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09-07-08, 08:56 AM
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Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 12th, '08
Since 2002
  "We aren't going to let politicians who are always wanting to jump on populous bandwagons dictate what we can and can't show." – Martyn Jolly "I love the photo so much. I think that the picture my mum took of me had nothing to do with being abused, and I think nudity can be a part of art." – Olympia Nelson "I will come to your agency if you’ll tell me now you’ll take my little sister Suzy sight unseen." – Dorian Leigh "No one is forcing Viacom to put their junk on the internet, you know. They can sell it on DVDs or put it on TV or in whatever ways they used to. But if they do want to enter the internet space, at least they should learn how to behave in the culture in the new medium, instead of trying to make it change to be like its old business model. Hire some geeks, Viacom, will you?" – Pamela Jones "This legislation will give the government unfettered and unchecked access to innocent Americans’ international communications without a warrant. This is not only unconstitutional, but absolutely un-American." – Anthony D. Romero "This fight is not over. We intend to challenge this bill as soon as President Bush signs it into law. The bill allows the warrantless and dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international telephone and email communications. It plainly violates the Fourth Amendment." – Jameel Jaffer "As one commenter to my blog so aptly said, 'Senator Obama, you can tap my phone or my wallet, but not both.'" – Bob Ostertag July 12th , 2008  20 Houses "To Use More Traffic Than Entire Net By 2011" AT&T claims the internet will run out of capacity in 2010, joining the gathering crowd of net doom mongers. The US telecoms giant repeats the now familiar warning that increased demand for video content could push the internet to its limits. "The surge in online content is at the centre of the most dramatic changes affecting the internet today," said Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, according to a report on ZDNet. "In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire internet today." "We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the internet by 2010," he added. AT&T last year pledged to adopt "net neutrality", which promises to treat all web traffic equally, and not give priority access to those providers who pay carriers. This latest outburst may be an attempt to reignite the debate, with Cicconi specifically pointing out that the internet hinges on the investment of companies such as his. "There is nothing magic or ethereal about the internet - it is no more ethereal than the highway system," he said. "It is not created by an act of God but upgraded and maintained by private investors." The UK has recently become embroiled in a similar row over the increasing demands of video content, with ISPs such as Tiscali calling for the BBC to help meet the bandwidth costs of its catch-up TV service. From April http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/189918/2...t-by-2011.html  Internet Cable-Laying Boom Dozens of new undersea internet cables are set to be laid over the next couple of years, providing a huge boost to worldwide capacity. The huge boom in internet video has led to Domesday scenarios of the internet running out of capacity. Yet, most of the bandwidth bottlenecks are found in the "last mile" of connections to the home, and not the undersea cables that underpin the worldwide internet infrastructure. Indeed, many experts believe that there is abundant amounts of "dark fibre" that remains unused in oceans across the world. Nevertheless, the Financial Times reports that major telcos are pushing ahead with projects that will see dozens of new cables laid before the end of the decade. At least 25 new cables will be laid by 2010, at a cost of $6.4bn, according to TeleGeography Research, a Washington-based telecoms consultancy. "In light of the tremendous untapped potential capacity on many submarine cables, it may seem surprising that a new cable-building boom is underway," TeleGeography claims. "The reasons for cable construction are often a combination of several factors; including dwindling available capacity on some cables, a desire for wider restoration options, the need for physically diverse routes, competition, and high capacity prices in some regions of the world." The cables are predominantly set to be laid in areas such as Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East, which are currently underserved. Google, for example, announced plans to build a 10,000km fibre-optic cable linking the US and Japan in February. Internet access to parts of the Middle East was cut off in February this year, when undersea cables were cut. http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/210999/i...ying-boom.html Aussies May Get Limitless Downloads Andrew Colley RELIEF may be at hand for Australian consumers starved of the limitless internet download quotas offered in other countries. A report on Asia's sub-marine cable market, which is supported by the announcement of an upgrade by Australia's main US internet traffic supplier, has revealed that the region's international bandwidth may creep into oversupply after 2010. The report by Communications analyst Ovum reveals a dearth of new undersea cable projects throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Australian internet service providers have argued that the cost of international capacity is not falling quickly enough to offset growing demand for international bandwidth among customers, which drives up their operating expenses. ISPs have passed cost increases on to their customers in the form of higher monthly charges for services, or reductions in bandwidth quotas. Ovum senior analyst David Kennedy said prices downstream suppliers paid for capacity in the medium term were expected to fall. It was not clear, however, what effect they would have over the long term, he said. "How far those prices will improve is difficult to say and a lot depends on what will happen after 2009. "There's a lot of proposed new investment in trans-Pacific cable. If all of it goes ahead into 2010 and so on, it is quite possible we could see some price drops," Mr Kennedy said. Ovum said projects including Pipe Networks' $200 million Sydney-Guam cable, Telstra's Australia-Hawaii cable, the Google-led Unity consortium's US-Japan cable, and other upgrades throughout the region, were expected to dramatically increase capacity in the region. One of the main drivers of capacity is the availability of new technology, which could treble the capacity on existing undersea fibre at low cost. Last week, Southern Cross Cable, which supplies 80 per cent of Australia's US transmission capacity, said it may increase the transmission capacity to the US by 1000 per cent within three years due to the availability of low-cost cable capacity upgrades. It was close to completing a 10Gb upgrade to its network, and sales and marketing director Ross Pfeffer said it might skip a 40Gb upgrade in favour of 100Gb technology becoming available earlier than expected. "We're already in detailed conversations with our board and have started conversations with suppliers as to when the next upgrade will be, and we are finalising new services that will require us to have a lot more capacity," Mr Pfeffer said. Ovum said most of the new capacity would be absorbed by a doubling of internet connections in the region by 2011, but it warned operators to avoid a price war. "Continued growth in capacity at the current rate would quickly create a large supply overhang that could easily result in a downward price spiral," it said. http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15306,00.html Telecoms Sue Over High-Speed Links Peter Page Telecommunications companies are suing cities around the nation to stop the construction of publicly owned fiber optic systems to bring high-speed Internet, telephone and cable television to communities far from metropolitan centers. Attorneys for cities say the telecommunications suits, whether brought under state law, the Federal Telecommunications Act or other laws, are veiled attempts to stop construction of competing public systems providing an essential utility in the digital age. "It's a national playbook. The longer they [telecom companies] delay things, the better for them," said Patrick Ottinger, general counsel for Lafayette, La. The city's plans for a $125 million municipal broadband system were delayed by suits brought by BellSouth and Cox Communications Inc. One suit resulted in the city holding a referendum to approve the bond sale. The other was resolved when the city amended the bond ordinance adopted after the referendum to conform with an unfavorable appellate decision. BellSouth Telcoms. Inc. v. City of Lafayette, 919 So. 2d 844 (La. 3d Ct. App.). Attorneys for telecommunications companies say the litigation is needed because municipalities with the ability to borrow money cheaply -- and not hobbled by the need to return a profit -- have unfair competitive advantages. "Our position has never been that it is unlawful for cities to do this, but you can't use your powers as a city to create an uneven playing field," said David Goodnight in Stoel Rives' Seattle office, who has represented Qwest Communications International Inc. against cities in numerous suits since 2000. Two pivotal cases Goodnight won upended the telecommunications ordinances in Berkeley, Calif., and Sante Fe, N.M. Qwest v. City of Berkeley, 433 F.3d 1253 (9th Cir. 2006); Qwest v. City of Santa Fe, 380 F.3d 1258 (10th Cir.). A Fight In Utah Goodnight cited an association of Utah cities formed to promote the construction of a broadband networks in smaller cities and rural areas. "What we found during discovery was that the cities were providing facilities and personnel at no cost, interest-free loans and, in some instances, outright cash infusions," he said. Steve Allread, a solo practitioner in Salt Lake City who represents the Utah association, countered that "[i]f the private sector had been more responsive, there would not have been a need for the project. This litigation was an attempt [by Qwest] to recreate the old monopolistic system." The suit settled in 2006. Qwest Corp v. Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, No. 2:05-cv-00471 PGC (D. Utah.). Jim Baller of the Baller Herbst Law Group in Washington has participated in many of the suits and is an advocate for policies favoring municipal broadband networks. "It is common for the affected cable company to sue over these initiatives," Baller said. "This is similar to electrification a century ago when small towns and rural areas were left behind, so they formed their own authorities." Many involved in the issue see a typical clash of viewpoints in the litigation embroiling Monticello, Minn., a town near Minneapolis, and TDS Telecom, a subsidiary of Bridgewater Telephone Co. The city, complaining that neither TDS nor its competitor Charter Communications Inc. would bring fiber cable to every home and business, won a 74 percent majority in a referendum to build a municipal system. TDS sued on the eve of a city council meeting to finalize the plan. "The municipal system will be in direct competition with private companies," said David Johnson of Sidley Austin in Chicago, who is representing TDS. "The city is construing public convenience so broadly it would allow the city of Monticello to go into competition with any business in the city if it didn't like the prices or services, and they could do it with tax-free financing with no need to make a profit." John Baker of Greene Espel in Minneapolis, who represents the city, said cities across the state had used the broadly worded state law to sell bonds backed by anticipated revenues to build water parks, ambulance services, ski areas and Internet services. "TDS is trying to take the open-ended authority of Minnesota municipalities to issue revenue bonds for public convenience and define 'public convenience' right out of existence," Baker said. A motion for dismal is scheduled to be argued on July 18. Bridgewater Telephone Co. v. Monticello, No. 86-CV-08-4555. http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnolo...769174&rss=ltn Broadband Customer 'Hit With £31,000 Bill' Jayne Davison The Manchester resident received the shock charge for downloading music and a TV show episode while overseas. A mobile broadband user has received a shock £31,000 ($60,000) bill for downloading music and a single episode of popular TV show Prison Break. Iayn Dobsyn, 34, downloaded the files through a mobile broadband card plugged into his laptop during a recent holiday in Portugal. The Salford, Greater Manchester resident was unaware that downloads are much more highly charged-for while the user is overseas. On receiving the bill from his broadband provider, Yes Telecom, Mr Dobsyn sought out legal advice; he has since had the bill reduced to £229. His current broadband bill averages £150 per month, he told the Lancashire Telegraph. Mr Dobsyn added: "The figures looked like they had come down from the moon. I just laughed. There had to be some mistake. I knew I had used a lot of data while abroad, but not to the tune of £31,000. The figures just didn't make sense." His lawyer, Danielle Mestraud, also told the newspaper that Yes Telecom initially said that they were "happy" with the bill and would be seeking payment for it. However, following "negotiations", it agreed to allow the broadband customer to switch to a lower tariff. http://www.money.co.uk/article/10008...31000-bill.htm As Web Traffic Grows, Crashes Take Bigger Toll Brad Stone Alex Payne, a 24-year-old Internet engineer here, has devised a way to answer a commonly asked question of the digital age: Is my favorite Web site working today? In March, Mr. Payne created downforeveryoneorjustme.com, as in, “Down for everyone, or just me?” It lets visitors type in a Web address and see whether a site is generally inaccessible or whether the problem is with their own connection. “I had seen that question posed so often,” said Mr. Payne, who perhaps not coincidentally works at Twitter, a Web messaging and social networking site that is itself known for frequent downtime. “Technology companies have branded the Internet as a place that is always on and where information is always available. People are disappointed and looking for answers when it turns out not to be true.” There is plenty of disappointment to go around these days. Such technology stalwarts as Yahoo, Amazon.com and Research in Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry, have all suffered embarrassing technical problems in the last few months. About a month ago, a sudden surge of visitors to Mr. Payne’s site began asking about the normally impervious Amazon. That site was ultimately down for several hours over two business days, and Amazon, by some estimates, lost more than a million dollars an hour in sales. The Web, like any technology or medium, has always been susceptible to unforeseen hiccups. Particularly in the early days of the Web, sites like eBay and Schwab.com regularly went dark. But since fewer people used the Internet back then, the stakes were much lower. Now the Web is an irreplaceable part of daily life, and Internet companies have plans to make us even more dependent on it. Companies like Google want us to store not just e-mail online but also spreadsheets, photo albums, sales data and nearly every other piece of personal and professional information. That data is supposed to be more accessible than information tucked away in the office computer or filing cabinet. The problem is that this ideal requires Web services to be available around the clock — and even the Internet’s biggest companies sometimes have trouble making that happen. Last holiday season, Yahoo’s system for Internet retailers, Yahoo Merchant Solutions, went dark for 14 hours, taking down thousands of e-commerce companies on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. In February, certain Amazon services that power the sites of many Web start-up companies had a day of intermittent failures, knocking many of those companies offline. The causes of these problems range widely: it might be system upgrades with unintended consequences, human error (oops, wrong button) or even just old-fashioned electrical failures. Last month, an electrical explosion in a Houston data center of the Planet, a Web hosting company, knocked thousands of Web businesses off the Internet for up to five days. “It was prolonged torture,” said Grant Burhans, a Web entrepreneur from Florida whose telecommunications- and real-estate-related Web sites were down for four days, costing him thousands of dollars in lost business. Web addicts who find themselves shut out of their favorite Web sites tend to fill blogs and online bulletin boards with angry invective about broken promises and interrupted routines. The volatile emotions around Web downtime are perhaps most prevalent in the discussion around Twitter, on which users post updates on who they are with, where they are, and what they are doing. According to Pingdom, a Web monitoring firm, Twitter was down for 37 hours this year through April — by far more than any other major social networking Web site. Instead of simply dumping the service and moving on with their lives, Twitter users have responded with an endless stream of rancor, creating “Is Twitter Down?” T-shirts, blog rants and YouTube parodies, and posting copies of Twitter’s various artfully designed error messages. “This is a free service. It’s not like anyone’s life is depending on Twitter,” said Laura Fitton, a consultant and self-described passionate Twitter user. “Twitter is all about the things we discover we have in common, so right there, Twitter failing is a huge thing we have in common,” she said. “It’s fun to complain to each other and commiserate.” Twitter has said its downtime is the result of rapidly growing demand and fundamental mistakes in its original architecture. Jesse Robbins, a former Amazon executive who was responsible for keeping Amazon online from 2004 to 2006, says the outcries over failures are understandable. “When these sites go away, it’s a sudden loss. It’s like you are standing in the middle of Macy’s and the power goes out,” he said. “When the thing you depend on to live your daily life suddenly goes away, it’s trauma.” He says Web services should be held to the same standard of reliability as the older services they aim to replace. “These companies have a responsibility to people who rely and depend on them, just as people going over a public bridge expect that the bridge won’t suddenly collapse.” By some measures, despite the high-profile failures, the Internet is performing better than ever. “There are millions of Web sites and billions of Web pages around the world,” said Umang Gupta, chief executive of Keynote Systems, which monitors companies’ Web performance. “These big high-visibility problems are actually very rare.” But perhaps they are not rare enough. One morning last month, Google App Engine, a service that lets people run interactive Web applications, was unavailable for several hours. Among those affected was Mr. Payne, who had just shifted downforeveryoneorjustme.com over to Google’s servers. It was inaccessible as well. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/te...outage.html?hp Photonic Switching Beckons 100x Internet Speeds Terabit capacity photonic technology faster than electric circuits Rodney Gedda Researchers at the University of Sydney have developed technology that could boost the throughput of existing networks by 100-fold without costing the consumer any more, and its all thanks to a scratch on a piece of glass. After four years of development, University of Sydney scientists say the Internet is set to become on average 60 times faster than existing networks. According to the Centre for Ultra-high bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) at the University's School of Physics, the scratch will mean almost instantaneous, error-free and unlimited access to the Internet anywhere in the world. CUDOS director, professor Ben Eggleton, said the discovery is a critical building block and a fundamental advance on what is already out there. Eggleton said that up until now information has been moving at a slow rate, but optical fibres have a huge capacity to deliver more. "The scratched glass we've developed is actually a photonic integrated circuit," Eggleton said. "This circuit uses the 'scratch' as a guide or a switching path for information - like when trains are switched from one track to another - except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks. This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times. We are talking about photonic technology that has terabit per second capacity." An initial demonstration proved it possible to achieve speeds 60 times faster than existing local networks. "We [now] use electronics for switching and that has been okay, but as we move toward a more tech-savvy future there is a demand for instant Web gratification," Eggleton said. "Photonic technology delivers what's needed and, more importantly, what's wanted." The CUDOS research is based on collaboration between teams at the University of Sydney, the Australian National University, and the Technical University of Denmark. Research is also supported with Australian Research Council funding. http://www.techworld.com.au/article/...nternet_speeds Comcast Again Chided For Allegedly Blocking Internet Traffic The company's agreement to smoothly deliver Vonage's VoIP services raises critics' questions about the ISP's network management practices. K.C. Jones Comcast's announcement that it has a collaborative agreement with Vonage to help ensure it can deliver its VoIP services smoothly has drawn criticism. Comcast has been criticized for slowing or blocking network traffic, but the company claims it has done so only to alleviate network congestion, without regard to the source of the content. The two companies said their network operators will be able to communicate directly to address any problems that come up. They will also work together as Comcast tests new network management methods, which Comcast has said will be "content-agnostic." Critics have jumped on this week's announcement, saying it calls into question Comcast's network management practices. Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press, lodged an official complaint with the Federal Communications Commission after media reported that Comcast blocked legal file-sharing. As regulators prepare to investigate the charges, Ammori launched fresh attacks. "We are baffled as to why it was necessary for Vonage to strike a network management agreement with Comcast to guarantee that their services are not degraded or blocked," he said. "Such anti-competitive, anti-consumer practices are already against the law. And beyond that, Comcast has been on the record as saying that they do nothing to deter their customers' use of VoIP. This announcement calls into question the company's honesty about its treatment of competing services." He wants to know if Comcast degraded Vonage's VoIP service and if they continue to degrade other services from competitors. "That these questions remain unanswered by today's announcement is cause for great concern. This collaboration should do nothing to deter the FCC from investigating and stopping Comcast's blocking other Internet services," he said. A Comcast representative said that the agreement was to ensure that the protocol-agnostic technique doesn't affect services and stressed that Vonage service was not affected in the past because only peer-to-peer applications were affected. http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=208808475 Court: FCC Should Decide Net Neutrality Issues Wendy Davis A federal judge in California has suspended proceedings in a subscriber's lawsuit against Comcast while the Federal Communications Commission completes its investigation into whether the company violated net neutrality principles by slowing traffic to peer-to-peer sites. U.S. Judge Phyllis Hamilton stayed the case on the grounds that the FCC was already considering petitions against Comcast filed by online video company Vuze, as well as net neutrality advocates Free Press and Public Knowledge. "The FCC is already using its recognized expertise to consider some of the exact questions placed before the court here, in an effort to promote uniformity in internet broadband regulation," Hamilton wrote in a ruling quietly issued late last month. In the ruling, Hamilton said the FCC has "well-established" authority to regulate broadband companies' services. "The reasonableness of a broadband provider's network management practices has ... been firmly placed within the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission," she wrote. Last year, an investigation by The Associated Press revealed that Comcast was slowing traffic to peer-to-peer sites. The report triggered complaints to the FCC that Comcast was violating 2005 net neutrality principles, as well as a putative class-action lawsuit by California resident Jon Hart. He alleged that Comcast mislead him about the speed of his broadband experience and accused the company of breach of contract and false advertising, among other charges. Comcast asked that Hart's lawsuit be stayed so that the FCC could finish its probe. In its motion, Comcast argued that regulation is "unnecessary and unwarranted," but also specifically said the FCC has authority over the matter. "Any inquiry into whether Comcast's P2P management is unlawful falls squarely within the FCC's subject matter jurisdiction," the company stated in its brief. But with that assertion, Comcast appears to undercut a major portion of its argument to the FCC -- that the agency lacks authority to enforce net neutrality principles. Some net neutrality advocates are already pointing out the discrepancy. "Clearly they're talking out of both sides of their mouth," said Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge. A Comcast spokesperson denied there was any contradiction "What we have argued in the Hart case is that the FCC believes it has jurisdiction here, and the court should wait to see what action the FCC takes," the spokesperson said. The spokesperson declined to elaborate further on statements in Comcast's brief or the court's ruling. Sohn added that the California judge's decision lends support to the neutrality advocates' argument that the FCC has the authority to decide whether Comcast unlawfully managed traffic. At the same time, federal judges in Washington, who would decide any appeal of the FCC's actions, won't necessarily come to the same conclusion as a federal judge in California. FCC Chair Kevin Martin has said he believes that the agency has the power to take action against Comcast. Martin testified at the Senate in April that no new net neutrality was are needed because the FCC already has authority to regulate broadband services. Earlier this year, Comcast said it will develop a protocol-neutral method of managing traffic. http://www.mediapost.com/publication...&art_aid=86143 F.C.C. Chief Would Bar Comcast From Imposing Web Restrictions Saul Hansell Federal regulators are prepared to take action against sellers of Internet access that want to restrict what their customers can do online. Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said Friday that Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, should be sanctioned because it had interfered with the Internet connections of users who were exchanging files with other people. Mr. Martin’s recommendation is a strong push for network neutrality, the idea that Internet access providers like Comcast should not be allowed to favor some uses of their networks over others. Internet companies like Google and free speech advocates have backed this approach. The cable and phone companies that provide most of the nation’s Internet service have argued that such rules were not needed. They have said that they should be free to run their networks as they see fit, and that there had been no cases of problems with such discrimination. Comcast’s practice of slowing the use of BitTorrent, a method of trading video, music and software files, provides such a case. The practice was intended to prevent frequent file-swappers from clogging up the company’s network. Under Mr. Martin’s recommendation, which would need to be approved by the full commission, Comcast would not be fined. But it would be forced to change its practices and give the commission more details on what it did in the past. Mr. Martin wants to set a standard that will make it difficult for an Internet provider to discriminate against users based on what they want to do online. “The Internet is based upon the idea that consumers can go anywhere they want and access any content they want,” Mr. Martin said in an interview. “When they show they are blocking access to some sort of content, they have the burden to show that what they are doing is reasonable.” Mr. Martin also said Comcast did not explain to its customers what it was doing. “If they are going to put limits on individual customers if you use a certain amount of bandwidth per month or per hour, they have to be willing to tell their customers more about how it works,” he said. But Mr. Martin said the issue went beyond simple disclosure because Comcast’s approach was not tightly related to the problem it said it was trying to solve. For example, BitTorrent users who were not exchanging large files were also blocked. Mr. Martin said that the commission wanted to protect legal activities, and that the rules would not apply to an Internet service that tried to block the unauthorized transmission of copyrighted material or child pornography. Comcast argues that its approach is legitimate, and that the commission does not have the authority to impose any sanctions. “We believe that the network management technique we chose at the time was reasonable,” said Sena Fitzmaurice, a Comcast spokeswoman. She added that Comcast had already said it planned to change its approach to dealing with heavy use. It is developing a system that will slow the Internet connections of people who are moving large amounts of data at busy times. Ms. Fitzmaurice was nonetheless concerned about Mr. Martin’s approach. She asked: “Does this create some broader precedent or authority for the F.C.C. that would be asserted in other cases?” She said that if the action was approved by the commission, the company would have to examine the order before deciding whether to appeal. Spokesmen for Time Warner Cable and Verizon, two other large providers of Internet access, concurred that their preferences would be for the commission to limit its scope to ensuring that providers properly disclose their practices to their customers. Some advocates of network neutrality are hoping that the commission uses this case to establish a broader principle. “The normative message is that it is wrong to block the Internet,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who is the chairman of Free Press, an advocacy group that filed the complaint about Comcast for which Mr. Martin is proposing a resolution. “The deeper message he’s sending here is that users are sovereign. If two people want to send a file between each other, the carriers are not to get in the way.” Professor Wu said the issues at stake go back to the common-law concept of a common carrier, which defined certain businesses — from blacksmiths to ferries — as so essential to commerce that their owners could not discriminate against any paying customer. These ancient concerns are increasingly relevant to the Internet as an ever-greater share of commerce is conducted online. Companies that sell products or offer content over the Internet have worried that without regulation, the Internet access providers might chose to offer better and faster service to some companies — perhaps those that pay for preferred treatment — than to others. Many are particularly concerned that cable and phone companies, which are in the pay television business, will choose to inhibit the growth of free video over the Internet from sites like YouTube, which is owned by Google. “If it turned out that the system accidentally or deliberately discriminated against online television, that would be anticompetitive because online television competes with Comcast,” said Marvin Ammori, the general counsel of Free Press. Other Internet experts say that Comcast is simply trying to compensate for the limited capacity of its network. On Internet connections delivered over cable systems, there is much more capacity for users to receive information than to send it, so uploading large files can quickly overwhelm the sending capacity. Some are concerned that if Mr. Martin presses these rules, the Internet providers will move away from offering unlimited Internet service. Already Time Warner is testing a system that would impose significant caps on how much its users could download. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/te...12comcast.html Bell's Internet Throttling Illegal, Google Says Google says the internet is too important to allow Bell or other service providers to act as a 'gatekeeper.' Peter Nowak Google Inc. says Bell Canada Inc. is breaking Canadian telecommunications law by slowing certain internet traffic, and is urging the CRTC to take action against the company. "Bell claims its throttling of peer-to-peer applications is a reasonable form of network management. Google respectfully disagrees. Network management does not include Canadian carriers’ blocking or degrading lawful applications that consumers wish to use," the company wrote in a 15-page submission to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which was made public over the weekend. "From consumer, competition and innovation perspectives, throttling applications that consumers choose is inconsistent with a content and application-neutral internet, and a violation of Canadian telecommunications law, which forbids unfair discrimination and undue or unreasonable preferences and requires that regulation be technologically and competitively neutral." Net neutrality at stake The Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine giant made the comments as part of an investigation by the CRTC into Bell's limiting of download speeds of peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent. Bell first started limiting the speeds — known as throttling — of its own Sympatico internet subscribers in November, then extended the practice to its wholesale customers in March. The company said growing usage by a small number of peer-to-peer users was threatening to cause slowdowns for its overall customer base. That move prompted a complaint with the CRTC from the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, a group of 55 small ISPs who rent portions of Bell's network, and sparked the "net neutrality" battle over who controls the internet in Canada. Aside from Google, CAIP has attracted the support of thousands of users, consumer groups and other technology firms including internet calling provider Skype. Bell, on the other hand, saw fellow large ISPs Telus Corp. and Rogers Communications Inc. come to its defence last week. Google said that in order to keep consumer choice and innovation alive on the internet, the CRTC must force Bell — and eventually other large ISPs — to end its throttling practices. "The internet is simply too important to allow them to act as such a gatekeeper," the company said. "Protecting end user choice is the central issue in this proceeding, but also a much larger issue. It goes to the heart of the internet and how it acts as an extraordinary platform for innovation and fair competition." A spokesman for Bell said the company plans to respond in its next submission to the CRTC, which is due on Thursday. Telus, which says it does not limit the speeds of its internet subscribers, in its submission argued that Bell is within its rights to change how it delivers services to its wholesale customers. The notification of network changes required by the Telecommunications Act apply only to other network carriers, a status many of CAIP's members do not have. "Customer relations matters that involve no network interface changes do not engage the network change notification requirements, and it would be inefficient and unwieldy to create new requirements in this regard," wrote Craig McTaggart, director of broadband policy for Telus. The company argued there is no discrimination because Bell is treating its own Sympatico and wholesale customers the same. Telus also discounted arguments made by other parties who have made submissions to the CRTC, including Skype, that the traffic-inspection technology used by Bell violates users' privacy. McTaggart noted that the current dispute should be limited specifically to the question of whether Bell is violating its wholesale agreement terms and should not be extended to other network owners, such as Telus. "To the extent that this dispute may raise any policy issues relating to retail internet access services, Telus would expect the commission to initiate a proceeding by way of public notice/notice of consultation before establishing new rules of general application," he wrote. "However, in Telus' view, no such proceeding is necessary." Other internet uses not affected: Rogers Rogers, which also slows peer-to-peer applications, disputed claims by CAIP that such throttling affects services such as voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and virtual private networks (VPN). "This equipment, therefore, does not impact any other traffic such as VoIP, VPN and other online streaming applications because their signatures are different," wrote Ken Engelhart, senior vice-president of regulatory affairs for Rogers. "There is therefore no reason why VPN or other encrypted traffic would be affected." Engelhart also reiterated that Rogers does not throttle the downloading of files over peer-to-peer applications — it only slows uploading. However, because the download speeds of many applications are tied to the upload speed, the downloads are effectively slowed as well, which is the fault of the application's provider. "Of course, because some P2P applications (BitTorrent for example) restrict download speed to the maximum upload speed provided by the user, a customer’s P2P download speed can be limited by the upstream cap, but that is a result of the business decision taken by the P2P applications provider," he wrote. Bell has also been supported by network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc., which said the CRTC should refrain from imposing network management regulations. Aside from Google and Skype, parties who have made CRTC submissions supporting CAIP include: the University of Western Ontario; the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic; the Union des consommateurs; Primus Telecommunications Canada Inc.; the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association; and the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance, which counts network equipment maker Alcatel Lucent among its members. The CRTC expects to rule on the CAIP-Bell dispute in September and has said a larger investigation into net neutrality principles is likely. http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...tech-crtc.html No Anti-BitTorrent Precedent Achieved in Canada enigmax Following comments which suggested that the closure of QuebecTorrent was “a major victory” for the recording industry, we have a statement from the owner of the site to balance things up. The smaller battle against this site is over, the larger one against Canadian BitTorrent sites in general appears unaffected. Yesterday we reported that, following a legal battle against 31 media industry organizations, the 85,000 member QuebecTorrent tracker had been forced to close. The site complied with a permanent injunction handed down by the Superior Court of Quebec. The recording industry, on the other hand, dropped its claim for $200,000 damages. Solange Drouin, managing director of ADISQ, an organization that represents the music industry in Québec, said in a response to the shutdown: “We wait to see the result of this first lawsuit. We hope that this result will have a dissuasive effect. If it is not the case, it is possible that we will engage in actions against similar sites.” Some may be under the impression that the closure of QuebecTorrent is a big legal victory for the entertainment industry. Although undoubtedly the media companies will be delighted that the site has been shuttered, due to how the case ended we’re not really much closer to the answer of torrent site legality in Canada. Instead of mounting a poor defense, in the end QuebecTorrent chose not to mount one at all. The site’s lawyer, Sébastien Leblond, said that part of the reason for accepting the injunction to close the site was that Doditz, the site admin, wanted to avoid the case setting a bad anti-torrent legal precedent: “Instead of going to war without the proper equipment, we decided not to hurt the big case,” said Leblond. In comments to the National Post, Michael Geist, a law professor at University of Ottawa, said he wasn’t surprised that 28 year old Brûlotte decided not to fight: “The prospect of both the legal fees and the big organizations on the other side who are prepared to spend millions of dollars on litigation has an enormous chilling effect. Invariably, individual users, web sites, cave in the face of these kinds of legal demands.” So, the entertainment might make it seem that the outcome of this case is a huge victory, the reality is more nuanced. Here is a message from ‘Doditz’ which should hopefully shine some light on what actually happened with the case: Statement from Sébastien Brûlotte, aka ‘Doditz’, owner of QuebecTorrent Quote:
Canadians Skirt Law to Watch TV on the Web Viewers north of the border turn to illegal options because legal means aren't available: study Canadians are turning on, tuning in and watching traditional TV shows on the Internet often using underground ways to access American programming, says a new study. There's less online content available from Canadian broadcasters than is available from U.S. broadcasters, study author Alan Sawyer said. The lack of available content is resulting in Canadians using underground activity to get the TV shows they want to see online, he said. "A very important thing to realize is that every television program that is broadcast is available in most cases in illegal peer-to-peer broadcasting," said Sawyer of Toronto-based Two Solitudes Consulting. "Canadians do an awful lot of that. I believe one of the reasons that Canadians do an awful lot of that is that they are not being offered sufficient alternatives." Traditional TV audiences are eroding as viewers, especially younger ones, turn to the Internet and mobile devices for content, said Sawyer, who noted the popularity of video-sharing site, YouTube. Major U.S. broadcasters are making between 52 per cent and 80 per cent of their non-news evening and primetime programming available in full-episode format on-demand on their websites, his study said. CTV offers 24 per cent and Global offers 15 per cent, says the study, which was done in January. "Canada's private French-language broadcasters offer much less broadcast-related video content than their English-language counterparts, but offer considerably more programming on a broadcast-broadband simulcast basis," the study found. Sawyer's study is called, Changing Channels: Alternative Distribution of Television Content, and was done for the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The federal broadcast regulator will use the study for background information as it prepares for a hearing into new media next year, he said. "In my opinion, Canadians aren't watching a lot of broadcast television content online because there's not a lot of it available," he said. That means a lot of advertisers haven't started to focus on it, he said. However, Sawyer said because a network buys a show's broadcast rights, it doesn't necessarily give it the right to put the show on the Internet. Canadians also can't use major U.S. TV network sites to watch shows online due to something called "geo-blocking," he said. Media companies use this practice to determine a person's location based on where his computer is accessing the Internet. "So if you are coming from Canada and try to go to ABC's website and you try to watch video there, it's going to say, 'Sorry you're not coming from within the United States. You can't watch this.' " It's usually done to save money because of the cost of streaming content over the Internet, Sawyer said. There's currently a legal battle in the United States that's pitting YouTube against Viacom Inc. and other copyright holders, who have filed a US$1-billion lawsuit against the popular online video-sharing service. Viacom shows include Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and Nickelodeon's "SpongeBob SquarePants" cartoon. http://timestranscript.canadaeast.co...article/347049 FCC to Begin White Space Wireless Broadband Field Tests Matthew Lasar Over the next four weeks, the Federal Communications Commission will conduct twelve field tests of TV white space devices—hardware that can transmit and receive broadband over unused TV channel frequencies. And it looks like the FCC may have taken up the offer from ESPN and the National Football League to let the Commission test these apps in a sports stadium. The agency's schedule says that the last two demos involve "wireless microphone testing" and will be conducted in a "sports venue" and an "entertainment venue." As Ars reported last month, ESPN/NFL are among the many groups raising a fuss over the threat that they say unlicensed broadband devices could pose to wireless mic use. On June 26th they filed comments with the FCC offering to let the agency's Office of Engineering Technology (OET) run tests on the prototype gadgets in nearby sports stadiums. "Wireless microphones are vital to operations at NFL games," the ESPN/NFL wrote. "We believe it is essential that field-testing studies reflect actual, true-to-life conditions, including testing of wireless microphones and other wireless audio equipment used at these games." The ESPN/NFL filing offered two Maryland locales near the FCC's DC headquarters for the wireless mic challenge: Baltimore's M&T Bank Stadium and the Federal Express Field in Landover. But the FCC has not disclosed whether it will go with these venues for the tests. The rest of the field observations will take place in Maryland, with the exception of one at the FCC's DC headquarters. They'll commence next week in Patapsco Valley State Park and the Thomas A. Dixon, Jr. Aircraft Observation Area of the Baltimore/Washington International airport. Next will come demos at residences in Ellicot City and College Park. After the FCC HQ test, there will be five more tryouts in rural and semi-rural areas (two parking lots and a creek near Harp Hill Road). Last but not least will come the wireless mic ordeals. The Commission says it wants all these experiments completed over the course of four weeks. At least two of these locations appear to have come from recommendations made by the Association for Maximum Service Television (MSTV): the Harp Hill Road locale and another along Route 17. As the TV industry's lobbyist on tech issues, the MSTV has been a fierce opponent of unlicensed broadband devices. But some of its recent filings suggest that the group has moved past outright opposition and is now in favor of requesting conditions that will restrict and weaken the hardware's reach. On July 3, three MSTV execs, one National Association of Broadcasters lawyer, and a CBS veep piled into the office of FCC Commissioner Michael Copps to talk to him and two of his legal advisers about the white space docket. They conceded that geolocator devices could potentially protect TV stations from white space app interference. But, "the FCC must also focus on protections against adjacent channel interference, requirements to assure an adequate database to support geolocation methodologies, robust certification procedures, and powerful and effective policing mechanisms," they warned. These TV white space device field tests will be open to the public, the FCC says, and the Commission will offer updates on any changes in the schedule. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...eld-tests.html Spanish RIAA Sues and Wins Blog Comment Case Julio Alonso, the founder of the leading Spanish blog network Weblogs SL, has been fined €9,000 plus legal costs for comments made by other people on his personal blog. What makes the story more interesting is that Alonso was sued by SGAE, (the General Society of Authors and Publishers), the Spanish equivalent of the RIAA. The post that ultimately led to the court case was made way back in 2004, and was titled SGAE=Thieves. That post then hit the top of the Spanish version of Google for the term “ladrones” (Thieves). It’s not clear from the email Julio sent me (nor the links provided) exactly what the comments were, and as of July 4 they were removed per the court order. What I did make out (with some Google translate help) is that the court found that the 22 comments posted by readers in response to that post had damaged the ‘honor’ of SGAE. Alonso still has the right to appeal against the sentence. The questions then raised: is it safe for anyone is Spain to offer open comments on a blog? and is this even a legal under European law? If you speak Spanish, you can follow the case on Julio’s blog here, and I’ll be keeping in touch with Julio as the appeal is put together (I’ve been following Weblogs SL since the early Blog Herald days). I’m not sure if there is anything we can do from outside of Spain, but I’m sure many will join me in offering moral support to Julio at this time. http://www.inquisitr.com/1504/spanis...-comment-case/ MediaSentry's Statements in Michigan Administrative Case Contradicted by Prior Statements in UMG v. Lindor Ray Beckerman You may recall that several days ago we posted some correspondence between MediaSentry's lawyer and Michigan's Department of Labor and Economic Growth, in connection with administrative proceedings in Michigan over MediaSentry's being engaged in investigation without a license. MediaSentry's lawyer replied that Quote:
Excerpts from 3 documents in UMG v. Lindor denying that MediaSentry relied on its technical expertise. [Ed. note. These people will say ANYTHING. Now let's hope that the Lindor court finds out about what they've been saying in Michigan, and the Michigan authorities find out what they've been saying in Brooklyn. -R.B.] "Probable Cause" Hearing Against MediaSentry NewYorkCountryLawyer RIAA sidekick MediaSentry's "illegal investigation" problem, which surfaced the other day when it got caught in a lie in Michigan (or got caught telling the truth after having told 2 years worth of lies in Brooklyn), has taken another turn for the worse. We learned today from court papers filed in North Carolina, in one of the cases targeting NC State students in Raleigh, that the North Carolina Private Protective Services Board has scheduled a Grievance Committee hearing to determine whether there is probable cause to investigate an alleged violation of the law by SafeNet (formerly known as MediaSentry). Fortunately for MediaSentry, they won't have to testify under oath, according to the notice (PDF). http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?.../07/12/0240204 MEPs Back Contested Telecoms Plan European politicians have voted in favour of amendments to telecoms law which campaigners say could be used to curb privacy online and file-sharing. Digital rights groups in Europe have formed a loose coalition to highlight their opposition to the amendments. But MEPs have denied that the amendments are aimed at throwing file-sharers off the net. MEP Malcolm Harbour, who helped oversee the so-called Telecoms Packet, said it was "about improving users' rights". The vote on whether to approve the Telecom Packet itself, which is a raft of laws aimed at harmonising European telecoms regulation, takes place in September. "There has been a great deal of dismay in the committee at the interpretation being put on these amendments," he told BBC News. "They have nothing to do with copyright enforcement. The interpretation of them is alarmist and scare-mongering and deflects from the intention which was to improve consumers' rights," he said. But campaigners say one of the amendments makes it easier to enforce the controversial "three strikes" law which the music industry is keen to use in order to clamp down on file-sharers. Soviet net It would see users receive two warnings if they download copyright material without permission, followed by a complete web ban. Tentative steps towards such a policy are already underway in the UK with the BPI (formerly the British Phonographic Industry) policing file-sharing sites and informing ISPs of people downloading material illegally. Virgin Media has sent about 800 warning letters to users and the BPI is threatening to take other ISPs to court if they fail to join the campaign. France is also about to enact laws that penalise persistent file-sharers. MEPs voted against Europe-wide legislation to tackle the issue in April 2008. Campaigners say the changes to the Telecom Packet legislation have more fundamental implications for net freedom. Another amendment allows governments to decide what software can be used on the web. The Foundation for a Free Internet Infrastructure (FFII) warned that they could create a "Soviet internet" on which only software and services approved by governments would be allowed to run. "Tomorrow popular software applications like Skype or even Firefox might be declared illegal in Europe if they are not certified by an administrative authority," said a FFII spokesman in a statement. But Mr Harbour claimed the legislation has entirely more innocent intentions. "It is about new provisions so that users can find out about new services. It will make price comparison sites easier to set up, it will force regulators to give equivalent access to disabled users and enhance emergency services with caller location," he said. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/7495085.stm One Subpoena Is All It Takes to Reveal Your Online Life Saul Hansell Whenever questions are raised about privacy, big online companies talk about how benign their plans are for using data about their customers: Much data is anonymous, they say, and even the information that is linked to individuals is only meant to offer users a more personal experience tailored to their interests. They never talk about subpoenas. Yet in the United States, one of the biggest privacy issues is what information about people can be revealed through a court process, either as part of a criminal investigation or in some sort of civil dispute. This article I wrote in 2006 gives some examples. The issue came up again last week when Google was ordered by a court to turn over records of activity on YouTube, including the user names and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of people who watched videos. A judge agreed with Viacom that the records could assist its case arguing that YouTube has infringed on its copyrights. There is nothing special about the way the law treats the Internet here. All sorts of records, from your health club dues to your auto repair history, can be drawn into all manner of legal proceedings, and the records of Internet companies are generally no different. There is a higher standard for the disclosure of the content of e-mail messages under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, but there are many ways for investigators to get access to e-mail as well, particularly if the user has already read it. (The law has traditionally given greater protection to a sealed envelope in a post office than to an opened letter sitting on a person’s desk.) But Internet companies are different from other businesses that keep records about their customers. A person’s activity online represents an unusually broad picture of his or her interests, transactions and social relationships. Moreover, it is the nature of computers to keep records of all of the bits of data they process. Much of this data is spread among various different companies and their servers. But these puzzle pieces can be put together. This is the key fact that so much of the discussion about I.P. addresses skips past. The way the Internet is set up now, an I.P. address, by itself, doesn’t identify an individual user. But an I.P. address can be traced to a specific Internet service provider, and with a subpoena, the Internet provider can be forced to identify which of their customers was assigned a particular I.P. address at a particular time. That is how the recording industry has been identifying and suing people who use file sharing programs. Viacom says that it isn’t going to use the information from Google to sue individual YouTube users for copyright infringement, but there is nothing under the law to stop it from doing so. It’s easy to skip past this part of the privacy debate. After all, the overwhelming majority of log files at Internet companies are boring and meaningless. But every now and then there is a tidbit that has meaning to someone: It could be a clue to solve a horrible crime. It could be a fact that could tip the balance in a dispute over, say, child custody or an employment contract. Or it could be a salacious detail that could embarrass — rightly or wrongly — a public figure. All this raises questions that I think Internet companies, privacy regulators and Congress would be wise to take stock of: • How much data should be retained by Internet companies and for how long? • What should Internet users be told about what sort of information could be disclosed about them in response to a legal action or government request? • Should there be new laws that define more clearly what the standards are for disclosing online surfing and searching activity? There is certainly a history of laws that create special privacy regimes for various domains, such as financial and medical records. Congress even protected records about what movies you rent and television channels you watch. Aren’t the records of where you surf, and for that matter, the videos you choose to upload to YouTube, worth at least as much protection? http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...rts/index.html Viacom and Google in Stalemate Over Shielding Identities in YouTube Data Miguel Helft A week after Google and Viacom both said they hoped to agree to make YouTube viewing data anonymous before Google hands the information to Viacom, no agreement has been signed. Neither company would discuss what’s holding things up. But in a statement late Friday, Google’s senior litigation counsel, Catherine Lacavera, clearly pointed the finger at Viacom: “If Viacom refuses to allow us to anonymize viewing history, we will seek review by the court.” In the meantime, Viacom has come under sharp criticism for saying that it never asked for information that could expose individual users’ viewing’ habits. Ultimately, however, Google may have more to lose if the matter is not resolved. Several privacy advocates have pointed out, that Google — and other Internet companies, for that matter — are putting people’s privacy at risk by collecting and retaining so much data about users. Google has insisted that it has strong privacy safeguards and that it collects the data to better serve users. In the meantime, a third party in the conflict, the lawyer representing the English Premier League in a parallel class action suit against YouTube, said he remained confident that the issue would be worked out soon. “I still believe that there will be an agreement,” said the lawyer, Louis Solomon, a partner at Proskauer Rose. “Unfortunately, this is how long the process takes.” But Mr. Solomon also hinted that there are some unresolved issues. “We are going to be anonymizing names, we are going to be anonymizing I.P. addresses, but we do want the data that we do get to be usable to make our case,” he said, refusing to be more specific. Late Friday, Viacom spokesman Jeremy Zweig responded to Google’s finger-pointing with the following statement: “Viacom suggested the initiative to anonymize the data, and we have been prepared to accept anonymous information since day one. We hope that Google will turn its focus back to anonymizing the data they are required to deliver, and spend less time making statements about why they won’t get it done.” http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ata/index.html Fact Checking Viacom's New Statement on Privacy and YouTube Viacom has a statement on its site now about the YouTube litigation it probably hopes will reassure you. Leaving out the anti-Google trash talk, it reads like this: Quote:
