distant server wastes time. And if the server is unavailable, you're out of luck entirely.

With a project called Content-Centric Networking, or CCN, Jacobson and his team of PARC networking gurus are turning this model on its head. They're building a networking system that revolves around the data itself, a system in which a router can actually identify that Bode Miller video and act accordingly. Under the CCN model, you don't tell the network that you're interested in connecting to a server. You tell it that you want a particular piece of data. You broadcast a request to all the machines on the network, and if one of them has what you're looking for, it responds. "You can authenticate and validate information using the information itself—independent of whom you got it from," says Jacobson. "So if you want The New York Times, you can pick it up from any machine that has a copy."

It's a bit like BitTorrent, but on a grander scale. CCN can improve everything from the public Internet to your private LAN. It can get you that Bode Miller video even if NBC's servers go down. But it's also an efficient means of keeping your calendar synchronized. You needn't set up three separate links between your PC, laptop, and a handheld. Each device simply broadcasts a request for calendar updates to all the others—wirelessly, say. Initially, Jacobson plans to roll out CCN on top of today's networking infrastructure—in much the same way BitTorrent was deployed across the existing Internet. But eventually, he wants to push these new ideas down to the Net's grass roots, to change in a fundamental way how machines speak to one another at the packet level. Yes, he's facing a mammoth task. But so did Copernicus. — next: The Man-Made Brain

The Man-Made Brain
It could be the most ambitious computer science project of all time. At IBM's Almaden Research Center, just south of South Francisco, Dharmendra Modha and his team are chasing the holy grail of artificial intelligence. They aren't looking for ways of mimicking the human brain, they're looking to build one—neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse.

"We're trying to take the entire range of qualitative neuroscientific data and integrate it into a single unified computing platform," says Modha. "The idea is to re-create the ‘wetware' brain using hardware and software."

The project is particularly daunting when you consider that modern neurology has yet to explain how the brain actually works. Yes, we know the fundamentals. But we can't be sure of every biological transaction, all the way down to the cellular level. Three years into this Cognitive Computing project, Modha's team isn't just building a brain from an existing blueprint. They're helping to create the blueprint as they build. It's reverse engineering of the highest order.

Their first goal is to build a "massively parallel cortical simulator" that re-creates the brain of a mouse, an organ 3,500 times less complex than a human brain (if you count each individual neuron and synapse). But even this is an undertaking of epic proportions. A mouse brain houses over 16 million neurons, with more than 128 billion synapses running between them. Even a partial simulation stretches the boundaries of modern hardware. No, we don't mean desktop hardware. We're talkin' supercomputers.

So far, the team has been able to fashion a kind of digital mouse brain that needs about 6 seconds to simulate 1 second of real thinking time. That's still a long way from a true mouse-size simulation, and it runs on a Blue Gene/L supercomputer with 8,192 processors, four terabytes of memory, and 1 Gbps of bandwidth running to and from each chip. "Even a mouse-scale cortical simulation places an extremely heavy load on a supercomputer," Modha explains. "We're leveraging IBM's technological resources to the limit."

Written with ordinary C code, this initial simulation is a remarkable proof of concept. As neuroscience and computing power continue to advance, Modha and his team are confident they can build cortical simulators of even greater complexity. And as they do, they hope to advance neuroscience even further, learning more and more about the inner workings of the brain and getting closer and closer to their ultimate goal.

Once they've simulated a mouse brain in real time, the team plans on tackling a rat cortex, which is about three and a half times larger. And then a cat brain, which is ten times larger than that. And so on, until they've built a cortical simulator on a human scale.

What's that good for? Anything and everything. "What we're seeking with cognitive computing is a universal cognitive mechanism, something that can give rise to the entire range of mental phenomena exhibited by humans," says Modha. "That is the ultimate goal." — next: Milestones of the Future

Milestones of the Future
Want a list of all the groundbreaking technologies due over the next decade? Tough luck. We've got neither the time nor the space. But we can give you the milestones—the 13 technologies guaranteed to change the world between now and 2020.

Summer 2007
The Real Quad-Core
AMD releases the first single-chip quad-core CPU. Code-named Barcelona, it promises 20 to 50 percent better performance than the competing multichip design from you-know-who.

Late 2007
Hello, OLED
Sony introduces the first OLED (organic light-emitting diode) television. It's too small and too expensive for mass consumption, but early adopters love its 3mm profile and 1,000,000-to-1 contrast ratio.

2008
Like Wi-Fi—but Everywhere
Carriers launch the first WiMAX services in the U.S., giving major metro areas wireless access that rivals the speeds of Wi-Fi. The difference? No more hot spots. It's everywhere you go.

2008
Eight-Core and More
Intel unveils an eight-core processor and completely revamps its Core architecture, moving the memory controller and graphics circuitry from distinct chipsets onto the CPU itself.

2010
So Long, Laser Printer
The first Memjet ink-based printers hit the market, delivering 60 pages per minute at a reasonable cost per page. The trick: multiple print heads that span the entire width of the paper you're printing on.

2010
The High-Def DVR
Seagate releases a 3.5-inch hard drive that stores 3 terabytes of data. That's 3,000 gigabytes. We're talking about a digital video recorder that records nothing but high-def video.

2011
Can You Say 4G?
Fourth-generation cellular networks debut in the United States. The LTE (Long Term Evolution) standard doubles the throughput of 3G networks, offering 3 to 4 Mbps to real-world users.

2011
Chips Go Optical
IBM perfects a chip for mainframes and other high-end machines that uses optical connections instead of copper. Moving photons instead of electrons improves data transfer speeds eightfold.

2015
A Cure for Jersey Drivers
The first cars equipped with Motorola's MotoDrive technology roll off the assembly line. Able to calculate their speed and position relative to other vehicles, these cars can automatically avoid accidents.

2016
HDTV Is Obsolete
Ultra High Definition Television (UHDTV) debuts with a resolution of 7,680-by-4,320 and 22 speakers of surround sound, dwarfing today's HDTVs, which top out at 1,920-by-1,080.

2016
Power Off, Memory On
Manufacturers use carbon nanotubes to offer NRAM (nonvolatile random-access memory). Unlike today's SDRAM and flash memory technologies, it can hold information even when you lose power.

2019
Wash 'N' Wear iPods
Flexible, washable OLED screens hit the market. That means laptops that roll up like place mats—not to mention smartphone and music-player displays built right into your clothing.

2020
Offices Everywhere
Wall-sized displays made of low-power polymers and improved video-conferencing technologies let groups of home-based workers interact as if they were sitting face to face.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0%2C18...47447%2C00.asp





Asia to Beat Europe in Mobile TV: Industry Execs
Tarmo Virki

Asia is set to overtake Europe's early lead in adopting mobile television broadcasting as Europe struggles to find available airwaves for broadcasts, industry executives at an Asian trade fair said this week.

"Out of the regions of the world this represents the most interesting at the moment," Peter MacAvock, executive director of industry body DVB Project, told Reuters in an interview at the BroadcastAsia fair in Singapore.

"The appetite for mobile phone based content is higher here than anywhere else."

Mobile operators hope that mobile TV could encourage users to spend an extra 5 to 10 euros ($7-$13) a month, compensating for declining revenues from voice calls.

But executives said a lack of consensus on business models and the variety of different technologies were holding back takeup of mobile TV.

"Everybody thinks mobile TV is a great idea, but when it's time to get out the chequebook everyone starts to look at each other," MacAvock said.

So far only one standard, digital video broadcast handheld (DVB-H), has been taken up globally, while Korea, Japan, U.S. and China are embracing local technologies.

Some of these other technologies are also aiming for the global market, preventing services from being offered worldwide under a single standard.

"That standard issue needs to sort itself out first," said Chris Lee, Sony Ericsson's head of marketing in Asia Pacific.

Because spectrum availability is not a problem in many Asian countries, commercial DVB-H broadcasts have already started in India and Vietnam, with Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia also set to open networks this year.

In Europe, three countries have started commercial networks.

Most people who currently watch TV on their cellphones use third-generation (3G) mobile networks -- bringing in long-awaited data transmission fees to operators -- but this caps the quality of the picture and maximum amount of users.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...17903520070622





Hollywood Seeks Ways to Fit Its Content Into the Realm of the iPhone
Laura M. Holson

The iPhone doesn’t go on sale until Friday, but Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, is already changing the perception of the mobile phone, from a quick way to call a friend to a hip, media-friendly device. In doing so, he has forced mobile phone and Hollywood executives to react by chasing hungrily after the newest thing or face being left behind.

Mobile phone makers are scurrying to offer new products to compete with the iPhone’s touch screen. Wireless carriers also seem more willing to listen to their partners’ advice. And in Hollywood, where Mr. Jobs’s convention-defying tactics are all too familiar, media executives are eagerly preparing for a new era as they hope to position more content where consumers want it: in their hands.