Quote:
Viacom may think they can say whatever they wish about what they asked for, since the details of their motion to compel were filed in a sealed memorandum. But we're not stupid, and we can read the Order, where the judge tells us what Viacom asked for. Let's review. Here's the part of the Order about the logging data: Quote:
Quote:
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No one is forcing Viacom to put their junk on the internet, you know. They can sell it on DVDs or put it on TV or in whatever ways they used to. But if they do want to enter the internet space, at least they should learn how to behave in the culture in the new medium, instead of trying to make it change to be like its old business model. Hire some geeks, Viacom, will you? Someone who has a blog or a Facebook account? It will shorten your educational process and remove you from This YouTube School of Hard Knocks. I know Viacom intended the hard knocks to be for Google, but it has seriously boomeranged to where we are now presented with the bemusing picture of Viacom knocking its own head really, really hard. Here's how Viacom can determine whether people like to use YouTube more for noninfringing use or for copyright infringement, and it's a way that doesn't require Google to turn over data on all the human beings who have ever viewed a video there. Here's 2006 a video that has been viewed 10,289,983 times. Just a goofy and creative guy dancing his goofy dance-like-a-3-year-old all over the world. Love the elephants. And the kids in Rwanda. Here's the 2008 version, which is even more adorable, because lots more interesting places were visited and more people joined in the dancing with Matt Harding. Love you, Stockholm. Love the monkeys in Madagascar, dancing in the tulips in the Netherlands, and the flying is space moves in Nevada. Ah, Paris! The new one has been viewed already 5,032,204 times in less than a month. It's all over the web, not just on YouTube, so even that number is just a hint of the true numbers. Matt explains how he did the video here. [Part 2, the part with the penguins; Part 3.] Yes, he tells more about the rock in Norway. He first posted it on his own site, before YouTube even existed. Bloggers just mirrored it and it grew and grew and finally Cadbury asked him to do a video to use with some gum it has, Stride. So they paid for the 2008 video trip, and it ended up on YouTube. It's now the the world's most popular video on the web. The International Herald Tribune calls 'Dancing' a near-perfect piece of Internet art. Viacom complained about Rugrats. So here's the results page of searching for Rugrats, and as you can see, the highest viewer number for a short 1.40 minute clip is 997,313 on a clip that's been up for a year or so. Me too. I'd rather watch Matt too. But let's face it, if I had a taste for Rugrats, a 1.40 minute clip might get me started, after which I might visit Viacom's site and even pay. Wake up, Viacom. When they said the Internet changes everything, it was true. What that means is, you have to change too. And copyright isn't the *only* right that exists on planet earth. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?s...80709044510241 Viacom vs. YouTube: Beyond Privacy As Viacom is granted access to YouTube user records, a bigger threat to user-generated sites emerges: The law is increasingly siding with rights owners Catherine Holahan Just before the holiday weekend, media giant Viacom (VIA) won a legal victory over YouTube that set off fireworks across the Internet. The July 1 ruling gave Viacom access to records of what people watch on YouTube, which is owned by Google (GOOG) and is the most popular video site on the Web. Bloggers and consumer advocates warned of the potential privacy violations, particularly if Viacom uses the information to track down and sue people who watch copyrighted video clips on the site. But there's an even larger issue at stake than privacy: The legal tide may be turning against many of the most popular companies on the Web. Numerous Internet companies, from YouTube and Flickr (YHOO) to eBay (EBAY) and MySpace (NWS), have built their success on the participation of their users. In the past, the courts have been quite clear that if those users violate laws—by posting copyrighted video of Viacom's Comedy Central shows on YouTube, for example—the Web company is not liable. Increasingly, however, the courts are siding with rights owners and ruling that Web sites are responsible for illegal submissions. The new legal position, if it becomes the standard for the industry, will have profound implications for Internet companies everywhere. They may have to change their business practices to proactively screen out user submissions that could violate laws. That could dampen the growth of Web sites that depend on user submissions, and, in some cases, make their business models untenable. Are Takedown Rules Enough? The Viacom legal victory in its ongoing $1 billion copyright infringement suit against YouTube is the latest example of a judge ruling in favor of content holders. Earlier this week, eBay lost its third court case with luxury brands concerning counterfeit items listed for sale by eBay's users (BusinessWeek.com, 7/1/08). A French judge ordered eBay to pay Louis Vuitton handbag manufacturer LVMH (LVMH.PA) $61 million in damages. In doing so, the judge rejected eBay's argument that it is not responsible for illegal items sold by users because it provides tools to request removal of infringing goods and takes them down once notified. The French court's decision is not binding in the U.S., and European courts, in general, have been more sympathetic to rights holders' arguments against U.S. technology companies. However, lawyers with cases in U.S. courts are likely to argue the international precedents should, at least, influence the thinking of American judges faced with their own cases challenging whether takedown rules are sufficient to protect sites against liability. Sympathy for Rights Owners There are several reasons why the courts may be growing more sympathetic to rights owners' arguments. First, companies such as YouTube increasingly look like they're cannibalizing the revenues of content creators like Viacom. In the past, YouTube and Google could make a "fair use" legal argument because YouTube typically shows clips—not whole episodes. But now, content creators are trying to make money from appending ads to roughly the same clips and distributing them on their own online networks. Just take a look at all the ad-supported clips on Hulu, News Corp. (NWS) and NBC Universal's joint venture. Second, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) may prove less of a legal shield for Web companies than it has in the past. Enacted in 1998, the law essentially protects Web sites from liability for their users' actions (BusinessWeek.com, 5/28/08), provided they remove illegal material once they are formally notified of its appearance on their site. The protections in the DMCA are among the main reasons sites across the Web—from social networks to media sites including BusinessWeek.com (MHP)—can solicit an array of user contributions. In spite of the DMCA's impact on the Web, it is still a relatively young law, say legal experts. It is still being challenged, and a long body of case law firmly establishing its breadth and limits has yet to be established. "The law is still developing in this area and that is probably going to happen for a while," says Jennifer Urban, director of the USC Intellectual Property & Technology Law Clinic. Judges and lawmakers are typically more sympathetic to arguments that protect companies from rights holders' lawsuits when their industries are still nascent. Few want to squash a developing industry and few rights holders want to spend thousands to millions suing a company that can't offer them substantial compensation. In recent years, however, many Web sites have started to sell ads against their user-generated content, giving rights holders the ability to seek higher damages and argue that the young industry has grown up. Rethinking Users' Latitude Already, there have been rulings limiting the scope of the DMCA. The decision against peer-to-peer file-sharing company Grokster in 2005 created case law that made sites more vulnerable to lawsuits. Under the ruling, sites could be liable for users' actions if they took measures that deliberately encouraged users to do illegal things. In its lawsuit, Viacom is arguing that YouTube is "inducing" users to commit illegal actions by highlighting copyrighted videos in areas such as YouTube's most-watched section. Viacom also argues that YouTube wants illegal content to stay on the site since it potentially profits from the additional traffic such content draws in. "We don't know if the court is going to buy that argument, but the consequences are enormous," says Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Matt Zimmerman. "It will depend on the way the ruling comes down." Viacom has been clear about its plans for YouTube users. The company says it has no plans to go after people who watched a few episodes of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. "The information we've requested will be used to support Viacom's claims that Google and YouTube are infringing its intellectual property," says Mike Fricklas, Viacom's general counsel. "I also can say with complete certainty that we will not use any of the data provided to pursue individual end users." As for the DMCA laws, Zimmerman and Urban both believe they should provide protection to YouTube. After all, it takes down material once it's notified and, according to Google, tries to keep the same infringing material from being posted again. Ultimately, however, the judge will have to decide whether Google or YouTube is liable. And, if Judge Louis Stanton rides the current wave coming out of Europe, Web sites may have to seriously rethink how they manage their users. http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...073_435740.htm The Government and Your Laptop The Department of Homeland Security is routinely searching laptops at airports when Americans re-enter the United States from abroad. The government then pores over or copies the laptop’s contents — including financial records, medical data and e-mail messages. These out-of-control searches trample the privacy rights of Americans, and Congress should rein them in. There have been widespread reports of the government searching — and often seizing — laptops, BlackBerrys, iPhones and other portable electronic devices at airports. It is not clear how often these searches occur, and the government will not say. The Association of Corporate Travel Executives says that of 100 people who responded to a survey it conducted this year, 7 said they had had a laptop or other electronic device seized. This goes well beyond examining a piece of luggage. Because of the enormous amount of private information people keep on their laptops, the searches are more akin to rifling through someone’s home and reading every letter, financial record and personal journal. At a Senate hearing last month, civil liberties, civil rights and business groups testified about the harm the program is doing. Some groups have additional concerns. Businesses object that their trade secrets are being jeopardized. Lawyers and journalists say the government should not have access to their confidential communications with clients and sources. Muslims contend that they are being singled out for particularly intrusive searches. Laptop owners rightly complain that the program violates the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. Their legal objections, however, have not fared well. In April, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco upheld a laptop search at Los Angeles International Airport. After this disappointing decision, Congress needs to act. Congress should pass a law that allows the government to look at data on laptops and other portable electronic devices only when it has a reasonable suspicion about the specific person being searched — something the law does not currently require. To copy data or seize devices, the government should be required to show probable cause, an even higher standard. Congress should force the government to spell out the rules governing its searches and report on how many it conducts. The law should also require the government to destroy data that does not lead to criminal charges. The government has the right to take reasonable steps to control what comes into the country, but the laptop-search program’s invasions of privacy go far beyond what is reasonable. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/opinion/10thu3.html Swedes Massively Protest Wiretap Law Ernesto In June the Swedish parliament passed a controversial surveillance law that gives authorities a mandate to read all email and listen in on all phone calls without warrant or court order. In response to the law, The Pirate Party organized rallies, bloggers and journalists turned into activists, and even Google decided to relocate their servers. The aftermath of the vote on wiretapping legislation has been turbulent, to say the least. Bloggers have not wasted a minute in their criticism, mainstream media eventually caught up and the newspapers are now running stories and editorials every day. Various viral campaigns have flourished along with grassroots activism and The Pirate Party has hauled full sails to catch the wind that will blow them straight into European Parliament during the elections of 2009. That’s not all. Google and former public telecoms company Telia moved their servers out of Sweden. Belgium says it will sue Sweden since Belgian citizens may be wiretapped without any apparent reason. Anne Ramberg, secretary-general of the Swedish Bar Association, has called for challenges to the law in Swedish and European courts and similar demands have been heard from several other interest groups, like the Journalist’s Union. It’s FRA hunting season this summer in Sweden! It is now obvious that the legislation was a deal made between the leaders of the four government parties without full support, even from within their own ranks. Active party members resigned in protest, like Fabian Norlin of the Moderate party who quit on June 24 and instead launched FRApedia, a Wiki covering everything about the law and the authorities. Meanwhile, the people responsible have not uttered a word in defense of the legislation. They haven’t even tried to justify it. In fact, the few quotes that were made referred in smug terms to the nature of the debate and the debaters. Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said “It would be best for everyone if the debate would calm down.” Others have called your-rights-online-bloggers “spirited amateurs”, sparking even more fury. During the time since the vote, the Members of Parliament have appeared everything from sad through to ridiculously stupid when trying to handle the turbulence. A representative of the “ridiculous” faction was Liberal Party member Gunnar Andrén who wrote a very upset internal email claiming he hadn’t been told by party colleague Camilla Lindberg that she was going to vote against the bill (she was the only member of any of the four government parties that voted against the bill and received much appreciation and media by it). His email was leaked to the press by another party colleague and Andrén was later heard on a recorded phone-call exclaiming that his secrecy of correspondence had been broken and that it was “Gestapo methods”. Dude, you just voted for a bill that allows all emails to be read and all phone calls to be recorded. Live with it! The big shift in public opinion came at the time of the vote when the blogs, who had pushed on the issue for many weeks before the vote, finally found the mainstream media with them, and with that the power to reach the masses. Some 6.6 million emails were sent to the Members of Parliament through an online petition created by daily newspaper Expressen which allowed easy protests to the members. Göran Petterson of the Moderate Party (until 2006 an military officer and one of those in favor of the FRA legislation) wrote on his blog: “Email is a great way to communicate with my voters but then you can’t do like Expressen has done now. […] Now, normal emails from the citizens are drowning in these.” Clearly, he didn’t understand his voters were trying to communicate with him, sending him a clear message of what they thought of him and his party. This Thursday, rallies were initiated in Malmö and Stockholm by The Pirate Party which gathered more than 2000 anti-FRA protesters. They were in fact parties rather than protests, celebrating that Sweden has become a banana republic. As in the protests before the vote in June, the parties’ youth organizations stood side by side fighting the FRA, all ideological differences set aside for what may be one of the most important issues in their political careers. In Malmö, Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay spoke at the rally saying “the FRA bill is unnecessary, ineffective, unwanted and last but not least, expensive. The government should listen to the people, as they cannot replace us. However, we have the power to change the government.” Meanwhile, in Stockholm, Maria Wetterstrand of the Green Party promised that an abolishment of the FRA bill would be one of their demands in order to form government with The Social Democrats after the elections 2010 while Alice Åström of the Left Party promised to motion this fall to give members of the government alliance parties the possibility to break up the legislation. Yesterday, the annual Swedish political gathering in Almedalen began, where ministers, parliament members, journalists, pundits, lobbyists and interest groups traditionally meet during a week on the island of Gotland. The government thought that putting the FRA vote at the back of the spring schedule would make it go unnoticed. Instead, it’s the only current political hot topic as the Almedalen week is approaching with the Pirate Party in full presence on site to further push the agenda. http://torrentfreak.com/swedes-massi...ap-law-080707/ The New FISA Compromise: It's Worse Than You Think Timothy B. Lee Telco immunity is the icing, not the cake Last month, the House of Representatives passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, Congress's latest response to President Bush's demands for expanded eavesdropping authority. The Democratic leadership, seemingly intent on avoiding real debate on the proposal, scheduled the final vote just a day after the bill was introduced in the House. Touted by Democratic leaders as a "compromise," it was supported almost unanimously by House Republicans and opposed by a majority of Democrats. The 114-page bill was pushed through the House so quickly that there was no real time to debate its many complex provisions. This may explain why the telecom immunity provision has received so much attention in the media: it is much easier to explain to readers not familiar with the intricacies of surveillance law than the other provisions. But as important as the immunity issue is, the legislation also makes many prospective changes to surveillance law that will profoundly impact our privacy rights for years to come. Specifically, the new legislation dramatically expands the government's ability to wiretap without meaningful judicial oversight, by redefining "oversight" so that the feds can drag their feet on getting authorization almost indefinitely. It also gives the feds unprecedented new latitude in selecting eavesdropping targets, latitude that could be used to collect information on non-terrorist-related activities like P2P copyright infringement and online gambling. In short, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 opens up loopholes so large that the feds could drive a truck loaded down with purloined civil liberties through it. So the telecom immunity stuff is just the smoke; let's take a look at the fire. The importance of judicial scrutiny The most fundamental question in the FISA debate is whether judicial oversight will be required when the government spies on international communications originating on American soil. FISA has never limited spying on purely foreign communications, but under current law, the government must obtain court approval to tap a phone line or fiber optic cable in the United States, even if the other end of the communication is abroad. An application for a FISA warrant must specify the person or organization being targeted and present evidence that the target is an "agent of a foreign power," such as the Chinese government or Al Qaeda. The Bush administration has chafed at these restrictions, insisting that the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists without court oversight. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell argues that that the FISA process is so cumbersome that it impedes the intelligence community's efforts to spy on terrorists. Civil libertarians disagree, noting that FISA sets a lower bar for approving surveillance than the process for obtaining ordinary criminal warrants. And in emergency cases, FISA allows the government to begin spying immediately and seek a warrant after the fact. Most importantly, civil liberties groups emphasize that without judicial oversight, there is no way to know if the government is respecting any limits that Congress establishes. Consider, for example, the case of National Security Letters, administrative subpoenas that the Patriot Act allows the FBI to issue without court oversight. Last year a government audit last year found hundreds of cases in which the FBI had issued NSLs without following even the permissive rules of the Patriot Act. Civil libertarians warn that similar corner-cutting is inevitable if the NSA is allowed to choose eavesdropping targets without judicial scrutiny. No individual warrants for international calls When it comes to judicial oversight of domestic-to-foreign calls, the legislation the House passed last month is an unambiguous victory for the White House and a defeat for civil libertarians. The legislation establishes a new procedure whereby the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence can sign off on "authorizations" of surveillance programs "targeting people reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." The government is required to submit a "certification" to the FISA court describing the surveillance plan and the "minimization" procedures that will be used to avoid intercepting too many communications of American citizens. However, the government is not required to "identify the specific facilities, places, premises, or property" at which the eavesdropping will occur. The specific eavesdropping targets will be at the NSA's discretion and unreviewed by a judge. Moreover, the judge's review of the government's "certification" is much more limited than the scrutiny now given to FISA applications. The judge is permitted only to confirm that the certification "contains all the required elements," that the targeting procedures are "reasonably designed" to target foreigners, and that minimization procedures have been established. Crucially, there appears to be no limit to the breadth of "authorizations" the government might issue. So, for example, a single "authorization" might cover the interception of all international traffic passing through AT&T's San Francisco facility, with complex software algorithms deciding which communications are retained for the examination of human analysts. Without a list of specific targets, and without a background in computer programming, a judge is unlikely to be able to evaluate whether such software is properly "targeted" at foreigners. The House legislation also drastically extends the timeline for reviewing surveillance activities, potentially allowing the government to commence eavesdropping and then drag out judicial review for months. Under existing law, the government must obtain judicial approval within 72 hours of the start of emergency wiretapping. In contrast, the judicial review of "certifications" can stretch out as long as four months. After beginning eavesdropping, the government has a week to submit its "certification" to the FISA court, which has 30 days to review the application. If the judge finds problems with the certification, the government can continue eavesdropping for another 30 days before it is required to comply with the order. And the government can buy still more time by filing an appeal to the FISA Court of Review. The appeals court may take as long as 60 days to make its decision, and the government will often be allowed to continue eavesdropping throughout the process of judicial review. This means that in many cases, the government will have completed its spying activities long before the courts reach a decision on its legality. No "targeting" Americans The legislation does provide modestly enhanced protections for Americans living overseas. The "authorizations" described in the previous section are only available when they "target" those who are not American citizens or legal residents. When the target of an eavesdropping program is an American, the government must satisfy more stringent requirements, including the traditional requirement that the target is an "agent of a foreign power." The surveillance also must cease within seven days if judicial approval for it is not forthcoming. This section is a modest restriction on the government's prior eavesdropping powers. Traditionally, FISA did not govern purely overseas eavesdropping activities, even if they targeted American citizens. Under the new legislation, the government will need court approval to "target" Americans overseas, even when the surveillance is conducted overseas. However, as a practical matter, this enhancement of Americans' privacy rights may prove extremely limited. The government may not "target" Americans under the broad "authorizations" discussed in the previous section, and in some cases the government may discard information obtained about Americans as part of the required "minimization" procedures, but the government would retain significant latitude to decide which information it retains. The paradoxical consequence is that broader wiretapping orders may be approved more easily than narrower ones. For example, the government could not unilaterally "authorize" the "targeting" of a particular San Francisco resident's international communications. However, it could "authorize" a dragnet surveillance program that intercepted the international communications of all San Francisco residents under the pretext that it was "targeting" any foreign terrorists who might happen to communicate with San Francisco residents. This is particularly troubling when we remember that in 2002, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review held that FISA does not prohibit coordination between foreign intelligence gathering and domestic law enforcement. That suggests that the FBI could ask the NSA to tailor its filters to intercept evidence of Internet gambling, copyright infringement, or other ordinary crimes. The Americans whose communications were turned over could not be the "target" of the surveillance, but the House legislation requires only that foreign intelligence gathering be "a significant purpose" of eavesdropping programs. If a terrorist surveillance program also catches American citizens who are gambling or infringing copyright law, that's even better! Other provisions As has been widely reported, the legislation would grant broad, retroactive immunity to firms that participated in the president's warrantless surveillance program. The bar for granting immunity is extremely low: to receive immunity, the firm must merely demonstrate that it had received a letter from the government stating that the program was lawful. Since we already know that the program participants received such letters, there is no practical difference between this standard and blanket immunity. The legislation expands the list of people who can be spied on to include those engaged in "the international proliferation of weapons of mass destruction." And curiously, it has an extremely broad definition of "weapons of mass destruction." It includes not only nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, but also "any explosive, incendiary, or poison gas that is designed, intended, or has the capability to cause a mass casualty incident." As Wired's Jason Sigger points out, this is significantly broader than the traditional definition. The legislation mandates that the Inspectors General of each agency involved in FISA surveillance prepare reports to Congress detailing the nature and extent of post-September 11 surveillance activities. Democratic leaders have made much of a provision designating FISA (along with ordinary criminal wiretapping procedures) as the "exclusive means" for intercepting electronic communications. But as a ruling last week made clear, this provision is little more than window dressing. Republican-appointed judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled last week that the 1978 FISA statute established "the exclusive means for foreign intelligence surveillance activities to be conducted." If the president ignored the exclusivity provisions of the current iteration of FISA, it's not clear what is accomplished by adding another one. Compromise or capitulation? Democratic leaders have worked hard to portray the legislation as a compromise, but close examination of its provisions suggests that it is an unvarnished victory for President Bush and his allies in Congress. The legislation eliminates meaningful judicial oversight of eavesdropping between Americans citizen and foreigners located overseas and effectively legalizes dragnet surveillance of domestic-to-foreign traffic. It stretches out the judicial review process so much that the government will in many cases be able to complete its surveillance activities before the courts finish deciding on its legality. And Democratic leaders have capitulated on the immunity question, agreeing to language that would almost certainly lead to retroactive immunity for lawbreaking telecom companies. Many supporters of Barack Obama were dismayed last month when he announced that he would support the legislation. Indeed, more than 20,000 have joined a group on his campaign website urging him to reject the bill; the group is now the largest on his website. But thus far, Obama has maintained his support for the bill. Last week, an Obama surrogate insisted that "with FISA expiring," the bill was the best Democrats could hope to get. The only problem is that FISA isn't expiring. It was enacted in 1978 and is not scheduled to sunset. The Protect America Act did expire in March, but given that the Bush administration managed to prevent terrorist attacks under FISA for almost six years until last summer's passage of the Protect America Act, it's hard to be too alarmed about living under FISA again for the final six months of Pres. Bush's term. The Democrats' capitulation is particularly puzzling because, as we've pointed out before, the Democrats' firm stance on FISA this Spring turned out to be a political asset, not a liability. When House Democrats called Pres. Bush's bluff and allowed the Protect America Act to expire in March, it got a wave of positive coverage from the media, which pointed out that the PAA's expiration would have little effect on the government's ability to spy on terrorists. Now that Democratic leaders are switching sides yet again, we've seen the re-emergence of unflattering coverage focusing on the Democrats' weakness on national security issues and lack of party unity. Protecting civil liberties ought to be a matter of principle, but even if Democratic leaders are unmoved by civil liberties concerns, one might have expected them to stand up to the White House based on purely political motivations. Civil libertarians' last stand against expanded government surveillance will occur in the Senate, in a vote that is expected to occur this week. So far, the determined opposition of a small group of Senators led by Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold has managed to stall the legislation for a couple of weeks. Dodd has signaled that he will continue using every weapon at his disposal to stop the legislation. But with Democratic leaders lining up in support of the bill, Dodd and Feingold face an uphill battle. http://arstechnica.com/articles/cult...compromise.ars Obama, FISA and the Netroots Bob Ostertag The current dust-up in the Obama camp over this week's FISA vote may have real consequences for the rest of this campaign. As you may know, the largest "group" on the Obama campaign's social networking site, MyBarackObama.com, is now a group assembled to protest Senator Obama's reversal of his promise to filibuster against the FISA legislation up next week. Reading through the blogoshpere, many commenters appear baffled at the intensity of the passions involved, and criticize the protestors for making such a fuss over "just one issue." But there are good reasons why core activists have taken a strong stand, and why the campaign may look different after this is over. For many Obama activists, a key issue that propelled them into campaign activism is dismantling the unconstitutional legal measures the Bush administration put in place in the aftermath of 9/11. The prison at Guantánamo, the secret CIA prisons scattered around the globe, the torture of prisoners, and the kangaroo courts set up to process them are the foreign pieces of this puzzle. Warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is the domestic piece. While understanding all the ins and outs of the FISA legislation requires a specialist's knowledge, the core issue is simple: are we working to return the country to the rule of constitutional law or not? (Click here for an excellent analysis of Obama's FISA statement by a specialist.) Obama made two arguments in his reply to the protestors. First, he argued that though the bill is "far better than the Protect America Act" which the Bush administration pushed through Congress last year. This argument is not only meaningless but downright misleading, for the Protect America Act was written to expire. If no new legislation is passed, we revert back to the pre-Bush, pre-9/11 version of the legal structure of state surveillance of Americans, not the Bush version. The question is not whether the new legislation is better than Bush's, but whether it is better than what the country lived under from 1978 until Bush. It is one thing for Obama to be vague about the particulars of his policies, as he was throughout the primaries. But it is a different thing altogether to make misleading statements about key issues. So we are left with Obama's second argument, and this one has actual substance: The ability to monitor and track individuals who want to attack the United States is a vital counter-terrorism tool, and I'm persuaded that it is necessary to keep the American people safe -- particularly since certain electronic surveillance orders will begin to expire later this summer. Given the choice between voting for an improved yet imperfect bill, and losing important surveillance tools, I've chosen to support the current compromise. The "important surveillance tool" he is referring to is warrantless wiretapping. Here Obama unequivocally sides with the argument the Bush administration justice department has been making for years: that in the context of the "war on terror," some constitutional rights must be suspended or at least sidestepped, and key among them is warrantless state surveillance. That is a BIG DEAL. There are more ways in which this issue stands out among others. Obama's promise to withdraw American troops from Iraq in 18 months is highly provisional and will be subject to many reality tests along the way. His program for global warming will be a major undertaking to put in place, and will surely show many signs of wear when and if it is enacted. The FISA issue is a completely different deal: this is pending legislation that will be voted on next week. It is very much still a fight. There are senators set to oppose the bill, by filibuster if necessary. Obama had promised to be one of them. On October 24, 2007, campaign spokesman Bill Burton announced, "To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies." The position was elaborated in another statement December 17, 2007: "Senator Obama unequivocally opposes giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies and has cosponsored Senator Dodd's efforts to remove that provision from the FISA bill. Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill, and strongly urges others to do the same." What Obama has done here is not a "refinement" of a policy position like he recently suggested concerning Iraq. It is an about face. Imagine how different next week would play out if the presumptive Democratic nominee was joining a filibuster on the floor of the senate, standing up for the constitutional rights of all Americans. The contrast between what would happen if Obama followed through on his promise, and what will happen if he doesn't, is night and day. (See this complete timeline of Obama's statements on the bill.) Here is another level on which this whole thing stinks. It is one thing for a presumptive nominee to adjust policy positions to reach out to constituencies he wants to bring in to his coalition which were not part of his primary victory. We have seen Obama do that with evangelicals, for example. Warrantless wiretapping has no constituency. There is no sector of the American population that just might jump off the fence and get behind Obama if he only agrees to give telecommunications corporations retroactive immunity for illegally collaborating with the Bush administration's spying. He is not courting votes here. Either he is caving in to pressure from the giant telecom corporations, or he has really bought into the idea that American actually needs warrantless wiretapping. Either option is equally unpalatable to many activists. Finally, here is yet another angle. Throughout the primaries, one of the big criticisms of Obama was that when it came to votes, he backed off. Thus all those "present" votes in Illinois. But the campaign came up with what seemed like a plausible explanation for all that, and many Obama supporters decided he deserved a pass on that. Well, here we are, the first big vote Obama faces on the national and international stage, and guess what? He is backing off. Not good. Yet there has been very little talk among the MyBO protestors of not voting for Obama. What there has been is a pronounced change of tone, which may hold real implications for the rest of the campaign. Obama rode to the nomination in large part on the backs of... well, of people like me. I always vote Democratic, and I always vote. All my life I have voted for a long string of mediocre Democratic candidates, but I have almost never volunteered for or sent money to a presidential campaign. I am politically active, but on local issues where I feel I can have a real impact, or on international issues that I feel are of global importance. The realm of presidential politics is another world to me: donors who can bring in millions, TV ads which I never see since I don't own a TV, and candidates loaded down with corporate backers with set agendas. Obama changed that for me. I sent him money. I phone banked. I held street signs. I don't know if I am going to continue with all that. I will vote for Obama of course. I will continue to urge everyone I know to vote for him. But my money and time, paltry though they may be, will likely get redirected to candidates who are willing to stand up for issues I care about. And because of the Internet, I know that there are a lot of other Obama supporters in the same boat; a lot of people considering cutting off their string of small donations to the campaign. All of this is coming at a time in which Obama's schedule is filled with big-money fundraisers where people can buy face time with the man for $30k. Put all these things together, and one cannot help but wonder if there is a turning point, that from here on out the campaign is will be less of a grassroots affair. This is not the death knell of the campaign. Far from it. I think Obama can do very well against McCain with a traditional, top down, big money campaign. I think he will be sworn in as our next president in January. But it will be a different campaign than what it has been until now. As one commenter to my blog so aptly said, "Senator Obama, you can tap my phone or my wallet, but not both." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-os..._b_111116.html Online Movement Aims to Punish Democrats Who Support Bush Wiretap Bill Sarah Lai Stirland Online activists from the right and the left announced an unprecedented campaign Tuesday to hold Democratic lawmakers accountable for caving in to the Bush administration on domestic spying. A group of high-profile progressive bloggers and libertarian Republicans are rolling out a new political action committee called Accountability Now to channel widespread anger over pending legislation that would legalize much of the president's warrantless electronic surveillance of Americans, and grant retroactive legal immunity to telephone companies that cooperated with the spying when it was still illegal. Progressive author and lawyer Glenn Greenwald, who writes for Salon.com, and blogger Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, are spearheading the effort. They've hired the political media consultants behind a historic Ron Paul online fundraising drive to organize a similar "moneybomb," set to go off Aug. 8. "That is the day Richard Nixon resigned, and the idea is that 35 years ago when you did this kind of stuff, you were forced out of office, and now congress drops everything to make your crimes legal," says Hamsher in an interview. The campaign marks a milestone in the evolution of online grassroots organizing. The PAC is cherry-picking the tactics and tools that proved most successful in the presidential primary campaigns, and is using them to corral online support for the single issue of domestic spying. The PAC's money pay for advertisements in the districts of the House Democrats who voted for the spy bill -- potentially causing problems for those capitulating on the Bush wiretapping program. "The fact is, we're all entering completely new territory here," writes Micah Sifry on the TechPresident blog in a post on other, similar efforts to rally support to influence Barack Obama's vote on the pending legislation this Wednesday in the Senate. "There have always been efforts to influence political candidates to take or change positions during a campaign (or afterward), but we've never before had a national campaign create an open platform for mobilizing supporters and then seen a salient chunk of those supporters openly use that platform to challenge the candidate on a policy position." Key to the new effort are consultants Trevor Lyman and Rick Williams, whose successful online money-raising effort for Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning Texas congressman, broke records last year. The pair masterminded a "moneybomb" drive called "This November 5th" that brought in an unprecedented $4.2 million in contributions in a single day. A repeat effort in December raised another $6 million for Paul. Now the pair have built a web page for Accountability Now where opponents of the spy bill can commit in advance to donating money to the PAC. Similar to the Ron Paul drives, netizens can grab Accountability Now badges to place on their blogs, which link back to the fundraising pledge page. The moneybomb is only one of several techniques, both online and off, that Hamsher's Firedoglake is experimenting with to make offending members of congress feel the anger of their constituents. Blue America PAC, of which Firedoglake is a part, has already hired Advomatic and Advomatic Laboratories in New York City, to create a VOIP widget that lets voters call their senators ask them what their stance is on the spy legislation, and to urge them to vote for an amendment that would remove the telecom immunity provision. So far, 1,600 calls have been made using the tool, which launched Wednesday, says Matt Browner Hamlin, Advomatic Laboratories' founder. Blue America PAC also launched a robocall campaign in late June against House Majority Leader and Maryland Representative Steny Hoyer, who organized the vote for the legislation. And it's run television ads against Reps. John Barrow, D-Ga., and Chris Carney, D-Pa -- the so-called Blue Dog Democrats who pushed for the legislation. Hamsher says the effort is aimed at Democrats, because that's the party in control of Congress. "They will have the power," she says. "From our perspective, Chris Carney, or a Republican, it doesn't make any difference -- they're both voting bad on a variety of issues. But Republicans have no power, and Chris Carney in the center will. Using money it has already raised, the group ran a full-page advertisement in The Washington Post on Tuesday with bullet points explaining what's wrong with the pending legislation. The Senate is expected to follow the House in approving the new spy legislation Wednesday. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...-activist.html Amendment Would Put Spy Lawsuits, Amnesty On Hold Pending Investigation Ryan Singel On Tuesday, the Senate resumes considering whether to hand new dragnet spy powers to the nation's spooks and to grant retroactive amnesty to telecoms that secretly helped the government spy on Americans without warrants for five years. The Senate seems set to bless the president's secretive program and to free some of the nation's largest corporations from the indignity of due process under the law, making an odd amendment from New Mexico Democrat Sen. Jeff Bingaman the the last real hope for those who want a court to rule on the legality of Bush's spying program. Democratic Sens. Christopher Dodd, Russ Feingold and Patrick Leahy have sponsored an amendment to fully strip the retroactive amnesty from the bill, therefore allowing a federal judge to decide how and whether to proceed with the class-action suits. That muscular approach failed by a substantial margin in March, and would likely do so again. Republican Sen. Arlen Specter offered an amendment that would allow the judge in the case to dismiss a plea for amnesty if the court found that the underlying surveillance violated the Constitution. That's a nifty proposal, but one unlikely to pass -- given that the Republican-appointed judge in the combined anti-wiretapping cases all but declared the President's secret wiretapping regime to be illegal in a ruling last week. Bingaman offers a different solution. Hitching his amendment to the anti-amnesty argument that Congress should not approve what it did not understand, Bingaman proposes that the court cases and amnesty powers all are put on hold, until three months after the joint report by the Inspectors General of the various intelligence services complete their report to Congress on just what transpired between the nation's telecoms and the intelligence services. If Congress is disturbed by the report -- due a year from the day the bill becomes law, it has time to undo or tweak the rules; otherwise, it can just leave amnesty provisions to come into effect three months after the report to Congress (both public and classified). That report is already required in the larger bill, but it's not due until next spring, far after the White House has a new inhabitant and long after the judge overseeing the anti-warrantless wiretapping program will have to dismiss the cases if the current bill is passed unmodified. The Bingaman amendment makes the simple argument that Congress should not handing out pardons without knowing what the pardons are for. Not surprisingly, the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General both told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) that if the bill were passed with the Bingaman amendment, they and other senior Bush advisors would recommend that the President veto it. "Continued delay in protecting those who provided assistance after September 11 will invariably be noted by those who may someday be called upon again to help the Nation," DNI Michael McConnell and AG Michael Mukasey wrote Monday. "Any amendment that would delay implementation of the liablity protection is critical to the national security." Critics, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, say preventing massive cooperation with a secret government surveillance operation that targets Americans is exactly the point of the suit. The government's set-in-stone opposition does not surprise Kevin Bankston, an EFF attorney who specializes in surveillance law. "They want to finish up the last of the cover-up of the government's illegal, warrantless wiretapping program," Bankston said. The Senate is set to begin debate on the bill Tuesday, though planned votes on the three pending amendments and the final bill will be Wednesday to allow senators to attend the funeral of former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Connecticut) is scheduled to take to the Senate floor early evening Tuesday. His orations against telecom amnesty and wider spying powers stopped the bill cold in December and evince a passion rarely seen on the Senate floor. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...?cid=121444500 Senate Approves Bill to Broaden Wiretap Powers Eric Lichtblau The Senate gave final approval on Wednesday to a major expansion of the government’s surveillance powers, handing President Bush one more victory in a series of hard-fought clashes with Democrats over national security issues. The measure, approved by a vote of 69 to 28, is the biggest revamping of federal surveillance law in 30 years. It includes a divisive element that Mr. Bush had deemed essential: legal immunity for the phone companies that cooperated in the National Security Agency wiretapping program he approved after the Sept. 11 attacks. The vote came two and a half years after public disclosure of the wiretapping program set off a fierce national debate over the balance between protecting the country from another terrorist strike and ensuring civil liberties. The final outcome in Congress, which opponents of the surveillance measure had conceded for weeks, seemed almost anticlimactic in contrast. Mr. Bush, appearing in the Rose Garden just after his return from Japan, called the vote “long overdue.” He promised to sign the measure into law quickly, saying it was critical to national security and showed that “even in an election year, we can come together and get important pieces of legislation passed.” Even as his political stature has waned, Mr. Bush has managed to maintain his dominance on national security issues in a Democratic-led Congress. He has beat back efforts to cut troops and financing in Iraq, and he has won important victories on issues like interrogation tactics and military tribunals in the fight against terrorism. Debate over the surveillance law was the one area where Democrats had held firm in opposition. House Democrats went so far as to allow a temporary surveillance measure to expire in February, leading to a five-month impasse and prompting accusations from Mr. Bush that the nation’s defenses against another strike by Al Qaeda had been weakened. But in the end Mr. Bush won out, as administration officials helped forge a deal between Republican and Democratic leaders that included almost all the major elements the White House wanted. The measure gives the executive branch broader latitude in eavesdropping on people abroad and at home who it believes are tied to terrorism, and it reduces the role of a secret intelligence court in overseeing some operations. Supporters maintained that the plan includes enough safeguards to protect Americans’ civil liberties, including reviews by several inspectors general. There is nothing to fear in the bill, said Senator Christopher S. Bond, the Missouri Republican who was a lead negotiator, “unless you have Al Qaeda on your speed dial.” But some Democratic opponents saw the deal as “capitulation” to White House pressure by fellow Democrats. “I urge my colleagues to stand up for the rule of law and defeat this bill,” Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, said Wednesday as the outcome was all but assured. The final plan, which overhauls the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act passed by Congress in 1978 in the wake of Watergate, reflected both political reality and legal practicality, supporters said. Wiretapping orders approved by secret orders under the previous version of the surveillance law were set to begin expiring in August unless Congress acted. Heading into their political convention in Denver next month and on to the November Congressional elections, many Democrats were wary of handing the Republicans a potent political weapon. The issue put Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, in a particularly precarious spot. He had long opposed giving legal immunity to the phone companies that took part in the N.S.A.’s wiretapping program, even threatening a filibuster during his run for the nomination. But on Wednesday, he ended up voting for what he called “an improved but imperfect bill” after backing a failed attempt earlier in the day to strip the immunity provision from the bill through an amendment. Mr. Obama’s decision last month to reverse course angered some ardent supporters, who organized an Internet drive to influence his vote. And his position came to symbolize the continuing difficulties that Democrats have faced in striking a position on national security issues even against a weakened president. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, who had battled Mr. Obama for the nomination, voted against the bill. Senator John McCain, the likely Republican presidential nominee, was campaigning in Ohio and did not vote, though he has consistently supported the immunity plan. Support from key Democrats ensured passage of the measure. Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who leads the intelligence committee and helped broker the deal, said modernizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was essential to give intelligence officials the technology tools they need to deter another attack. But he said the plan “was made even more complicated by the president’s decision, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, to go outside of FISA rather than work with Congress to fix it.” He was referring to the secret program approved by Mr. Bush weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks that allowed the N.S.A, in a sharp legal and operational shift, to wiretap the international communications of Americans suspected of links to Al Qaeda without first getting court orders. The program was disclosed in December 2005 by The New York Times. As Congress repeatedly tried to find a legislative solution, the main stumbling block was Mr. Bush’s insistence on legal immunity for the phone companies. The program itself ended in January 2007, when the White House agreed to bring it under the auspices of the FISA court, but more than 40 lawsuits continued churning through federal courts, charging AT&T, Verizon and other major carriers with violating customers’ privacy by conducting wiretaps at the White House’s direction without court orders. The final deal, which passed the House on June 20, effectively ends those lawsuits. It includes a narrow review by a district court to determine whether the companies being sued received formal requests or directives from the administration to take part in the program. The administration has already acknowledged those directives exist. Once such a finding is made, the lawsuits “shall be promptly dismissed,” the bill says. Republican leaders say they regard the process as a mere formality to protect the phone carriers from liability. Lawyers involved in the suits against the phone companies promised to challenge the immunity provision in federal court. “The law itself is a massive intrusion into the due process rights of all of the phone subscribers who would be a part of the suit,” said Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer representing several hundred plaintiffs suing Verizon and other companies. “It is a violation of the separation of powers. It’s presidential election-year cowardice. The Democrats are afraid of looking weak on national security.” The legislation also expands the government’s power to invoke emergency wiretapping procedures. While the N.S.A. would be allowed to seek court orders for broad groups of foreign targets, the law creates a new seven-day period for directing wiretaps at foreigners without a court order in “exigent” circumstances if government officials assert that important national security information would be lost. The law also expands to seven days, from three, the period for emergency wiretaps on Americans without a court order if the attorney general certifies there is probable cause to believe the target is linked to terrorism. Democrats pointed to some concessions they had won. The final bill includes a reaffirmation that the FISA law is the “exclusive” means of conducting intelligence wiretaps — a provision that Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House speaker, and other Democrats insisted would prevent Mr. Bush or any future president from evading court scrutiny in the way they say that the N.S.A. program did. David Stout contributed reporting. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/wa...10fisa.html?hp ACLU Announces Legal Challenge To Follow President’s Signature FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: (202) 675-2312, media@dcaclu.org or (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org WASHINGTON – Today, in a blatant assault upon civil liberties and the right to privacy, the Senate passed an unconstitutional domestic spying bill that violates the Fourth Amendment and eliminates any meaningful role for judicial oversight of government surveillance. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 was approved by a vote of 69 to 28 and is expected to be signed into law by President Bush shortly. This bill essentially legalizes the president’s unlawful warrantless wiretapping program revealed in December 2005 by the New York Times. “Once again, Congress blinked and succumbed to the president’s fear-mongering. With today’s vote, the government has been given a green light to expand its power to spy on Americans and run roughshod over the Constitution,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This legislation will give the government unfettered and unchecked access to innocent Americans’ international communications without a warrant. This is not only unconstitutional, but absolutely un-American.” The FISA Amendments Act nearly eviscerates oversight of government surveillance by allowing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to review only general procedures for spying rather than individual warrants. The FISC will not be told any specifics about who will actually be wiretapped, thereby undercutting any meaningful role for the court and violating the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure. The bill further trivializes court review by authorizing the government to continue a surveillance program even after the government’s general spying procedures are found insufficient or unconstitutional by the FISC. The government has the authority to wiretap through the entire appeals process, and then keep and use whatever information was gathered in the meantime. A provision touted as a major “concession” by proponents of the bill calls for investigations by the inspectors general of four agencies overseeing spying activities. But members of Congress who do not sit on the Judiciary or Intelligence committees will not be guaranteed access to the agencies’ reports. The bill essentially grants absolute retroactive immunity to telecommunication companies that facilitated the president’s warrantless wiretapping program over the last seven years by ensuring the dismissal of court cases pending against those companies. The test for the companies’ right to immunity is not whether the government certifications they acted on were actually legal – only whether they were issued. Because it is public knowledge that certifications were issued, all of the pending cases will be summarily dismissed. This means Americans may never learn the truth about what the companies and the government did with our private communications. “With one vote, Congress has strengthened the executive branch, weakened the judiciary and rendered itself irrelevant,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “This bill – soon to be law – is a constitutional nightmare. Americans should know that if this legislation is enacted and upheld, what they say on international phone calls or emails is no longer private. The government can listen in without having a specific reason to do so. Our rights as Americans have been curtailed and our privacy can no longer be assumed.” In advance of the president’s signature, the ACLU announced its plan to challenge the new law in court. “This fight is not over. We intend to challenge this bill as soon as President Bush signs it into law,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. “The bill allows the warrantless and dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international telephone and email communications. It plainly violates the Fourth Amendment.” For more information, go to: www.aclu.org/fisa http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general...s20080709.html LegalTorrents Offers CC Works Via BitTorrent A site called LegalTorrents has just launched that hosts trackers and seeds for digital media licensed under the Creative Commons license. ("We distribute content with the full permission of the rights holders and use the peer-2-peer file-sharing technology called Bittorrent.") The site even provides a way to donate money to artists you like. (LegalTorrents takes 15% off the top unless you are a member, which costs $50 one-time during the beta period.) It's always good to see "legitimate" content distributed in ways that make it hard to demonize the distribution system itself — something Lawrence Lessig in particular has been doing for years, and his book "Free Culture" is one of the audiobooks available through LegalTorrents. Note that LegalTorrents has been around for a while now, rather than "just launched," but the current beta period won't last forever. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/06/1856244 Your Mashup Is Probably Legal TV Barn We've been conditioned to think that if you pull something off the web and use it, you're committing some sort of copyright infringement. But increasingly, the law is moving in the opposite direction. Provided you are making a truly new use of the content, you are free to make money off those copyrighted images and video and sound. On Monday the Center for Social Media released "Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video," which reflects the latest changes in copyright law that has expanded the understanding of fair use to include "transformational effect." Already Miro has endorsed the guidelines, as have several public broadcasters. The Center has a good track record, having issued guidelines for documentary filmmakers that have greatly reduced copyright claims in that area. The website has plenty of resources for mashers and mixers; I interviewed the Center's director in this podcast that summarizes the most important findings of the report. On the other hand, says reader kaliphonia, your guitar tablature sites may not fare so well. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/08/1245204 Download Torrents Remotely with Mininova Bookmarks Ernesto Mininova has just launched their new bookmarking feature for registered users. One of the benefits of your mininova bookmarks page is that generates a personalized RSS feed which allows you to automatically add bookmarked torrents to your BitTorrent client. Importing torrents via RSS can be very useful if you’re at work, school, or at a friends place. With this new feature from mininova you only have to bookmark the torrent, and it will start downloading automatically when your BitTorrent client is running at home. Here is how it works. First of all, you’ll have to be a registered user at Mininova to use the bookmarking feature. Then, when you come across a torrent you would like to download, simply click on the “Add to bookmarks” button. The torrent will then be added to your personal bookmarks page, which has its own RSS feed. Next, you will have to add your personal bookmarks feed to your favorite BitTorrent client and then you’re all set. In addition you can customize the process a bit more, depending on the client you use. Some clients, for example, let you choose whether to download the torrent immediately, or start it later manually. Mininova is not the first BitTorrent site to add bookmarking capabilities. Torrentz.com has had this feature for quite some time now. However, Mininova is the first site to combine it with an RSS feed that has BitTorrent enclosures, which makes it compatible with BitTorrent clients that support RSS downloading. Mininova has covered their new bookmark feature, with some additional details, in their latest blog post. For those who are interested, we have some more RSS tutorials over here. http://torrentfreak.com/automate-you...kmarks-080709/ File-Sharing Fetish Virginia Heffernan In 1996, as Hollywood was lionizing the pornographer Larry Flynt as the author of the real sexual revolution, the Internet was trying to decide what to do about porn. It was not an either-or question. After all, data could instantly be conveyed at low cost across vast distances, from traceless studios to private lairs. Pornography was bound to ride this network. Observers accepted it as axiomatic: technology and pornography — from the printing press, to photography, magazines, film and videotape — always evolve in tandem. “Sometimes the erotic has been a force driving technological innovation,” John Tierney wrote in The Times in 1994. “Virtually always, from Stone Age sculpture to computer bulletin boards, it has been one of the first uses for a new medium.” The Internet is for porn. Since I spend days and nights watching online video, people frequently remind me of this maxim from “Avenue Q.” A little too rapidly, I protest that YouTube, the Web’s most comprehensive video site, where people watch around three billion videos a month — fertile territory for pornography any way you look at it — has somehow kept itself (relatively) clean and outstripped the video-sharing competition. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who founded the site, met at PayPal, the money-exchange company. Their ambition in developing YouTube was not to create entertainment but to build another safe, secure and trustworthy exchange site, this one for videos. To a great extent, they have succeeded. So while pornography is no doubt culturally important and central to technological progress, I almost never run across it in my own online travels. Yes, I’m trying to seem relaxed and cosmopolitan. The truth is that pornography makes me feel tired and sulkily excluded, as if I were watching a long foreign-language play filled with hilarious jokes I’ll never understand. But almost everyone else seems to get it, and entrepreneurs in the mid-’90s saw dollar signs. Thanks to pro-sex feminism, the apotheosis of Flynt and nostalgia for the era of “Boogie Nights,” the entrepreneurs could even — if in existential doubt — wrap themselves in the Stars and Stripes. Pornography — or some kinds of it — was cerebral, hip. In San Francisco, there was Kink.com, a supposedly humane fetish site started by someone who had been to Columbia University. In New York, Nerve.com, a press darling aimed at a literate and coed audience, opened its doors. Elsewhere on the Web, sexual connoisseurship of specific sorts thrived, with sites devoted to underwater scenes, latex, “chunky angels” and copulation with octopuses, among other fetishes. The same radical eclecticism that characterizes today’s pornography also is in evidence everywhere on YouTube, in different guises. On a recent Wednesday, the most-popular video showed a boy shrieking like a madman over a toy car, just as an earlier YouTube boy shrieked over a Nintendo Wii. A little farther down that list, after commercial music videos, soccer clips and an admittedly sexy montage of the MTV star Heidi Montag, a YouTube video blogger named PhillyD filed what he unpersuasively billed as his final video. The fake goodbye by an exhausted blogger — who returns a little while later, unable to truly quit — has also become something of a YouTube set piece. YouTube’s redefinition of broadcast success from having giant audiences for blockbuster content to having a giant inventory of videos that each satisfy arcane, niche interests may have come from online pornography. Users create microgenres and niches by posting answering images: the shrieking-kid-with-toy genre, the cats-being-mean genre, the speed-painting genre. Fans find one another, then break away to chat. However uneasy it makes me, the influence of pornography on nonporn online video is hard to ignore. Among the people I know who learned their way around the Web early on, many were motivated by an interest in porn. My friend A., for example, passed hours at a boring reality-TV job staring at “bear thumbs”: heavy, bearded, naked men rendered at thumbnail — postage-stamp — size. As A. talked about bear thumbs, and making do with them instead of paying to magnify the images, we marveled at the fact that the words “bear” and “thumb” had been united in this strange way, at this strange time in history, at this particular moment in the diversification of sexual markets. “How small are bear thumbs?” I finally asked. “Tiny. Like at my cubicle, right now, I am peering at a set of pixels that could be a badger or buffalo or just a brown-beige cube of light.” “Does it hit the spot?” I wondered. “Yes, in a weird way. Not getting the chance to quite see porn is the story of anyone’s life who grew up when the adult channels were scrambled. You learned to be turned on by partial views.” A. was at the leading edge, but now I have also developed a taste for undersize, partial and blurry images. In YouTube’s early days, the homepage often featured fuzzy clips of people in the middle of some ordinary action, seemingly shot and uploaded by accident. A seated, half-concealed kid would turn and say, “What are y— ” and that would be it. I watched every one I could find. They were otherworldly. Partly, too, I thought I didn’t have much time to see them. One look at YouTube’s eccentric offerings, and I figured its days as a free-for-all “video-sharing site” were numbered. Sooner or later it would become a porn depot. But it did not. Chen and Hurley were committed to taking down videos that users objected to, and they maintained their own standards, too. Chief among the site’s assets, in fact, were top-secret pattern-recognition technologies that block porn uploads. (I imagine a Galaga-like spaceship that shoots down constellations of flesh-colored pixels; YouTube’s not telling how they do it.) Of course, there’s plenty of suggestive and sexy stuff on YouTube, including raunchy near-nudity like “Super Booty Webcam Dance,” that’s not suitable for work or children. But nothing I’ve ever seen would count as X-rated. And while other video sites that gave YouTube competition at the start — like Gorilla Mask — are now overrun with pornography, YouTube has managed to chasten porn-uploaders enough that they’ve been forced to create their own counterparts to YouTube, like Pornotube and Eroshare. By keeping obscenity in check, YouTube teems with video of near infinite variety, stuff that thrives when pornography, which is hard to contain once it takes root, has been banished. YouTube risked losing millions of viewers when it made rules against pornography. But it has gained radical variety, the kind that defines the most robust ecosystems. YouTube’s dizzying diversity, in fact, now makes online porn sites that purport to cater to a broad range of tastes look only obsessive and redundant. On one recent day, YouTube’s most popular videos were not highbrow, but they were eclectic. A kid wiped out on his skateboard. Shayla Worley walked the balance beam at the Olympic trials. A group of friends used their cellphones to pop corn. What?! I was skimming thumbnails as usual when the popcorn video arrested my attention. I watched four times, transfixed. Before my eyes, popcorn on a coffee table popped, triggered (it seemed) by nothing more than ringing phones aimed at kernels. Whoa. Were the videomakers really allowed to suggest that cellphones emit so much radiation that they speed food preparation? Related cellphone-popcorn videos came up, including some videos that seemed to demonstrate that the popping was a fraud. Then still other videos appeared to reproduce the popping. I frantically tried to solve the mystery, eager to find out once and for all whether cellphones are hazardous. Who knew so many people shared this twisted curiosity? As I kept clicking and watching, I began to feel excited, even turned on. Points of Entry THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDATIONS DIGNIFY IT: Put Walter Kendrick’s readable, scholarly and caseclosing 1987 book, “The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture,” on your desk, and suddenly the whole thing doesn’t feel so sordid. With an afterword from 1996. GET NERVOUS: One of the few Web 1.0 sites from New York still in business, Nerve no longer calls its content “literate smut,” but the site still offers 24/7 sex news, pictures and tales for ladies and gentlemen who consider themselves “mature” adults with “discretion.” Its personal ads also get high marks. A recent headline: “There’s one thing I’ve never done in bed, and I’m saving it for my future husband.” If you’re tantalized, see Nerve.com. OTHER PERVERSIONS: Though Wired featured a physicist who debunked them, and the first one may be an ad for headphones, the cellphone-popcorn videos are thrilling, if you’re into that kind of thing. Go to YouTube.com and perform a search for “cellphone” and “popcorn.” Watch the debunking videos. Then watch again. And you decide. Pop. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/ma...emedium-t.html Open WiFi Network Viable Defense Against Infringement Charge—at Least in Germany Jacqui Cheng An appeals court in Germany has ruled that the owners of a network are not responsible for the copyright infringement of their users. The decision overturns a previous judgment that held an open WiFi network owner liable for damages, even if the infringer is a stranger making use of the network. Although the latest ruling may affect others across Europe, it's not likely to carry much weight in the US. No safe harbor for RapidShare in copyright infringement case The decision comes out of a case where an unidentified artist sued a man because his IP address was identified as offering one of her songs for download on a P2P network. The defendant argued that he wasn't guilty of copyright infringement, but that he had operated an open wireless network and that someone else may have connected to it in order to use P2P. The prosecution responded by saying that open WiFi networks are easily abused, and that it's the owner's responsibility to ensure that the network is locked down and encrypted. The district court that heard the case ruled in favor of the plaintiff, saying that since the defendant couldn't prove which third-parties (if any) were guilty of copyright infringement on his network, he was responsible. Unsurprisingly, the defendant appealed the case, and the Frankfurt court of appeals ruled in his favor. The court said that the "abstract risk of abuse" of the defendant's connection is not enough to require him by law to lock it down. There was also no concrete evidence of copyright infringement on the defendant's part, therefore he should not be held liable for damages, the judge said. The decision could affect similar court cases across Europe, such as one brewing in the UK between Davenport Lyons and a handful of users accused of copyright infringement. As TorrentFreak points out, Davenport has stated in its letters to these users that the German courts have held network owners responsible for the actions of those using their connections, and that the UK courts could rule the same way. After this ruling, however, those letters (and the way the courts lean) could change. Still, some here in the US believe that unsecured WiFi networks just leave the door open to all manner of scum and villainy. SCO chairman Ralph Yarro told the Utah legislature last year that the state should regulate WiFi networks, even to the point of banning free and unintentionally open networks. In cases where people have been arrested for leeching off of an open network, one of the justifications given is the possibility that their freeloader could have been using the free access point for illegal activities. Additionally, a Texas man accused of possession of child pornography tried to use his open WiFi network as a defense, saying that someone else could have used the same network to traffic the images. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit didn't buy the argument, however, and upheld his conviction. Take that and combine it with the RIAA's reliance on IP addresses to identify targets for its own lawsuits, and attempting to finger a nameless WiFi freeloader may not work so well on this side of the pond. You may be able to demonstrate down the line that it actually was someone else downloading Britney Spears' Greatest Hits over your open network, but doing so may prove to be a very expensive proposition. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...n-germany.html Justice Breyer Is Among Victims in Data Breach Caused by File Sharing Brian Krebs Sometime late last year, an employee of a McLean investment firm decided to trade some music, or maybe a movie, with like-minded users of the online file-sharing network LimeWire while using a company computer. In doing so, he inadvertently opened the private files of his firm, Wagner Resource Group, to the public. That exposed the names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of about 2,000 of the firm's clients, including a number of high-powered lawyers and Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer. The breach was not discovered for nearly six months. A reader of washingtonpost.com's Security Fix blog found the information while searching LimeWire in June. Services such as LimeWire, which are known as peer-to-peer networks, link computers directly, allowing users to swap digital movies, music and files with other users without the need of a central Web site to manage the exchange. What users may not be aware of is that the software that facilitates file sharing may be configured to allow access to a portion, if not all, of a user's documents. Robert Boback, chief executive of Tiversa, the company hired by Wagner to help contain the data breach, said such breaches are hardly rare. About 40 to 60 percent of all data leaks take place outside of a company's secured network, usually as a result of employees or contractors installing file-sharing software on company computers. "We've seen a lot of instances where a company will be working on a product that's not even released yet, and the diagrams for that product are already out on the Net," Boback said. "This case is unique because of the high profile of the targets. The individuals on this list are at a very high risk, almost imminent, of identity theft." In June, medical records and Social Security numbers for at least 1,000 patients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center were exposed in a peer-to-peer data breach. In June 2007, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer disclosed that an employee who installed peer-to-peer software on a company laptop exposed files containing the names, Social Security numbers, addresses and some compensation information of 17,000 current and former Pfizer employees. In March, a Seattle man was sentenced to 51 months in prison for using LimeWire and similar networks to dig up personal and financial information on more than 50 people, which he then used to open lines of credit in the victims' names. Tiversa officials found that more than a dozen LimeWire users in places as far away as Sri Lanka and Colombia downloaded the list of personal data from the Wagner network. "To me, this was devastating," said Phylyp Wagner, founder of the investment firm. "I didn't even know what peer-to-peer was. I do now." A spokesman for Breyer said the justice had no comment on the security breach, which came to light after the reader notified Security Fix and the blog alerted some of the Wagner clients. Wagner said his company has contracted with FirstAdvantage of Poway, Calif., which last week sent out letters notifying affected clients of the breach and offering each six months of free credit-report monitoring. He emphasized that the peer-to-peer disclosure never endangered his clients' financial records, which are stored by a separate company. But that may be small consolation to several lawyers on the list who said they recently experienced unexplained financial activity. "This may explain why two weeks ago I got a $9,000 cellphone bill from AT&T," said Steven Agresta, a partner with the law firm Alston & Bird. Someone had opened a phone account using his date of birth and Social Security number, but with a different address. Agresta said AT&T promptly canceled the account and the bogus charges, but he's still checking his credit history and other accounts for signs of fraud. Of the 2,000 records from Wagner Resource Group that were found online, 700 included Social Security numbers, names and birth dates, while other records included only one or two of those details. Frank Cabri, vice president of product management for FaceTime Communications, a Belmont, Calif., company that helps organizations control employee use of peer-to-peer networks and other applications, said there are more than 120 free software titles available for online file-sharing. "Some of these applications are more complicated than others in terms of helping users figure out what files and folders they want to share and expose, and a lot of times the user is so focused on just going after that latest MP3 file that they're not paying attention to the default settings that come with the application," Cabri said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...802997_pf.html The Chief Justice, Dylan and the Disappearing Double Negative Adam Liptak The last chief justice liked light opera. The new one cites Bob Dylan. Four pages into his dissent on Monday in an achingly boring dispute between pay phone companies and long distance carriers, John G. Roberts Jr., the chief justice of the United States, put a song lyric where the citation to precedent usually goes. “The absence of any right to the substantive recovery means that respondents cannot benefit from the judgment they seek and thus lack Article III standing,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “ ‘When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.’ Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone, on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records 1965).” Alex B. Long, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and perhaps the nation’s leading authority on the citation of popular music in judicial opinions, said this was almost certainly the first use of a rock lyric to buttress a legal proposition in a Supreme Court decision. “It’s a landmark opinion,” Professor Long said. In the lower courts, according to a study Professor Long published in the Washington & Lee Law Review last year, Mr. Dylan is by far the most cited songwriter. He has been quoted in 26 opinions. Paul Simon is next, with 8 (12 if you count those attributed to Simon & Garfunkel). Bruce Springsteen has 5. But Mr. Dylan has only once before been cited as an authority on Article III standing, which concerns who can bring a lawsuit in federal court. His key contribution to legal discourse has been in another area. “The correct rule on the necessity of expert testimony has been summarized by Bob Dylan: ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,’ ” a California appeals court wrote in 1981, citing “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Eighteen other decisions have cited that lyric. Chief Justice Roberts’s predecessor, William H. Rehnquist, cited his beloved Gilbert & Sullivan in a 1980 dissent from a decision that the press had a constitutional right of access to court proceedings. He was still an associate justice, and he thought the court had made up the right out of whole cloth. In rebuttal, Justice Rehnquist relied on the Lord Chancellor in “Iolanthe” to rebuke the majority. “The Law is the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent,” the Lord Chancellor says. “It has no kind of fault or flaw, and I, my Lords, embody the Law.” That made Justice Rehnquist’s point pretty well. The Roberts citation is more problematic. On the one hand, he showed excellent taste. “Like a Rolling Stone,” as Greil Marcus has written, is “the greatest record ever made, perhaps, or the greatest record that ever would be made.” On the other hand, Chief Justice Roberts gets the citation wrong, proving that he is neither an originalist nor a strict constructionist. What Mr. Dylan actually sings, of course, is, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” It’s true that many Web sites, including Mr. Dylan’s official one, reproduce the lyric as Chief Justice Roberts does. But a more careful Dylanist might have consulted his iPod. “It was almost certainly the clerks who provided the citation,” Professor Long said. “I suppose their use of the Internet to check the lyrics violates one of the first rules they learned when they were all on law review: when quoting, always check the quote with the original source, not someone else’s characterization of what the source said.” The larger objection is that the citation is not true to the original point Mr. Dylan was making, which was about the freedom that having nothing conveys and not about who may sue a phone company. (See, e.g., “Me and Bobby McGee.”) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/we...w/29dylan.html Analysis: NSA Spying Judge Defends Rule of Law, Congress Set to Strip His Power Ryan Singel Just days before the Senate will convene to give a final blessing to President Bush's secret, warrantless wiretapping program, a federal court judge ruled that his legal justification for the surveillance has no legal merit. He's the same judge Congress is trying to save the nation's telecoms, such as AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, from having to face in court. Late Wednesday, U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker issued a ruling in a case against the government alleging illegal spying, finding that in 1978 Congress had clearly set out the rules for wiretapping inside the United States and that Bush's claims to have inherent authority outside of those rules did not pass Constitutional muster. Quote:
Not so, according to Walker: Quote:
They will also likely give retroactive amnesty to telecom companies that agreed to illegal and sweeping surveillance requests from the same government agencies that dole out fat secret contracts to the very same telecom companies. So thanks to Congress's pending meddling with the courts in capitulation to the President, Vaughn Walker's ruling is the closest we will likely come to a judicial ruling on the limits of presidential power to spy on Americans. Judge Vaughn Walker is no raging San Francisco liberal. He was appointed to the bench by President George H W Bush, and is known for his intellect and libertarian streak. Walker also ruled that the government's claims that the case would endanger national security did not overrule the provisions of law that let a spied-upon person sue the government for breaking the law. But Walker dismissed the underlying case, which was based on a Top Secret document accidentally provided to American lawyers for a Muslim charity that the government was in the process of designating as a terrorist organization. The plaintiffs have been barred from using the document to prove they were spied on and thus can not prove standing. If they can find another way to prove they were spied on, they can refile the suit. He's the same judge who's overseeing all the cases against the telecoms. When the Senate votes Tuesday, they are voting to keep Judge Walker from examining whether the nation's largest telecoms massively violated federal privacy laws by helping the government spy on Americans. The vote for or against amnesty not about whether telecoms participate in the future. In the future, they are supposed to get court orders -- that's the promise of the bill. The planned July 8 vote is whether or not Americans can get justice for a violation of federal law, or whether some of the nation's largest companies -- and by extension, the nation's highest elected officials -- are above the law. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...is-nsa-sp.html Remembering Brainwashing Tim Weiner IT was a time of secrecy and fear. Fear of a strange enemy driven by an alien ideology, killing Americans abroad, threatening Americans at home. And it created a new terror. In the early 1950s, American troops were being killed and captured by the thousands in Korea. Panic spread that China’s Communists had learned how to penetrate and control the minds of American prisoners of war. The technique was called “brainwashing.” And suddenly it’s worth recalling what brainwashing was about. Because now we know, from an article in The New York Times last week, that in a new time of anxiety America’s own interrogators drew lessons from China’s treatment of American prisoners of war for their treatment of prisoners in the war on terror. The concept of brainwashing was the brainchild of Edward Hunter, a newspaperman born in 1902, who had covered the rise of fascism in Europe before joining the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency, during World War II. The Korean War had just begun in 1950 when The Miami News published his article, “ ‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese Into Ranks of Communist Party.” He determined that “the Reds have specialists available on their brainwashing panels,” experts in the use of “drugs and hypnotism,” as he later told the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Their ultimate goal was conquering America. “The United States is the main battlefield,” he testified, “the people and the soil and the resources of the United States.” He warned that brainwashing would make Americans “subjects of a ‘new world order’ for the benefit of a mad little knot of despots in the Kremlin.” The idea that a totalitarian state could control people like Pavlov’s dogs had appeared in 1940s novels, notably Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” and George Orwell’s “1984.” It took Mao’s China — and the forced “confessions” of some American prisoners of war during the Korean conflict — to make brainwashing a centerpiece of 1950s culture. After the war, thousands of American P.O.W.’s returned under suspicion of having collaborated with the enemy while in captivity. A handful, on orders from their captors, had, in fact, falsely accused the United States of conducting germ warfare against North Korea. Congress was transfixed by “the fear that the soldiers could have been brainwashed by the Chinese and still be spying for them,” Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie wrote in the journal Military Medicine. Dread that the Chinese Communists had created zombie sleeper agents spread quickly and ran deep. A Dutch psychologist, Joost A. M. Meerloo, caught the apocalyptic tone in a New York Times Magazine article in 1954: “The totalitarians have misused the knowledge of how the mind works for their own purposes. They have applied the Pavlovian technique — in a far more complex and subtle way, of course — to produce the reflex of mental and political submission of the humans in their power.” Orwell’s hero in “1984,” Winston Smith, holds out hope against Big Brother and his minions: “With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking.” But the threat that they could riveted Americans — and the C.I.A. Finding out what others are thinking was (and is) the job of spies. The Korean experience spurred the C.I.A.’s search for mind-control techniques to grill suspected double agents. The agency took on a task described in its documents as “overseas interrogations.” Clandestine prisons were created in occupied Germany, occupied Japan and the Panama Canal Zone. “Like Guantánamo,” said a charter member of the C.I.A., Thomas Polgar. “It was anything goes.” In these cells, the agency conducted experiments in drug-induced brainwashing and other “special techniques” for interrogations. These continued inside and outside the United States, sometimes on unsuspecting human guinea pigs, long after the Korean War ended in 1953. “There was deep concern over the issue of brainwashing,” Richard Helms, the former director of central intelligence, told the journalist David Frost 25 years later. “We felt that it was our responsibility not to lag behind the Russians or the Chinese in this field, and the only way to find out what the risks were was to test things such as L.S.D. and other drugs that could be used to control human behavior. These experiments went on for many years.” While the government chased after truth serum, fiction raced behind reality. The theory of a robot-like Manchurian Candidate was posited by the C.I.A. in 1953, six years before Richard Condon published the novel of that name, nine years before the book became a movie. William Burroughs, in “Naked Lunch” (1959), created a drug-addled mad scientist, Dr. Benway, “an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control.” In the 1960s, brainwashing began to fade as a nightmare, though it was revived when captured soldiers and pilots released by North Vietnam made antiwar statements. In 1967, a Republican presidential contender, Gov. George Romney of Michigan (Mitt’s dad), was ridiculed when he said he had been brainwashed by American generals about how well the war in Vietnam was going. Flash forward to 2002. American military and intelligence officers, looking for better ways to interrogate prisoners in the war on terror, went combing through government files. They found that the best institutional memory lay in the interrogation experiences of American P.O.W.’s in Korea. They reprinted a 1957 chart describing death threats, degradation, sleep deprivation — and worse — inflicted by Chinese captors. And they made it part of a new handbook for interrogators at Guantánamo. The irony is that the original author of that chart, Albert D. Biderman, a social scientist who had distilled interviews with 235 Air Force P.O.W.’s, wrote that the Communists’ techniques mainly served to “extort false confessions.” And they were the same methods that “inquisitors had employed for centuries.” They had done nothing that “was not common practice to police and intelligence interrogators of other times and nations.” Brainwashing was bunk: no secret weapon to control the human mind existed, America’s best experts concluded in the 1960s. Yes, the Communists used time-honored and terrifying interrogation tactics during the cold war. Some, like waterboarding, had been perfected during the Spanish Inquisition. But Mr. Biderman concluded that “inflicting physical pain is not a necessary nor particularly effective method” to persuade prisoners of war. Some veterans of the war on terror say that lesson should have been relearned, despite the urgent need to uncover whatever possible about terrorist planning — the administration’s principal justification of its harsh interrogation policies. Alberto J. Mora, the Navy’s general counsel from 2001 to 2006, told a recent Congressional hearing, where the Biderman chart resurfaced: “Our nation’s policy decision to use so-called ‘harsh’ interrogation techniques during the war on terror was a mistake of massive proportions.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/we.../06weiner.html When News Is the Story David Carr Like most working journalists, whenever I type seven letters — Fox News — a series of alarms begins to whoop in my head: Danger. Warning. Much mayhem ahead. Once the public relations apparatus at Fox News is engaged, there will be the calls to my editors, keening (and sometimes threatening) e-mail messages, and my requests for interviews will quickly turn into depositions about my intent or who else I am talking to. And if all that stuff doesn’t slow me down and I actually end up writing something, there might be a large hangover: Phone calls full of rebuke for a dependent clause in the third to the last paragraph, a ritual spanking in the blogs with anonymous quotes that sound very familiar, and — if I really hit the jackpot — the specter of my ungainly headshot appearing on one of Fox News’s shows along with some stern copy about what an idiot I am. Part of me — the Irish, tribal part — admires Fox News’s ferocious defense of its guys. I work at a place where editors can make easy sport of teasing apart your flawed copy until it collapses in a steaming pile, but Lord help those outsiders who make an unwarranted or unfounded attack on me or my work. Our tactics may be different, but we, too, are strong for our posse. Media reporting about other media’s approach to producing media is pretty confusing business to begin with. Feelings, which are always raw for people who make their mistakes in public, will be bruised. But that does not fully explain the scorched earth between Fox News and those who cover it. Fox News found a huge runway and enormous success by setting aside the conventions of bloodless objectivity, but along the way, it altered the rules of engagement between reporters and the media organizations they cover. Under its chief executive, Roger Ailes, Fox News and its public relations apparatus have waged a permanent campaign on behalf of the channel that borrows its methodology from his days as a senior political adviser to Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. At Fox News, media relations is a kind of rolling opposition research operation intended to keep reporters in line by feeding and sometimes maiming them. Shooting the occasional messenger is baked right into the process. As crude as that sounds, it works. By blacklisting reporters it does not like, planting stories with friendlies at every turn, Fox News has been living a life beyond consequence for years. Honesty compels me to admit that I have choked a few times at the keyboard when Fox News has come up in a story and it was not absolutely critical to the matter at hand. But it cuts both ways: Fox News’s amazing coup d’état in the cable news war has very likely been undercovered because the organization is such a handful to deal with. Fox is so busy playing defense — mentioning it in the same story as CNN can be a high crime — that its business and journalism accomplishments don’t get traction and the cable station never seems to attain the legitimacy it so clearly craves. There have been few stories about Bill O’Reilly’s softer side (I’m sure he has one), and while Shepard Smith’s amazing reporting in New Orleans got some play, he was not cast as one of the journalistic heroes of the disaster. The fact that Roger Ailes has won both Obie awards and Emmys does not come up a lot, nor does the fact that he donated a significant chunk of money to upgrade the student newsroom at Ohio University, his alma mater. Instead, Mr. Ailes and Brian Lewis, his longtime head of public relations, act as if every organization that covers them is a potential threat and, in the process, have probably made it far more likely. And as the cable news race has tightened, because CNN has gained ground during a big election year, Fox News has become more prone to lashing out. Fun is fun, but it is getting uglier by the day out there. • A little more than a week ago, Jacques Steinberg, a reporter at The New York Times who covers television, wrote a straight-up-the-middle ratings story about cable news. His article acknowledged that while CNN was using a dynamic election to push Fox News from behind, Fox was still No. 1. Despite repeated calls, the public relations people at Fox News did not return his requests for comment. (In a neat trick, while they were ignoring his calls, they e-mailed his boss asking why they had not heard from him.) After the article ran, Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy of “Fox and Friends,” the reliable water carriers on the morning show on the cable network, did a segment suggesting that Mr. Steinberg’s editor was a disgruntled former employee — Steven V. Reddicliffe once edited TV Guide, which, like Fox News, is owned by the News Corporation — and that Mr. Steinberg was his trained attack dog. (The audience was undoubtedly wondering what the heck they were talking about.) The accompanying photographs were heavily altered, although the audience was probably none the wiser. Mr. Reddicliffe looked like the wicked witch after a hard night of drinking, but it was the photo of Mr. Steinberg that stopped traffic when it appeared on the Web at Media Matters side by side with his actual photo. In a technique familiar to students of vintage German propaganda, his ears were pulled out, his teeth splayed apart, his forehead lowered and his nose was widened and enlarged in a way that made him look more like Fagin than the guy I work with. (Mr. Steinberg told me that as a working reporter who covers Fox News, he was not in a position to comment. A spokeswoman said the executive in charge of “Fox and Friends” is on vacation and not available for comment but added that altering photos for humorous effect is a common practice on cable news stations. It’s a particularly vivid example of how the Fox response team works, but hardly the only one. Julia Angwin of The Wall Street Journal wrote a profile of Roger Ailes in 2005. Again, her coverage was right up the middle, but that is not the way that Fox News saw it, and she was held out for ridicule over and over in items on various blogs penned by Fox News staff when she jumped the gun on the start date for the Fox business channel. (Ms. Angwin is on book leave and did not answer a message left on her cellphone.) Earlier this year, a colleague of mine said, he was writing a story about CNN’s gains in the ratings and was told on deadline by a Fox News public relations executive that if he persisted, “they” would go after him. Within a day, “they” did, smearing him around the blogs, he said. (I did not ask him for a comment because the information was of a private nature.) Some of the avenues of attack are easier to anticipate than others. Right now, there are advance copies circulating of a reported memoir I wrote about my times as a drug addict and drunk. I’ve already been called a “crack addict” on Bill O’Reilly’s show, which at least has the virtue of being true, if a little vintage. Expect a return engagement with some added detail. I have a bit of an advantage in that my laundry is already hanging on the line, not to mention that with a face made out of potatoes, the Photoshopped picture of me will have to go a long way to make me any uglier than I actually am. Having pointed a crooked columnist finger at Fox, at least I have it coming. Not so for many of the beat reporters who go to work every day confronted by a public relations machine that will go feral if it doesn’t get what it wants. When I started calling around about Fox News, Mr. Lewis, the public relations head, made himself available on very short notice on the Fourth of July. He patiently explained that while yes, the game had changed, it was hardly in the way I was describing. There are no dark ops, he said, and no blacklist — “a myth” — only good relationships and bad ones. Mr. Lewis said that members of his staff were not in the business of altering photos, that they had no control over stories that appeared on “Fox and Friends” or other shows, and he pointed out that it makes their job harder when they go after reporters. He called my suggestion that there was something anti-Semitic about the depiction of Mr. Steinberg “vile and untrue.” Mr. Lewis denied that his staff had threatened one of my colleagues or planted private information about him on blogs. That comes as a surprise to reporters I talked to who say they have received e-mail messages from Fox News public relations staff that contained doctored photos, anonymous quotes and nasty items about competitors. And two former Fox employees said that they had participated in precisely those kinds of activities but had signed confidentiality agreements and could not say so on the record. “Yes, we are an aggressive department in a passive industry, and believe me, the executives and talent appreciate it,” Mr. Lewis said, adding that with the 24-hour news cycle and the proliferation of blogs, a new kind of engagement and activism was required. “We are the biggest target in the industry and we accept that,” he said. “We embrace controversy,” but he said that he and his colleagues respect that reporters have a job to do. Many of the television-beat reporters I called had horror stories, but few were willing to be quoted. In the last several years, reporters from The Associated Press, several large newspapers and various trade publications have said they were shut out from getting their calls returned because of stories they had written. Editors do not want to hear why your calls are not being returned, they just want you to fix the problem, or perhaps they will fix it by finding someone else to do your job. David Folkenflik, now the media reporter for National Public Radio, ended up on the outs with Fox News in 2001 when he was at The Baltimore Sun. After he wrote that Fox’s Geraldo Rivera had not been at the site of an incident of friendly fire in Afghanistan as he had told viewers, Mr. Folkenflik said, his calls to Fox News were not returned for more than 15 months. “My sense was that it was designed to make it appear that I was having trouble doing my job, but also to intimate that the people who cross them will be shut out,” he said. Mr. Folkenflik said he did not take it personally because it was not aimed just at him. “I think it is a notably aggressive effort to manage the Fox News brand and image,” he said. “I think it is suffused with a political sensibility, and I don’t think it is any secret that it comes from the top with Roger Ailes. They behave less like a competitive news outlet and more like a political campaign when it comes to managing coverage.” But he holds no grudge. “I currently have a perfectly good relationship with Fox News,” Mr. Folkenflik said. “I touch base with them all the time, and I write the good and bad news as it occurs.” Bill Carter has covered television for The New York Times for many years and has always had a good working relationship with Fox News, but he was appalled to see what he viewed as an anti-Semitic caricature of Mr. Steinberg, a colleague and a friend. “I have not had a big problem with them, in part because their success has been such a great story, but this seemed over the line and really hateful,” Mr. Carter said. “It doesn’t seem like you can deal with them professionally. You do this kind of thing to a guy who’s writing a story for a newspaper?” Fox News has long held that it is its politics and not its tactics that set it apart and require such vigilance. But working reporters have been shaking their heads for years about the nightmare of dealing with Fox News and as a result, the antagonism they believe they are fighting against seems to be on the march. Mr. Lewis made it clear that Fox News has no problem working with reporters when they don’t have an agenda, and of course, I called with a very clear one. For the record, everyone I dealt with at Fox News in connection with this column was polite, highly responsive, and got right to the point, while still not giving ground on a single material fact. A guy could get used to that. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/bu...07carr.html?hp Mother Sues Over Tale of 'Drunken Party' Lifted from Bebo Robert Verkaik It read like the teenage party from hell: a riot of sex and wanton damage fuelled by under-age drinking that only ended when the police arrived. According to media reports, the mother of the teenage hostess was so angry with her daughter that she punched her. But Jodie Hudson's lurid description of the party on the social networking website Bebo, subsequently carried in a number of national newspapers, turned out to be fantasy. The media stories, and the accompanying pictures taken from Bebo, are now the subject of a landmark legal case that could redraw the boundaries of the use of information published on social networking sites including Bebo, Facebook and MySpace. Jodie's mother, Amanda Hudson, is suing six national newspapers for defamation and breach of privacy after they ran stories based on her daughter's exaggerated claims about her party, held at the family's £4m villa in Spain, where it was suggested jewellery was stolen and furniture and a television set thrown into the swimming pool. But Mrs Hudson says the party was anything but a drunken riot. In her letter before action to the newspapers, her lawyers say that the Hudsons employed private security guards to help supervise the private party on 3 May. The letter adds that nothing was stolen; no alcohol was served or permitted; none of the guests took part in sexual acts; the police were not called; and only minor damage was caused to one of the doors. Mrs Hudson also denies "punching or otherwise chastising" her daughter. In her claim Mrs Hudson says that, since the media reports, she has received abusive phone calls. The case is expected to have far-reaching consequences for third parties who use or publish information from social networking sites. Lawyers say it could place a duty on all second-hand users to establish the truth of everything they want to republish from such sites. Mrs Hudson not only denies the allegations but accuses the newspapers of misusing information posted by her daughter on the Bebo site, saying there was no legitimate public interest in publishing material from the site. Mrs Hudson says that, because the information was inaccurate, the papers cannot rely on the defence of fair comment. Her solicitor, David Price, said the case raised important issues of libel, privacy and copyright in relation to the unauthorised use of material taken from social networking sites. "Teenage conversation has always involved a large amount of embellishment..., but until recently it has not been communicated in a way that can potentially be accessed by the mass media," he said. Mrs Hudson said her daughter has also suffered greatly because of the breach of her privacy. "Jodie is 15 years old," she said. "She did not consent to the publication in the media of any photograph of her or her party, or of any material that she wrote on her Bebo site." http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...bo-865039.html New Bout in Seinfeld Cookbook Battle Julie Bosman Thanks to a rise in Amazon rankings, a revamped lawsuit and an “Oprah” rerun, the debate over “vegetable plagiarism” has entered Round 2. “Deceptively Delicious,” the cookbook by Jessica Seinfeld whose recipes for concealing puréed vegetables in comfort food for children bore such similarities to another cookbook’s that it inspired a lawsuit from that book’s author, shot to the top of the Amazon best-seller list on Wednesday, nine months after it was published. The sharp rise in sales caught the eyes of both books’ publishers, who traced it to the rerun on Tuesday of an episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” that featured Ms. Seinfeld. The appearance also subsequently lifted sales of “The Sneaky Chef,” by Missy Chase Lapine, the author who is suing Ms. Seinfeld. The books, similar in theme, content and appearance, remain inextricably tied to each other. On Amazon, shoppers viewing “Deceptively Delicious” are prodded to order “The Sneaky Chef,” and vice versa. And both books’ newfound popularity came as Ms. Lapine vowed on Friday to press ahead with her lawsuit against Ms. Seinfeld and her husband, Jerry Seinfeld, originally filed in January. The suit charged that the Seinfelds were guilty of copyright infringement and defamation. (It was Mr. Seinfeld who, during an appearance on “Late Show with David Letterman,” before calling Ms. Lapine a “wacko,” mockingly suggested that his wife was accused of “vegetable plagiarism.”) Armed with a new set of lawyers, Ms. Lapine recently extended her lawsuit against the Seinfelds to include HarperCollins, the publisher of Ms. Seinfeld’s cookbook. Ms. Lapine’s original lawyers left the case because they also represent News Corporation, which owns HarperCollins, Ms. Lapine said. Ms. Lapine is seeking unspecified damages. The Seinfelds called Ms. Lapine’s charges “trumped up,” pointing out that sneaking vegetables into children’s foods has been done in cookbooks since the early 1970s. (A lawyer for the Seinfelds did not return calls for comment on Friday.) In a telephone interview from her literary agent’s office on Friday, Ms. Lapine said she would continue her lawsuit as long as necessary. “I have no expectations or requirements on time,” she said. “I’d love to see truth and justice and fairness prevail.” Steve Ross, the publisher of Collins, the imprint that published “Deceptively Delicious,” said the inclusion of HarperCollins in the lawsuit did not change its support of Ms. Seinfeld. “HarperCollins remains thrilled to count Jessica Seinfeld on its roster of talented authors, and continues to stand unequivocally behind her work,” he said. The “Sneaky Chef” dispute began last summer, when Ms. Lapine received an eight-page promotional brochure for “Deceptively Delicious,” a sort of mini-version of the book. Ms. Lapine said she was stunned to see the similarities between the books, down to Ms. Seinfeld’s cover (a winking chef and an attempt to hide carrots). Ms. Lapine’s book had been rejected by HarperCollins and was eventually published in April 2007 by Running Press, an imprint of the Perseus Books Group. Six months later Ms. Seinfeld’s book was published. Each book became a best seller, but Ms. Seinfeld’s celebrity status helped her win a coveted appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” the ultimate book promotion. As of this week, Ms. Seinfeld’s publisher said 2.4 million copies of “Deceptively Delicious” were in print, while Ms. Lapine’s publisher said more than 200,000 copies of “The Sneaky Chef” were in print. In March Ms. Lapine published a second “Sneaky Chef” cookbook, directed at women trying to persuade their spouses to eat healthier food. She is currently working on a third cookbook, “Sneaky Chef to the Rescue,” built around specific food-related questions she has received from readers, like cooking for holidays, for dieters and for people with food allergies. The Perseus Books Group, Ms. Lapine’s publisher, is not a party to the lawsuit, but its chief executive, David Steinberger, has signaled his solidarity with her. “We support our author’s right to take steps to protect her intellectual property and reputation,” Mr. Steinberger said in an e-mail message on Friday. Thomas Girardi, one of Ms. Lapine’s new lawyers, did not give details on the damages that Ms. Lapine is seeking, but said he expected the lawsuit to stretch into the fall. “This is not something that’s going to be resolved a week from Tuesday,” he said. Mr. Ross, Ms. Seinfeld’s publisher, said despite the pending lawsuit and the swirl of controversy surrounding her book, HarperCollins has tentatively planned a new book with Ms. Seinfeld, which will be announced sometime this summer. “Because we are convinced of her innocence,” Mr. Ross said, “we see no justification for not continuing the relationship.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/books/12sneak.html Internet Based Political "Meta-Party" For Massachusetts sophiachou The Free Government Party, a non-profit, open source political "meta-party" focused on providing citizens with more direct control of Congress through online polling and user-drafted bills, seems to be looking for a candidate to endorse for US Representative of Massachusetts' 8th Congressional District. If you're from the Boston area, you might have seen this already on Craigslist. The chosen candidate will be bound by contract to vote in Congress only as do his or her constituents online. However, they don't seem to be going for direct democracy. To make voting convenient, you can select advisers to cast your votes for you, unless you do so yourself. Supposedly, interviews for the candidate position are already underway. Anyone from MA's 8th Congressional District on Slashdot already apply? http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?.../07/11/0351257 The Facebooker Who Friended Obama Brian Stelter Last November, Mark Penn, then the chief strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton, derisively said Barack Obama’s supporters “look like Facebook.” Chris Hughes takes that as a compliment. Mr. Hughes, 24, was one of four founders of Facebook. In early 2007, he left the company to work in Chicago on Senator Obama’s new-media campaign. Leaving behind his company at such a critical time would appear to require some cognitive dissonance: political campaigns, after all, are built on handshakes and persuasion, not computer servers, and Mr. Hughes has watched, sometimes ruefully, as Facebook has marketed new products that he helped develop. “It was overwhelming for the first two months,” he recalled. “It took a while to get my bearings.” But in fact, working on the Obama campaign may have moved Mr. Hughes closer to the center of the social networking phenomenon, not farther away. The campaign’s new-media strategy, inspired by popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook, has revolutionized the use of the Web as a political tool, helping the candidate raise more than two million donations of less than $200 each and swiftly mobilize hundreds of thousands of supporters before various primaries. The centerpiece of it all is My.BarackObama.com, where supporters can join local groups, create events, sign up for updates and set up personal fund-raising pages. “If we did not have online organizing tools, it would be much harder to be where we are now,” Mr. Hughes said. Mr. Obama, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, credits the Internet’s social networking tools with a “big part” of his primary season success. “One of my fundamental beliefs from my days as a community organizer is that real change comes from the bottom up,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “And there’s no more powerful tool for grass-roots organizing than the Internet.” Now Mr. Hughes and other campaign aides are applying the same social networking tools to try to win the general election. This time, however, they must reach beyond their base of young, Internet-savvy supporters. By early April, Mr. Obama’s new-media team was already planning for the election by expanding its online phone-calling technology. In mid-May, to keep volunteers busy as the primaries played out, the campaign started a nationwide voter registration drive. And in late June, after Senator Clinton bowed out of the race, the millions of people on the Obama campaign’s e-mail lists were asked to rally her supporters as well as undecided voters by hosting “Unite for Change” house parties across the country. Nearly 4,000 parties were held. The campaign’s successful new-media strategy is already being studied as a playbook for other candidates, including the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain. “Their use of social networks will guide the way for future campaigns,” Peter Daou, Mrs. Clinton’s Internet director, said at a recent political technology conference. Mr. Daou called Mr. Obama’s online outreach “amazing.” The heart of the campaign’s online strategy is a teeming corner of Mr. Obama’s headquarters two blocks from the Chicago River, a crowded space that looks more like an Internet start-up company than a campaign war room. During a visit in late May, a bottle of whiskey sat, almost empty, atop a refrigerator (there had been plenty of victories to celebrate lately, a staff member explained). Sitting amid a cluster of cubicles, Mr. Hughes, whose title is “online organizing guru,” handles the My.BarackObama.com site, which is known within the campaign as MyBo. Other staff members maintain Mr. Obama’s presence on Facebook (where he has one million supporters), purchase online advertising, respond to text messages from curious voters, produce videos and e-mail millions of supporters. Before helping build Facebook, the social network of choice for 70 million Americans, the fresh-faced and sandy-haired Mr. Hughes, who grew up in Hickory, N.C., went to boarding school at Andover, where he joined the Democratic Club and the student government. In the fall of 2002, he went to Harvard, where he majored in history and literature. He and a roommate, Mark Zuckerberg — now the chief executive of Facebook — shared a room that was “just about as small as my cubby at work is these days,” Mr. Hughes said. Mr. Zuckerberg and another Facebook co-founder dropped out in 2004 to work on the site full time, but Mr. Hughes graduated in 2006 before venturing to Silicon Valley. In February 2007, after showing interest in Mr. Obama’s candidacy and being reassured that the campaign’s new-media operation would be more than “just a couple Internet guys in a corner,” he left Facebook, where he has stock options that are potentially worth tens of millions of dollars, and moved to Chicago, where he lives — and dresses — like any other recent college graduate. “Cabs are a luxury,” he said. As supporters started to join MyBo in early 2007, Mr. Hughes brought a growth strategy, borrowed from Facebook’s founding principles: keep it real, and keep it local. Mr. Hughes wanted Mr. Obama’s social network to mirror the off-line world the same way that Facebook seeks to, because supporters would foster more meaningful connections by attending neighborhood meetings and calling on people who were part of their daily lives. The Internet served as the connective tissue. While many candidates reach their supporters through the Web, the social networking features of MyBo allow supporters to reach one another. Mr. Hughes’s abrupt shift from Facebook pioneer to campaign aide was not easy. In the lonely months before the Iowa caucus, he grappled with the small scale of his new social network, measuring its membership by the thousands rather than the millions he was accustomed to. He had to learn mystifying political shorthand (VAN, for voter file management; N.P.G., for the donor and volunteer database) and figure out how campaigns operate. Eventually, he grew comfortable. At first, his main focus was a single state. Throughout last summer and fall, the prevailing attitude was, “What can you do for Iowa today?” Mr. Hughes recalled. Mr. Obama’s win in the Iowa caucuses drove new supporters to the MyBo site in droves. Using the campaign’s online toolkit, energized volunteers laid the groundwork for field workers. So far, MyBo has attracted 900,000 members, although aides play down the raw numbers. “The point is not to have a million people” signed up, said Joe Rospars, the campaign’s new-media director, although he does expect to have well over a million signed up on MyBo by November. “The point is to be able to chop up that million-person list into manageable chunks and organize them.” In some primary and caucus states, volunteers used the Internet to start organizing themselves months before the campaign staff arrived. In Texas on March 4, Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote, but Mr. Obama came away with a lead of five delegates, thanks to a caucus win. Caucuses are a test of organizational strength, and Mr. Obama’s team used database technology to track 100,000 Texas volunteers and put them to work. This permitted campaign staff members to “skip Steps 1, 2 and 3,” Mr. Hughes said. So maybe the Obama core does “look like Facebook.” Mr. Penn’s remark, made at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa and reported by The Politico, was cited by both Mr. Rospars and Mr. Hughes in separate interviews. Virtual phone banks greatly benefited Mr. Obama. During the primaries, volunteers could sign in online, receive a list of phone numbers and make calls from home. The volunteers made hundreds of thousands of calls last winter and spring. At the end of June, the Obama campaign began carefully opening up its files of voters to online supporters, making it easier to find out which Democratic-leaning neighbors to call and which registered-independent doors to knock on. One goal is to drive online energy into in-person support. From January to April, for instance, the Obama campaign spent $3 million on online advertising to steer would-be voters to their polling places with online tools that tell people where to vote. The locators “are hard to build, but once you build them, they have a very high return on investment,” Mr. Hughes said. Much of the technology in the Obama toolbox was pioneered by Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign. “We were like the Wright brothers,” said Joe Trippi, the Web mastermind of the Dean campaign. The Obama team, he added, “skipped Boeing, Mercury, Gemini — they’re Apollo 11, only four years later.” Mr. Rospars and other former Dean aides formed a consulting firm, Blue State Digital, to refine their techniques. The Obama campaign purchased the backbone of MyBo from Blue State and has set out to improve it. “It’s still TheFacebook,” Mr. Hughes said, comparing Mr. Obama’s current site to the earliest and narrowest version of Facebook. “It’s still very, very rough around the edges.” Last month, acknowledging that attacks during the general election are likely to be more vociferous, the Obama campaign tried to capitalize on its network by creating a Web page, FightTheSmears.com. Through that site, the campaign hopes that supporters will act as a truth squad working to untangle accusations, as bloggers have informally in other campaigns and as many did when CBS reported on President Bush’s National Guard service in 2004. People who have posted on the site have already taken up five rumors, including that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States (a birth certificate was displayed) and that he does not put his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance (the site links to a YouTube video of him doing so). Republican strategists say, wryly, that Senator McCain’s 2000 campaign was innovative in its use of technology. (The candidate held a groundbreaking virtual fund-raiser and enabled supporters to sign up online.) But that was back when Mr. McCain ran as an outsider; as the presumptive nominee, he is no longer an upstart. His social network, called McCainSpace and part of JohnMcCain.com, is “virtually impossible to use and appears largely abandoned,” said Adam Ostrow, the editor of Mashable, a blog about social networking. By all accounts, Mr. McCain is not the BlackBerry-wielding politician that Mr. Obama is. But he has given credit to what he calls Mr. Obama’s “excellent use of the Internet,” saying at a news conference last month that “we are working very hard at that as well.” The McCain campaign recently reintroduced its Web site and hired new bloggers to broaden its online presence. Patrick Ruffini, a Republican strategist who was the Webmaster for President Bush’s 2004 campaign, said that a campaign’s culture largely determines its digital strategy. The McCain campaign “could hire the best people, build the best technology, and adopt the best tactics” on the Internet. “But it would have to be in sync with the candidate and the campaign,” Mr. Ruffini said. Mr. Hughes and other Obama aides say that their candidate gravitates naturally toward social networking, so much so that he even filled out his own Facebook profile two years ago. Mr. Obama has pledged that if he is elected, he will hire a chief technology officer; Mr. Hughes’s face lights up at the thought. Other administrations have adapted to the Internet, “but they haven’t valued it,” he said. Mr. Hughes has not decided whether to return to Facebook, and the decision does hinge in part on the fate of the campaign. But the lessons he has learned in political life seem to reinforce those learned in Silicon Valley. “You can have the best technology in the world,” he said, “but if you don’t have a community who wants to use it and who are excited about it, then it has no purpose.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/te.../07hughes.html Ex-Prosecutor’s Book Accuses Bush of Murder Tim Arango As a Los Angeles county prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi batted a thousand in murder cases: 21 trials, 21 convictions, including the Charles Manson case in 1971. As an author, Mr. Bugliosi has written three No. 1 best sellers and won three Edgar Allan Poe awards, the top honor for crime writers. More than 30 years ago he co-wrote the best seller “Helter Skelter,” about the Manson case. So Mr. Bugliosi could be forgiven for perhaps thinking that a new book would generate considerable interest, among reviewers and on the broadcast talk-show circuit. But if he thought that, he would have been mistaken: his latest, a polemic with the provocative title “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” has risen to best-seller status with nary a peep from the usual outlets that help sell books: cable television and book reviews in major daily newspapers. Internet advertising has been abundant, but ABC Radio refused to accept an advertisement for the book during the Don Imus show, said Roger Cooper, the publisher of Vanguard Press, which put out the book. ABC Radio did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Bugliosi, in a recent telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles, said he had expected some resistance from the mainstream media because of the subject matter — the book lays a legal case for holding President Bush “criminally responsible” for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq — but not a virtual blackout. His publisher and publicist said they had expected that Mr. Bugliosi’s credentials would ensure coverage — he is, after all, fairly mainstream. His last book, a 1,612-page volume on the Kennedy assassination, “Reclaiming History,” which was published last year, sought to debunk the conspiracy theorists. It is being made into a 10-hour miniseries by HBO and the actor Tom Hanks. Mr. Bugliosi said bookers for cable television, where he has made regular appearances to promote books, have ignored his latest offering. MSNBC and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” were two outlets Mr. Bugliosi had thought would show interest, but neither did. “They are not responding at all,” he said. “I think it all goes back to fear. If the liberal media would put me on national television, I think they’d fear that they would be savaged by the right wing. The left wing fears the right, but the right does not fear the left.” A spokeswoman for Comedy Central said the staff of “The Daily Show” was on vacation and unavailable for comment. A representative for MSNBC said: “We get many pitches to interview authors and very few end up on our programs.” The editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham, said he had not read the manuscript, but he offered a reason why the media might be silent: “I think there’s a kind of Bush-bashing fatigue out there.” “If it’s selling well,” Mr. Meacham said, “it’s another sign that the traditional channels of commerce have been blown up. If a dedicated part of the Internet community wants to move something, it doesn’t need a benediction from the mainstream media and might benefit from not having one.” The book was published in late May by Vanguard Press, a division of the Perseus Books Group — which also owns PublicAffairs, the publisher of the recent memoir by a former White House spokesman, Scott McClellan — and has sold about 130,000 copies. On Sunday it was No. 14 on the New York Times best-seller list. (The Times published a lengthy review of Mr. Bugliosi’s Kennedy book last year by the writer Bryan Burrough of Vanity Fair; his latest book is under consideration for review, said Robert R. Harris, the deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review.) For the Bush book, the equation for success seems to be this: Mr. Bugliosi’s reputation plus talk radio plus the viral nature of the Internet. Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publisher’s Weekly, said, “130,000 copies is an enormous number of copies of anything.” “You should never underestimate the power of a brand name author to circumvent the normal publicity and marketing channels,” Ms. Nelson said. “Somebody was very smart to see that something subversive like this is best marketed on the anonymous and youthful medium of the Internet.” Ms. Nelson said that if the book becomes successful, “the same people who didn’t want to give him publicity in advance would give him publicity after the fact.” Mr. Cooper of Vanguard Press said, “We publish books on all sides of the political fence and all kinds of political thought.” The company's sibling, PublicAffairs, has also published one of President Bush’s favorite writers: Natan Sharansky, the onetime Soviet dissident whose book “The Case for Democracy” is said to have influenced Mr. Bush’s foreign policy agenda. On Mr. Bugliosi’s book, Mr. Cooper said, “I expected there would be people who would choose not to talk about it. But I thought some would.” Mr. Bugliosi has had more than 100 radio interviews about the book, and Vanguard was behind an aggressive Internet campaign that included ads on liberal blogs. “It’s been frustrating on one hand but exhilarating on the other,” Mr. Cooper said. “Using the Internet has been an integral fact in the success of this book. I feel terrific about the sales of this book.” While Mr. Bugliosi’s Kennedy book got the star treatment from Hollywood in Mr. Hanks, he had to look outside the United States to find money for a film on his Bush polemic. Jim Shaban, a theater owner in Windsor, Ontario, financed a documentary on the book that is almost complete. The movie, directed by David Burke, does not yet have a distributor. But it will not carry the same name as the book. “Mad as Hell” is one name under consideration, according to Peter Miller, of the PMA Literary and Film Agency, who has represented Mr. Bugliosi for about 25 years. “We may not be able to work with a mainstream company,” Mr. Miller said. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/bu...7bugliosi.html Bush Edits Out Jefferson's Religious Views Ed Brayton Hat tip to Sandefur for catching this. President Bush was at Monticello for a 4th of July celebration and he delivered an address. But it's quite telling that his speechwriters, in quoting Jefferson, cut out an anti-religious statement from a long and famous quote. Here's the way Bush put it: Thomas Jefferson understood that these rights do not belong to Americans alone. They belong to all mankind. And he looked to the day when all people could secure them. On the 50th anniversary of America's independence, Thomas Jefferson passed away. But before leaving this world, he explained that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were universal. In one of the final letters of his life, he wrote, "May it be to the world, what I believe it will be -- to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all -- the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government." Now let's look at the full quote, including the part that was cut out. This is from a letter he wrote to Roger Weightman reflecting on the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (which, it turns out, was the day both he and John Adams died): May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. Jefferson made many such statements, of course. Clearly they are best edited out by those who advocate nothing if not monkish ignorance and superstition. http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2...rsons_reli.php Serenity Prayer Stirs Up Doubt: Who Wrote It? Laurie Goodstein Generations of recovering alcoholics, soldiers, weary parents, exploited workers and just about anybody feeling beaten down by life have found solace in a short prayer that begins, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” Now the Serenity Prayer is about to endure a controversy over its authorship that is likely to be anything but serene. For more than 70 years, the composer of the prayer was thought to be the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one of modern Christianity’s towering figures. Niebuhr, who died in 1971, said he was quite sure he had written it, and his wife, Ursula, also a prominent theologian, dated its composition to the early 1940s. His daughter Elisabeth Sifton, a book editor and publisher, wrote a book about the prayer in 2003 in which she described her father first using it in 1943 in an “ordinary Sunday service” at a church in the bucolic Massachusetts town of Heath, where the Niebuhr family spent summers. Now, a law librarian at Yale, using new databases of archival documents, has found newspaper clippings and a book from as far back as 1936 that quote close versions of the prayer. The quotations are from civic leaders all over the United States — a Y.W.C.A. leader in Syracuse, a public school counselor in Oklahoma City — and are always, interestingly, by women. Some refer to the prayer as if it were a proverb, while others appear to claim it as their own poetry. None attribute the prayer to a particular source. And they never mention Reinhold Niebuhr. An article about the mystery of the prayer, by Fred R. Shapiro, associate library director and lecturer at Yale Law School, will be published next week in the Yale Alumni Magazine, an independent bimonthly publication. It will be followed by a rebuttal from Ms. Sifton. Mr. Shapiro, who edited “The Yale Book of Quotations,” said in an interview, “Reinhold Niebuhr was a very honest person who was very forthright and modest about his role in the Serenity Prayer. My interpretation would be that he probably unconsciously adapted it from something that he had heard or read.” In his quotation avocation, Mr. Shapiro says he has debunked claims about the provenance of other famous sayings, including Murphy’s Law (“Anything that can go wrong will”) and P. T. Barnum’s (“There’s a sucker born every minute”). Ms. Sifton faults Mr. Shapiro’s approach as computer-driven and deprived of historical and theological context. In an interview, she said her father traveled widely in the 1930s, preaching in college chapels and to church groups — especially Y.M.C.A.’s and Y.W.C.A.’s — and could have used the prayer then. She said she fixed the date of its composition to 1943 in her book, “The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War” (W. W. Norton, 2003), because she had relied on her parents’ recollections. Ms. Sifton said the newly unearthed quotations were merely evidence that her father’s spellbinding preaching had had a broad impact. And she said she took greatest umbrage at Mr. Shapiro’s notion that the prayer was so simple that it could have been written by almost anyone in any era. “There is a kind of austerity and humility about this prayer,” Ms. Sifton said, “that is very characteristic of him and was in striking contrast to the conventional sound of the American pastorate in the 1930s, who were by and large optimistic, affirmative, hopeful.” The precise origins of the Serenity Prayer have always been wrapped in a fog. Even in Niebuhr’s lifetime, his authorship was challenged. His response was typically modest. He was quoted in a magazine article in 1950 as saying: “Of course, it may have been spooking around for years, even centuries, but I don’t think so. I honestly do believe that I wrote it myself.” The version of events most often cited in biographies of the theologian is that after Niebuhr used the prayer in a sermon in rural Massachusetts, a neighbor who was an Episcopal priest asked for permission to print it in a booklet for the armed forces in 1944. The U.S.O. distributed it widely. Alcoholics Anonymous also embraced it and circulated it widely as a motto for its 12-step program. The prayer is now ubiquitous, on mugs and greeting cards and embroidered pillows, sometimes with Niebuhr’s name attached. But it is possible to find attributions ranging from Aristotle to St. Augustine to Francis of Assisi. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations attributed it to Niebuhr but gave the date as 1934, perhaps citing an erroneous reference in an article in the magazine of Alcoholics Anonymous, Mr. Shapiro said. But Ursula Niebuhr, who died in 1997, wrote in a memorandum (which an assistant for Mr. Shapiro saw in the Library of Congress) that her husband “may have used it in his prayers” by 1934, but “it certainly was not then in circulation.” A Niebuhr biographer, Charles C. Brown, said he was surprised to hear of the early references. “It is now well established beyond the shadow of any doubt among knowledgeable and fair-minded people,” Mr. Brown said, “that Niebuhr did compose it, probably in 1941 or ’43.” Mr. Brown said that perhaps Ms. Sifton’s theory was right, that the newspaper quotations were from people who heard Niebuhr speak the prayer years before he wrote it down. “His name was very much before the more theologically literate public” by the early 1930s, said Mr. Brown, author of “Niebuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Prophetic Role and Legacy” (Trinity Press International, 1992). But, Mr. Shapiro argued, knowing that Niebuhr was so famous by then, why did none of the people who cited the prayer in the clippings also cite him? The artifacts that Mr. Shapiro unearthed dismayed the Rev. Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary, which was Niebuhr’s scholarly home for many years. Professor Dorrien said, “What has the ring of truth to me is that some of the phrases in it, the gist of it, he heard or came into contact with in some way that he wouldn’t have remembered, since he’s not a scholarly, bookwormish person with habits of scholarly exactitude anyway.” “He is a preacher. He is coming into contact with things and blending them,” Professor Dorrien said, adding that for preachers, “it’s an occupational hazard.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us/11prayer.html?hp With New CD, Faith Hill In Christmas Mood Already It's summer and it's hot, but even so, Faith Hill is quick to warm up to talk about Christmas. Which is more than appropriate as she starts promoting the first Christmas album of her 15-year career, "Joy to the World," due September 16 on Warner Bros. While many Nashville-based artists record holiday records early and relatively often, Hill's was several years in the making and intended to be her definitive take on the season. "Joy to the World" is overwhelmingly a collection of standards, be it the big, booming orchestral arrangements of the title track or "Oh, Holy Night" or swinging, big-band, vintage-sounding versions of more lighthearted fare such as "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" and "Holly, Jolly Christmas." "I love everything about Christmas, and I have wanted to record a Christmas album since the beginning of my career," Hill said while taking a break from shooting video for potential TV spots promoting the record. The day before, Hill had been at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., taping "Sunday Night Football" promo spots with a group of NFL stars. Even as the industry craters, holiday-themed records remain a lucrative niche for labels. Josh Groban's "Noel" (2007) has moved 6.7 million copies in the United States for Warner Bros., flirting with Kenny G's "Miracles-The Holiday Album" from 1994, the top-selling Christmas album of the Nielsen SoundScan era (1991-present). On the country side, Toby Keith's Christmas album "A Toby Keith Classic Christmas" sold 294,000 last year. Hill was in stores last year with a greatest-hits package that sold just 257,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. She has moved more than 19 million albums in her career, topped by the 6.5 million copies of "Breathe" in 1999. Her last studio set, 2005's "Fireflies" has sold more than 2.2 million copies. Work on "Joy" started three years ago, but the project was sidetracked by the "Fireflies" and hits packages, not to mention the massive, record-breaking Soul2Soul II tour with her husband, Tim McGraw, in 2007-08. When those projects wrapped, Hill returned to the Christmas album. Song selection was one of the "toughest things" about putting the project together, Hill said. She didn't take the easy road, instead choosing challenging vocals, complicated lyrics and ambitious melodic structure. The album plays to her strengths as an unmistakably Southern soulful chanteuse and also conjures a vintage feel that would work in any era. "Fortunately, most of these songs I've known my entire life," she said. "On some of them I was used to singing the lyric I grew up with, which was not really always the original lyric. I guess over time things just change, or people take their own interpretation of what the song was originally." The more-spiritual songs on the record, such as "Oh Come All Ye Faithful," "Joy" and "Silent Night," feature the Nashville String Machine with conductor Carl Gorodetzky and were recorded live in the studio with Hill's vocals. "I've performed with an orchestra but I've never recorded with an orchestra live," she said. "I don't read music, and certainly it was difficult for me to read the scores, I really couldn't. So (arranger/conductor) David Campbell had quite a task put in front of him to direct the orchestra, as well as me. That was quite a challenge, but it worked out in the end." After a long layoff, the album was completed early this year, and Hill said it was surprisingly easy to resurrect the "spirit." "When we got into the studio this last time to complete it, it had been 18 months since we had heard the tracks. And all of us just sat there, turned off the vocal and just listened to the tracks of this Christmas music," she said. "We were all commenting on how fresh it was and how exciting it was to be back on the project. You would think it would be difficult with it not being the Christmas season, but when you record something that you're really proud of, it kind of stands the test of time, any time of the year." Hill won't tour to promote this release, but a wide range of multimedia promotional initiatives are being lined up. Hill has scheduled a special-edition "Soundstage" performance of her Christmas album that will be broadcast on PBS and also air elsewhere, said her manager, Gary Borman. He added that Hill's team is in discussions with a network about Hill and her Christmas music "participating in a major way" in an existing prime-time special. Beyond all the marketing, setup and commercial opportunity, Hill is sincere in touting the record's higher purpose. "I want it to be spiritual, I don't want to forget why we even celebrate Christmas," she said. "To me these songs are powerful and meaningful, and I want this to be the only Christmas album I'll ever record. And hopefully in 50 years it will sound as good as it does now. That's the intent behind it." http://www.reuters.com/article/music...33858220080707 Rare Marley, Skynyrd Performances Sold Online Vintage concert performances by such acts as Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bob Marley will soon join the nearly 500 recordings already available for download purchase at the music and memorabilia site Wolfgang's Vault. The additions were made possible through a deal between Universal Music Group (UMG) and Wolfgang's Vault founder Bill Sagan. The recordings include live performances by UMG artists culled from thousands of concerts produced by late promoter Bill Graham, along with gems from other catalogs and archives dating back decades. "This is a far-reaching agreement to make available what I would consider previously unreleased live performance recordings of Universal Music Group artists from the mid-'60s on through today," Sagan told Billboard.com. "It covers hundreds of UMG performers and thousands of live performance concerts." Sagan launched the Web site in 2003 after acquiring Graham's cache of memorabilia and concert recordings for $5 million. The downloadable content deal is for 10 years, with a streaming deal stretching "into perpetuity," Sagan said. If the concert is longer than 30 minutes, a full download is priced at $9.98, with concerts of less than 30 minutes at $5.98. Some one- or two-song performances cost $3.98. The site will continue to offer free streaming. "Of the 1,434 concerts that are up on the site, 488 can be downloaded right now," said Sagan. "And some very major artists will be downloading within the next 30 to 60 days." Eventually the product will be offered as CDs and vinyl under Universal's direction. "There will be physical product," Sagan said. A quick run through the site shows vintage performances for sale by artists including the Alarm, Fleetwood Mac, the Kinks, Billy Joel, Iggy Pop, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Lou Reed, Mott the Hoople, Poco, Steve Miller, the Tubes, Uriah Heep, Warren Zevon and many others. (http://www.wolfgangsvault.com) http://www.reuters.com/article/music...42275420080606 It’s American Brandstand: Marketers Underwrite Performers Robert Levine The hip-hop and R&B producer Jermaine Dupri has discovered best-selling acts like Kris Kross and Da Brat, has produced hits for Mariah Carey and Jay-Z, and now runs the urban music division of the Island Def Jam Music Group. He’s also looking for fresh talent for a new label financed by a company new to the music industry. The new player? Procter & Gamble. The consumer goods giant is part of a wave of companies getting into the music business to promote their own products, essentially becoming record labels themselves. Procter & Gamble, for example, is joining Island Def Jam in a joint venture called Tag Records, a label that will sign and release albums by new hip-hop acts. It is named after a brand of body spray that P.& G. acquired when it bought Gillette. And Mr. Dupri, a music-industry veteran and the longtime partner of the singer Janet Jackson, sounds quite pleased with his new gig. “I’ve never seen someone wanting to devote this much money to breaking new artists,” said Mr. Dupri, who will serve as president of Tag Records while keeping his position at Island Def Jam. “Nobody in the music business has the marketing budget that I have.” At a time when online file-sharing is rampant, record stores are closing and consumers are buying singles instead of albums, getting into the music business might seem like running into a burning building. But as record labels struggle to adjust to a harsh new digital reality, other companies are stepping up their involvement in music, going far beyond standard endorsement contracts and the use of songs in commercials. These companies — like Procter & Gamble, Red Bull and Nike — are stepping outside of their core businesses to promote, finance and even distribute music themselves. A few months ago, Bacardi announced that it would help the English electronic music duo Groove Armada pay for and promote its next release. Caress, the body-care line owned by Unilever, commissioned the Pussycat Dolls singer Nicole Scherzinger to record a version of Duran Duran’s “Rio” that it gave away on its Web site to promote its “Brazilian body wash” product. The energy drink company Red Bull is starting a label that is expected to release music before the end of the year. And at least some of this music is credible: a hip-hop song that Nike released by Kanye West, Nas, Rakim and KRS-One was nominated for a Grammy Award for best rap performance by a duo or group. Unlike Starbucks, which got into the music business to sell CDs at its stores, these companies want to use music to promote products they already sell. “It’s not about money,” said Sarah Tinsley, a global marketing manager at Bacardi. “It’s a branding exercise.” Unlike the exclusive album deals that Wal-Mart is striking with groups like the Eagles, these companies are attracting artists at the height of their relevance. Two weeks ago, Converse released a single by a combination of artists that The Times of London called “a three-headed Frankenstein’s monster of coolness”: the Strokes singer Julian Casablancas, the producer Pharrell Williams and the R&B performer Santogold. Offered as a free download on Converse’s Web site, the song received mostly favorable reviews from both blogs and newspapers. “Our instructions to them were to have fun, as though they were doing any song,” said Jon Cohen, co-founder of Cornerstone, a music marketing company that has set up music deals for Converse, Nike, Caress and Smirnoff. “It doesn’t matter where the music comes from as long as it’s great.” A decade ago, signing a record contract with a body spray company would have been unthinkable for most artists. But at a time when labels’ promotion budgets are declining, consumer brands can offer valuable exposure in print and television ads. Jeff Straughn, Island Def Jam’s vice president for strategic marketing, said that Tag might spend seven times as much promoting a release as a traditional label. “When I started in this business 10 years ago, it was hard to get an artist to stand in front of a sign with a logo on it,” said David Caruso, the co-founder of Acme, the agency that negotiated the deal between Island Def Jam and Tag. “Now brands are engaging their audiences with content.” But the brands walk a fine line by making sure that consumers are aware that they financed a song without having it simply seem like a commercial. “We wanted it to be like they were making their own record,” said Rob Stone, a Cornerstone co-founder, referring to the song that Kanye West, Nas and KRS-One made for Nike with a celebrated producer, Rick Rubin. “None of them had to mention the Air Force 1,” a Nike shoe. Instead, Cornerstone asked the artists to write a track about the theme of timelessness and promoted it like any other song, making a video, promoting it to radio and selling it on iTunes. (Nike’s profits went to the Force4Change Fund, a charity for youth leadership programs.) As it turned out, the song, “Better Than I’ve Ever Been,” does mention the sneakers as well as “Nike’s straight classic.” For artists, deals with brands can be more lucrative than traditional record contracts. Performers usually get an advance or fee in addition to a royalty rate higher than that given by record labels, which is usually $1 to $2 per sale. If the artist is signed to a label, he usually has to share the money he makes. In most cases, control of the recording copyright reverts to the artist or label after a set period of time. In another deal Cornerstone negotiated, the electronic music duo Crystal Method remixed some of its songs to create a workout soundtrack that Nike could sell on its page in Apple’s iTunes store. The sneaker company gave Crystal Method a small advance but a generous royalty, according to Richard Bishop, the duo’s manager. The mix sold nearly 40,000 copies online, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and more than 15,000 copies in traditional stores once Nike’s period of exclusivity ended. Crystal Method’s last traditional album sold 184,000 copies, but Mr. Bishop said the duo made more money on the Nike project because the royalty rate was so much better. “I think in the world today, it doesn’t make a difference to the consumer if a record comes out on Warner Music, EMI, Red Bull or Diesel Jeans,” Mr. Bishop said. “Artists may be better advised to put their music out with a brand to get better reach and bigger advertising.” Groove Armada should also do well in its deal with Bacardi, according to the band’s manager, Dan O’Neill. The yearlong contract calls for the duo to play 25 Bacardi events and give the liquor company online distribution rights to its new E.P. — a release with less music than a CD — which is due in October. In exchange, Groove Armada receives a monthly fee, money for recording costs and a generous royalty on music Bacardi sells or gives away. It retains the copyright to its recording, as well as the right to sell its E.P. in traditional outlets, where it will presumably benefit from the money Bacardi spends on marketing. Music executives say many of the acts now striking deals with brands are popular enough to do so because they have already benefited from major-label marketing campaigns: Crystal Method was signed to Interscope, Groove Armada to Sony. Although consumer brands are taking on roles once reserved for labels, they are investing so much money in music because the same digital technology that whipsawed the music business is also making it harder to reach consumers. “We don’t just want to talk to people,” said Anne Jensen, a brand-building director at Unilever who works with Caress. “We want to give them something that adds value to their lives.” She said that Ms. Scherzinger of the Pussycat Dolls was perfect for the campaign because she embodied the spirit of Brazil. (Though, truth be told, she is Hawaiian, Russian and Filipino.) Ms. Scherzinger will get money from her deal with Caress as well as exposure in the brand’s television campaign — the kind of advertising that a major label would not buy, even for a star. “If you’re only looking at these deals in terms of money, you’re going to miss what they do for each party,” said Jeff Haddad, who manages Ms. Scherzinger and the Pussycat Dolls. Danny Goldberg, founder of the management company Gold Village Entertainment and former chairman and chief executive of Mercury Records, said that deals with brands would turn off fans of some bands but could be effective in promoting other performers. “In another era, there was a stigma attached to this,” he said. “Now it’s just another way to expose your music.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/bu...a/07music.html EU Musicians Oppose Europe-Wide Online Royalties; Outcome Could Affect iTunes Kimberly Chow The Bee Gees' Robin Gibb and other European music composers warned today that standardizing music royalties across Europe could hurt musicians and the songs they write. The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, is close to finishing an antitrust investigation into how royalties are collected. The outcome might help large music retailers like Apple's iTunes sell from one store across Europe, rather than different stores with different products in each of the 27 EU nations. Gibb and three other composer-songwriters, representing the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance, or ECSA, warned that drastic changes to Europe's current online music market could reduce the royalties that musicians, particularly lesser-known ones with fewer sales, depend on to keep writing songs. ECSA said that if major online services can negotiate lower, region-wide fees, artists could get less for their songs despite seeing them distributed more widely. "On a fundamental scale, it's a human right that someone who writes a piece of work should have control of it," Gibb said in a statement, adding that a change could discourage newer songwriters from producing tomorrow's hits. Musicians make money from their music after they register copyrights with collective-rights managers, who in turn license songs and collect royalties from online services, radio stations, nightclubs and other outlets. Currently, there are separate licensing managers in each of the 27 EU nations, leading to a highly fragmented market and causing European online music sales to lag behind those in the United States. EU spokesman Jonathan Todd said the European Commission supports the collective-rights system because they minimize administrative fees and leave musicians with more money. However, the commission is investigating if this fragmentation violates fair trade rules by giving national copyright agencies a de facto monopoly. The collecting agencies' contracts with composers give authors only one choice of agency per country to collect payments. Todd said the antitrust probe may be concluded this month but gave no firm date. The EU has been at pains to create a Europe-wide copyright and licensing system for online music to make it easier and cheaper for commercial users to buy rights. Under the current setup, commercial users - satellite or cable broadcasters and Internet sites - that want to buy rights to music must get a license from each national collection agency. Because of the complexities, companies don't bother getting licenses for every market, so not all online music is available equally across the EU. More than 220 singers, musicians and composers - including Charles Aznavour, Sade, David Gilmour, Julio Iglesias, Maurice Jarre, Mark Knopfler and Michel Legrand - already have signed an appeal to the EU saying pan-European music licensing will stifle creativity. In a statement issued after meeting with EU officials, ECSA said EU-wide licensing would likely wipe out hundreds of thousands of small and medium-size businesses representing writers and publishers, reducing "the ability for Europe to produce cultural goods of any value in the international market." http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1 Last.fm Starts Paying Royalties to Unsigned Bands Frederic Lardinois Online music service Last.fm today announced that it will start paying out royalties to unsigned and independent bands that upload their music to last.fm. Artists will earn royalties whenever their music is played on-demand, or on Last.fm's streaming radio service. Last.fm had first announced this in January, but it took until today for Last.fm to officially start up its Artist Royalty Program. According to Last.fm, artists have uploaded close to half a million tracks since the program was first announced. When uploading a song, all artists can choose to opt into the Royalty Program. So far, Last.fm has been completely ad-supported, though a premium subscription service is currently in beta. Judging from the payout schedule, however, artists will need a lot of plays on Last.fm to make a reasonable amount from the program. On the other hand, though, MySpace pays out royalties to the major labels, but doesn't pay any royalties to unsigned bands on its site. Not everybody seems to be happy about this announcement from Last.fm, though. Merlin, the "world's first global rights body for independent music," which represents close to 8% of the US music market, has issued a statement to its roughly 12,000 members, telling them that Last.fm has failed to address its concerns about copyright infringement on Last.fm. Merlin also argues that the license terms of the Royalties Program are too ambiguous. Regardless of Merlin's objections, though, Last.fm's step to start paying out royalties should be applauded, as it gives musicians yet another way to make money outside of the mainstream music business. While the Royalty Program is limited only to Last.fm and doesn't collect royalties from various sources in the way SoundExchange would, Last.fm is giving musicians an alternative to the more traditional revenue models, which should prove to be especially appealing to smaller, still unknown bands. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives..._royalties.php Arctic Monkeys in Dispute with Pioneering Radio Website Over 'Failure to Pay Royalties' Jonathan Brown Some of Britain's top bands, including the Arctic Monkeys, Editors and Basement Jaxx, are locked in an increasingly bitter dispute with the music radio website Last.fm over substantial unpaid royalties. Talks between the pioneering internet company and leading independent record labels aimed at resolving the issue have broken down without agreement, it emerged yesterday. Merlin, which represents labels including Beggars Group and Koch – who between them account for 12 per cent of global sales – has written to its members claiming Last.fm has been unwilling to "properly address its illegal infringing activity". The website boasts 21 million users worldwide and offers 3.5m audio tracks. In 2007 CBS bought the business for £140m – at the time the largest Web 2.0 deal brokered for a UK-based company – and agreed to keep the existing management team, after Last.fm became the fastest-growing free music website in the United States. The take-over made the founders among the wealthiest internet pioneers of the decade. Merlin's chief executive, Charles Caldas, confirmed that he had called in the lawyers but said he was still hopeful of striking a deal covering the explosion in on-demand streaming services. He is urging labels to seek independent legal advice in their dealings with Last.fm. Mr Caldas said: "We'd do whatever we feel is necessary to ensure that our members' rights are properly protected. "We're considering what evidence we can put in front of Last.fm to show that there is a vast amount of our members' repertoire being used on their services without licences." Describing the situation as "not acceptable", Mr Caldas accused the site of failing "to keep the negotiation going at a pace we think is acceptable". It is the second recent setback for Last.fm. The website wants to become the first site on which any song can be accessed at any time – paid for simply by advertising revenues. Its founders hope that users will also eventually be able to access every music video ever made. But last month Warner Music Group pulled Led Zeppelin songs and hundreds of thousands of other tracks from the service. Last.fm was one of the stars of Web 2.0, the internet trend that saw the rise of sites including MySpace and Facebook. It was founded in 2002 in a small office in Whitechapel, east London, by four German and Austrian entrepreneurs. It allowed users to customise and share playlists appealing to their tastes. The following year they integrated the Audioscrobbler system, a plug-in devised by the computer student Richard Jones as part of a project while studying at Southampton University. The huge database calculates recommendations based on the listening habits of music fans. This week Last.fm launched its own artist royalty programme offering unsigned and independent artists the chance to earn money as their music is played. Some 450,000 tracks have been uploaded since the programme was announced in January. Announcing the service, one of Last.fm's Austrian co-founders, Martin Stiksel, said: "The young musician making music in a bedroom studio has the same chance as the latest major label signing to build an audience and get rewarded. It is another revolutionary step towards helping musicians take control of their music – and, more importantly, make a living from it." http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...es-865053.html Pop Tours Still Sell, Despite Economy Ben Sisario For the music industry these days, flat is good. Despite inflation, rising gasoline prices and the continuing slide of record sales, concert tours from January to June grossed $1.05 billion in North America, the same as the midyear gross in 2007, according to a report this week by Pollstar, a trade magazine. Bon Jovi topped the list with a gross of $56.3 million, followed by Bruce Springsteen, with $40.8 million, and Van Halen, with $36.8 million. But with grim economic forecasts, many in the industry are bracing for a sharp downturn for the rest of the summer and the fall. “Everybody’s nervous,” said Gary Bongiovanni, the editor of Pollstar. “If you look at the parade of bad economic news we’ve seen in the first six months of the year, we’re doing better than we should be. When is the bottom going to drop?” Because tickets for the most popular tours are often bought months in advance, sales for recent shows may not reflect the jump in fuel prices over the last couple of months. The true test, according to concert promoters, booking agents and others, will be over the next few months, as consumers decide whether to buy tickets for the fall. “There’s been a delayed effect,” said Randy Phillips, the chief executive of AEG Live, the second-largest promoter (after Live Nation). “Most of these shows went on public sale in February, March and April, and it wasn’t as dire as it got right after that.” Not everyone in the industry is so worried. Live Nation is doing strong business on some of its most important tours, said Jason Garner, its chief executive for North American music. Madonna’s tour, which begins in Europe next month and comes to the United States in October, is already 90 percent sold out, he said. (Last fall Madonna signed a multifaceted deal with Live Nation worth a reported $120 million, covering recorded music, tours and merchandise.) Coldplay’s summer dates are also 90 percent sold out, and the New Kids on the Block reunion, starting in September, is at 80 percent, a Live Nation spokesman said. “The data so far this year suggests that the concert business is as healthy as it’s been,” Mr. Garner said. In addition to rock and pop, country acts placed high on the Pollstar list. Kenny Chesney is No. 4, with $35.3 million; Rascal Flatts No. 8, with $25.4 million; and the bill of Keith Urban and Carrie Underwood grossed $18.5 million to reach No. 11. With the exception of Kanye West (No. 6, with $31.6 million) and the Jay-Z and Mary J. Blige tour (No. 7, $30.7 million), hip-hop is largely absent. Mr. Garner said most concertgoers attend only a few shows a year but can be reliable ticket buyers for their favorite acts. Midyear sales for the last three years have been fairly steady after low numbers in 2004 and 2005. Grosses might be holding steady, but attendance has been slipping for years, as the industry has remained profitable by selling fewer tickets for more money. The total number of tickets sold in the first half of 2008 fell by 5.6 percent to 16.9 million, though that was offset by a 5.9 percent increase in prices. The average ticket price for Bon Jovi, for example, was $88, and for Jay-Z and Ms. Blige it was $111. Mr. Bongiovanni said high prices made the business vulnerable if the economy continues to curb discretionary spending. “When times are tight, and there are fewer of those dollars around,” he said, “the first thing that’s going to get cut is a $200 concert ticket.” The concert industry is based on tight margins. Much of the face value of a ticket — up to 90 percent, or even more for the biggest acts — goes to the artists. That forces promoters to rely on ancillary sales, like food, merchandise and parking. Those sales are also threatened by a souring economy, said David B. Kestenbaum, a media analyst with the investment banking firm Morgan Joseph. “People will still pay for the top artists,” Mr. Kestenbaum said, “but they may not spend as much at the concert.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/ar...ic/12tour.html Music Business Hits Jackpot at Casinos Mitchell Peters The music industry is striking it rich at casinos. As casino venues target concertgoers from all walks of life through creative artist bookings, the effort hasn't gone unnoticed by those in the business. "If you're an agent, you love casinos," says Greg Oswald, a William Morris agent for such acts as Big & Rich, Hank Williams Jr. and Lynyrd Skynyrd. As new casinos boomed in the past 15 years, "it's found money," he adds. Most casinos are proactive in booking top-selling rock and pop acts, with the specific intent of drawing younger gamblers. But, as Oswald says, casinos appeal to a broad base of fans, therefore allowing booking opportunities for multiple genres. For some country acts in particular, casino venues have proved to be a beneficial asset when routing a tour. "Frankly, for a lot of artists in the country business and other genres, it has saved their bacon," Oswald says, adding that many casinos still draw older crowds. In 2007, Kenny Rogers, whom Oswald books, will play 30 casino dates nationwide. Tom Cantone, VP of sports and entertainment at the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville, Conn., says live music is a major component in modern-day casinos. "You really have to get into the event business to drive traffic and revenue on a consistent basis," he says. This summer alone, Mohegan Sun hosted 164 events across its three venues -- the 10,000-seat Mohegan Sun Arena, the 400-seat Wolf Den club and the 330-seat Cabaret Theatre. In 2006, 51 shows at the arena grossed $15 million and drew more than 387,000 fans, according to Billboard Boxscore. Mohegan Sun recently broke ground on a $740 million project set to include a House of Blues, Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville restaurant and store, and a 1,000-room hotel. Full completion is scheduled for 2010. Steve Gietka, VP of entertainment for Trump Entertainment Resorts in Atlantic City, N.J., oversees booking at venues in Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza and Trump Marina. He says that while live entertainment certainly helps sell hotel rooms and fill restaurants and nightclubs, there's a price to be paid. "Because we're casinos, and agents, artists and managers believe that their artists help us drive gaming revenues, we typically pay premiums when compared to regular promoters," Gietka says. Indeed, William Morris' Oswald says that casinos are in a good position to buy plenty of talent. "They have ancillary income in the form of bar, food and obviously, casinos," Oswald says. "So it's easier than the guy who is only going to make money from the box office." But there are also challenges with casino venues, No. 1 being overbooking, according to Oswald. In some markets, casinos are bringing in act after act, which can sometimes exhaust the local fan base. "They've made it real hard to sell tickets," Oswald says. "The fans are spoiled because they can go down to the casino on any Friday night and there will be a big act." As a result, promoters are forced to lower ticket prices to attract concertgoers, he adds. But hosting too many concerts has never been a problem for Mohegan Sun, which is owned by the Mohegan Tribe. Arena concerts scheduled through October include such diverse acts as Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, Big & Rich featuring Cowboy Troy, Van Halen, Mana, Maroon 5, Phil Lesh and Kelly Clarkson. And with the 25-and-older demographic expanding, Cantone remains confident that casino bookings will reflect their tastes. "It used to be where an older market went to have their entertainment fix. But now the twentysomethings are going. If you're young, want to go out and play poker or blackjack, then catch a cool concert, where else can you go?" From December, 2007 http://www.reuters.com/article/music...25804420071014 Just the Way He Is Dan Barry SAG HARBOR, N.Y. SOMEONE must sing a proper song of farewell for Shea Stadium, the nice try of a coliseum in Queens, as its dismantling draws near and a new ballpark rises just yards away. But that someone must be able to convey emotions specific to the place, emotions beyond the sadness of many lost Mets summers and the euphoria of two World Series championships. There is so much more. The romantic idealism and the yeah-right realism. The quickness to mock and to take offense. The need to prove oneself better than any Upper East Side twit and the guilt from having conceived such a hollow ambition. The restlessness, angst and ache of the striver. The Long Island of it all. Of course the meeting of Shea muckety-mucks to discuss who should sing this farewell probably lasted as long as it took to say: Billy Joel. Those of you who detest Billy Joel, you self-assured music critics and self-appointed cultural arbiters, you who have Reagan-era flashbacks of being stuck in summertime traffic in a car with only AM radio and hearing “Uptown Girl” or “Pressure” or “Tell Her About It” no matter what button you push and traffic still isn’t moving — consider this: When tickets went on sale several months ago for an absolutely final Shea concert, starring Mr. Joel and taking place this Wednesday, more than 50,000 were sold in 48 minutes; a sellout. Promoters were so, um, touched by this response that they added a final, we mean it this time, absolutely final show for Friday; those tickets sold out in 46 minutes. That’s a lot of Brendas and Eddies buying tickets. Not bad for a 59-year-old piano player who hasn’t released an album of new pop songs in 15 years. A few weeks ago, during a sound check just hours before another sold-out Billy Joel concert at the Mohegan Sun casino in eastern Connecticut, the drummer tested his drums, the saxophone player his sax. Then a short, stocky man in a T-shirt and baseball cap limped up the steps and gimped over to the piano, looking every bit the road-battered stagehand making one last check for Mr. Joel. He sat down, turned his cap around, propped his coffee mug on the piano — oh, the boss ain’t gonna like that — and started fluttering with the keys. A medley of opening strains to old Billy Joel hits echoed through the empty arena, then segued into a little of Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto.” Satisfied, the man collected his mug and hobbled offstage to have a cigarette. Two hours later, this same balding, gray-haired man — Himself, of course — sat before the same piano, in a dark blazer and blue jeans but still looking just as short and stocky. As 10,000 people rose to their feet, a not so angry, not so young, but energetic as hell Billy Joel ripped into the first of two dozen songs, most of them written before the births of the women worshiping him from the front rows. And here’s the thing. He gets it. “I’m just this shlubby guy who plays the piano,” he says later. He knows that save for those large, please-don’t-hurt-me eyes, he looks nothing like the bushy-haired young man communing with a white mask on the cover of “The Stranger,” the album that launched him into the stratosphere, now being released in a 30th-anniversary deluxe package. (What happened to the 25th anniversary?) Nothing like the baby-faced entertainer asserting in old video loops playing in the casino gift shop that he didn’t start the fire — a fire that, post-9/11, seems almost innocent. While Bruce Springsteen has stalled the aging process through blessed genes or some Faustian bargain, Mr. Joel looks like every heartbreak, bad review, car crash and attendant tabloid dig has exacted a physical toll, so much so that if those adoring young women were to encounter him at the mall, he says, “they wouldn’t look twice at me.” But he clearly understands this; he even seizes upon it to mock the myth of the ageless, unapproachable rock star. “I’m from Long Island; I’m not going to delude myself,” he says. “I know what I look like. And I want them to know that I know how absurd all this is.” He lets them know by often announcing the release dates — “This next song came out in 1977” — as if to suggest both the song’s endurance and a disbelief that he still gets paid to sing it. And he lets them know by poking fun at himself. During this particular Mohegan Sun concert, he recalled a tabloid photograph many years ago of him on the beach, reaching up to hold hands with the tall model Elle Macpherson. “I looked like Bubbles the Chimp,” he told the audience. One could argue that Mr. Joel can afford to be so self-deprecating. According to the Recording Industry Association of America he is ranked sixth among the top-selling artists of all time, behind the Beatles and Elvis Presley but ahead of Elton John and Barbra Streisand. He has the financial wherewithal to surprise his wife, the cookbook author and television correspondent Katie Lee Joel, with the darnedest thinking-of-you gift: a house in the Hamptons worth roughly $16 million (not to be confused with other multimillion-dollar properties he owns, including an estate in Oyster Bay). Sitting in another of his homes, this one facing his boat basin in Sag Harbor and large enough so that his collection of vintage motorcycles takes up little space, Mr. Joel says he knows what I am thinking, since I too am from the lower-middle-class middle of Long Island, having grown up 15 miles from Hicksville, his hometown. “I know: rich bastard,” he says. “I used to feel awkward about it, but I shrugged it off. It’s all luck and sweat. But I earned it — though I can’t justify the amounts.” Mr. Joel often expresses an opinion or emotion, then almost immediately holds that opinion or emotion up for analysis, as though running it through some internal truth check. He expresses pride in his work but doesn’t want to brag. He makes crazy money but isn’t saying he’s worth it. He mocks himself before someone else gets the chance. If you’re tired of hearing “Just the Way You Are,” well, he’s tired of playing it. (“It’s a wedding song,” he says. “I also feel hypocritical. I divorced the woman I wrote it for.”) If you wince when you hear “Honesty,” well, so does he, on the inside. (“You hypocrite,” he says he thinks to himself. “Since when are you Mr. Sincerity?”) And if he doesn’t sing “Uptown Girl,” he mimics what you’re thinking with a slight rise in his voice: “He’s probably mad at Christie.” In fact it has nothing to do with Christie Brinkley, his second ex-wife, but with the lost ability to hit the very high notes with consistency. He may be one of the most successful performers in the world, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an extraordinarily gifted musician who can move from rock to ballad to soulful doo-wop, who can capture with a few spare words the dreams and disappointments of clerks and secretaries rocking their lives away on the Long Island Rail Road. But he acts as though he still worries what the guys standing outside some 7-Eleven in Hicksville might say, because the worst that they can say is: He forgot where he came from. He’s full of it. A fake. Mr. Joel is occasionally dismissed as inauthentic, as more of a Tin Pan Alley jinglemeister than a rock musician. While he says the question of authenticity is contrived, he defends himself by resurrecting a couple of pet conspiracy theories. First, he plays piano, suspect instrument of the rich, rather than guitar, revered instrument of the poor. And second, he comes from Long Island — and really, the thought goes, what hard-knocks artistry could possibly emerge from the land of suburban tracts? The truth is, if rock-star authenticity means having endured pain and tribulation, self-created and otherwise, then Billy Joel sits in the V.I.P. room. His Jewish grandparents fled Europe to evade the Nazis, leaving behind a successful business. He was 8 when his parents split up and his father returned to Europe. His mother worked as a bookkeeper, paying a few bucks a week for her gifted son’s piano lessons. He took up boxing to answer the bullies who teased him about playing the piano; he’ll gladly show you the unevenness of his damaged nose. He didn’t graduate from high school because he was already a working musician, helping his mother pay bills by performing in bars and clubs from Mineola to Montauk. Along the way he identified and teased out certain themes about Long Island, his world. He cites a few as he sits in his Sag Harbor home, sipping coffee: how the city that our parents escaped became the first place we wanted to go; how we Long Islanders have an inherent inferiority complex; how we use ridicule and sarcasm to show affection. “Everything was testing, testing, testing,” he says. “Testing your manhood, testing your humor — really, testing your friendship.” He attempted suicide when he was 21 and spent three weeks in a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric unit, where he says his time with the profoundly troubled gave him perspective. “I’d go up to the nurse’s window and say, ‘Hey, I’m O.K., but these other people are really crazy,’ ” he recalls. “They’d just hand me my Thorazine.” He made it big, really big, then lost money and his trust in some close advisers. He made back his money and more, smashed up cars and motorcycles, and married for a third time, in 2004, to Katie Lee, a woman more than 30 years his junior. A few months later he went into rehab. “I realized I was still drinking too much,” he says. “And I wanted to fix it.” All this has given deeper resonance to his lyrics, many of them written during his precocious youth. When asked which of his songs make him think, Ah, at least I got that one right, he immediately cites two: “Vienna” (1978), a celebration of a life’s worth at every age, and “Summer, Highland Falls” (1976), a meditation on emotional extremes. His back and forth between sadness and euphoria may have led to effective songwriting over the years, he says, but he now strives toward the more comfortable middle ground of contentment. There was a time when he would read a bad review aloud onstage, fulminate and dramatically rip up the article to the cheers of an audience that “most of the time didn’t know what I was talking about,” he says. Now a bad review doesn’t ruin his life. “I think that was a Long Island thing,” he says. “Someone would take a swipe, and I felt compelled to swing back.” There was a time when he resented his signature song, “Piano Man,” when he simply refused to sing about its Paul, the real-estate novelist, and Davy, forever in the Navy. Now he accepts his role as patron saint of all those who provide wallpaper music in open obscurity, like the slumped man playing for the early-bird crowd at a Sag Harbor restaurant just around the corner. “I made peace with it,” he says — so much so that the song now often closes his concerts. None of this should suggest that Mr. Joel has achieved a constant state of inner peace. “When I’m low, I’m very low, and when I’m euphoric, I’m very euphoric,” he says. “Which is why I seek contentment. And I wish I was less discontent.” These days Mr. Joel works on original instrumental compositions, preferring what he calls a more abstract form of expression. Still, he continues to perform in concert, singing songs he has sung 1,000 times, 10,000 times. Why? Because he can. Because it’s the greatest job in the world. And, he says, “Because people still want to see me do this.” They do, because they get it too. The Brendas and Eddies of yesterday, who long ago “bought a couple of paintings from Sears,” and the Brendas and Eddies of today, buying their wall decorations at Target. Those who moved out and wish they hadn’t; those who didn’t move out and wish they had. Those who didn’t start the fire but lived through it. A few nights from now they will file into a doomed stadium that will be remembered as much for its tragicomedies as for its triumphs. They will fill those uncomfortable seats. And when a short, stocky, bald man appears onstage, they will roar in recognition. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/ar...ic/13barr.html |
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Join Date: May 2001
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The Professional Suicide of a Recording Musician
Bob Ostertag In March 2006 I posted on the Web all of my recordings to which I have rights, making them available for free download. This included numerous LPs and CDs created over 28 years. I explained my motivations in a statement on the Web site: Quote:
When record companies first appeared, their services were required in order for people to listen to recorded music. Making and selling records was a major undertaking. Recording studios and record manufacturing plants had to be built, recording technology and techniques developed. Records not only had to be manufactured but also distributed and advertised. Record executives may have been crooked in their business practices, callous about music, or racist in their treatment of artists, but the services the companies provided were at least useful in the sense that recorded music could not be heard without them. Making recorded music available to the general public required a significant outlay of capital, which in turn required a legal structure that would provide a return on the required investment. The contrast with the World Wide Web today could not be more striking. Instant, world-wide distribution of text, image, and sound have become automatic, an artifact of production in the digital realm. I start a blog, I type a paragraph: instant, global "distribution" is a simple artifact of the process of typing. Putting 28 years of recordings up on my Web site for free download was a simple procedure involving a few hours of effort yet resulting in the same instant, free, world-wide distribution. It makes no difference if 10 people download a song or 10,000, or if they live on my block or in Kuala Lumpur: it all happens at no cost to either them or me other than access to a computer and an Internet connection. So much for distribution. What about production? Almost none of my releases were recorded in a recording studio provided by a record company. They were either recorded on-stage, in schools or radio stations, or in living rooms, bedrooms, and garages with whatever technology I could cobble together. They are made either by myself alone or with a small handful of close collaborators. In one sense this is atypical, because I intentionally developed an approach to recording that was premised on never needing substantial resources, with the explicit goal of maintaining maximum artistic autonomy. Yet while this approach may have been unusual 20 years ago, it is less and less so today as digital technology has drastically reduced the cost of recording. There are very few recording projects today that actually require the resources of the sort of high-end recording studios record companies put their artists in (and for which the artists then pay exorbitantly -- bills which must be paid off before the musicians see any royalties from their recordings). Just as the Web has changed the character of music distribution, laptops loaded with the hardware and software necessary for high-quality sound recording and editing have changed the character of music production. Record companies are not necessary for any of this, yet the legal structure that developed during the time when their services were useful remains. Record companies used to charge a fee for making it possible for people to listen to recorded music. Now their main function is to prohibit people from listening to music unless they pay off these corporations. Or to put it slightly differently, they used to provide you with the tools you needed to hear recorded music. Now they charge you for permission to use tools you already have, that they did not provide, that in fact you paid someone else for. Really what they are doing is imposing a "listening tax." Like all taxes, if you don't pay you are breaking the law; you are a criminal! Armed agents of the state have shown up at private residences and taken teenagers away in handcuffs for failure to pay this corporate tax. It is worth noting how draconian state coercion has been in this field in comparison to many others. For example, almost everyone I know (including myself) has a unpaid copy of Microsoft Word on their computer. I am certain that some kids who have run into legal trouble for sharing music without paying the corporate tax also had unpaid copies of Microsoft Word on the very same hard disks that were taken as "evidence" of their musical crimes. Yet no state agents are knocking on the doors of our houses to see if we have pirated software. Music alone is singled out for this special treatment. You would think that musicians would be leading the rebellion against this insanity, but most musicians remain firmly committed to the idea of charging fees for the right to listen to their recorded music. For rock stars at the top of the food chain, this makes sense economically (if not politically). The entire structure of the record industry is built around their interests, which for all their protesting to the contrary dovetails fairly well with those of the giant record companies. But the very same factors that make the structure of the record business favor the interests of the sharks at the top of the food chain work against the interests of the minnows at the bottom, who constitute the vast majority of people actually making and recording music. Most records, in fact, produce good money for corporations and little or none for the musicians. This is because the recording studios and engineers, art departments, advertising departments, A&R departments, legal departments, limo services, tour agencies, caterers, and distribution networks that swallow up the sales revenue for all but the big hits are owned by these very same corporations. Records that sell tens of thousands don't "break even" not because no money comes in, but because all the money goes to keeping the corporation in the black. Revenue for the corporation starts coming in with the first CD sold, royalties for artists don't kick in until every part of the bloated corporate beast is adequately fed. What exactly are these corporations? To begin with, we should note that the major "record companies" are not actually record companies at all but huge media conglomerates. Most "independent" labels are owned by a corporate label. Each "major" is in turn owned by an even bigger corporation, and so on up the food chain. At the top of the chain sit a tiny handful of media giants: Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, Viacom (formerly CBS) and General Electric. These corporations are among the world's largest. All are listed in Fortune Magazine's "Global 500" largest corporations in the world. They have integrated both horizontally (owning lots of record labels, lots of newspapers, and radio stations) and vertically (controlling newspapers, magazines, book publishing houses, and movie and TV production studios, as well as print distribution systems, cable and broadcast TV networks, radio stations, telephone lines, satellite systems, web portals, billboards, and more). This incredible concentration of power over news, entertainment, advertising, music, and media of all kinds is a recent phenomena, and is fueled by the very same digital technology that has made the Web and the recording-studio-in-the-bedroom possible. In 1983, 50 corporations dominated US mass media, and the biggest media merger in history was a $340 million deal. By 1997 the 50 had shrunk to 10, one of which was created in the $19 billion merger of Disney and ABC. Just three years later, the end of the century saw the 10 shrink to just five amidst the $350 billion merger of AOL and Time Warner, a deal more than 1,000 times larger than "the biggest deal in history" just 17 years before. As Ben Bagdikian, author of the classic study The New Media Monopoly noted, "In 1983, the men and women who headed the first mass media corporations that dominated American audiences could have fit comfortably in a modest hotel ballroom ... By 2003, [they] could fit in a generous phone booth." These companies own the most powerful ideology-manufacturing apparatus in the history of the world. It is no wonder they have convinced most musicians, and most everyone else, that the entire endeavor of human music-making would come to a screeching halt if people were allowed to listen to recorded music without first paying a fee -- to these corporations. I know many musicians for whom making records in an environment dominated by corporate giants has been an exhausting and thankless task from which they have derived little or no gain, yet they remain convinced that taking advantage of the free global distribution offered by the Internet would constitute some sort of professional suicide. Here is how the structure of this industry ruins the aspirations of independent-minded musicians and labels. Mainstream CDs sell in really large numbers only for a short window of time, usually while songs from the CD are on the radio. Unless those CDs are on the shelves of stores while the songs are on the air, potential sales are lost. In order to get stores to order large numbers of CDs in advance, the industry evolved with the norm that stores can return unsold CDs at any time. If your company sells pants, or toasters, or bicycles, retailers cannot do this, but record shops can. As a result, record labels must have more money in the bank per unit sales -- be more capitalized -- than other kinds of companies. Unfortunately, with almost all independent labels this is far from the case. Most are started by music fans driven in to the business by their passion for the music they love. They operate on a shoestring. They send out a bunch of records and hope for the best. Sales might look good at first, but at some later point they get swamped with returns and they have a cash flow crisis. To survive the crisis they engage in creative bookkeeping, telling themselves it is OK because they are really doing this in the interest of the artists, and when things improve everything will get sorted out. But things only get worse, until they collapse or they get bought by a bigger company with more capital. If they collapse, artists don't get paid and there is a storm of mutual recrimination. If they get bought, the company that buys them is generally only interested in the top selling artists in the catalog, and may well take all the other titles out of print. I know one artist who had ten years of his recordings vanish into the vault of a big label that bought the little label he recorded for. He approached his new corporate master and asked to buy back the rights of his own work and was refused. In the company's view, his work did not have sufficient market potential to justify releasing it and putting corporate market muscle behind promoting it, but neither did they want his work released by anyone else to compete with the products they did release. From their perspective it was a better bet to just lock it up. I could relate many more anecdotes here, or delve deeper into the structure of the industry, but I think what has been said so far should suffice. Among people in my immediate social circle of musicians, John Zorn, Mike Patton, and Fred Frith have, over the years, sold CDs in sufficient quantity to actually make money. For all the rest of us, selling recordings in whatever format has been a break-even proposition at best. Not only have we not made any money, for most people in the world our music is unavailable. My works provide an excellent example. • My first LP, with the Fall Mountain ensemble, was released on Parachute, a small label run by Eugene Chadbourne which folded long ago and the music has been unavailable ever since. • My Getting A Head and Voice of America were released on Rift, a small label run by Fred Frith which suffered the same fate. It remained unavailable until I put it on line for free. • My Attention Span, Sooner or Later, Burns Like Fire, and Say No More were released on RecRec in Switzerland, a label launched by a music fan that went through exactly the trajectory typical of small labels I described above. By the time that I, and other artists recording for the label, discovered that we were being cheated out of our royalties the label was already collapsing. Here again, all this music remained unavailable until I put it on line for free. Since then, several thousand people have heard it. I could continue this list but there are a lot of CDs and the stories would become dully repetitive. Of course, my music is pretty far off the beaten path. But if I had instead spent the last decades playing in rock bands that had released a series of recordings that each sold in the tens of thousands, the details would be different but the result would be the same. This is the structure of music distribution it is allegedly in the interests of musicians to defend. There is now a very simple alternative, which is to simply post your music on the web. No, you won't make any money from it, but the odds are overwhelming that you would never make any money from it anyway if you charged for it. And by posting it on the Web a remarkable thing happens. People all over the world can actually hear it. When I was making my music available for sale on CD, I would often hear from people who had spent years unsuccessfully trying to find a copy of a particular CD, and these were dedicated hard core listeners, who put a lot of their free time into music. Now anyone with even a passing interest can find my music easily and hear it. People have actually been convinced that if it were not possible to charge fees for listening to recorded music, there would be no "incentive" to play music. It's time to take a step back and see the big picture. As recently as 60 years ago, most people who made their livelihood from music viewed the recording industry as a threat to their livelihood, not the basis of it. Given the mountains of money that big stars have made during the intervening decades, this fear has generally been viewed in retrospect as hopelessly naïve. But consider the following: A few years ago I performed in the cultural festival organized by the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and witnessed the parade and dance party which is this festival's culminating event. The parade brought roughly half a million people into the streets, including participants and observers. It took hours for the parade to slowly move through its course. Every contingent in the parade had its own choreography and music. The participants danced through the street, and many spectators danced alongside. So that's half a million people dancing in the street for several hours. The parade ended in a 12-hour dance party attended by over 20,000, featuring seven different pavilions with non-stop music in each. Before the era of recording, the number of musicians required to keep half a million people dancing in the street for six hours, and then 20,000 dancing for 12 hours more, would have easily run in to the thousands. At the event I attended, the musicians involved numbered exactly one. No contingent in the parade included a live musician -- all were dancing to recordings. All the music at the dance party was recorded as well. In the largest pavilion, at the climax of the party, an actual live singer, Chaka Kahn, emerged in a blaze of fireworks and lights to sing a short medley of her hits -- to recorded accompaniment. Humans have walked this earth for about 195,000 years. We don't know exactly when music emerged, but it was certainly a very long time ago, long before recorded history. There is evidence that music may have been integral to the evolution of the human brain, that music and language developed in tandem. The first recording device was invented just 129 years ago. The first mass-produced record appeared just 110 years ago. The idea that selling permission to listen to recorded music is the foundation of the possibility of earning one's livelihood from music is at most 50 years old, and it is a myth. The fact that most musicians today believe in this myth is an ideological triumph for corporate power of breathtaking proportions. I should note that I do have serious reservations about the emerging culture of on-line music, but they have nothing to do with money. My music is made for sustained, concentrated listening. This kind of listening is increasingly rare in our busy, caffeine-driven, media-drenched, networked world. I suspect it is even rarer for music that was downloaded for free, broken up and shuffled through fleeting "playlists", and not objectified in an object that one can hold in one's hand, file on the shelf, or give to a friend. But this concern has nothing to do whether we charge money to hear recorded music, and everything to do with how we live in a culture in which there is a surplus of information and a scarcity of time to pay attention. The issues involved here are hardly limited to music, but extend outward to a legal and corporate structure that shapes our culture so profoundly its importance can hardly be exaggerated. Music is no longer just music but a small subset of a corporation's properties. Property rights have become so absurdly swollen that they now constitute a smokescreen hiding a corporate power grab on a scale rivaling that of the great robber barons of the nineteenth century. Instead of grabbing land or oil, today's corporate barons are seizing control of culture. They are using the legal construct of property to extend the reach of corporate power into parts of our lives that were previously beyond their grasp. There are so many shocking anecdotes one could relate in this regard; here is one from my own recent experience. If it seems trivial at first glance, it is because it is. That is precisely my point, as you will see if you bear with me. It has been my privilege to have John Cooney as a student. John is young, bright, enthusiastic, hard-working, politically engaged, and artistically gifted. During his freshman year at UC Davis, he made a short animation about global warming that won the Flash Contest prize from Citizens for Global Solutions, and the Environmental Award of the Media That Matters Film Festival. He also made a computer game that he put on-line for free, and that was listed as a "Top Free Online Games" by Freeonlinegames.com, a "Game of the Week" by ActionFlash.com, and a "Featured Game," by Addicting Games. John's game also made the "Flash Player Top Games List," and was even the subject of a story on BBC World News. Not bad for an 18-year old college freshman. But both his projects resulted in cease-and-desist letters from corporate lawyers, including one from Tolkien Enterprises demanding that he not refer to an animated character in a game he was offering on-line for no charge as a "hobbit." None of this involved high stakes or dire consequences. John's game no longer features a "hobbit." This case is trivial compared to parents getting sued for vast sums because their kids are downloading pop songs, or the unhappy plight of Eyes on the Prize, a film which beautifully documents the civil rights movement in the US, yet was withdrawn from circulation because its makers could not afford to renew all the necessary permissions on the incidental music that "leaked" into the film via documentary footage (which included a substantial payment to the copyright holders of the "happy birthday" song as the film shows Martin Luther King Jr.'s family at home celebrating the civil rights leader's birthday). But John's experience is important precisely because it did not involve important people or high-profile issues. Even though there was no realistic possibility that anyone would think Tolkien Enterprises had somehow endorsed or been involved in John's project, the mere fact that someone, somewhere was making new, independent culture using Tolkien Enterprises' copyrighted character was enough to set the corporate reflexes in motion. The key thing here is the convergence of corporate power with the growth of the World Wide Web. If John had just shown his game in class and not put it on the Web, Tolkien Enterprises would have never known or cared. If his animation had not won an award, there would likely have been no legal threats. Together, the episodes offer an elegant demonstration of how copyright law punishes success and deters creative use of the World Wide Web. Anything on the Web is available to anyone, which is of course both its promise and its peril. Corporate legal departments can write automated programs that crawl through the Web 24/7 searching for copyrighted works. The "hits" then generate threatening letters that intimidate anyone who doesn't have deep pockets and a lot of time on their hands. The cost to the sender is almost nil; the cost to society is, in a literal sense, immeasurable. Getting a threatening letter for a corporate legal department is not a pleasant experience for anyone, least of all an 18-year old kid. Keep in mind that more and more students turn in homework assignments via the Web, and not just in college but in high school too. All of that work is now exposed to the corporate vultures. "Property rights" have bloated to the point where they can dictate the content of freshman art projects. But that is not all. Altogether more and more of what we do in our lives passes through the Web. People invite friends to parties, view art, listen to music, play games, have political discussions, date and fall in love, post their family photo albums, share their dreams, and play out sexual fantasies -- all on line. Since corporate legal departments claim their copyright privileges extend to anything on the Web, the result is a huge extension of corporate power into private lives and social networks. But that is just the beginning of the story, for the accelerating rate of technological change continues to push digital technology further and further into our lives in just about any direction you might look. To pick just one example, boundaries between our bodies and minds and our technology are blurring. Cochlear implants, for example, now allow deaf people to hear via computer chips loaded with copyrighted software which are implanted in their skulls and in response to which their brains reconfigure, growing new synapses while unused synapses fade. Cochlear implants are wirelessly networked to hardware worn outside the body which usually connects to a mic, thus allowing the deaf to hear the sound environment around them. But the external hardware can just as easily be plugged into a laptop's audio output for a direct audio tap into the Web. When the Web extends into chips in our skulls, where is the boundary between language that is carved up into words that are corporately owned and language that is free for the thinking? I don't wish to be sensationalist. We are not all about to turn into corporately-owned cyborgs. But I do wish to point out that the issues around turning culture into property are urgent, and far-reaching. Society is not well-served if we treat specific matters like downloading music on the Web as isolated problems instead of one manifestation of a vastly bigger struggle in which much more is at stake. From April, 2007 http://www.alternet.org/story/50416/ Lyle Lovett Sells Millions, Earns Nothing Lyle Lovett says he has "never made a dime" from album sales during his two-decade career, and hopes to rectify that situation when his contract expires. The eclectic country singer has two more albums on his deal with Curb/Universal, his home since 1985, and figures the horizons are wide open. "The possibilities are very exciting, I think," Lovett told Billboard.com. "I've never made a dime from a record sale in the history of my record deal. I've been very happy with my sales, and certainly my audience has been very supportive. I make a living going out and playing shows." Lovett, 50, has sold 4.6 million albums in the United States since 1991, the year when SoundScan sales data were introduced. His most recent release, "It's Not Big It's Large," has sold about 145,000 copies since debuting at a career-best No. 18 on the Billboard 200 last September, according to Nielsen SoundScan. "Records are very powerful promotional tools to go out and be able to play on the road, but you do have to think about it as a way of sustaining itself at some point. I'm very excited about being able to do some of that on my own, maybe," Lovett said. He did not, however, rule out another label deal. "Certainly if a major label is interested in working with me after these next two records and is able to come up with a strategy that does engage some of the new technology in a way that can benefit everybody, I'd be very interested in that." Lovett said he hopes to start work on his next album in time for a 2009 release. He has a direction in mind but says, "I don't know if I want to talk about it yet." He is currently touring North America with his Large Band through mid-August, and has also financed an album recorded at some of the singer/songwriter shows he does with John Hiatt, Guy Clark and Joe Ely but is having trouble getting his label interested in putting it out. Lovett, who has graced the big screen in such films as "The Player" and "The Opposite of Sex," recently added to his acting resume with "a very small contribution" to Michael Meredith's film "The Open Road," which stars Justin Timberlake and Jeff Bridges, and is expected to open later this year. "I got to do a scene with Justin, which was fun. I enjoyed meeting him," said Lovett, who also performed a song for the soundtrack with Charlie Sexton, who's scoring the film. http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...30835920080710 A Private Dance? Four Million Web Fans Say No Charles McGrath There are no weekend box office charts for online videos. But if there were, near or at the very top of the list right now might well be a four-and-a-half-minute video called “Dancing,” which more than four million people have viewed on YouTube, and perhaps another million on other sites, in the just over two weeks since it appeared. It’s the online equivalent of a platinum hit, seeping from one computer to the next like a virus. The title is not misleading. “Dancing” shows a guy dancing: a big, doughy-looking fellow in shorts and hiking boots performing an arm-swinging, knee-pumping step that could charitably be called goofy. It’s the kind of semi-ironic dance that boys do by themselves at junior high mixers when they’re too embarrassed to partner with actual girls. The dancer is Matt Harding, the 31-year-old creator of the video, and with some New Agey-sounding music playing in the background, he turns up, grinning and bouncing, in 69 different locations, including India, Kuwait, Bhutan, Tonga, Timbuktu and the Nellis Airspace in Nevada, where he performs the dance in zero gravity. He started doing it at work, years ago, when he was living in Brisbane, Australia. “I’d dance at lunchtime or during an awkward pause or just to annoy people,” Mr. Harding said. “It was sort of a nervous tic.” Now he’s on the streets in Mumbai one minute, balanced on the Giant’s Causeway rock formation in Northern Ireland the next, and then he’s in a tulip field in the Netherlands or in front of a geyser in Iceland. Sometimes Mr. Harding dances alone. On a Christmas Island beach he has an audience of crabs, and on Madagascar he performs for lemurs. But more often — and this accounts for much of the video’s appeal — he’s in the company of others: South African street children in Soweto, bushmen in New Guinea, Bollywood-style dancers in India, some oddly costumed waitresses in Tokyo, crowds of free spirits in Paris, Madrid and rainy Montreal, all copying, or trying to, his flailing chicken-step. Mr. Harding even dances for a lone military policeman (unmoved to join him) in the Korean demilitarized zone. In many ways “Dancing” is an almost perfect piece of Internet art: it’s short, pleasingly weird and so minimal in its content that it’s open to a multitude of interpretations. It could be a little commercial for one-world feel-goodism. It could be an allegory of American foreign policy: a bumptious foreigner turning up all over the world and answering just to his own inner music. Or it could be about nothing at all — just a guy dancing. However you interpret it, you can’t watch “Dancing” for very long without feeling a little happier. The music (by Gary Schyman, a friend of Mr. Harding’s, and set to a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, sung in Bengali by Palbasha Siddique, a 17-year-old native of Bangladesh now living in Minneapolis) is both catchy and haunting. The backgrounds are often quite beautiful. And there is something sweetly touching and uplifting about the spectacle of all these different nationalities, people of almost every age and color, dancing along with an uninhibited doofus. Children, not surprisingly, turn out to be the best at picking up on Mr. Harding’s infectious vibe. There’s frequently a grown-up, on the other hand — especially one in the front row of a crowd — who tends to ham it up and make a fool of himself. The other remarkable thing about the “Dancing” phenomenon is that it is, to a very considerable extent, a creation of the Internet. It doesn’t just live, so to speak, on the Web; it was the Web that, more or less accidentally, brought it into being. The current video is actually the third iteration of a project that began in 2003, when a friend, using a Canon pocket camera with the capacity to record brief videos (when it was still something of a novelty), shot Mr. Harding doing his dance in Hanoi. It was the equivalent of taking a photograph as a souvenir, Mr. Harding said in a phone conversation recently while driving with his girlfriend in Northern California. Mr. Harding, who grew up in Westport, Conn., skipped college at the suggestion of his father, who didn’t see the point of paying tuition for someone he thought was unmotivated. He has been employed in a video game store and as a designer of video games, but prefers just to travel. “It’s one thing I’m really good at,” he said. He collected all the dancing shots from that first trip in 2003, edited them into a little video with a soundtrack from an adaptation of a traditional song from the Solomon Islands, performed by the group Deep Forest, and, at his sister’s suggestion, posted it on his Web site, wherethehellismatt.com. (No reference intended to the “Today” show feature “Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?” “I’m almost never up that early,” Mr. Harding said.) The video went up in the fall of 2004, before YouTube or the other big video upload sites, but even so it quickly became a hit among the people trolling the Internet back then. “It got picked up by somethingawful.com and sites like that,” Mr. Harding recalled. “Usually, what they showed was people getting hurt or doing something really stupid, so I was bracing myself for abuse, but everyone seemed to like it.” So did the newly formed Stride chewing gum company, which offered to underwrite Mr. Harding’s subsequent travels, virtually no strings attached. (In the 2006 version the Stride name pops up in the corner of the screen every now and then, and, in the newest video, the company is acknowledged at the very end, but amazingly, in this era of shameless commercial tie-ins, Mr. Harding is not obliged to wear a Stride T-shirt or deliver a little pitch for the product. Exactly what connection the company sees between gum and a guy dancing, but not chewing, remains a bit of a mystery.) In 2005 Mr. Harding released a second video much like the first — exotic locations, guy dancing, New Agey music — except with better sound and camera resolution, and in 2006 he went back to Stride and asked if he could repeat the venture, this time with other people dancing along with him. The idea first came to him in 2006, he recalled, when he was dancing with some street kids in Rwanda. “If I had tried dancing with kids in a mall in San Francisco, say, I probably would have got arrested,” he said. “But in Africa there aren’t any barriers, and there’s immediate access to this kind of joy and irreverence.” He added: “Those first videos were something I needed to do for me, but I realized then that watching me dance was getting a little old. The new video pushes a different button — you’ve got all these different people doing the same thing. I remember thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat if you could capture that?’ ” The new video has better photography still and a score, called “Praan,” that Mr. Schyman orchestrated for a 25-piece band. For the lyrics, he and Mr. Harding decided to stick with a language other than English (because it’s less of a cliché, Mr. Harding said) — but how do you find someone who can sing Bengali? On the Internet, of course. Mr. Harding’s girlfriend, Melissa Nixon, who works for Google, discovered Ms. Siddique on YouTube. Mr. Harding is aware that fame on the Internet is fleeting, and needs novelty for life support. On the one hand, data is never lost — it’s floating out there in cyberspace forever — but, on the other, our memories (and those of our computers) are limited and subject to constant upgrades. A video is downloaded, sent to a friend or two and then quickly forgotten. Who anymore goes back to look at that animated dancing baby that was all the rage in the ’90s? So Mr. Harding isn’t certain yet whether he wants to make a sequel. “I wouldn’t want to make another video unless there was something to say that I hadn’t said,” he explained. “I’m going to see if there’s something more to be done, but if not, I’m happy with what there is. I don’t want to pop the bubble.” http://nytimes.com/2008/07/08/arts/t...ncer.html?8dpc Boyz 2 Pipettemen Lab equipment gets the X factor. Brendan Maher Could these five men persuade you to buy their automated pipette? In a dreary, lonely lab a young female postdoc puts down her pipette to massage her aching latexed hands. Sounds like the perfect set-up for a hot new music video. Well at least it does to Tyler Kay, creative director at Compare Networks Production Group (CNPG) in San Francisco, California. A recent release from CNPG features a group of five winsome young men singing the praises of a new automated pipetting system called epMotion, made by international biotech company Eppendorf. As the lab heroine is whisked to a beach under the Golden Gate Bridge, the band members gyrate around her and her glasses are shed along with her inhibitions, just before the chorus. “Girl you need epMotion” (whispered: “yeah girl it's time to automate.”) Stefanie Noehren, online project manager at Eppendorf in Hamburg, says the company was looking for a 'viral marketing' campaign that would spread the word about the epMotion product rapidly through the Internet. And CNPG, the video production company of online biotech marketers Biocompare, was the obvious choice. In January, it created a minor internet sensation with The PCR Song by the mock group, Scientists for Better PCR — PCR (the polymerase chain reaction) is a lab technique used to amplify DNA. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. This advertisement from Bio-Rad Laboratories, based in Hercules, California, was styled after megastar group recordings of the 1980s like Band Aid's chart topping Do They Know It's Christmas. In The PCR Song, crooners mawkishly sing their way through lyrics like: “PCR, when you need to find out who the daddy is (who's your daddy?)” In the finale, one singer lovingly smooches a thermal cycler. “That thing took a life of its own,” says Kay. It attracted more than 700,000 web-page views and spawned several homage videos from fans, singing or lip-synching the words. At Eppendorf, says Noehren, marketers decided in March to try out the music video format, this time aping one of the prototypical manufactured male pop groups known colloquially as boy-bands — standard-bearers include 'N Sync, Take That, 98° and the Backstreet Boys. Kay, a self-taught film-maker with Biocompare since near its inception, wrote the song with a list of product features and intense background research. “I had to listen to a whole lot of boy-band songs,” says Kay. “I started to gain an appreciation for it. Those guys really know how to crank out the hits on a few chords.” The result is It's Called epMotion, a saccharine-sweet parody of songs like 98°'s Because of You. Next they needed a band to sing it. In the true tradition of boy-band manufacture, the members represent a variety of races and styles: the tough-looking Asian, the Latin lover, the bad-boy surfer, the African American with a winning smile and an odd-looking skinny one with a surprisingly deep voice. The result is a slick, if inexpensively produced video. The cost to Eppendorf for the video was just US$50,000, says Noehren. But does it sell the product? Amy Wagers at Harvard's Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, Massachusetts, says “It didn't tell me much about the product, if that's what they were going for, but it's working in that now I've gotten two of these videos via e-mail.” YouTube shows nearly 22,500 views and counting. More may have found the video through other sites, and Noehren says a comparable number has clicked through to the website since the video was launched in early June. “We are quite satisfied,” she says. http://www.nature.com/news/2008/0807...l/454149a.html Internet is 'Pharmaceutical Candy Store' Report: Drugs Still Easy to Buy Online Without Prescription Despite Crackdown Megan Chuchmach OxyContin. Valium. Xanax. Vicodin. Ritalin. Adderall. Despite being some of the most commonly abused and misused prescription drugs in the country, each of these controlled drugs is readily available online and most websites sell them without prescriptions, according to a report released today by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA). Despite recent crackdowns by federal and state agencies, the report entitled, "You've Got Drugs!" found that prescription drug trafficking is alive and well on the web. "The bottom line is that any person of any age, including children, can, with a click of a mouse, order these drugs online and get them," said CASA Chairman and President Joseph A. Califano, Jr. Out of 365 Web sites that CASA found advertising or selling controlled prescription drugs drugs that the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) controls because of abuse potential or risk only two sites were certified by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy as legitimate online pharmacies. "The other 363 were rogue sites," said Califano, a former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. The study also found that 85 percent of Web sites selling prescription drugs do so without a physician's prescription. Of those, 42 percent stated that no prescription was required, 45 percent offered online consultations, and 13 percent did not mention prescriptions at all. Federal law prohibits consumers from purchasing controlled prescription drugs without a valid prescription from a physician. These sites, Califano said, get around the law by having consumers complete online questionnaires or participate in virtual meetings with doctors employed by the sites. "They're sham consultations," said Califano. "They ask you a few medical questions and then say you need this drug." The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) says that prescriptions written by these "cyber doctors" are not legitimate under the law. But at a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee last month, DEA Deputy Assistant Administrator Joseph Rannazzisi said that the proliferation of rogue Internet pharmacies has created new legal challenges, including the involvement of internet web site operators, medical practitioners and pharmacists in online consultations. "This process is designed to elicit what drug the customer wants and what the method of payment will be," Rannazzisi said, "rather than diagnosing a health problem and establishing a sound course of medical treatment." Rannazzisi said that most illegal pharmacies are run by people with no medical or pharmaceutical training but who get doctors to approve prescriptions in exchange for $10 to $25. Some doctors, he said, authorize hundreds of prescriptions a day through Web sites. "In short, the Internet has provided drug trafficking organizations with the perfect medium," Rannazzisi said. "It connects individuals from anywhere in the globe at any time it provides anonymity, and it can be deployed from almost anywhere with very little formal training." CASA's study was conducted by entering various keywords and phrases into popular search engines, where unlicensed pharmacies are allowed to advertise their services, said Califano, who thinks it should be illegal for the search engines to have these pharmacies on their sites unless they've been certified. Eight states passed laws in 2006 and 2007 to regulate the online selling of prescription drugs. The Senate passed a bill in April that prohibits the online distribution, dispensing and delivery of controlled substances without a prescription from a practitioner who has evaluated a patient in-person and which requires online pharmacies to be federally certified. It is now before the House. "This report further emphasizes the need to take immediate action to stop rogue pharmacies on the Internet," said Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) who, along with Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), introduced the "Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act." The bill is named after Ryan Haight, a 25-year-old San Diego man who died of a drug overdose in 2001. Feinstein said Haight purchased hydrocodone, a cough suppressant with effects similar to morphine, on the Internet after completing an online questionnaire. According to Feinstein, Haight said he had chronic back pain but was not examined by, nor did he meet, the doctor who eventually wrote the prescription. Feinstein said she knows of at least 17 other people who have died due to overdoses from drugs purchased online through these types of pharmacies. CASA has been tracking the online availability of controlled prescription drugs for five years. While this year's report, which calls the Internet a "pharmaceutical candy store," found a decline in the number of Web sites advertising or selling these drugs down to 365 from 581 in 2007 it found, for the first time, that some Web sites are now selling prescriptions that consumers can print off at home and take to a local pharmacy. "And the prescriptions actually get filled," said Califano. "What's the real killer here is that any kid can get this stuff." On its website, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warns that some drugs sold online are fake, expired or handled incorrectly. The agency recommends that consumers make sure that online pharmacies are licensed through the National Association of Boards of Pharmacies and that any potential Web site requires a prescription and has a pharmacist available for questions. http://www.abcnews.go.com/Blotter/st...5334828&page=1 Loan Pains Turned Site Into a Hit Louise Story The misery in the housing market is registering on the Implode-O-Meter. As millions of homeowners fall behind on their mortgages, a fledging Web site called the Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter is gleefully tallying the number of lenders that run into trouble too. On Monday, the count was 265 — and rising. With its tongue-in-cheek tone and running lists of the “imploded” and the merely “ailing,” the Implode-O-Meter has become a sort of Gawker of the subprime world. At a recent Mortgage Bankers Association conference, a speaker addressed what has become a hot topic among lenders: how to keep your company’s name off the site. “No one wants to be number 266,” said Jim Reichbach, a vice chairman and leader of Deloitte’s banking and securities team. “This is a death toll that is equivalent to the casualty ticker of the Vietnam War.” The Implode-O-Meter is the brainchild of Aaron Krowne, a former researcher at Emory University in Atlanta. A computer scientist and mathematician, Mr. Krowne, 28, started the site in 2007, believing that the troubles in the housing market, and by extension the mortgage industry, would worsen. He was right — and the Implode-O-Meter took off. Traffic on the site soared, reaching as many as 100,000 regular visitors, and advertising dollars rolled in. Mr. Krowne quit his day job and hired 10 people for his company, Implode-Explode Heavy Industries. “The crisis has come in waves,” Mr. Krowne said. “It just keeps coming.” With the economy struggling, more financial companies, even well-known ones, are finding themselves on the fated list. When parts of Bear Stearns’s residential mortgage unit were sold to private equity investors, for instance, the Implode-O-Meter recorded the sale. And E*Trade Financial could not remove the link on its site to its mortgage division or change the recording on its mortgage division’s 1-800 number without the site chiming in. The tips usually come anonymously from employees at the troubled mortgage companies. Critics of the site say some of the tips have been more gossip than reality. But the Implode-O-Meter often posts the phone recordings and company e-mail to back up the bad news coming out of places like Merrill Lynch, which in March fired nearly everyone at First Franklin Financial, a business it purchased in 2006. The Implode-O-Meter is just the latest iteration of online death-watch lists. When the dot-com bubble burst, a slew of similar sites popped up, most notably one with an obscene name playing off the title of Fast Company, the magazine. That site and others like it faded when the technology company blowups were no longer front-page news. Mr. Krowne is hoping to keep his franchise around longer by looking for trouble in areas like hedge funds, banks, home builders — the list goes on. It has been an adventurous 18 months for the site, including a nasty lawsuit, a run-in with a celebrity and attention from financial commentators like CNBC’s Jim Cramer. As more mortgage companies go broke, Mr. Krowne hopes to turn a tidy profit by selling his site, possibly to a media company. He takes advertising from “nonimploded lenders,” which, he says, his company has scrutinized. On occasion, he says, he has had to remove a lender’s name from the safe list as their fortunes turn, though he declined to name which ones. The Implode-O-Meter, Mr. Krowne likes to say, has beat out the mainstream media time and again. Case in point, he says, was last October when it broke the news that Michael Jackson faced foreclosure on his Neverland property. Mr. Jackson’s representatives quickly denied the Implode-O-Meter’s story, which Mr. Krowne chalks up to his start-up status. His response? He posted the notice of Mr. Jackson’s defaults. In December, proof of trouble at one mortgage company came in the form of a 42-second audio track. Family First Mortgage, a lender in Palm Coast, Fla., now out of business, laid people off by phone recording. The call began, “Thank you for calling Family First Mortgage Corp. If you have been directed to this voicemail box, your employment with Family First Mortgage Corp. has been officially terminated, effective immediately.” Glenn Hill, the vice president of the company, wrote by e-mail in late June that the recording as played on the Implode site had been altered, but he did not provide evidence backing up the claim. Implode-O-Meter denies it altered the recording. The Family First call, which is still available on the Implode-O-Meter site, explains that the company was trying to focus attention on brokers who were still generating profits. It ends with: “Thank you to everyone, and have a great day.” Mr. Krowne can hardly suppress a laugh when describing the recording. What surprises him is that failing companies seem to put on “Herculean efforts” to convince the rest of the world, and their own employees, that they are sound. “Every company thinks it is different,” Mr. Krowne says. He points to April last year as an example. Employees of SouthStar Funding, a mortgage company in Atlanta, bombarded him with phone calls at his day job, trying to persuade him that the company was fine after he placed it on his Ailing Lender list, he said. After all, the employees told him, they were being sent on a team-building trip to the Bahamas. Soon, Mr. Krowne said, he started getting threats from the company. When SouthStar folded, Mr. Krowne wrote: “I have to say that it is with genuine satisfaction that I post this report of SouthStar’s closure.” Not every company goes down without a fight, though. Loan Center of California, of Suisun City, Calif., sued Mr. Krowne’s company over a posting, saying it published false information, including that the company was out of business when it says it was still making loans. The parties settled in December, and Mr. Krowne insists he was unfairly pursued as a small Web entrepreneur. But while Mr. Krowne records the pain of the mortgage industry, he said he does not relish it. “I really wish that our esteemed policy makers would pay attention and not repeat the same mistake,” Mr. Krowne said. “It’s so depressing.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/bu...08implode.html Bend Over Dude, You’re Getting A Dell Chad Lakkis Manufacturers strive to create innovative products and we as consumers work day and night to afford them. We exit our vehicles and are greeted by the open arms of big box retailers housing shelf after shelf of electronic excess. We fork over handfuls of hard earned cash for microscopic phones and wafer thin laptops. Each item is priced, each price must be met, and it is instilled in our minds that we get what we pay for … but do we really? As a blogger you are expected to offer up your opinion and provide your readers with a unique perspective. The more successful outlets do this in a timely and creative fashion on a daily basis. Staying on top means getting every ounce of capability out of everything you have at your disposal … including your hardware. I bought a Dell laptop months ago with the intention of using it as a command center both at home and on the road. I wanted something powerful enough to run all the image and video editing software that I would need to keep Ripten rocking day and night. I hit the ground running, and everything seemed to be working great, until I decided to record some on-screen video. Time and time again I tried to record audio and video feeds that displayed on my screen with no luck. I would get the video to record no problem, but the audio just wouldn’t record. I searched for alternative drivers and consulted Dell’s support page to no avail. Fully frustrated with my semi new purchase, I opened my wallet and switched my focus to software. I began to buy different types of software in the hopes that one would work. I tried Camtasia, Super Screen Recorder, WM Recorder, and a few others I can’t even remember. None remedied the situation. Thoroughly exhausted I gave up for a while, but eventually found myself needing to do it again. As I began my prep work for this years E3, I thought I would give it one last go before scrapping my laptop (HULK SMASH) and buying a new one. At this point I was convinced that it was a hardware issue, and that the manufacturer of the video card built it with their head up their ass. In what I promised myself would be my final attempt, I searched the web for software yet again. Being that my problem was audio, I limited my search to “record on screen audio”. The suggested software Google spit back was the ACA Screen Recorder. I installed the trial version, but was met by the same unsuccessful result. The software did however display a link that claimed to address the issue, so I clicked through and discovered that my sound card should have three audio recording options (listed below). • Microphone/Mic - The audio will be captured from the microphone port • Line-in/Line In - The audio will be captured from the Line-in port • Stereo Mix/Mono Mix/WAVE Out - The audio will be captured from the sound card’s speakers port What? Stereo Mix? Where the fuck is my stereo mix? I only see two options, Mic and Line-in. Perplexed, I refocused my efforts on Google and began to search for the missing third option. It was not long before I encountered multiple threads started by equally frustrated and confused consumers suffering from the same misfortune. Oddly enough they were all Dell owners with the same SigmaTel brand audio card that I had. As I dug deeper into the various threads, I soon discovered that the issue had nothing to do with the hardware itself, and everything to do with the restrictions placed on it by the PC manufacturers. It appears that Dell, and several other computer manufacturers such as Gateway and Pac Bell, were pressured by the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) into disabling the stereo mix functionality. If true, I find it disturbing that at no time did any of the aforementioned manufacturers see it fit to explain the restrictions they were imposing on our hardware. One blogger explained that he contacted Dell seeking a solution for his stereo mix woes, and they offered him one — for a $99 fee. “Since my desktop is new, I decided to contact Dell. After a long online chat and a phone call, Dell told me they had the solution, but if I wanted to know it would cost me $99.00.” So that we are all clear, the evidence points to Dell appeasing the RIAA by disabling hardware, only to have their customer service reps turn around and offer a solution to their consumers that reverses the alteration they made in the first place at a premium price. I am no rocket scientist, but that sure as fuck sounds fishy to me. In the end, I was able to restore my laptop’s stereo mix functionality by following a series of registry edits outlined here. While I am now able to record on-screen audio and video, this solution is not something that I recommend everyone attempt, as those who lack the necessary experience to make registry edits could unintentionally cause more harm than good. The unfortunate reality here is that prebuilt computers are potentially becoming nothing more than an advertising platform for big time brands and a way for highly influential organizations to impose their will on the unaware masses. In the event I decide to make use of a PC again in the future, I will build it with my own two hands. Update: A Dell Community Ambassador has responded to this post in the comments section below stating that the outbound links in this article are specific to laptops (as was the issue I was having). He has provided a link he claims will rectify the issue, however it is unclear if this will work for all Dell computers that have had the sound card feature disabled by the company. Also, this does not explain why it was disabled in the first place. If you have a Dell desktop computer with this issue, or the link below simply does not work for your Dell laptop, please let me know in the comment section below or email me at chad@ripten.com. http://www.ripten.com/2008/07/07/ben...etting-a-dell/ Can’t Find a Parking Spot? Check Smartphone John Markoff The secret to finding the perfect parking spot in congested cities is usually just a matter of luck. But drivers here will get some help from an innocuous tab of plastic that will soon be glued to the streets. This fall, San Francisco will test 6,000 of its 24,000 metered parking spaces in the nation’s most ambitious trial of a wireless sensor network that will announce which of the spaces are free at any moment. Drivers will be alerted to empty parking places either by displays on street signs, or by looking at maps on screens of their smartphones. They may even be able to pay for parking by cellphone, and add to the parking meter from their phones without returning to the car. Solving the parking mess takes on special significance in San Francisco because two years ago a 19-year-old, Boris Albinder, was stabbed to death during a fight over a parking space. “If the San Francisco experiment works, no one will have to murder anyone over a parking space,” said Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose work on the pricing of parking spaces and whether more spaces are good for cities has led to a revolution in ideas about relieving congestion. “It will have a cascade of positive effects on transportation and the economy and environment,” he said. About a dozen major cities are in discussions with technology companies to deploy so-called smart parking systems, though San Francisco is ahead in its efforts. New York City is not among them. The Bloomberg administration’s plan for easing traffic through a congestion pricing plan died in the State Legislature this spring, though high gas prices are reducing traffic somewhat on their own. Not that New Yorkers need any reminders of their traffic problems, but a study released in June by Transportation Alternatives, a public transit advocacy group, reported that 28 percent to 45 percent of traffic on some streets in New York City is generated by people circling the blocks. The study also said that drivers searching for metered parking in just a 15-block area of Columbus Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side drove 366,000 miles a year. Gavin Newsom, San Francisco’s mayor, said that better parking systems were part of a broader approach to managing congestion without imposing restrictive tolls, as used in London and Singapore to discourage driving in downtown areas. For Mr. Newsom the largest part of the challenge is replacing the city’s aging infrastructure. “When I watch the movie ‘Vertigo,’ ” I still recognize every single traffic signal,” said the Mr. Newsom, referring to the 50-year old Alfred Hitchcock film. SFpark, part of a nearly two-year $95.5 million program intended to clear the city’s arteries, will also make it possible for the city to adjust parking times and prices. For example, parking times could be lengthened in the evening to allow for longer visits to restaurants. The city’s planners want to ensure that at any time, on-street parking is no more than 85 percent occupied. This strategy is based on research by Mr. Shoup, who has estimated that drivers searching for curbside parking are responsible for as much of 30 percent of the traffic in central business districts. In one small Los Angeles business district that he studied over the course of a year, cars cruising for parking created the equivalent of 38 trips around the world, burning 47,000 gallons of gasoline and producing 730 tons of carbon dioxide. To install the market-priced parking system, San Francisco has used a system devised by Streetline, a small technology company that has adapted a wireless sensor technology known as “smart dust” that was pioneered by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. It gives city parking officials up-to-date information on whether parking spots are occupied or vacant. The embedded sensors will also be used to relay congestion information to city planners by monitoring the speed of traffic flowing on city streets. The heart of the system is a wirelessly connected sensor embedded in a 4-inch-by-4-inch piece of plastic glued to the pavement adjacent to each parking space. The device, called a “bump,” is battery operated and intended to last for five and 10 years without service. From the street the bumps form a mesh of wireless Internet signals that funnel data to parking meters on to a central management office near the San Francisco city hall. Streetline has technology that will display open parking spaces on Web sites that can be accessed through wireless devices like smartphones. They are also developing a low-cost battery-operated street display that will be able to alert drivers to open parking spots nearby. The San Francisco project is part of a more ambitious sensor network that will use technology for a range of services. It will be possible to monitor air quality as well as deploy noise sensors that act as sentries for everything from gunshots to car crashes. Advocates assert that wireless sensor technology is now so inexpensive and reliable that it is practical to use for essential city services. “The broader picture is what we’re building is an operating system for the city that allows you to talk to or control all the inanimate objects out there to reduce the cost and improve quality of city services,” said Tod Dykstra, chief executive of Streetline, the company that is supplying the wireless sensor technology to San Francisco. Mr. Newsom thinks that San Francisco will rally behind the sensor technology and will expand it to all of the city’s on-street and parking garage spaces in 2010. “There isn’t a person who hasn’t experienced the travails of going around the block multiple times searching for a parking space, using gas and wasting time and generating greenhouse gases,” he said. “It will scale in people’s consciousness to the point that the public will demand more.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/bu...12newpark.html Apple’s Latest Opens a Developers’ Playground John Markoff and Laura M. Holson When Apple opens its online App Store for iPhone software on Thursday, Steven P. Jobs will be making an attempt to dominate the next generation of computing as it moves toward Internet-connected mobile devices. The store, which will offer more than 500 software applications, including games, educational programs, mobile commerce and business productivity tools, may be a far more important development than the iPhone 3G, which goes on sale at the same time. An abundance of software could make the iPhone’s operating system dominant among an abundance of competing phones. “The reaction we have gotten so far has been really strong,” Mr. Jobs said in a telephone interview this week. “The quality and the sophistication of the applications you can write for the iPhone is in a different class.” Mr. Jobs failed to make his personal computers dominant, in part because software developers did not write as many programs for Mac-based machines as they did for Microsoft Windows PCs. He did not make the same mistake when he developed the iPod music players. Apple’s iTunes stores, with easy and inexpensive downloads of music, gave the device an insurmountable lead, to date, over other players. With the App Store, Apple simplified the process of adding software to the phone. Mr. Jobs contends that Apple does not plan to make much money on games and other applications; he has also said the company does not make much money selling music on iTunes. “We are not trying to be business partners,” Mr. Jobs said of the App Store. Instead, he said, the goal is to “sell more iPhones.” Apple gives developers a 70 percent cut of sales. The enthusiasm among software developers is high, from San Jose to San Francisco. But, at the same time, some developers are approaching Apple with caution as they figure out what their relationship with the company will be. Many expect the dealings to be more lucrative than those with wireless carriers, which in large part control what programs end up on phones. But there are still many unknowns, especially for developers whose applications will compete with the popular iTunes music and video store. Apple has a substantial way to go to catch its competitors. Palm, Microsoft, R.I.M., Nokia and Symbian have all enticed developers to write software for their smartphone operating systems. Palm, for example, says that it has 30,000 active software developers, and Microsoft said last month that it had more than 18,000 applications available for its Windows Mobile operating system, which is available from 160 cellular carriers around the world. Still, Mr. Jobs is catching up quickly, and none of his rivals are dismissing him. “Everybody wants to build an iPhone app,” said Gene Munster, a senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray in Minneapolis. “It’s pretty rare you hear things like this. The enthusiasm is surprising.” Matt Murphy, a partner in a fund set up by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to invest in iPhone apps, ascribes the intense interest to the consumer demand for the iPhone, as well as the unfettered distribution promised by the App Store: it limits the phone company’s role as a gatekeeper. “A lot of the best entrepreneurs haven’t wanted to start anything because the carriers had to bless you,” he said. “There were a lot of unknowns.” For instance, there was no standard deal for what carriers would be paid. Carriers also rejected some applications and, Mr. Murphy said, “No one wanted to fall on their face.” One indication of how much the iPhone changes the scene is Mr. Murphy’s fund, the iFund, which plans to invest $100 million in new iPhone-related software firms. In the last four months, the Kleiner fund has received 2,000 financing requests from developers, 85 percent of them intended for consumers. Mr. Murphy said that Kleiner was serious about 100 of those ideas. The fund expects games, health care, social networking, mobile commerce and location-based services to be the most popular types of software. An application that would allow Bay Area surfers to check tides and network with other surfers failed to past muster. Instead, Kleiner is backing, among others, iControl Networks, which is creating an application to let homeowners turn off their lights and alarms at home, as well as monitor security cameras, via their iPhones. Still, Apple could end up at odds with some developers — particularly creators or distributors of content and media — who offer applications that compete directly with iTunes. Rajeev Raman, chief executive of Mywaves, an ad-sponsored free mobile video service available on millions of handsets, including Nokia and BlackBerry smartphones, said he would like to offer Mywaves in the App Store. But he has made little headway in his discussions with Apple, he said: “We have a reverse conflict because they are not providing video for free, but we are. We are interested, but we don’t want to jump into anything that will have our hands tied behind our backs.“ When asked about it, Mr. Jobs said: “He’s right. We will compete.” He added, “That’s a discussion to have.” Twenty-five percent of the first 500 applications at the store will be free, Mr. Jobs said. Of the commercial applications, 90 percent will be sold for $9.99 or less, he said, adding that a third of the first wave of applications will be games. Mr. Jobs insisted that the 30/70 split is a more generous deal for developers than what is common in the video game industry. And he said that Apple would provide distribution and marketing. The question that remains unanswered is how Apple and Mr. Jobs will manage the relationship with software developers. When the iPod was released, music executives hailed him as a savior for their flagging business. But they later complained they were not paid enough. Hollywood studio executives were even more cautious, dragging their feet for months before allowing full-length movies on iTunes. Mr. Jobs declined to elaborate on how he expected to foster a more positive relationship with software developers, but Mr. Murphy of the iFund said: “He can’t kill the golden goose. The promise of the iPhone is developers. If you choke them off, there are a lot of other platforms waiting.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/te...10apps.html?hp A First Look at the iPhone Apps Store Well, the iPhone Apps Store went live last night, and it’s just crazy, insane fun. I’ve just downloaded about 30 programs to play with on the iPhone 3G. As I predicted, it’s just a blast. One of the first things I found was the free, 1-megabyte program called Remote, from a company called Apple. It lists all the iTunes libraries on all the computers in your house. You pick the one you want to control. The iPhone displays a four-digit passcode, which you type into a new box that appears in iTunes (version 7.7). Suddenly, instantly, your entire iTunes library shows up on the iPhone’s screen. You can view the list by artist, album, playlist, whatever, or you can search the whole library. You tap a song, and it starts playing on your computer. The album art fills the iPhone screen. You control playback and volume, you can rewind and fast-forward, you can skip around among your tunes, and so on. Response is instantaneous. (It can also work to control playback on an Apple TV.) It’s that simple: the iPhone is now a house-wide wireless remote control for your music library. I would hate to be one of the companies that sells house-wide wireless remote controls for your music library right about now. http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/.../index.html?hp For iPhone, the ‘New’ Is Relative David Pogue One year and 11 days ago, our nation was swept by iPhone Mania. TV news coverage was relentless. Hard-core fans camped out to be the first in line. Bloggers referred to Apple’s new product as the “Jesus phone.” It was a stunning black slab of glass: a cellphone, a brilliant music and video player and the best pocket Internet terminal the world had ever seen. The huge, bright, touch-sensitive screen made it addictive fun to rotate, page through or magnify your photos, videos and Web pages. Today, the iPhone is in the hands of six million people. Clumsy touch-screen lookalikes from rival phone makers line the shelves. And Friday is the iPhone’s second coming. This time, though, when the iPhone 3G goes on sale in AT&T and Apple stores, iPhone Mania will be considerably more muted. That’s partly because the mystery is gone, partly because the AT&T service costs more and partly because there aren’t many new features in what Apple is calling the iPhone 3G. The new name hints at the biggest change: this iPhone can bring you the Internet much faster. It can exploit AT&T’s third-generation (3G) cellular network, which brings you Web pages in less than half the time as the old iPhone. As a handy bonus, 3G means that you can talk on the iPhone and surf the Internet simultaneously, which you couldn’t do before. There is, however, a catch: you don’t get that speed or those features unless you’re in one of AT&T’s 3G network areas — and there aren’t many of them. The 3G coverage map at wireless.att.com/coverageviewer (zoom in and turn on “View 3G/Mobile Broadband Coverage” below the map) reveals that in 16 states, only three cities or fewer are covered; 10 states have no coverage at all. (Tip: Whenever you’re outside of a 3G area, turning off the iPhone’s 3G feature doubles the battery’s talk time, to 10 hours from 5.) AT&T hastens to note that its 3G coverage will expand, and also that it will get even faster over time. (3G is a much bigger deal in the 70 other countries where the iPhone will soon be available because 3G is much more common.) The other drastic change is the iPhone’s price: $200 for the 8-gigabyte model, $300 for the 16-gig. Those are terrific prices for a machine with so much sophistication, utility and power; a year ago, an 8-gig iPhone would have cost you $600. But the iPhone 3G is not really, as Apple’s Web site puts it, “half the price.” The basic AT&T plan — unlimited Internet and 450 minutes of calling — now costs $70 a month instead of $60 (plus taxes and fees), and comes with no text messages instead of 200. (Adding text messaging costs at least $5 a month more.) True, iPhone 3G service now matches the plans for AT&T’s other 3G phones; still, by the end of your two-year contract, the iPhone 3G will have cost you more than the old iPhone, not less. The third improvement is audio quality, which has taken a gigantic step forward. You sound crystal clear to your callers, and they sound crystal clear to you. In fact, few cellphones sound this good. The other improvements are smaller, but welcome. For example, the new iPhone feels even better in your hand, thanks to a gracefully curved, shiny plastic back. It also has a standard headphone jack — hallelujah! — so no clunky adapter is required for your favorite non-Apple headphones. The power adapter has been shrunk down to a one-inch cube, so it doesn’t hog an extra spot on your power strip. The new iPhone has true G.P.S. now, too, in addition to the fake G.P.S. of its predecessor — an ingenious system that shows your location on a map by analyzing nearby cellphone towers and Wi-Fi hot spots. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example. Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are. There are lots of small software improvements. The four-function calculator now turns into a scientific calculator when you rotate the phone 90 degrees. There’s an address book search box, parental controls and instant language switching. (That feature is made possible by the on-screen keyboard, with keys that change to reflect the language you’ve selected. “That’s really hard to do on your BlackBerry,” says an Apple rep.) And speaking of the BlackBerry crowd: Apple also says that the iPhone works better with corporate systems, like Microsoft Exchange and ActiveSync. Note, though, that these software tweaks aren’t iPhone 3G features. They’re part of the free software upgrade called iPhone 2.0, which will be available to the six million original iPhones, starting Friday. For $10, even iPod Touch owners can get this upgrade. Unfortunately, most of the standard cellphone features that were missing from the first iPhone are still missing. There’s still no voice dialing, video recording, copy-and-paste, memory-card slot, Bluetooth stereo audio or phone-to-phone photo sending (MMS). And when the battery needs replacement after a couple of years, you’ll still have to pay Apple $86 for a replacement. Plenty of Appleholics have expressed dismay at how little the handset has changed. They’d gotten their hopes up for the second-generation iPhone: video phone calls! iPhone Nano! 3G hovercraft! But there is one towering tsunami of a feature that may well shut them up. It’s the iPhone App Store: a central, complete, drop-dead simple online catalog of new programs for the iPhone. Hundreds will be available when the store opens Friday, with thousands to follow. You browse, download and install new programs directly on the iPhone; they don’t have to be transferred from a computer, and you don’t have to hack the phone to use them. Most of the programs will be free or cheap. Apple has demonstrated 16 of these programs, including an instant message program, an eBay auction tracker, medical references and a touch-sensitive musical keyboard; the best of them exploit the iPhone’s orientation sensor, wireless technologies and other high-tech components. One coming program, called iCall, will give you free phone calls when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot. Another, called G-Park, exploits G.P.S. to help you find where you parked. Yet another, Urbanspoon, is “a cross between a magic eight ball and a slot machine:" you shake the phone, and it randomly displays the name of a good restaurant nearby, using the iPhone’s G.P.S. and motion sensor. You can also expect to see a time and expense tracker, home-automation remote control, voice recorder, Etch-a-Sketch, a recipe box, tip calculator, currency converter, e-book reader and so on. Above all, the iPhone is about to become a dazzling hand-held game machine. The games revealed so far feature smooth 3-D graphics and tilt control; in one driving simulator, you turn the iPhone itself like a steering wheel, and your 3-D car on the screen banks accordingly. Other games exploit the multitouch screen, so you and a buddy can sit at opposite ends of the screen and fire at each other. In short, the iPhone is about to become much more than a phone. And here’s the best part: the App Store is also available to the original iPhones and the iPod Touch. So the iPhone 3G is a nice upgrade. It more than keeps pace with advancing technology, and new buyers will generally be delighted. But it’s not so much better that it turns all those original iPhones into has-beens. Indeed, the really big deal is the iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store, neither of which requires buying a new iPhone. That twist may come as a refreshing surprise to planned-obsolescence conspiracy theorists — and everyone who stood in line last year. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/te...h/09pogue.html iPhone 3G Review Ryan Block It's hard to think of any other device that's enjoyed the level of exposure and hype that Apple found in the launch of the first iPhone. Who could forget it? Everyone got to be a gadget nerd for a day; even those completely disinterested in technology seemed to come down with iPhone fever. But the original device was still far from perfect: its limited capabilities (especially in the 3G department), high price of entry, and the small number of countries in which it was available kept many potential buyers sidelined. Until now -- or so Apple hopes. The wireless industry is a notoriously tough nut to crack, and it's become pretty clear that the first iPhone wasn't about total domination so much as priming the market and making a good first impression with some very dissatisfied cellphone users. With the iPhone 3G, though, Apple's playing for keeps. Not only is this iPhone's Exchange enterprise support aiming straight for the heart of the business market, but the long-awaited 3rd party application support and App Store means it's no longer just a device, but a viable computing platform. And its 3G network compatibility finally makes the iPhone welcome the world over, especially after Cupertino decided to ditch its non-traditional carrier partnerships in favor of dropping the handset price dramatically. $200? We're still a little stunned. So now that Apple finally stands poised for an all out war on cellphone-makers everywhere, will the iPhone 3G stand up to the competition -- and higher expectations than ever? Read on for our full review. Update: Our first iPhone 3G battery test is in and we're guardedly underwhelmed, to put it mildly. Last year we raved over the original iPhone's "Herculean" ability to play video for up to 9-hours on a single charge. So surely Apple's iPhone 3G, capable of playing video at "up to 7 hours," would easily best yet another conservative threshold quoted by Apple. Nope, not even close. Repeating a near identical test from last year (and mimicking Apple's own testing methods), we managed just 5 hours and 24 minutes of continuous playback of our 320 x 176, H.264 video encoded at 127kbps. Our test, was conducted with the screen at half brightness, half volume (Apple-supplied headphones inserted), WiFi on but not connected to a network, Bluetooth off, 3G and cellular radios on, and location services on (default). Add our result to Mossy's disappointing battery test for 3G voice and we're already feeling nostalgic for our first-generation, aluminum-backed, long-lasting friend. Granted, our battery might require some breaking in (it's been discharged and recharged fully only once) so we'll continue testing and get back to you on the quick with our results. The hardware No one will have any trouble recognizing the new device from its face -- it's essentially identical to the original iPhone. Thankfully, the bright, high quality, high resolution 480 x 320 3.5-inch display that's just so easy to love, hasn't been changed a bit. Unfortunately, it's still every bit as much a magnet for smudges and fingerprints -- in fact, even more so now that the rear of the device has dropped its chic matte aluminum in favor of black (or white, optional on the 16GB model) plastic. Hey, at least now it's more symmetrical. The move to plastic seemed almost inevitable now that the iPhone has so many radios, frequencies, and antenna needs (GSM, EDGE, HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS), but while we do prefer the original aluminum, the plastic does feel pretty solid and not at all flimsy, which is more than we can say for a hell of a lot of handsets. There's no doubt about the fact that we'd have preferred a matte or soft-touch finish to the glossy plastic, but that's all a matter of taste. The body of the phone is slightly thicker at its center than its predecessor, although the edges are tapered and thinner than before, which is always a good way to make a device feel smaller than it actually is. (Palm learned this a long time ago.) There are a couple downsides to the body shape, though: first, when you're tapping off-center on a hard, flat surface, the phone wobbles (but only a little, oh well). Second, the new shape means you won't be using it in your original device's dock. This really wouldn't be all that bad if Apple included a dock with the 3G like they did with the first iPhone, but now they want you to buy that separately. Did we mention they're asking $30 for it? Way lame. That absurdly small power adapter kind of makes up for it, but only a little. One thing Apple was keen to talk up is the vastly improved call quality of the iPhone 3G. Those in the know understand that 3G call quality is often better than regular GSM -- but it turns out Apple made a huge improvement on both sides. iPhone 3G calls made over 3G and GSM both sounded significantly better than calls made on the original iPhone. If you're upgrading your device iPhone you may not necessarily notice it, but on a side by side it was pretty obvious. Of course, call quality most often depends on coverage, and coverage varies between 3G and GSM networks depending on where you are. 3G calling also requires more battery power. Where are we going with this? Well, despite many of the painstaking measures Apple's taken to preserve battery power, the iPhone 3G doesn't do any real time signal detection to help determine whether you currently have better 3G or GSM voice coverage. If you suspect you might get better coverage either on or off 3G, it's up to you to dig down through a few settings menus to flip the switch. Not a deal breaker by any means, but it'd make for a welcome fix. We're still working on our battery testing on the iPhone 3G (which can take a number of days -- we'll post a supplemental), but our preliminary results are tracking near Apple's stated expectations. For reference, Apple's numbers on the iPhone peg it at 10 / 5 hours talk on GSM / 3G (respectively), 5 hours 3G data, 6 hours WiFi, 24 hours music and 7 hours video. There have been a number of other fixes to better the device as well. For example, the phone now has two proximity sensors to better detect when it's held to your ear. We also found that while the camera was essentially identical, we were getting images that were ever so slightly sharper and crisper than the original iPhone on 1.1.4 (check it out below). Still, knowing that HTC's Touch Diamond -- which features a 3.2 megapixel sensor and mechanical autofocus -- could pack such a great camera in an even smaller form factor than the iPhone's left us pining for something a bit more than the same 2 megapixels from the first time around. What we're probably the most excited about, though, is that two of our biggest hardware-related gripes from the original device have finally been addressed: first, the headphone jack is now flush, which means any standard (3.5mm) headphones will work in the iPhone without the need for an adapter. The new jack has a solid, confidence-inspiring feel that won't leave you worrying about damaging the device or your headphones. To this day we still have no clue why Apple pushed the jack in -- it was kind of funny hearing Steve pitch the flush jack as a feature at WWDC. It's the simple things, you know? Second, the speaker volume has been jacked up significantly, giving your calls (or music) a much more workable volume level if you're not blessed with superhuman hearing. It's not the loudest speaker we've ever heard on a device, and unlike many Nokia Nseries phones, it's still mono. But it's definitely a step up compared to the first iPhone, which was not only quiet, but also seemed to distort at much lower volumes. Speed and location At the end of the day, it's the 3G data that's important enough to become part of the new iPhone's namesake. Speed testing the iPhone 3G hasn't been disappointing in the slightest. We've seen speeds between 300 - 500Kbps in the US (roughly equivalent of other HSDPA devices we've tested), and in networks abroad where the data rates are even faster, we've gotten consistent data rates of over 700-800Kbps. It's pretty clear the iPhone 3G isn't hitting hardware limits right now, so much of what you can prepare to see in terms of speed in the US will depend directly on reception with AT&T's network -- which doesn't have the most outstanding reputation, nor the broadest 3G rollout. Interestingly, in one test, our iPhone 3G had worse reception on AT&T than a Nokia N78, yet managed speeds of over 100Kbps faster. So ultimately, where 3G coverage is decent, you should be seeing speeds that will no longer have you tearing your eyes out, as was so often the case with little mister sometimes-takes-minutes-to-load-a-small-page first-gen iPhone. GPS acquisition has also been surprisingly fast for a cellphone. AGPS devices use traditional GPS receivers, but help speed up location acquisition and accuracy by using cellphone towers to triangulate. As far as we know, the iPhone 3G is the only device out right now that not only has AGPS, but takes advantage of Skyhook's proprietary WiFi-based location system, giving it a total of three ways to help find where you're at. We were able to acquire GPS in as little as a second or two, although depending on your location and reception, you might see that take longer. It's important to note, though, that the iPhone's was clearly intended to be a location-aware smartphone -- not a dedicated GPS device. There's a big difference. That said, there's an enormous amount of interest by people hoping they can add one more to the pile of devices their iPhone has taken over for. It's pretty clear why people might want the iPhone 3G to replace their car's dedicated GPS nav, too. It's not just a location-aware device with a large, bright screen -- it's also connected (with service you're already paying for), thus able to get traffic updates, routing information, and so on. The Google Maps app doesn't provide turn by turn route guidance, though, so while it does provide directions, you can only use it as a stand-in -- and not as a full replacement -- for a proper GPS device. This problem might be solved later by some intrepid 3rd party developer (like, say, TomTom or Telenav), but there's been some confusion as to whether this might actually happen, and what Apple's official stance on GPS nav actually is. And even if this GPS software does eventually come out, the speaker on the iPhone 3G simply won't be loud enough to be heard over most road noise, so you'd also have to make use of a line-out. In other words, don't sell your GPS device just yet, okay? The software Anyone that's used the original iPhone knows what a delight the device can be to use -- except when using the old mail app -- but the hardware is only one part of that. An accurate capacitive touchscreen and well optimized mobile processors form the basis of that experience, but the iPhone continues to derives its real power in usability. The iPhone 3G and the second release of mobile OS X have given the device numerous useful new features while keeping in line with expectations that they not slow down the experience, nor overwhelm new or experienced users. So far, so good. Easily the most significant addition to the iPhone 3G (as well as the original iPhone and iPod touch) is the App Store, which finally enables users to trick out their phone with whatever programs make it through Apple's rigorous developer screening and software testing process. We've got as many mixed feelings about that closed-but-open model as we do about many of the programs that launched with the device -- especially the AIM client, which we were most excited about, but that kind of flopped. (Disclosure: Engadget is owned by AOL / TimeWarner. Sorry gang!) Although the App Store isn't open to any developer, it's worth noting that Apple's implementation wrests all control from its carrier partners, which typically expect 3rd party applications to be either side-loaded (i.e. more for the power user set), or simply want complete control of sales through their own walled garden. It's easy to argue that the App Store just trades one walled garden for another, but what the hell, we'll happily Apple's over AT&T's. The applications themselves vary in price, and are purchased after you've logged in with your iTunes account. (Yeah, you'll need one even if you're only downloading free programs.) Apps under 10MB download over the air, and are immediately deposited in your first available slot, where they can be moved (or removed) as you see fit. As new versions of the apps become available, the App Store notifies you of updates and manages the downloads. Yes, it's a new kind of walled garden, but the App Store is also a category-redefining experience. We've already heard a radically open version will be making its way to Android, and we hope it will eventually find its way to platforms like Windows Mobile and Symbian as well. Another new addition is character recognition support for logographic-based languages, such as Traditional Chinese, as well as localized keyboards for nearly two dozen languages and markets worldwide. But the touchscreen keyboard can still be a major sticking point for some -- ourselves enthusiastically included -- and Apple hasn't given any more of its default programs (like SMS) the increased ease of typing that comes with using the keyboard in landscape mode. There's simply no question that in terms of efficiency, on an iPhone we're nowhere close to where we can get on a spacious (or even not so spacious) QWERTY keypad. To their credit, though, Apple's made a few tweaks over the last year that have made typing a little faster and easier (like letting you pre-type the next letter before your first finger has lifted). But the fact is this defining feature of the iPhone remains one of its biggest drawbacks. Although we've been unable to extensively test MobileMe (namely due to the fact that the service has been more or less completely offline since they flipped the switch this week), we have found the Exchange support to be simple enough to set up and use that you may not have to bug your IT dude. Some hardcore enterprise users will miss the full Exchange suite, including synced notes and tasks, but the core functionality (email, calendar, contacts) work very well. Our biggest gripe with Exchange isn't small, though: the system is unable to let enterprise contacts and calendars coexist on the same device with personal contacts and calendars. (Personal and corp email get along just fine, though.) When you turn on Exchange-synced contacts and calendars, you're notified that it's a one or the other kind of a situation, and your personal data will be removed from the phone. Though that data isn't purged from your host machine, of course, you do immediately lose the ability to change contact or calendar sync settings. This effectively means that your device can only serve as an enterprise device OR a personal device, but not both at once. Kind of defeats the purpose of convincing your boss to get you an iPhone in the first place, you know? Some other new and noteworthy features: • As mentioned, Google Maps now shows a pinging blue locator that can track your movement. As of right now there's no way to convert this to KML or anything usable for geocaching. • The camera will also now ask you permission to use GPS to geotag photos with your current location. Once you grant that permission, it will add the necessary standard EXIF data to your photos. Trés useful, but you can't refer back to those geotags to bring up a location in Google Maps. • Side note: there's now an option to reset location notifications, if you accidentally granted permission to an app you don't want knowing where you are. • The iPhone can now read PowerPoint, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote documents. It's still incapable of editing or creating new documents, however, and outside of sending yourself these files via email, there's no accessible file storage. • You can now save images from the web to your camera roll by tapping and holding. • The calculator goes into scientific mode when the device is tilted sideways. • Entering passwords is a little easier -- the last character you entered is temporarily shown at the end of the string. Keeps things safe but makes sure you know if you mistyped. • One of the very first things we ever requested the iPhone see fixed is finally fixed: calendar colors are now supported, meaning you can finally visually tell your appointments apart based on calendar. • You can now control email, contact, and calendar fetching from system settings, giving you granular control over push and pull data on your various accounts. • You can also enable parental controls if you got the device for your kids. Or you just want to curb temptation to constantly watch Charlie the Unicorn on YouTube or buy Lil Wayne tracks on the WiFi Store, weirdo. • Screen captures can be taken by holding home, then pressing sleep. They're dropped in the camera roll. • Doing a hard reset now fully purges the device's memory, thereby making it much more difficult to recover the kind of data you don't want someone else recovering. We'd also be remiss if we didn't namecheck a few of the things missing from the device, some likely to be inconveniences, others outright dealbreakers: • Easily-replaceable battery -- especially being that 3G is much more demanding on battery power than EDGE data. We haven't popped the back off, but even if replacing the battery were as simple as unscrewing the two screws at the bottom (and it's not), that's still not what we'd call easily replaceable. • Copy / paste. As if we even needed to mention this. • MMS. Ditto. • Expandable memory still isn't in the cards (har). 