Two years ago, David Ulmer, senior director of entertainment products at Motorola in Sunnyvale, Calif., and his colleagues got a “no, thank you” from wireless carriers when they tried to pitch a mobile phone with a touch screen. “Now, we are finding it easier to get people to talk to us,” Mr. Ulmer said. “Apple has changed the perception of how sexy a phone can be. Now, everyone wants to get in. It’s a whole new world. We’re in talks with everyone, Universal Studios, Time Warner, you name it.”

But perhaps the biggest shift is the notion that in the not-too-distant future, these various groups — which have worked together uneasily so far — could find themselves as competitors as consumers demand more and better access to media and care less about how they get it.

For years, mobile phone carriers like AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint have closely controlled what cellphone users watch, when they watch it, and on what kind of screen they watch it — much the way the networks did with television before new technologies loosened their grip. Many in Hollywood and Silicon Valley hope the iPhone’s multimedia features will make it easier for any mobile-crazed consumer to do the same things they do on the Web: watch their favorite television shows, download maps, send e-mail messages to friends and swap videos.

In what is the beginning of many attempts to make the cellphone more Web friendly, Apple has designed its own application so consumers can receive YouTube videos through a Wi-Fi network. Industry executives predict that as it becomes easier to get information via Wi-Fi networks, more consumers will bypass traditional wireless networks altogether. That prospect, while helpful for phone makers and media concerns, is frightening for service providers if consumers begin to regard them as irrelevant.

“Video, particularly, has largely been behind a wall,” said John Smelzer, the general manager of mobile operations for Fox Interactive Media, referring to the limited and clumsy access most consumers have to news, sports and entertainment on traditional cellphones. “It’s the antithesis of what’s happening on the Web. Any device that replicates the experience online is good for the entire industry. It will help us reach a mass audience,” he said.

Even Mr. Jobs’s competitors, who are quick to point out that the iPhone has limitations, like its sole availability through AT&T, say that it will nudge resistant wireless carriers to pay more attention to their customers’ wishes. “The iPhone is a fantastic device, but they don’t control the network,” said Craig Shapiro, head of content strategy and acquisition for Helio, the mobile phone maker and service company. “For these things to work, though, everyone has to get with the program.”

Communications companies know they have to adapt or risk being left behind. Glenn Lurie, president of national distribution for AT&T’s wireless business, said in an interview that it took an outsider like Mr. Jobs to generate interest in mobile’s potential that the industry could not muster itself. “The wireless industry has been around 20 years, and people have found the industry to be somewhat complex,” Mr. Lurie said. “Steve Jobs and the Apple team come at it from a different perspective.”

Most important, owners of Apple products stay faithful. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review said, by contrast, that in the consumer electronics category, customers of mobile phone services were among the most dissatisfied. Pricing plans and services were too confusing. Contracts were restrictive. Service among some carriers was unpredictable. And early attempts to offer video proved more frustrating than compelling.

“They don’t make it easy,” said Bill Sanders, vice president of mobile networks programming at Sony Pictures Television International. “Everyone I talk to says, ‘There are all these things that are wrong with the iPhone.’ But consumers can’t wait to get their hands on it. That’s because Apple makes it easy.”

This will not be Mr. Jobs’s first experience in redefining an industry. Many executives in the beleaguered music business hailed Mr. Jobs as a savior when the iPod was introduced in 2002 because it was an alternative to the illegal online sharing of songs. Three years later, though, they derided him in a war over pricing.

Film executives, who watched Mr. Jobs’s relationship with the music industry sour, have been more cautious in their dealings with him. In particular, major studios, including Warner Brothers Entertainment and 20th Century Fox, have resisted Mr. Jobs’s overtures to put movies on the video iPod unless he guaranteed copyright protection and reduced prices.

So far, Apple and AT&T are getting along. But even Hollywood blockbusters can have a surprising ending. “All I can speak to is that working with the Apple team for two years, the relationship has been terrific,” Mr. Lurie said. “I can’t speculate what will happen down the road.”

To be sure, all the parties in the three industries involved are circling each other warily as they seek to protect their overlapping interests. But as their ambitions collide, rivals are hiring talent from disparate fields to navigate through a unsettling era.

Cingular Wireless, which merged with AT&T, has lost a number of executives who left to join start-ups or television production companies. Among them is Jim Ryan, who helped develop mobile video at Cingular. He left in May to become chief executive of Mobile Campus, a messaging service for college students. Last year, Jon Vlassopulos, a former senior director of business development at Cingular, joined the television production company Edemol USA as a new-media executive.

A background in movies is proving valuable, too. Sherry Lansing, the former chairman of the motion picture group of Paramount Pictures, was elected to Qualcomm’s board last year, sought after for her keen knowledge of Hollywood. More recently, Christine Peters, the producer of “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” was named to the board of Xero Mobile, a fledgling cellphone service aimed at college students.

“Filmmakers are not going to be happy having their films downloaded to cellphones with poor quality,” Ms. Peters said. “That’s the beauty of the iPhone. It’s simple and it looks good. Half the people who have these fancy cellphones don’t know how to use them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/25/te.../25iphone.html





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Blade Runner at 25: Why the Sci-Fi F/X Are Still Unsurpassed

A quarter-century after Ridley Scott's dark vision of the future changed the face of filmmaking, special-effects maestro and MythBuster Adam Savage offers an appreciation.

Twenty-five years ago, the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner became an instant science fiction classic. Set in a sodden, squalid Los Angeles of 2019, the neo-noir masterpiece influenced a generation of filmmakers and video-game designers. Long before I teamed up with Jamie Hyneman to form the MythBusters, I was a special-effects modelmaker, and Scott's cyberpunk gem almost instantly became the most important film in the canon of movies I love.

I'm still such a big Blade Runner fan that I watch it at least once every 18 months. I also own pretty convincing replicas of the "blade runner blaster" wielded by Harrison Ford's world-weary former cop Rick Deckard. The source material was a Steyr Mannlicher .222 target rifle magazine cover, with a Bulldog .44 carriage underneath. I can't get enough of this prop. Now, I want a working one.

In Blade Runner's dystopian near future, replicants, or genetically engineered humanoids, do the hard work on off-world colonies. After a bloody mutiny, the androids are forbidden from coming to Earth — on pain of death. So when six rogue replicants return home, they must be "retired" — hunted down and killed — and Ford's Deckard, once a top replicant hunter, or "blade runner," is pulled out of his own retirement to do the job.

I worked on Star Wars Episodes I and II, on the Matrix films, on AI and Terminator 3; yet 25 years later there are ways in which Blade Runner surpasses anything that's been done since. Watching the theatrical release DVD at home with PM reminded me of Scott's genius for creating stunning effects with simple technology.

Virtual World
Watch this opening pan across the Los Angeles skyline — there's nearly nothing else like it. This is something I think Ridley Scott does better than almost any other director. Whether he's shooting a fantastical movie like Alien (1979), or a realistic one like Black Hawk Down (2001), you always know where you are in the movie's physical space. Blade Runner is unmatched by any other sci-fi film in terms of feeling like you're in an environment you understand. This isn't the kind of sci-fi where everyone wears silver suits. It's lived-in science fiction — a world.

Model Mastery
You have to remember, Blade Runner was made years before digital effects became common. Today, CGI [computer-generated imagery] is becoming a mature art form, but even now there are times you just can't beat doing some effects like these "in camera." Most of these cityscapes are a combination of models and traditional matte paintings. For the aerial shots they used a set about 12 ft. wide, and those towers you see belching fire are about 12 in. high. They're made of etched brass and model parts and use thousands of tiny, grain-of-wheat light bulbs like you'd find in a dollhouse. They filmed some of the fireballs in the parking lot behind the studio, and for others they used stock footage from the 1970 Antonioni film, Zabriskie Point.

Motion Control
I love the scenes where you're moving through the city and see video billboards the size of buildings. (Today we have billboards like that in Times Square — so, the movie wasn't far off!) The normal way to create these effects would be to build a miniature, shoot it and then composite in the billboards and other elements in postproduction.

But they did all of these effects in camera, which even back then was a much more complex way to execute them. The key to this is a motion-control camera — a smart robot, basically — that moves through the city on the same track, over and over again. It's accurate to within a couple thousandths of an inch. They did separate passes, rewinding the film each time and then re-exposing it to add each new element. So they did one pass for the lights on a building, another for the video projection, then a pass for the rain lighting and so on — as many as 16 passes in some cases. And all that layering is what makes you feel you're in a totally complete world, yet one that's completely alien.

Timeless Design
Scott hired an incredible art department, including Syd Mead, who started out designing cars for Ford. Some scenes have almost a 1930s look to them, while others are totally futuristic. But all the technology they designed — like flying cop cars they call "spinners" — meshes perfectly with your idea of this world. It's one of the reasons this movie has stayed at the top of my list. It just doesn't date.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech....html?series=6
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