8 and 16GB capacities are very decent, but the ability to go further with microSDHC would be welcomed by many. As would be a 32GB model. • A2DP (stereo Bluetooth). If this was an unlikely addition before, it's all but written off now. A2DP is a notorious battery hog on devices like cellphones, and the iPhone is already pushing the limits on power conservation and efficiency. It pains us to say it, but we just don't see A2DP happening any time soon. • Push Gmail. Hey, if Helio can have it on the Ocean, and Samsung on the Instinct, why is Apple stuck with only push Yahoo mail? • Service-independent device to machine wireless syncing. Exchange and MobileMe are nice, but even nicer would be a way to easily sync data directly to your machine without having to pay or have some kind of service. • Tethered data. Hey, you're paying $30 a month for data (likely more if you're using it outside the US), your laptop should be able to use some of it too. • No way to open a link in a new tab in mobile Safari. We also wish the browser was still a bit better about caching data, too -- it'd be nice not to have to do so many reloads when switching between tabs or moving back and forward through history. Wrap-up If you're an avid Symbian, BlackBerry, or Windows Mobile / Exchange user, chances are you might think the iPhone 3G is Apple playing catch-up -- and you're not wrong. 3G, GPS, third party apps, enterprise messaging, these are all old hat. But even the would-be iPhone killers being churned out weekly haven't yet found a way to counter the iPhone's usability and seamless integration of service and software, desktop and mobile, and media and internet. There are always things that could be improved, features to be added, fixes that should be applied -- but from first to second gen, from year one to year two, Apple has proven itself a relentless upstart in the mobile space, and is showing no signs of slowing down. All those new features give the iPhone even more appeal than ever, but the price is what really seals the deal. For our money, you're going to have a hard time finding a better device for two hundred bucks -- or maybe even for any price. But that doesn't mean you ought to toss your original iPhone, either. With the release of iPhone 2.0, Apple's given early adopters every possible new feature for free, meaning the iPhone 3G's biggest roadblock to adoption in the US may be its still very worthy predecessor. But as Steve says, "If anybody is going to cannibalize us, I want it to be us." As for the rest of the world? Things are about to get interesting. http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/11/iphone-3g-review/ Apple and AT&T Stores Having Difficulty Activating iPhones (UPDATE: It's the iPocalypse) We've heard four many accounts now from varying Apple store and AT&T locations that employees are having problems while trying to activate phones through iTunes. From Atlanta, one camper reports: A 'teal shirt' apple representative came out to let us know they are having difficulty accessing accounts on the iTunes system. The line has been amazingly slow, but at least we are inside! In the last maybe 30 minutes only 5 people got into the store. Time to get comfy. UPDATE: Here's the official word from AT&T: We have had reports that customers attempting to download new iTunes 7.7 software to their new iPhone may get an error message saying "page not found." We have reported this issue to Apple. While Apple works to resolve this issue, we are asking customers to sync their newly activated phone later at home. This does not look good. Apparently people at home can't even upgrade to firmware 2.0 and the problem is afflicting iTunes on an international scale. Here are a running tally of notifications we've received from the US: "I was in the first group of 30 to get an iPhone 3g at the biggest AT&T Experience store in Houston, Texas. The staff couldn't get anyone's phones to activate, so they let us take them home.....where I still can't get it to activate - itunes keeps timing out for activation, but not the itunes store or anything else." "Not sure if you have heard this, but I'm in an att store in nj and they can't activate the phones because itunes is so slow. I've been waiting for 30 mins with the new iphone attached to itunes in the store and there is no end in sight... Have you heard about others having problems activating the phones? Sounded like other stores are having the same problem..." "I bought an iPhone 3G and the AT&T activation isn't working. They are using iTunes to do it and there is network problems. Went home, and iTunes still won't activate. Seems to be an iTunes network issue." "Apparently Apple completely underestimated the load on their servers for activation and ALL COMPUTERS in the Boston Apple store are stuck in the iPhone activation screen. No iTunes are able to connect to the central server, so no iPhones can be activated. " Even the iTunes link on Apple is gone. "I was at the AT&T store in Dublin, OH this morning, 7th in line. They were letting people in 4 at a time and it took them about 30-40 minutes to get the first person done because of the servers crashing. I eventually got in and got my new iphone, but not until almost 9:00." "Jordan creek in west DES moines is down as is the apple store. A teal shirt said that they're contemplating going with the old activate at home method. Told everyone in the line to get comfy. No one entered either store for 30 minutes" "Atlanta update: nothing. People who went inside an hour ago are either still in there or escaped through a trap door. 3 words about why waiting this year us better than last year— 'super monkey ball'" "Apple store in Skokie il (north suburb of Chicgao) is down. It's been an hour and 15 minutes and only 4 people have left. I'm still waiting for mine!" "iPhone 3G San Antonio: I waited about 15 minutes for activation, and nobody else's was working either so I just took my phone and left. They kept telling me that wasn't allowed, but I had already paid for the phone so there was nothing they could do to stop me." From our own Benny Goldman in NY: "We spoke with several people who walked out of the store without a working iPhone, as the iTunes/iPhone server appears to be overloaded since around 9:45. Two people said they waited for 15 minutes without any luck, and another two were advised to try activation tomorrow. In my own experience, I left the store without activating because I thought I would do it on my laptop, but I wasn't able to. I went back inside the Apple store and didn't fare any better. We were just told by an Apple employee that they are slowing down the number of people they are letting into the store and working on the servers in order to fix the problem." "I work for a Rogers dealer up in Canada and I just read this post and wanted to say that we’re having the same problem up here as well. Yay." Also, a special thanks to commenter brianhatch for the headline. http://gizmodo.com/5024187/apple-and...the-ipocalypse Technology Reshapes America's Classrooms Jason Szep From online courses to kid-friendly laptops and virtual teachers, technology is spreading in America's classrooms, reducing the need for textbooks, notepads, paper and in some cases even the schools themselves. Just ask 11-year-old Jemella Chambers. She is one of 650 students who receive an Apple Inc laptop each day at a state-funded school in Boston. From the second row of her classroom, she taps out math assignments on animated education software that she likens to a video game. "It's comfortable," she said of Scholastic Corp's FASTT Math software in which she and other students compete for high scores by completing mathematical equations. "This makes me learn better. It's like playing a game," she said. Education experts say her school, the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Boston, offers a glimpse into the future. It has no textbooks. Students receive laptops at the start of each day, returning them at the end. Teachers and students maintain blogs. Staff and parents chat on instant messaging software. Assignments are submitted through electronic "drop boxes" on the school's Web site. "The dog ate my homework" is no excuse here. The experiment at Frederick began two years ago at cost of about $2 million, but last year was the first in which all 7th and 8th grade students received laptops. Classwork is done in Google Inc's free applications like Google Docs, or Apple's iMovie and specialized educational software like FASTT Math. "Why would we ever buy a book when we can buy a computer? Textbooks are often obsolete before they are even printed," said Debra Socia, principal of the school in Dorchester, a tough Boston district prone to crime and poor schools. There is, however, one concession to the past: a library stocked with novels. "It's a powerful, powerful experience," added Socia. Average attendance climbed to 94 percent from 92 percent; discipline referrals fell 30 percent. And parents are more engaged, she said. "Any family can chat online with teacher and say 'hey, we're having this problem'." Unlike traditional schools, Frederick's students work at vastly different levels in the same classroom. Children with special needs rub shoulders with high performers. Computers track a range of aptitude levels, allowing teachers to tailor their teaching to their students' weakest areas, Socia said. Surge In Online Courses The Internet is also a catalyst for change. U.S. enrollment in online virtual classes reached the 1 million mark last year, 22 times the level seen in 2000, according to the North American Council for Online Learning, an industry body. That's only the beginning, said Michael Horn, co-author of "Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns". "Our projections show that 50 percent of high school courses will be taught online by 2013. It's about one percent right now," said Horn, executive director of education at Innosight Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Massachusetts. K12 Inc, which provides online curriculum and educational services in 17 U.S. states, has seen student enrollment rise 57 percent from last year to 41,000 full-time students, said its chief executive, Ron Packard. Much of the growth is in publicly funded virtual charter schools. "Because it is a public school, the state funds the education similar to what they would in a brick and mortar school, but we get on average about 70 percent of the dollars," Packard told Reuters. "We don't usually get capital dollars, or bond issue dollars. Sometimes we don't get local dollars. So on average it works out 70 percent of the per pupil spending that an average school in the state would receive," he said. "We're getting the kids who the local school is not working for. And the spectrum goes from extreme special education to extremely gifted kids," he said. U.S. investment bank Morgan Stanley says K12 and similar companies look set to capture an increasing share of the $550 billion publicly funded U.S. education market for children aged from about 5 to 18 as more U.S. states adopt virtual schools. Virginia-based K12 recently opened an office in Dubai to expand overseas. Packard says he expects strong offshore demand for American primary and secondary education tailored for foreign nationals who want to enter U.S. universities. Apex Learning Inc, based in Bellevue, Washington, is seeing a similar surge in demand. It started in 1997 by offering online advanced-placement courses to parents and individual schools but now sells an array of online classes for entire school districts and state departments of education. "Over the last two years in particular we have seen very, very significant growth in the interest and demand for our type of digital curriculum," Apex chief executive Cheryl Vedoe said in a telephone interview. Apex enrollments rose 50 percent to 300,000 in 2006-2007, and likely grew at the same pace last year, she said. "Where we see the greatest growth today is actually in brick and mortar high schools for programs for students who are not succeeding in the existing programs," she added. Online tutoring is also expanding rapidly. Bangalore-based TutorVista, which launched online U.S. services in 2005, estimates its average global growth in active students at 22 percent a month -- all taught by "e-tutors" mostly in India. Horn expects demand for teachers to fall and virtual schools to boost achievement in a U.S. education system where only two-thirds of teenagers graduate from high school -- a proportion that slides to 50 percent for black Americans and Hispanics, according to government statistics. "You deliver education at lower cost, but you will actually improve the amount of time that a teacher can spend with each student because they are no longer delivering one-size-fits-all lesson plans," he said. "They can actually roam around." (Reporting by Jason Szep; Editing by Eddie Evans) http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...47885520080707 Rainy day fun Cut and Paste One Line of Code to Make Any Website Editable Patrick Altoft Have you ever wanted to edit the web pages of another website? This simple line of code makes it possible. Of course you can’t actually edit the actual web page but you can edit the page as you see it on your screen. This is one of the ways scammers create fake screenshots, fake Adsense & affiliate earnings and even fake Paypal transactions. All you need to do is visit the site you want to edit, paste the code below into your web browser address bar (tested in Firefox & IE7) and hit the Enter button. Then simply select a portion of text on the page and start editing. Code:
javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0 Spammers Announce World War III Robert Jaques Hackers are deluging web users with malware-laden spam claiming that World War III has started following a US invasion of Iran. Security experts warned today that spam emails with subject lines including 'Third World War has begun', '20000 US Soldiers in Iran' and 'US Army crossed Iran's borders' have been intercepted. The emails contain links to a malicious webpage that displays what appears to be a video player showing the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. Text on the page reads: 'Just now US Army's Delta Force and US Air Force have invaded Iran. 'Approximately 20000 soldiers crossed the border into Iran and broke down the Iran's Army resistance. 'The video made by US soldier was made today morning. Click on the video to see the first minutes of the beginning of World War III. God save us.' However, Sophos warned that users visiting the webpage and clicking on the 'video player' run the risk of being infected with the Troj/Tibs-UO Trojan and a malicious JavaScript hidden on the website as Mal/ObfJS-AY. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said: "Hackers are taking advantage of the fact that many people today get their fix for breaking news via the internet. "People, especially those with loved ones in the Middle East, may rush to watch the video without engaging their common sense. "Everyone should ensure that they keep their antivirus protection up-to-date and never follow links in unsolicited email messages." http://www.itnews.com.au/News/80088,...d-war-iii.aspx Seagate's Latest Desktop HDD Has 1.5TB Capacity Daniel A. Begun Seagate announced three new consumer-level hard drives today, which it claims are the "industry's first 1.5-terabyte desktop and half-terabyte notebook hard drives." The company claims that it is able to greatly increase the areal density of its drive substrates by utilizing perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. Wikipedia states that PMR is "capable of delivering more than triple the storage density of traditional longitudinal recording." Seagate's latest desktop-class hard drive, the Barracuda 7200.11, will be available in a 1.5TB capacity starting in August. The 3.5-inch drive is made up of four 375GB platters and has a 7,200-rpm rotational speed. It has a 3Gb/second SATA interface, or 1.5Gb/second using Native Command Queuing (NCQ). Seagate also claims that the new 1.5TB drive supports a sustained data rate of up to 120MB/second. This represents a slight improvement in performance over the existing drives in Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 series, which have stated sustained data rates between 105 and 115MB/second--with the 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 on the slow end of that scale at 105MB/second. While many of the existing drives in the 7200.11 series have both 16MB and 32MB cache versions, the 1.5TB will likely only be available with a 32MB cache--similar to its 1TB sibling. Pricing has yet be announced. For the moment, Hitachi and Western Digital's highest-capacity desktop hard drives top out at 1TB--the Hitachi Ultrastor AK71000 and the Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS--both of which share similar specs with the Barracuda 7200.11 series (other than Seagate's 1.5TB capacity, of course). Seagate also announced today two new 500GB notebook hard drives, the Momentus 5400.6 and Momentus 7200.4. As its name implies, the 5400.6 spins at 5,400-rpm, and it includes an 8MB cache. The 7200.4 spins at 7,200-rpm and has a 16MB cache. Both drives use 3Gb/second SATA interfaces. Seagate also claims that both drives are reasonably vibration-resistant and are low on power consumption: "Both Momentus drives are built tough enough to withstand up to 1,000 Gs of non-operating shock and 350 Gs of operating shock to protect drive data, making the drives ideal for systems that are subject to rough handling or high levels of vibration. For added robustness in mobile environments, the Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 are offered with G-Force Protection, a free-fall sensor technology that helps prevent drive damage and data loss upon impact if a laptop PC is dropped. The sensor works by detecting any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity and parks the heads off the disc to prevent contact with the platter in a free fall of as little as 8 inches and within 3/10ths of a second. Seagate's new Momentus drives are lean on power consumption, allowing notebook users to work longer between battery charges, and are virtually inaudible thanks to Seagate’s innovative SoftSonic fluid-dynamic bearing motors and QuietStep ramp load technology." Despite Seagate's claims, the new 500GB Momentus are not the first "half-terabyte notebook hard drives." Not only have Hitachi and Fujistu already announced their 500GB, 2.5-inch hard drives earlier this year, but Samsung's 500GB, 2.5-inch, Sprintpoint M6 (model HM500LI) has been shipping since March. Oh well, you can't blame Seagate for trying. Both of their 2.5-inch, Momentus drives are expected to start shipping sometime in the fourth quarter of this year, and pricing has not be set yet. http://www.hothardware.com/News/Seag...15TB_Capacity/ 2010: the 5TB 3.5in HDD Cometh James Sherwood Hitachi has pledged to release a 5TB 3.5in hard drive within two years, and it claims two of the drives will boast enough capacity to store everything in your brain. According to a report by Nikkei Net, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies will use Current-Perpendicular-to-Plane Giant Magnetoresistance (CPP-GMR) magnetc read heads to achieve the aim. This, the firm claims, will allow its drives to store 1TB of data in every square inch of the recording surface. Hitachi’s announcement is a step on from a claim it made back in October 2007 that 4TB of storage could become a reality by 2011. It’s worth noting though that Hitachi’s not the first storage company to promise super-capacity HDDs. Back in August 2007, rival Fujitsu announced that 2.5in disks were its proposed ‘patterned medium’ for such compact storage. It too plans to have commercial models available by 2010. Fujitsu's approach uses anodised aluminium to create a pattern of "nanoholes", each holding a portion of magnetic material used to store a single bit of data. The aluminium-oxide surrounding these so-called 'nanoholes' helps magnetically insulate each bit from all the others, preventing one from affecting another, which might lead to data corruption. Nonetheless, Dr Yoshihiro Shiroishi from Hitachi has claimed that two of its 5TB will together “provide the same storage capacity as the human brain”. So, if your memory’s not great, then just buy a couple of 5TB drives from Hitachi and download all your thoughts and memories onto them, before wiping the slate clean and staring afresh with another 10TB of brain capacity. http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/07..._5tb_hdd_2010/ Pioneer Promises 400GB Optical Discs Pioneer has developed a 16-layer read-only optical disc which it claims can store 400GB of data.. The per-layer capacity is 25GB, the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc, and the multilayer technology will also be applicable to multilayer recordable discs. Multi-layered discs have been difficult to develop because 'crosstalk' from adjacent layers and transmission loss mean that getting a stable signal from the disc is often nearly impossible. Pioneer achieved stability in the playback of recorded signals by employing a wide-range spherical aberration compensator and light-receiving element that can read out weak signals at a high signal-to-noise ratio in the optical pick-up mechanism. The huge capacity of these discs means that the new technology will be best suited for applications such large volume data archiving, rather than consumer use. Pioneer will present the details of this research at the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage 2008 in Hawaii on 13 July. http://www.itnews.com.au/News/79933,...cal-discs.aspx Alcatel-Lucent Appeals Loss of $1.5 Billion Award Appeals court arguments in a battle over MP3 digital music patents between Alcatel-Lucent and Microsoft Corp focused Monday on a joint development pact struck nearly two decade earlier. Alcatel-Lucent is looking to restore a $1.5 billion judgment against Microsoft awarded by a lower court jury that was later overturned. Much of the arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit centered on a 1989 joint development agreement between AT&T and German research organization Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. Microsoft has said that it licensed the MP3 technology from Fraunhofer for $16 million, and is innocent of any infringement. Alcatel-Lucent, however, maintains the patent was based on work that was done previously by Bell Labs, now the research arm for Lucent Technologies, and could not legally be licensed by Fraunhofer to Microsoft. Lucent was spun off from AT&T in 1996 and owns Bell Labs. MP3 is the standard digital music format, which allows audio to be compressed so that it can be easily played on computers, mobile phones or digital music players. The case caused an uproar last year when a jury in San Diego ruled that Microsoft had infringed two patents and awarded Alcatel-Lucent $1.5 billion. But U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster disagreed with the jury, and said Microsoft had not violated one of the patents and had licensed the other. The judge threw out the jury's award. "We are hopeful that they (federal circuit judges) will agree that the jury was correct in its original judgment and that the jury's verdict should be reinstated," Alcatel-Lucent said on Monday in a statement. Microsoft reiterated its innocence. "Judge Brewster was correct when he ruled that Microsoft did not infringe the '457 patent and that Microsoft properly licensed the technology embodied in the '080 patent from its co-owner and industry recognized MP3 licensor -- Fraunhofer," said Microsoft spokesman David Bowermaster. (Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Tim Dobbyn) http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...43569320080707 Dutch Chipmaker Sues to Silence Security Researchers Elinor Mills Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors has sued a university in The Netherlands to block publication of research that details security flaws in NXP's Mifare Classic wireless smart cards, which are used in transit and building entry systems around the world. NXP, formerly Philips Semiconductors, sued to prevent Radboud University Nijmegen from publishing a scientific paper on the technology in October. A hearing is scheduled for Thursday in the Dutch court, Rechtbank Arnhem. "We feel the publication would not be responsible," NXP said in an e-mail statement when asked to comment for this article on Wednesday. "We cannot give further comments at this time, as it is in the hands of the court and the court has given a confidentiality order." A court decision on the matter is expected next week, according to Karsten Nohl, a University of Virginia graduate student who worked with others to break the crypto algorithm last year and has been closely following the case. The Dutch university's research builds upon Nohl's work. Nohl said he plans to publish his research in August and that NXP has not sued him to halt publication of his work. "NXP spent most of this year defending the technology," Nohl told CNET News in a phone interview this week. "Only recently have they started admitting that the security is flawed, but they are still not ready for this to leak into the public domain." "The only thing NXP would achieve if they win the lawsuit is prevent information from getting to other research groups that might very well be looking for solutions to this problem," Nohl said. Meanwhile, information on how to break the cryptography on the smart cards is already available to criminals who are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars, he added. A statement issued by the Dutch University in March says: "Because some cards can be cloned, it is in principle possible to access buildings and facilities with a stolen identity. This has been demonstrated on an actual system." Dr. Bart Jacobs of Radboud University Nijmegen demonstrated last month how he could ride the London transit system for free. Once he obtained the key used by the London transit system, he then brushed up aside passengers carrying the Oyster transit cards and was able to collect their card information on his laptop and make a clone of it. This YouTube video shows how it is done. In addition to the transit system in The Netherlands, the technology is used in the subway systems in London, Hong Kong and Boston, as well as in cards for accessing buildings and facilities. The Mifare technology is used in more than 80 percent of the market, Nohl said. The university defended its plans to publish the research in a statement released Monday in Dutch, saying it has a duty to research and publish data on security technology flaws so that they can be fixed. http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-99....html?hhTest=1 Linux for Housewives. XP for Geeks. Robin Harris The computer proletariat is rising up - and computing will never be the same. Tiny, sub-$500 “netbooks” like the Asus Eee are the hottest thing going in notebooks today. And some surprising things are happening. Like housewives on Linux. Asus is forecasting worldwide shipments of 10 million 7 to 10 inch screen netbooks this year! And a billion in 2018. Appliance computing In an article in the Asian business publication Tech-on reporter Tomohiro Otsuki writes: Quote:
Yet a quick look at Amazon shows that Asus Eee’s with XP roughly $35-$100 more than their Linux brethern. Housewives know a bargain when they see one. Microsoft Research’s Gordon Bell noted that every 10 years a new form of computing emerges thanks to Moore’s Law and the declining cost/increasing performance of ICs. Looks like the netbook is this decade’s new form: a minimalist computer for Internet, email, chatting, video and light application use. The new market leaders A big surprise is that inventors and leaders in this new segment are the Taiwanese firms that build, for other people, most of the world’s notebooks. The contract manufacturers, who mostly assemble to spec, are enjoying the freedom to build their own products using their own sense of what the market wants. Taiwan is the wild East. Expect some crazy experiments - and some revolutionary products. The Storage Bits take This is the chance Linux partisans have been waiting for - and it’s coming faster than I’d expected. Microsoft is reportedly charging $60 for netbook XP - a big chunk of a $200 computer’s cost. As Netscape discovered it is hard to compete with “free.” If Taiwanese housewives are buying Linux the guys in Redmond need to sharpen their pencils. Housewives don’t need Office and Exchange. What do they need? And Apple will be late to this party as they’ve got their hands full with the iPhone and Snow Leopard. Apple has a history of missing these big shifts - if they haven’t invented them - as they did with towers replacing desktops in the mid-90s. The netbook space promises to be a lot of fun. http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=342 Google, Zen Master of the Market Steve Lohr Bill Gates, who walked away from full-time work at Microsoft last month, was perhaps the foremost applied economist of the second half of the 20th century. Mr. Gates and Microsoft fundamentally shaped how people think about the behavior of modern markets in which technology plays a central role. Under Mr. Gates, Microsoft also challenged the conventional wisdom about competition, business strategy and even antitrust law. Now, in the early years of the 21st century, Google is the company prompting a rethinking of assumptions. Microsoft was a master practitioner of “network effects,” the straightforward precept in economics that the value of a product or service often goes up as more people use it. There is nothing new about the concept. It was true of railways, telephones and fax machines, for example. Microsoft, however, applied the power of network effects more lucratively than any company had done before it. Microsoft attracted consumers and software developers to use its technology, the software that controls the basic operations of a personal computer. The more that people used Microsoft’s operating system (DOS and later Windows), the more that third-party developers built products to run on Windows, which attracted more users. So Microsoft’s success snowballed, and the company owned the essential technology, making it harder for users and developers to switch to alternatives. But the Internet has changed the rules of networked competition, partly because Internet software standards are more open than those in the PC industry. That helps explain why Microsoft has struggled to catch up with Google in the rich new market for Internet search advertising. Google’s huge, widening lead in that business suggests that while some weapons of competition have changed, the market dynamics are similar, say economists and industry experts. At this stage, they note, Internet search appears to be a market that is winner take most, if not all. Google, it seems, is the emerging dominant company in the Internet era, much as Microsoft was in the PC era. The study of networked businesses, market competition and antitrust law is being reconsidered in a new context, shaped by Google. Google’s explanation for its large share of the Internet search market — more than 60 percent — is simply that it is a finely honed learning machine. Its scientists constantly improve the relevance of search results for users and the efficiency of its advertising system for advertisers and publishers. “The source of Google’s competitive advantage is learning by doing,” said Hal R. Varian, Google’s chief economist. In the Internet marketplace, Mr. Varian notes, users can easily switch to another search engine by typing in another Web address, so there is no tight technology control, as there is with proprietary PC software. Similarly, Mr. Varian says, advertisers and publishers can switch fairly easily to rival ad networks operated by Yahoo, Microsoft and others. But economists and analysts point out that Google does indeed have network advantages that present formidable obstacles to rivals. The “experience effects,” they say, of users and advertisers familiar with Google’s services make them less likely to switch. There is, for example, a sizable cottage industry of experts who tailor Web sites to get higher rankings on search engines, which drive user traffic and thus ad revenues. These experts understandably focus their efforts on the market leader, Google — another network effect, analysts say. Google executives often point out that personal data in its services like Web e-mail is not held in proprietary document formats, as it is in PC software. Formats aside, however, a person with a year or so of e-mail housed in Gmail is highly unlikely to switch as a practical matter, analysts say. Taken together, these networked advantages enjoyed by Google are significant, most analysts agree. “It certainly does have an impact on whether other companies can be competitive threats to Google,” said Michael Katz, an economist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “But it’s a very different way to lock people in than it was for Microsoft. It would be a lot easier for people to walk away from Google.” Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees the difference in terms of what he calls “direct network effects” and “indirect network effects.” The direct effects, he says, include software document formats and technology standards that are owned by one company and that are incompatible with a rival’s technology. The indirect effects, he adds, include large numbers of users, the ability to learn from those users, the power of a well-known brand and user inertia. “For Google,” Mr. Cusumano said, “the indirect network effects are very powerful.” Google’s market power, it seems, is the economic equivalent of what in foreign affairs is called “soft power,” a term coined by the political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr. This is the power to co-opt rather than coerce. The implications of Google’s market power for antitrust law are just beginning to be considered. The Justice Department is reviewing Google’s planned partnership with Yahoo. Under the agreement, Yahoo, the No. 2 company in search, would farm out some of its search advertising to Google, the leader. Google has said the deal is simply a voluntary outsourcing arrangement, while opponents say it will reduce competition in search advertising even further. Google’s market share alone invites scrutiny worldwide. In the United States, antitrust law defines a dominant firm with potentially monopolistic power as a company with 70 percent market share or more. In America, Google has garnered more than 60 percent of searches conducted and about 70 percent of the search ad market. In Europe, the definition of a dominant firm is one that has as little as 35 percent of a market, legal experts say. Still, dominance alone is not an antitrust problem. The issue is the powerful company’s behavior, says Andrew I. Gavil, a professor at the Howard University School of Law. “You have to be big and bad, not just big,” he said. The telltale signs of a company’s bad behavior include raising prices, hindering innovation and excluding competitors. There is no evidence that Google is engaged in suspect behavior, but it could be hard to spot. Its ad auction system, for example, is essentially a private marketplace run by Google, without much disclosure to advertisers or to Web publishers. Mr. Varian, Google’s chief economist, acknowledges that the company has been criticized for its lack of transparency. But he says that the Google approach is a byproduct of its virtue as a fast-moving learning machine. “The system is constantly evolving to optimize efficiency, improve ad quality and make the pricing smarter, so you don’t want set rules that say we do X and we don’t do Y,” Mr. Varian explained. Whether that kind of “trust us” explanation will satisfy government regulators, if Google’s market power continues to grow, remains to be seen. But Google seems to have learned a lesson from Microsoft and its antitrust troubles. Mr. Varian said antitrust training is mandatory now for Google managers. “Google looks at what happened to Microsoft, and we’re going to follow the rules,” he said. “If you’re really successful, you need to know about antitrust. That goes with the territory.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/te.../07google.html Google Ventures Into Virtual Reality With ‘Lively’ AP In the latest expansion beyond its main mission of organizing the world's information, Internet search leader Google Inc. hopes to orchestrate more fantasizing on the Web. The Mountain View-based company unveiled a free service Tuesday in which three-dimensional software enables people to congregate in electronic rooms and other computer-manufactured versions of real life. The service, called ''Lively,'' represents Google's answer to a 5-year-old site, Second Life, where people deploy animated alter egos known as avatars to navigate through virtual reality. Google thinks Lively will encourage even more people to dive into alternate realities because it isn't tethered to one Web site like Second Life, and it doesn't cost anything to use. After installing a small packet of software, a user can enter Lively from other Web sites, like social networking sites and blogs. The Lively application already works on Facebook, one of the Web's hottest hangouts, and Google is working on a version suitable for an even larger online social network, News Corp.'s MySpace. ''We know people already spend a lot of time online socializing, so we just want to try to make it more enjoyable,'' said Niniane Wang, a Google engineering manager who oversaw Lively's creation over the past year. Although Google is best known for the search engine that generates most of its profits, the company has introduced other services that are widely used without making much, if any, money. Google's peripheral products include its 3-D ''Earth'' software, Picasa for sharing photos and programs for word processing, calendars and spreadsheets. Google has no plans to sell advertising in Lively, Wang said. But the service could still indirectly help the company if it encourages people to remain online longer. Google's management reasons that more frequent Web surfing ultimately will lead to more moneymaking clicks on the ads it shows alongside its search results and millions of other Web sites. Lively's users will be able to sculpt an avatar that can be male, female or even a different species. An avatar can assume a new identity, change clothes or convey emotions with a few clicks of the mouse. The service also enables users to create different digital dimensions to roam, from a coffeehouse to an exotic island. The settings can be decorated with a wide variety of furniture, including large-screen televisions that can be set up to play different clips from YouTube.com, Google's video-sharing service. Lively users can then invite their friends and family into their virtual realities, where they can chat, hug, cry, laugh and interact as if they were characters in a video game. As a precaution, Google is requiring Lively's users to be at least 13 years old -- a constraint that hasn't been enough to prevent young children from running into trouble on other social spots on the Web. Google spent several months testing Lively among a group of Arizona State University students before opening the service to the public through its ''Labs'' section -- a technology sandbox set up for the company's experimental products. ------ On The Net: http://www.lively.com http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/busi...l-Reality.html US Pirate Party Study Shatters MPAA Claims Ernesto While the Pirate Party might be well known in Sweden, and heard of elsewhere around Europe, it’s not really taken off in the country that prides itself as being ‘the land of the free’. Unperturbed, the US Pirate Party has soldiered on and with the preliminary release of data from it’s first study, it’s hitting back at the media lobbyists. Claims by the music or film industries that ‘piracy is costing billions’ are commonplace. In 2005, for instance, the MPAA funded the LEK study, which claimed that over $6 billion was lost to MPAA members due to piracy. However, the figures and data behind those claims have never been publicly released, a fact underscored this past January when the MPAA had to release a statement saying ‘they made a mistake’ in one of the figures. It’s a figure that’s been quoted a lot, to this day, and was something that rankled US Pirate Party Administrator, Andrew Norton. “I was tired of seeing those claims on every press release,” he tells TorrentFreak, “knowing there was no evidence to back them up. They could have said that the loss was $20 billion, if they think they could bluff it out. The sad fact is that we have news outlets, and politicians quoting this figure as fact, and yet not one verified any claim. If I said I could turn lead into gold, I would be bombarded with requests to prove it. They have turned air into $6billion, and supposedly smart people accept it without question.” Frustrated, Norton decided he should study the MPAA’s own figures. When he couldn’t find any data to support their claims, he decided that there needed to be a study of the data the MPAA did put out. “I was thinking about where I could look, when the MPAA announced a new record year, and I thought ‘of course’. The MPAA can hardly question the accuracy of the data published by its members, and itself.” The preliminary findings of the study, published today, show a different picture to the one the MPAA paints. Norton took the view that the films most likely to be distributed on filesharing networks, and sold on street corners, would be the big blockbuster films, and so he should look at the top 10 films of each year. The results from that are shown below. With average growth throughout the time period, it would seem that claims of cinema piracy hurting box office figures (leading to cinemas issuing night vision goggles to staff, and teenagers being charged with crimes for recording 20-second clips) are unfounded. When certain p2p protocol lifespans are marked on the graph, for comparison, the MPAA claims are pretty much shattered. Mr. Norton is also aware that he will have to prove he is not just making things up. The US Pirate Party, who is publishing the study, has stated that all data used in the study will be available when the full study will published at the end of July. He does have a comment for the MPAA however. “Prove your claims, or shut up about them.” http://torrentfreak.com/us-pirate-pa...claims-080709/ ‘Hancock’ Powers to the Top of Box Office Michael Cieply Will Smith’s “Hancock” scored a strong $66 million in domestic ticket sales over the weekend, affirming his drawing power but leaving Hollywood short of the peaks it hit during last year’s Fourth of July holiday period. Since opening with previews Tuesday evening, “Hancock,” Sony Pictures Entertainment’s comic action movie about a damaged superhero, took in $107.3 million at the domestic box office and $78 million more from 50 countries around the world, studio executives said. That marked a personal triumph for Mr. Smith, as audiences flocked to the film despite soft reviews. “He’s just the guy everybody loves,” said Rory Bruer, the Sony Pictures distribution president. “Everybody wants to see what he’s up to.” Mr. Bruer noted that the film was Mr. Smith’s eighth consecutive No. 1 opening, beginning with “Men in Black II,” which opened over the July Fourth holiday in 2002. The current Top 10 films took in about $155.5 million for the weekend, down 2.9 percent from $160.1 million for the Top 10 during the equivalent weekend last year, according to figures compiled by Screenline, the box-office reporting service. “Hancock,” an unusually complex take on the superhero genre, took in far less over the extended holiday period than did Paramount Pictures’ toy-based action film “Transformers,” which had $155.4 million during the equivalent period last year. “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl,” a G-rated film, took in just $3.6 million over the weekend for Picturehouse to place No. 8 as it expanded in its third weekend from a handful of screens to more than 1,800 in a bid to capitalize on the popularity of the American Girl doll line. Other top performers included “Wall-E” from Walt Disney, which placed at No. 2 with $33.4 million in sales for its second weekend; “Wanted” from Universal Pictures, which was No. 3 with $20.6 million in its second weekend; and “Get Smart” from Warner Brothers, which was No. 4 with $11.1 million in its third weekend. The weekend performance by “Hancock” may have been dampened slightly by unusually intense fan anticipation for a more conventional superhero movie, “The Dark Knight,” another entry in the Warner Brothers Batman series. While that movie will not open in the United States until July 18, the Fandango.com and Movietickets.com ticket services have reported high levels of advance sales, with midnight and 3 a.m. showings on opening day already selling out. Still, the weekend was a vindication not just for Mr. Smith and for Sony, but also for the director Peter Berg and a producing team that included Akiva Goldsman, Michael Mann and Mr. Smith’s longtime partner James Lassiter. The filmmakers had bucked conventional wisdom by casting Mr. Smith as a drunken antihero who needs as much help as he can offer others. Some critics rebelled — and Variety caused ripples in Hollywood by comparing the film to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s failed turn in the action movie sendup “Last Action Hero,” released by Sony in 1993. Yet the audience galloped past the reviews to give Mr. Berg the highest ticket sales of his directing career in just five and a half days. Much of Hollywood, meanwhile, spent the weekend pondering a tally of another sort. A closely watched vote on a tentative contract between the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (Aftra) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers is expected to be completed on Tuesday. As of late last week, industry players with ties to Aftra and the Screen Actors Guild were privately predicting that the Aftra contract would be approved by a clear margin, though without the overwhelming support that is common in union ratification votes. The SAG leadership has campaigned strenuously against the pact, contending that its terms undercut the guild’s ability to reach a new agreement of its own. The guild’s contract with producers expired last Monday, but actors have continued working without a new pact. Because the unions have overlapping membership, the Aftra vote is expected to provide a gauge of SAG’s ability to hold out for better terms. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/movies/07box.html Hollywood Studios Say Actors Rebuff "Final" Offer Hollywood's major studios said the Screen Actors Guild on Thursday rebuffed the industry's "final" contract offer, a move the studios said "puts labor peace at risk." The statement from the studios' bargaining agent, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, came hours after a SAG delegation delivered its formal response to an offer the studios had presented last week as a take-or-leave proposition. The contract at issue covers the work of 120,000 SAG members in prime-time television and movies, an industry still recovering from a 14-week screenwriters strike that ended in February. "The refusal of SAG's Hollywood leadership to accept this offer is the latest in a series of actions by SAG leaders that, in our opinion, puts labor peace at risk," the producers alliance said. The industry group called again on SAG's leaders to submit the offer, a package the studios say is worth $250 million in additional compensation to actors over three years, to the union's rank-and-file for a ratification vote. "The last thing we need is a long, hot summer of labor strife," the producers said in their statement. There was no immediate word from SAG on the outcome of Thursday's meeting. The studios' latest offer to SAG essentially mirrors the terms of a separate TV-only deal ratified on Tuesday by members of the smaller American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or AFTRA. The AFTRA deal won approval despite an all-out campaign by SAG to persuade some 40,000 of its members who belong to both unions to reject the settlement, which SAG leaders have branded as inadequate. As of this week, SAG leaders have downplayed the likelihood of calling a strike, a move that would take weeks to organize and require a 75 percent vote by members. (Reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte) http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...47597820080711 Aftra Votes for Deal With Hollywood Producers Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes Members of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists approved their new contract with Hollywood’s major production companies by a solid margin on Tuesday, dealing a blow to the efforts of another actors’ union that is holding out for substantially better terms. Leaders of the federation said members ratified the deal with 62.4 percent approval in a vote that concluded late Tuesday evening. The margin of approval was smaller than the overwhelming endorsements typical of union ratification votes. The federation declined to give an exact vote count, citing longstanding practice. But the margin was large enough to create a migraine for the Screen Actors Guild, the dominant actors’ union with some 120,000 members. The guild has been demanding higher pay, an increase in payments connected to DVD sales, restrictions on the placement of commercial products in shows and movies and a bigger take from the use of their work in new media. S.A.G. members have been working without a contract for the last week, even as their negotiators ponder what producers termed a final offer. The guild has not yet taken a strike authorization vote — a process that might take weeks and would require 75 percent approval. That level would be difficult to achieve now that so many actors have already approved the Aftra pact, which stops short of guild demands. About 75 percent of Aftra’s 70,000 members are actors. Those figures suggest that a large number of actors are weary of Hollywood’s labor unrest and are not eager for a new strike. About 40,000 actors belong to both Aftra and S.A.G. Alan Rosenberg, S.A.G.’s president, said in a statement: “Clearly many Screen Actors Guild members responded to our education and outreach campaign and voted against the inadequate Aftra agreement.” He added, “We will continue to address the issues of importance to actors that Aftra left on the table.” On Tuesday, S.A.G. was dealing with what two board members described as deepening internal dissent. More moderate members, which include many top-earning actors, were arguing that an Aftra ratification by any margin erased S.A.G.’s bargaining power, while more militant leaders held fast to the position that a contract approval by the smaller union was not a death blow. Regardless, S.A.G.’s leaders are now left with a set of tough choices: They can risk a strike authorization vote that might not pass, concede points they have been pressing for months or prolong the current uncertainty despite the growing impatience of many union workers whose income is evaporating as production slows down. A guild spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment. In brief statements on Tuesday, the guild and the producers’ alliance said the actors would respond to the companies’ latest offer at a meeting on Thursday. On May 28, Aftra reached a tentative deal with producers, which became the focal point of a bitter public dispute with S.A.G. The guild urged Aftra members to reject the contract as a way of pressuring the companies to sweeten terms that have now been accepted in substantially similar form by the Directors Guild of America, the Writers Guild of America East and the Writers Guild of America West. Prominent performers weighed in on all sides. Tom Hanks spoke for the Aftra deal, Sean Penn campaigned against it, and George Clooney had a middle response, proposing that actor pay be reviewed annually by a panel of big stars. While the cut-and-thrust continues, Hollywood has been edging forward on makeshift production schedules aimed at suspending movie and television shoots should the actors strike. In announcing Tuesday’s results, Roberta Reardon, national president of the federation, said her union was planning steps to close its rift with S.A.G. The two unions had negotiated jointly for years before differences over goals and process caused a separation in recent months. Those steps included a planned meeting of performers and union leaders and a proposal that various guilds coordinate efforts before any new contract talks. Aftra will also promise to review measures that may lead to a resumption of joint negotiations with S.A.G. before a pair of contracts with commercial producers expires in the fall. At the same time, Ms. Reardon made clear that she resented the attack by Mr. Rosenberg and his associates on her union’s dealings. In a statement, she thanked members of her union who endorsed the new contract in the face of what she called “potential retribution” by its opponents. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/bu...a/09aftra.html Studios, SAG Still Can't Agree AMPTP says SAG rejected offer; guild says it didn't Leslie Simmons After a five-hour meeting between SAG and the studios Thursday, Hollywood is in the very same place it has been since talks started April 15: without a new actors contract. The studios said Thursday that SAG officially rejected their final offer. The guild says it didn't. "The refusal of SAG's Hollywood leadership to accept this offer is the latest in a series of actions by SAG leaders that puts labor peace at risk," the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television said in a strongly worded statement after talks broke off just before 7:30 p.m. The studios said the guild was "unreasonably" seeking more than other unions and that they're not interested in further negotiations. "We believe the bargaining is continuing," Alan Rosenberg countered in a terse statment that reflected a diametrically opposed interpretation of the meeting at the AMPTP headquarters in Sherman Oaks. "We did not reject their offer," SAG's chief negotiator Doug Allen said. "We made a comprehensive counterproposal that adopted some of their proposals and offered alternatives on others. A studio source said the counterproposal contained dozens of changes to the AMPTP's offer, including a continued push for more DVD residuals, product integration proposals and new-media residuals "These counterproposals could've been done over the last five weeks," AMPTP spokesman Jesse Hiestand said. "SAG wasted the last five weeks fighting with AFTRA. Allen said he would not discuss the particular proposals anywhere but at the bargaining table with the AMPTP. "We're disappointed with SAG not accepting our final offer, and we're calling on SAG to have its membership vote on the final offer," Hiestand said. A SAG spokeswoman said it's not up to the studios to decide how and when SAG's members should ratify a contract. No new talks were scheduled. In a two-sentence official statement, SAG said its negotiating committee members presented the AMPTP with their response to the producers' proposal and that its bargaining committee would meet today to discuss the AMPTP's response. The conflicting views of what transpired Thursday are not the result of a misunderstanding. Rather, they reflect the two sides' strategic jockeying as they try to bring their increasingly acrimonious talks to an endgame. If the two sides reach an impasse the studios have the right to impose all or part of its final offer on the guild, which is working without a contract but working under its conditions. Thus, it's now very much in the studios' interest to declare the talks deadlocked. The guild can avoid imposed conditions as long as bargaining is continuing. Early in the afternoon SAG officials delivered a roughly 30-minute formal response to the studios so-called "last, best and final" offer, and the two sides then peeled off into a series of private caucuses and sidebar meetings. News crews milled about outside AMPTP headquarters, but neither side issued any indication of how talks were proceeding. It was the groups' first face-to-face sit-down since AFTRA's members ratified their contract Tuesday. It's also the fourth major labor negotiation that the AMPTP has been caught up in during the past nine months. Actress Connie Stevens, who is on the SAG negotiating board, was spotted smiling outside the proceedings late in the afternoon catching a breath of fresh air. "There's always talking and room for understanding, and we're doing our best," she told The Reporter. "There's great people on both sides, a lot of dedicated people on both sides, and I'm optimistic." Her optimism, however, was mixed with some frustration, as she said she couldn't understand how "people can get stuck on the smallest things and smallest amounts that a couple of years ago I would have pitched in and paid for myself." The AMPTP's offer was delivered June 30, after 42 days of negotiating and just hours before SAG's contract expired. Tuesday's ratification of AFTRA's primetime/TV contract, which the studio said mirrors those signed off on by the WGA and DGA and offered to SAG, has put added pressure on SAG to reach a deal. Included in that offer was an Aug. 15 deadline for SAG to ratify the deal so that it could be retroactively put in place. The deadline came to light this week, but was something that has always been in the offer and that SAG is aware of since it was first made, Allen said. The AMPTP sees the retroactive offer deadline as an incentive for the guild. "It's a good way for them to get paid what they've missed so far since the contract has expired," Hiestand said. What would happen after Aug. 15 remains to be seen. The AMPTP has indicated that the impasse process is a lengthy one, in which the studios would have to prove to the National Labor Relations Board that any further meetings with SAG would be fruitless. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...65edac15?imw=Y Cannes Success Gives Italian Cinema a Boost Elisabetta Povoledo When two Italian films won the top runner-up prizes at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the reaction at home was akin to that usually reserved for victorious national soccer teams. The news media went wild. “The Italian redemption,” the critic Natalia Aspesi wrote in a front-page article in the Rome daily La Repubblica, lavishly praising the two films for their clean break from the spiritless cinema that had taken root in Italy in recent years. “Gomorrah,” Matteo Garrone’s unblinking exposé of the Neapolitan underworld, won the grand prix, and “Il Divo” (subtitled “The Extraordinary Life of Giulio Andreotti”), Paolo Sorrentino’s unflattering portrait of the man who was prime minister of Italy seven times, took home the jury prize. Intellectuals jumped on the bandwagon, pronouncing the birth of a new movement that some dubbed neo-neorealism, in homage to the golden postwar era when directors like Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica and Federico Fellini captivated audiences and critics alike. “You can call it neo or whatever you want,” said Caterina d’Amico, chief executive of RAI Cinema, a division of the national broadcaster RAI, which helped finance “Gomorrah.” “The fact is that great Italian cinema is rooted in reality. At the heart is a way of looking at the world or a person or society for what it is.” Americans, she added, “are good at telling dreams; we’re good at telling reality.” The last time Italy won two top prizes at Cannes was in 1972, when two films that also skewered contemporary Italy shared the highest award, the Palme d’Or: Francesco Rosi’s “Mattei Affair” and Elio Petri’s “Working Class Goes to Heaven.” Mostly, though, many critics and industry experts see the recent recognition at Cannes as a positive sign that after a protracted dark age, periodically brightened by hits that turned out to be flashes in the pan, Italian cinema is finally back on track. “The fact that two fine and important films won gives resonance to both films,” said Irene Bignardi, the president of Filmitalia, which promotes Italian cinema abroad. The films were not made in a vacuum, she noted, but “emerged from an overall situation that is quite bright.” Ms. Bignardi had just returned from New York and the eighth edition of the Open Roads film festival, which showcases emerging Italian talents. “There’s a new generation of directors in Italy making interesting and entertaining films that look at reality through a very personal lens,” she said. For many years independent Italian cinema languished under the often justified allegation that its excessive navel-gazing held little appeal beyond the country’s borders. But while “Gomorrah” and “Il Divo” deal with distinctly Italian themes, they use a narrative and visual language that is decidedly international, and that, critics concur, accounts for their success at Cannes. Mr. Sorrentino, the director of “Il Divo,” said the “novelty of the language” of his film, which uses a raucous soundtrack and lush, innovative cinematography to turn Mr. Andreotti’s story into a larger meditation on power, “has given this film a life outside Italy.” Distribution rights have been sold to several European countries, including France and Britain. At home “Il Divo,” which cost about $6.7 million to make, has grossed about that much in its first six weeks. “Gomorrah,” which cost about $6.2 million, has made about $15 million since its release in mid-May (second only to the latest “Indiana Jones” installment). That flush bottom line could have a long-term effect on the Italian film industry in general. “Until this spring producers were oriented toward comedies because they make money,” Mr. Sorrentino said. “But after Cannes another mind-set kicked in, making producers realize that it’s possible to produce independent films without losing” a great deal of money. “I think it’s a good starting point,” he added. Weeks after their release on hundreds of screens, “Gomorrah” and “Il Divo” are still playing on dozens. By comparison, Francesco Munzi’s “Resto Della Notte,” a biting snapshot of Italian middle-class wealth and immigrant violence that also showed at Cannes, was playing on only 61 screens when it opened in June, which is far more typical of independent films here. (“But 10 years ago it would only have played in two,” Ms. d’Amico said.) The Cannes awards have also stoked the never-ending debate on the Italian model of public financing for films, an approach that has been as vehemently criticized as a system of private patronage using public money as it has been praised post-Cannes. A report published in May by the Italian screenwriters’ association underscored the “primary importance” of the state in keeping reels rolling in Italy. (Television has also been a significant investor, since a 1994 law mandated that a percentage of advertising revenue had to be invested in film production.) Drafted “as a response to attacks in the national press that the public financing is a thing of the past,” said Alessandro Rossetti, a board member of the association and one of the authors of the study, the report also suggests that loans made to support Italian films are ultimately repaid through indirect conduits, like value-added tax and income tax. Each winning film received money from the state, “which shows that Italy’s cultural and industrial policy regarding film works and bears fruit,” said Andrea Occhipinti of Lucky Red, an Italian production and distribution company that co-produced “Il Divo.” He said that the film, “like most important Italian films of recent years,” could not have been made without public money. What is not in dispute is the effect an important prize has on box office fortunes. The classic example is Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso,” which opened on a limited number of screens and made a pittance, Mr. Rossetti said. It was rereleased after it won a grand jury prize at Cannes in 1989 and an Oscar in 1990 and went on, he said, to “become a huge box office hit.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/movies/09film.html Great Photo on Flickr? Getty Images Might Pay You For It Miguel Helft If you are a photographer with high-quality images posted on Yahoo’s Flickr service, you may soon get an e-mail inviting you to become a paid contributor to Getty Images, the world’s largest distributor of pictures and video. Yahoo and Getty Images said Tuesday that they have entered into a partnership under which Getty editors will comb Flickr in search of interesting images. They will then invite photographers to participate in the program and ensure that their images have the proper releases to be licensed legally. Those who are included in the program will get paid at the same rates that Getty pays photographers who are under contract with the company. “We believe that Flickr will be an important addition to the mix that we have,” said Jonathan Klein, co-founder and chief executive of Getty Images. Mr. Klein said Flickr photographers will increase the depth of Getty’s catalog on certain subjects and certain regions of the world. And they will be bringing an element that professional photography often lacks, he said. “Because the imagery is not shot for commercial services, there is more authenticity,” Mr. Klein said. “Advertisers are looking for authenticity.” Getty will make payments to Flickr, but detailed terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Mr. Klein said that financially the deal will be immaterial for both Yahoo and Getty Images. Over time, however, thousands of Flickr photographers may benefit. Mr. Klein said that Getty charges on average between $500 and $600 for “rights managed” images, which are used by a customer exclusively for a period of time. Photographers get between 30 percent and 40 percent of that. The company charges on average of $250 for non-exclusive use of images and gives photographers a 20 percent cut of that, Mr. Klein said. Getty also runs a site called iStockPhoto, where amateurs contribute photos that the company markets at lower rates. The photos on Flickr are of sufficent quality to demand higher prices, Mr. Klein said. “It is a real testament to the quality of the photography on Flickr,” said Kakul Srivastava, general manager of Flickr. The program will be rolled out in the coming months, and all Flickr photographers will be eligible to participate. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...-it/index.html An Artist of the Cutting-Room Floor Manohla Dargis Bruce Conner's ecstatic films — fabricated from bits of old documentaries and educational reels, from mass-cultural snips and snails and recycled movie tales — were at once salvage projects and assertions of individuality in an increasingly anonymous age. In their modest way (modesty, in this case, being less a virtue than a worldview), they were acts of resistance, an aesthetic rejoinder to a world drowning in its own image. Just as important, they are generally a blast — witty, exuberant, despairing, engaged, apocalyptic. As it happens, a real blast figures large in his most famous film, “A Movie,” which was also made under a (mushroom) cloud in 1958, the year a B-47 lost a hydrogen bomb off the coast of Georgia and a second B-47 accidentally dropped an atom bomb in South Carolina. (No one was killed, but yikes.) There are jokey sections in “A Movie,” funny if sinister laughs, but mostly there are found-footage wipeouts and crashes, firing guns and dropping bodies and that very big bomb. An elephant dies, and Mussolini shows up dead. As a chronicle of the first half of the 20th century, the film takes you down, down, down, even as its kinetic editing brings you up, up, up. Mr. Conner, who died on Monday at 74 after a long illness, made some two dozen films. Even if you think you’ve never seen any of them — “A Movie,” “Cosmic Ray,” “Report,” “Mongoloid” — you probably have, if only by proxy, because of their influence and cultural dispersion. (Generally short, they make for friendly viewing, if deeper thinking, which is why they show up in college courses.) Dennis Hopper has said that the editing of “Easy Rider,” his wiggy 1969 generational cri de coeur, was directly influenced by Mr. Conner. For better and sometimes worse, scores of other filmmakers in both the avant-garde and the commercial mainstream have been influenced by Mr. Conner’s shocking juxtapositions and propulsive, rhythmically sophisticated montage. MTV should have paid him royalties. Mr. Conner was already a critically recognized assemblage artist when he turned to cinema in his mid-20s. In his hands film became an extension of assemblage and, arguably, an elaboration. Where once he used physical detritus like scraps of lace and junk to make art, he now used old Hollywood movies, newsreels and stock footage. Where once his materials included nylon stockings, they now included a clip of Marilyn Monroe (or a lookalike). Mr. Conner used that Marilyn image early in “A Movie” for a startling sequence that features a man peering through a periscope, a submarine discharging a torpedo, and an exploding nuclear bomb. With a few deft edits, he transformed innocuous cheesecake into a disquieting riff on annihilation. Somewhat paradoxically, while Mr. Conner liked to say that an inspiration for “A Movie” was the Marx Brothers’ comedy “Duck Soup,” even this teenage favorite had its dark lining. “There’s a war going on,” he explained to an interviewer in 1976, “and Groucho tells Harpo that we need help, and he runs out and puts a ‘Help Wanted’ sign on the front of the building. Then you start seeing all these tanks, and airplanes, and soldiers, and porpoises, and giraffes — I don’t know — all sorts of creatures and things rushing to help them.” He added, “After that I started thinking about all the things I could stick together in a sequence like that: elephants running, trains blowing up, cars going, cars crashing, and so on and so forth.” It wasn’t all crashes, wipeouts and dead presidents. (His 1963-67 film “Report” explores the image-exploitation of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.) His 1966 “Breakaway,” for instance, features his original footage of the singer and choreographer Antonia Christina Basilotta, a k a Toni Basil, dancing dressed and undressed, in forward and backward motion, to her rendition of the catchy song of the title. (“I’m gonna breakaway, breakaway from the everyday.”) On one level, the black-and-white film recalls Eadweard Muybridge’s early motion studies — Ms. Basil’s joy in her own physicality is glorious — but it’s particularly self-conscious and liberated. In contrast to Muybridge’s subjects, she looks as if she’s having the time of her life, her hair whipping and body thrashing in perfect harmony with Mr. Conner’s staccato and strobe-like editing. She’s a different kind of explosion. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/movies/12conn.html Talk of Isolation and Expectations Follows a Young Model’s Death in New York Cara Buckley There was a grim inevitability to the questions that followed that dark moment in Lower Manhattan last Saturday when a young woman known as the “Russian Rapunzel” tumbled to the earth. The woman, Ruslana Korshunova, was 20, and her nine-story fall from her apartment balcony on Water Street was ruled a suicide by the police. It was a conclusion that Ms. Korshunova’s family and friends passionately refute, largely because they believe she may have slipped. Regardless of what caused Ms. Korshunova’s fall, her death set off a small media storm. Ms. Korshunova was a model; young and beautiful, she had worked for some of the world’s top designers. Some wondered whether the pressures of her industry, riddled with tales of young women succumbing to depression, anorexia and drugs, had something to do with her death. After all, in popular imaginings, models lead opulent and edgy lives: being fawned over by older, richer men, partying all night, jetting around the world. All of which might seem a little much for a young woman like Ms. Korshunova, who was in a fiercely competitive city far from home — in her case, Kazakhstan — and barely out of her teens. Yet many people in the industry say that that image of models is a stereotype that often has little in common with reality. Instead, they say, the biggest peril that afflicts foreign models in New York City is a far more ordinary one: loneliness. “A lot of these girls are very young, they’re still learning English, and they’re expected to be on their own and grow up overnight, basically,” said Megan Walsh, a studio manager for the fashion photographer Craig McDean. “They’re not ready. I used to be a model scout, and that’s why I got out of it. One day it just hit me; I was like, ‘I can’t believe we’re taking these young girls from their small towns, be they in Ohio or Estonia. They’re not given a chance to be kids and grow up.’ ” In recent years, the popularity of models from Russia and Eastern Europe has soared, supplanting the zeal for Brazilian women ushered in by the supermodel Gisele Bündchen about eight years ago. Sciascia Gambaccini, who was the fashion director for Jane magazine, now defunct, said that a big part of what has made Russian and Central and Eastern European models so appealing was how seriously they took their jobs. Many of the young women come from humble beginnings, and send a good chunk of their earnings home. “People love working with Eastern European girls; they’re hard working, and they’re beautiful,” Ms. Gambaccini said. “I worked in fashion during the ’80s. Now girls are much smarter, and maybe even better business girls.” Unlike the hard-partying models of the past, Ms. Gambaccini and Ms. Walsh said that while there were still models who stayed up all night, they could not recall the last time a model showed up late for a shoot. “The successful ones, the ones that we work with, that we’re shooting Dior campaigns with, those girls are not going out and partying,” said Ms. Walsh, who had worked with Ms. Korshunova and described her as “very, very sweet.” “They treat it like a business,” she said. “They keep healthy.” Foreign models in the city do have support networks. Models from Russia or Eastern Europe tend to stick together. Irina Miccoli, 20, a Russian model who divides her time between South Africa and New York, described the cliques of foreign models in the city as “mini societies.” “And it’s a big help,” she said. Fashion agencies also often ensure that younger models are accompanied to shoots by their mothers or other caretakers, and they assign under-age models to live with other models, as well as a chaperone. Iulia Cirstea, 20, a Romanian who recently moved into a models’ apartment on the East Side, said she rarely felt alone. She also draws support from the in-house chaperone. “She’s like a mommy to all of us,” Ms. Cirstea said. Still, the challenge of working in a foreign land and not speaking English can be especially isolating. Dasha Vlasenko, 26, an Estonian-born model who lives on the Upper East Side, said younger models often pined for home. “I see girls being constantly very homesick,” she said. And competition is fierce in New York, where a premium is placed on young women who fit a certain fashion mold. Anine Bing, 25, a Danish-born model, left New York after four months, after being told that she was too shapely and too short, and that her looks were more suited to California. “New York’s like the toughest place in the world,” said Ms. Bing, who now lives in Los Angeles. “All the top models are there, and you have to be super tall and super skinny. It was too tough for me. I couldn’t handle — I couldn’t handle the pressure.” At 5 feet 8 inches, Ms. Korshunova was on the shorter side for a model. Yet she landed highly coveted work, shooting a perfume commercial for Nina Ricci and appearing in a DKNY ad and on the covers of French Elle and Russian Vogue. Working for IMG Models, which represents some of the world’s highest-earning models, including Ms. Bündchen, Heidi Klum and Kate Moss, she was most likely earning a six-figure salary, people in the industry said, and perhaps $7,000 a shoot. Still, she was not in the coveted top rung occupied by models whose faces are universally known. “It can provide an extreme high when you’re doing very well, but it can also provide an extreme low,” said Jesper Lannung, a model who also runs Modelshotel.com, a social networking Web site. “It can be very lonely. You’re pushed in different ways. There’s a lot of expectations, and you’re expected to maintain a certain image.” Ms. Korshunova’s death has caused some reflection in an industry long seen as superficial. “There’s not one person I know in this business that has not said, ‘This is really upsetting and tragic, and what a horrible thing,’ ” said Neal Hamil, director of Elite Model Management’s North America operations. “And everyone has taken a harder look at young girls, asking: ‘Are you O.K.? Is there anything you want to talk about? Because you can tell us anything.’ ” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/ny.../05models.html Dorian Leigh, Multifaceted Cover Girl of the ’40s, Dies at 91 Douglas Martin  Dorian Leigh, who combined pristine blue eyes, curling eyelashes, an arresting intelligence and intoxicating sexuality to become one of history’s most photographed models — perhaps the first to truly merit the adjective super — died Monday in Falls Church, Va. She was 91. The death was announced by her grandson Thibaut Dubois. Ms. Leigh graced seven Vogue covers in 1946, according to a New Yorker magazine article of the time, and in the next six years appeared on more than 50 more covers of various magazines, Playbill reported. Her images in Revlon’s “Fire and Ice” nail polish and lipstick campaign in the 1950s — “For you who love to flirt with fire ...who dare to skate on thin ice” — were shot by Richard Avedon and became Madison Avenue legend. “Dorian was truly the best model of our time,” Eileen Ford, the doyenne of the modeling agency industry, said in an interview with The Roanoke Times in 1997. “She instinctively knew what every photographer wanted, and she came alive just at the moment the shutter clicked.” Cecil Beaton wrote in his book “Photobiography” (1951) that Ms. Leigh was as demanding as the eminent photographers who shot her, including Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Irving Penn. He said she could convey many moods, including “the sweetness of an 18-century pastel, the allure of a Sargent portrait, of the poignancy of some unfortunate woman who sat for Modigliani.” Ms. Leigh’s mystique was enhanced by her many romances, which included five marriages — counting the one in Mexico to a Spanish marquis who turned out to be already married. There were also the many real or imagined affairs with famous writers, musicians and photographers, eagerly tabulated by gossip columnists. Ms. Leigh was definitely attractive, standing 5 feet 5 inches, with an hourglass figure and an alluring smile. “She had so much estrogen, like some men are full of testosterone,” Carmen Dell’Orefice, who started modeling in 1945, a year before Ms. Leigh, said in an interview with Vanity Fair in 2006. “Dorian was so sexy without saying a word. And she was her own person.” Truman Capote called his friend Ms. Leigh “Happy-Go-Lucky,” and she had many similarities to Holly Golightly, the heroine of Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” — not least what Vanity Fair called her wayward lifestyle and reckless bravado. (Gerald Clarke, Capote’s biographer, cautioned skepticism about this resemblance: “Half the women he knew, and a few he did not, claimed to be the model for his wacky heroine,” he wrote in 1988.) It is incontrovertible that Ms. Leigh paved the way for her youngest sister, Suzy Parker, to become a supermodel, one who possibly eclipsed even Ms. Leigh. According to Vanity Fair, Ms. Leigh called Ms. Ford and made an offer that Ms. Ford was forever glad she accepted. “I will come to your agency if you’ll tell me now you’ll take my little sister Suzy sight unseen,” she said. Ms. Parker died in 2003. Dorian Parker was born on April 23, 1917, in San Antonio. Her daughter Young Eve Paciello said her middle name was Leigh, contradicting published reports that she picked up that name in adulthood on the advice of a numerologist. The family later moved to Queens, where her father, a chemist and inventor, concocted an improved form of etching acid that made him rich. Ms. Leigh attended what was then Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Va., majoring in English. While there, she married Marshall Hawkins, with whom she had two children; they were divorced in 1937. She later studied calculus at New York University and got a job working for the Navy doing mechanical drafting. She next worked for the Eastern Aircraft Corporation, helping design airplane wings, beginning at 65 cents an hour and ending up at a dollar. When her eyes bothered her, she took a job with Republic Pictures as an apprentice copywriter. There are many stories of how she fell into modeling, but all begin with her finding her way to the Harry Conover Agency. Mr. Conover advised her to go immediately to Harper’s Bazaar and tell the editor, Diana Vreeland, that she was 19. (She was 27.) The first thing Ms. Vreeland said was never to touch her exquisite zigzag eyebrows. Dahl-Wolfe photographed her the next morning wearing a little black tulle hat trimmed with a pink rose. Ms. Leigh was on the cover of the June 1944 Harper’s Bazaar. Soon she was making $1 a minute, which she said astounded her. Her father insisted she drop the name Parker, because he did not approve of modeling. (Ms. Leigh’s success caused him to change his mind about Suzy.) Besides her daughter Ms. Paciello, of Northport, Ala., from her second marriage, Ms. Leigh is survived by a son from her first marriage, T. L. Hawkins of McLean, Va.; and a daughter from her marriage to Serge Bordat, Miranda Bordat; three grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren. A daughter from her marriage to Mr. Hawkins, Marsha Lynn Smith, died in the early 1990s. A son, Kim Blas Parker, from her liaison with the Spanish racing-car driver and athlete Alfonso Cabeza de Vaca, marquis of Portago, committed suicide in 1977 at 21. Her last husband was Iddo Ben-Gurion, whom she married in 1964 and divorced two years later. After modeling, Ms. Leigh opened what is usually called the first modeling agency in Paris, ran gourmet restaurants in France and had successful catering operations in the United States, among other endeavors. She wrote several books about food, including one about pancakes and another featuring fritters. Perhaps mindful of models’ concerns about diet, she included a recipe in the fritter book for low-fat, low-cholesterol chocolate doughnuts. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/arts/09leigh.html Nude Girl Art Row Flares in Australia The Art Monthly cover photo, featuring Olympia Nelson and taken by her mother Melbourne photographer Polixeni Papapetrou A photograph of a nude six-year-old girl on the cover of a high-brow Australian art magazine today sparked an uproar after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called it disgusting, infuriating liberal art critics. This month's taxpayer-funded Art Monthly Australia magazine placed the photograph of the young dark-haired girl on the cover, sitting and with one nipple showing, to protest censorship of a recent photo exhibition featuring similarly naked children. "I can't stand this stuff," said Rudd, a staunch Christian whose centre-left Labor government won a sweeping victory over conservatives last year, in part on a vow to reinvigorate Australia's small but influential arts community. "We're talking about the innocence of little children here. A little child cannot answer for themselves about whether they wish to be depicted in this way," Rudd added, as officials said they would review the magazine's funding. Magazine editor Maurice O'Riordan said he hoped the July edition of the monthly magazine would restore "dignity to the debate" about artistic depictions of children and anyone else. The magazine cover followed confiscation by police in May of photographs of a young girl taken by artist Bill Henson and briefly on display in a Sydney art gallery. The cover photo, which had been on public exhibition in Australia for some time, was taken in 2003 by Melbourne photographer Polixeni Papapetrou and depicted her own daughter, Olympia Nelson, now aged 11. The Australian Childhood Foundation said parents had no ethical right to consent to nude photographs being taken of their children, as it could have a psychological impact in later years. But Nelson and her father, art critic and professor Robert Nelson, defended the photo in a press conference outside their home in the southern city of Melbourne. "I love the photo so much. I think that the picture my mum took of me had nothing to do with being abused, and I think nudity can be a part of art," Olympia Nelson said. Rudd last week met with the leaders of Australia's six states and said he would forge a national child protection system following a spate of shocking cases of child neglect and abuse. His government also criticised Australia's "binge drinking" culture and sharply lifted taxes on so-called "alcopops" blending alcoholic drinks like vodka or rum with soft drinks and juices, making them popular with young adults, especially women. "We're sick of being unjustly targeted by a small minority group of wowsers," Australian Hotels Association chief executive Sally Fielke said, using an Australian term for an excessively puritanical person. Fielke represents mainly the $25bn local alcohol industry, but her thoughts echoed those of many social commentators and liberals. Martyn Jolly, the head of photography and media arts at the elite Australian National University, said of the latest art controversy that the Henson photographs had been reviewed and approved by government censors. "We aren't going to let politicians who are always wanting to jump on populous bandwagons dictate what we can and can't show," Jolly said. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...ia-861720.html Qwest to Block Known Child Porn Internet Sites Jasa Santos Qwest Communications will now block customer access to known child pornography Web sites through a voluntary agreement with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "Our agreement with the national center really helps us advocate for children and online safety," said Qwest spokeswoman Johnna Hoff. The national center works with law enforcement to identify and list Web sites containing child pornography. Qwest will use that list to block customer access to those sites. Hoff said Qwest has already created several other programs that address Internet safety for its customers. The agreement with the national center is a continuation of that process, she said. "This is our way of working with the national center to protect customers and help combat online child exploitation," Hoff said. Other area Internet service providers offer security measures for customers, though they don't specifically block child pornography cites. Bresnan's vice president of public affairs said the company is cautious about channel blocking due to concerns about First Amendment rights of customers, technological issues and proper identification of sites. Shawn Beqaj said the company offers Bresnan Safety Net, a comprehensive child safety program. The program offers free Internet blocking software to parents, offered free digital identification of children and offers resources, tools and information to its customers. "Internet safety, and particularly Internet safety with children, is the paramount concern that we have," Beqaj said. "From a perspective of an Internet service provider, it is our primary concern. The Internet itself is a phenomenal tool, but with it comes responsibility." Beqaj said Bresnan also recently worked with the national center to provide all its employees with a wireless Amber Alert system. "That's a really specific way where we can become part of the solution here," Beqaj said. Like Bresnan, wyoming.com is respectful of a customer's First Amendment rights, said Chris Robisch, the director of interconnection and public policy for the site and Contact Communications. Customers of wyoming.com sign acceptable use agreements at the beginning of their service, Robisch said. If the agreement is violated, the company can terminate Internet services. The company also adheres to all federal regulations and complies with federal investigations into customers suspected of visiting inappropriate sites. "Our position has been and continues to be the First Amendment is important, and we acknowledge that," Robisch said. "At this time, we do not block any content. However, that doesn't say that we allow it.". http://www.trib.com/articles/2008/07...7e007d4326.txt NY Attorney General Gets More ISPs to Block alt.* Newsgroups John Timmer Last month, the New York state Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, announced that a sting operation had uncovered an indifference on the part of Internet service providers regarding complaints about child porn accessible through their networks. Using a combination of legal threats and public shaming, Cuomo was able to get three ISPs to drop access to the entire alt.* hierarchy of Usenet, a move that encouraged California to request similar measures. Now, in a sign that these efforts against child porn were becoming a movement, Cuomo has announced the launch of a web site, nystopchildporn and agreements with two more ISPs. AOL is the subject of one of the new agreements, which isn't much of a surprise, given that its corporate sibling, Time Warner Cable, had already signed on with Cuomo. It will apparently require no changes on its part, as CNET reports that the company had already implemented a policy of blocking child porn access. AT&T is the other, and, given that it's apparently the US' largest service provider, it represents a significant accomplishment for the AG. Apparently, AT&T's efforts will be as indiscriminate as those pursued by Verizon, in that they plan on blocking access to the entire alt.binaries.* hierarchy. Cuomo's new web site signifies that he's clearly not done yet. It includes contact information for 20 ISPs that presumably operate in New York, and text of a letter to send to them to urge that they sign on to the campaign. Its promised link to a printable PDF of the letter, however, is nonfunctional. Regardless of how you feel about Cuomo's efforts or the implementation of his agreements by the ISPs, it's difficult to interpret the new site as anything more than an effort in self promotion. Its intent is signaled by the entry page, which is entitled "Press Releases" and contains an animation that rotates through four photos of Cuomo announcing the site's launch. Three of the four sentences in the draft letter to ISPs include Cuomo's name, and the fourth refers to him by his title. The letter is also notable for the fact that it no longer focuses on the actual accessibility of child porn via the ISP, and instead simply requests they join in Cuomo's campaign. The rapid shift of focus from an identifiable problem to a high-publicity campaign seems as likely to produce cynicism as it is to lead to progress on the underlying issue. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ewsgroups.html Blumenthal Wants Video Game Ratings Change after Beer Pong Game AP Connecticut's attorney general wants a video games rating board to change its methods so games involving alcohol aren't recommended to minors. Richard Blumenthal says the Entertainment Software Rating Board made a mistake by clearing a game called Beer Pong for minors as young as 13 years old. The game is made by Las Vegas-based JV Games Inc., and designed for Nintendo Co.'s popular Wii game system. JV Games officials say they're renaming the game Pong Toss and eliminating all references to alcohol. The Entertainment Software Rating Board's president justified the rating of the original Beer Pong game, saying that alcohol played a minimal role in the game and nobody was shown drinking beer. http://www.newstimes.com/latestnews/ci_9808079 Google Faces 'Street View Block' Google's plans to launch a mapping tool in the UK could be referred to the Information Commissioner. Street View matches photos of locations to maps, including passers-by who were captured as the photograph was taken. Privacy International, a UK rights group, believes the technology breaks data protection laws. "In our view they need a person's consent if they make use of a person's face for commercial ends," said Simon Davis of the group. Street View has already been launched in the US and includes photos of streets in major American cities. Photographing of areas in the UK, including London, is believed to have started this week. Some individuals in the US have complained about their images being used and Google has said it removed their presence on request. The company has said it had begun to trial face blurring technology, using an algorithm that detects human faces in photographs. But Privacy International says it has doubts about the technology. It has written to the search giant and asked for technical information about the system. If the group does not get the answer it seeks within seven days, Mr Davies said it would write to the Information Commissioner seeking a suspension of the service in the UK. "We've spoken to Google in the past about this and received a snide response telling us to look more closely at their blogs. "We've been told by engineers at Google that the technology is not ready to be deployed." In the US it is legal to take photos of people on public streets. But Mr Davies believes that because Street View is being used for commercial ends anyone in the UK who appears in the photo needs to grant his or her consent. Google has said it complies with all local laws. In a letter to Jane Horvath, senior privacy counsel at Google, Mr Davies said that Google's track record on deploying technology designed to protect privacy was patchy. He said: "I recall the promise made by Google to the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] during the Doubleclick acquisition that "crumbling cookies" would be developed. "We have seen no evidence that this technology has been deployed. In response to concerns expressed at the time of our 2007 internet privacy rankings, Google also promised a "privacy dashboard" to help consumers understand the functionality of their user settings. This technology has not appeared." Privacy International has also asked Google about "the steps, if any, that you have taken to consult the public over the use of their images for what is, in effect, a commercial purpose". Mr Davies added: "Google likes to think of itself as a global player. In reality it is acting like an irresponsible adolescent. "It's time for the company to take responsibility for its actions and to do the right thing." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7488524.stm 'Public' Online Spaces Don't Carry Speech, Rights Anick Jesdanun Rant all you want in a public park. A police officer generally won't eject you for your remarks alone, however unpopular or provocative. Say it on the Internet, and you'll find that free speech and other constitutional rights are anything but guaranteed. Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors. The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services - from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video - become more central to public discourse around the world. It's a fallout of the Internet's market-driven growth, but possible remedies, including government regulation, can be worse than the symptoms. Dutch photographer Maarten Dors met the limits of free speech at Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) (YHOO)'s photo-sharing service, Flickr, when he posted an image of an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth. Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking. Dors eventually convinced a Yahoo manager that - far from promoting smoking - the photo had value as a statement on poverty and street life in Romania. Yet another employee deleted it again a few months later. "I never thought of it as a photo of a smoking kid," Dors said. "It was just of a kid in Romania and how his life is. You can never make a serious documentary if you always have to think about what Flickr will delete." There may be legitimate reasons to take action, such as to stop spam, security threats, copyright infringement and child pornography, but many cases aren't clear-cut, and balancing competing needs can get thorny. "We often get caught in the middle between a rock and a hard place," said Christine Jones, general counsel with service provider GoDaddy.com Inc. "We're obviously sensitive to the freedoms we have, particularly in this country, to speak our mind, (yet) we want to be good corporate citizens and make the Internet a better and safer place." In Dors' case, the law is fully with Yahoo. Its terms of service, similar to those of other service providers, gives Yahoo "sole discretion to pre-screen, refuse or remove any content." Service providers aren't required to police content, but they aren't prohibited from doing so. While mindful of free speech and other rights, Yahoo and other companies say they must craft and enforce guidelines that go beyond legal requirements to protect their brands and foster safe, enjoyable communities - ones where minors may be roaming. Guidelines help "engender a positive community experience," one to which users will want to return, said Anne Toth, Yahoo's vice president for policy. Dors ultimately got his photo restored a second time, and Yahoo has apologized, acknowledging its community managers went too far. Heather Champ, community director for Flickr, said the company crafts policies based on feedback from users and trains employees to weigh disputes fairly and consistently, though mistakes can happen. "We're humans," she said. "We're pretty transparent when we make mistakes. We have a record of being good about stepping up and fessing up." But that underscores another consequence of having online commons controlled by private corporations. Rules aren't always clear, enforcement is inconsistent, and users can find content removed or accounts terminated without a hearing. Appeals are solely at the service provider's discretion. Users get caught in the crossfire as hundreds of individual service representatives apply their own interpretations of corporate policies, sometimes imposing personal agendas or misreading guidelines. To wit: Verizon Wireless barred an abortion-rights group from obtaining a "short code" for conducting text-messaging campaigns, while LiveJournal suspended legitimate blogs on fiction and crime victims in a crackdown on pedophilia. Two lines criticizing President Bush disappeared from AT&T Inc. (ATT)'s webcast of a Pearl Jam concert. All three decisions were reversed only after senior executives intervened amid complaints. Inconsistencies and mysteries behind decisions lead to perceptions that content is being stricken merely for being unpopular. "As we move more of our communications into social networks, how are we limiting ourselves if we can't see alternative points of view, if we can't see the things that offend us?" asked Fred Stutzman, a University of North Carolina researcher who tracks online communities. First Amendment protections generally do not extend to private property in the physical world, allowing a shopping mall to legally kick out a customer wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a smoking child. With online services becoming greater conduits than shopping malls for public communications, however, some advocacy groups believe the federal government needs to guarantee open access to speech. That, of course, could also invite meddling by the government, the way broadcasters now face indecency and other restrictions that are criticized as vague. Others believe companies shouldn't police content at all, and if they do, they should at least make clearer the rules and the mechanisms for appeal. "Vagueness does not inspire the confidence of people and leaves room for gaming the system by outside groups," said Lauren Weinstein, a veteran computer scientist and Internet activist. "When the rules are clear and the grievance procedures are clear, then people know what they are working with and they at least have a starting point in urging changes in those rules." But Marjorie Heins, director of the Free Expression Policy Project, questions whether the private sector is equipped to handle such matters at all. She said written rules mean little when service representatives applying them "tend to be tone-deaf. They don't see context." At least when a court order or other governmental action is involved, "there's more of a guarantee of due process protections," said Robin Gross, executive director of the civil-liberties group IP Justice. With a private company, users' rights are limited to the service provider's contractual terms of services. Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard professor who recently published a book on threats to the Internet's openness, said parties unhappy with sensitive materials online are increasingly aware they can simply pressure service providers and other intermediaries. "Going after individuals can be difficult. They can be hard to find. They can be hard to sue," Zittrain said. "Intermediaries still have a calculus where if a particular Web site is causing a lot of trouble ... it may not be worth it to them." Unable to stop purveyors of child pornography directly, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo recently persuaded three major access providers to disable online newsgroups that distribute such images. But rather than cut off those specific newsgroups, all three decided to reduce administrative hassles by also disabling thousands of legitimate groups devoted to TV shows, the New York Mets and other topics. Gordon Lyon, who runs a site that archives e-mail postings on security, found his domain name suddenly deactivated because one entry contained MySpace passwords obtained by hackers. He said MySpace went directly to domain provider GoDaddy, which effectively shut down his entire site, rather than contact him to remove the one posting or replace passwords with asterisks. GoDaddy justified such drastic measures, saying that waiting to reach Lyon would have unnecessarily exposed MySpace passwords, including those to profiles of children. Meanwhile, in response to complaints it would not specify, Network Solutions LLC decided to suspend a Web hosting account that Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilders was using to promote a movie that criticizes the Quran - before the movie was even posted and without the company finding any actual violation of its rules. Service providers say unhappy customers can always go elsewhere, but choice is often limited. Many leading services, particularly online hangouts like Facebook and News Corp. (NWS) (NWS)'s MySpace or media-sharing sites such as Flickr and Google Inc. (GOOG) (GOOG)'s YouTube, have acquired a cachet that cannot be replicated. To evict a user from an online community would be like banishing that person to the outskirts of town. Other sites "don't have the critical mass. No one would see it," said Scott Kerr, a member of the gay punk band Kids on TV, which found its profile mysteriously deleted from MySpace last year. "People know that MySpace is the biggest site that contains music." MySpace denies engaging in any censorship and says profiles removed are generally in response to complaints of spam and other abuses. GoDaddy also defends its commitment to speech, saying account suspensions are a last resort. Few service providers actively review content before it gets posted and usually take action only in response to complaints. In that sense, Flickr, YouTube and other sites consider their reviews "checks and balances" against any community mob directed at unpopular speech - YouTube has pointedly refused to delete many video clips tied to Muslim extremists, for instance, because they didn't specifically contain violence or hate speech. Still, should these sites even make such rules? And how can they ensure the guidelines are consistently enforced? YouTube has policies against showing people "getting hurt, attacked or humiliated," banning even clips OK for TV news shows, but how is YouTube to know whether a video clip shows real violence or actors portraying it? Either way, showing the video is legal and may provoke useful discussions on brutality. "Balancing these interests raises very tough issues," YouTube acknowledged in a statement. Unwilling to play the role of arbiter, the group-messaging service Twitter has resisted pressure to tighten its rules. "What counts as name-calling? What counts as making fun of someone in a way that's good-natured?" said Jason Goldman, Twitter's director of program management. "There are sites that do employ teams of people that do that investigation ... but we feel that's a job we wouldn't do well." Other sites are trying to be more transparent in their decisions. Online auctioneer eBay Inc. (EBAY) (EBAY), for instance, has elaborated on its policies over the years, to the extent that sellers can drill down to where they can ship hatching eggs (U.S. addresses only) and what items related to natural disasters are permissible (they must have "substantial social, artistic or political value"). Hypothetical examples accompany each policy. LiveJournal has recently eased restrictions on blogging. The new harassment clause, for instance, expressly lets members state negative feelings or opinions about another, and parodies of public figures are now permitted despite a ban on impersonation. Restrictions on nudity specifically exempt non-sexualized art and breast feeding. The site took the unusual step of soliciting community feedback and setting up an advisory board with prominent Internet scholars such as Danah Boyd and Lawrence Lessig and two user representatives elected in May. The effort comes just a year after a crackdown on pedophilia backfired. LiveJournal suspended hundreds of blogs that dealt with child abuse and sexual violence, only to find many were actually fictional works or discussions meant to protect children. The company's chief executive issued a public apology. Community backlash can restrain service providers, but as Internet companies continue to consolidate and Internet users spend more time using vendor-controlled platforms such as mobile devices or social-networking sites, the community's power to demand free speech and other rights diminishes. Weinstein, the veteran computer scientist, said that as people congregate at fewer places, "if you're knocked off one of those, in a lot of ways you don't exist." http://apnews.myway.com//article/200...D91OGQ680.html Rockwell Re-enlisted for a Nation’s Darker Mood Damien Cave Elliott Earls’s reinterpretation of Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” practically screams. A little girl seems to be crying, her eye bruised, with an American flag in the background and two words framing her figure: “Liberty Weeps.” The color scheme is red, white and blue, but patriotic pride has been supplanted by sadness. “She is begging us with her eyes to take responsibility for our actions as a nation,” Mr. Earls said of his creation in an e-mail message. “And to live up to the greatness embedded in our social fabric by the brilliance of our founding fathers.” Clearly, Rockwell’s America this is not. It is Sunday afternoon at the Aventura Mall in South Florida, and I’ve come to gauge the impact of a handful of images displayed in 14-foot-high posters near Nordstrom. Culled from a surprising new exhibition at the Wolfsonian museum at Florida International University titled “Thoughts on Democracy,” they are all artists’ responses to Rockwell’s wartime “Four Freedoms” series. Sixty artists contributed to the show. But their creations bear little resemblance to the Rockwell paintings, which helped raise $133 million for the war effort in 1943 after the government turned them into posters. There is no folksy man standing up to speak his opinion (exemplifying “Freedom of Speech”), no devout group praying (“Freedom of Worship”) no wholesome family sitting down to a Thanksgiving meal (“Freedom From Want”). And while the fourth freedom, “Freedom From Fear,” does reappear, the message seems ominous. In Guillermo Kuitca’s rendition of Rockwell’s image of parents putting their small children to bed, the family is surrounded by a sea of blackness. In James Victore’s remake, tears burst from the parents’ eyes as they pull an American flag over a wooden coffin. What all of this suggests is not just a reinterpretation of Rockwell but a meditation on an American crisis of self-confidence: the sense that trust in American ideals is giving way to fear and uncertainty about how they are exploited. Culture has long been a documentarian of sorts, and this somber mood is also reflected at the box office these days, where the dystopian world of “Wall-E” is a hit, and in bookstores, where titles like “Are You There, Vodka, It’s Me, Chelsea” are best sellers. Many of the artists interviewed said they felt that now was not the time to emphasize American greatness, as Rockwell did, but rather to caution people about the risks of complacency. They said they created the posters because they loved their country — about two-thirds of the 60 are American — but felt that their fellow citizens needed to wake up, to break free from anxiety and a habit of looking away. In the mall at least, the artists’ instincts seemed to be borne out. In an hour and a half, more than 100 people walked by the exhibit. Only 8 stopped to look. “People don’t care anymore,” said David Babich, 31, one of the few who lingered, gazing at the prints. “They aren’t as affected by stuff that happens.” Rockwell time might not have been entirely different. Nostalgia for World War II has often obscured what the era’s most famous war correspondent, Ernie Pyle, once wrote during a visit home: “A great many people don’t know there’s a war on, or don’t seem to care.” Rockwell’s art, too, has been obscured or whitewashed. His scenes of domestic bliss are far better known than later images like “The Right to Know” (1968), which shows a group of Americans clamoring around an empty chair that is meant to signify government bureaucracy during the Vietnam War. Nonetheless, the divide between battlefront and home front seems to be widening. When I returned from Iraq in January, after reporting there for about 18 months on and off, I found myself stunned by the war’s lack of impact on people’s lives or thoughts. “OURS ... to fight for.” That simple phrase sits atop the Rockwell “Freedom From Want” and “Freedom From Fear” posters. But today, as many returning soldiers have witnessed, that sense of collective responsibility often seems absent, except for the occasional campaign speech. There are no calls to arms among the 80 posters in the Wolfsonian’s show. Those that directly tackle the war — including Mr. Victore’s coffin and Helene Silverman’s poster of a soldier’s face, striped in red and white with the names of other soldiers laid over it — emphasize the losses. Words like “ours” also seem to have disappeared, just as they have from posters on the walls of recruiting offices nationwide and military bases in Iraq. In urging people to sign up or re-enlist, they do not address why “we” fight but rather what “you,” the average 18-year-old, can get from a job in uniform. That has been the government’s pitch for decades. “Back in 1973 when we made the decision to end conscription, part of the Pentagon’s decision was, we’re going to compete in the labor market and we’re going to work with ideas that get people to work for the armed forces,” said David R. Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland. “There was a decision made to downplay values and emphasize economic incentives.” Not surprisingly, many of the Wolfsonian artists blame the Bush administration for discouraging broad-based sacrifice and starting a war that proved to lack a credible cause. Mr. Victore, an independent designer in New York, who comes from a military family and whose father flew refueling missions over Vietnam, said he had been particularly disillusioned by what he sees as the government’s use of fear to drum up support. He said he hoped his poster would remind Americans to raise questions suppressed by anxiety. “A fearful public is a submissive one, and we willingly — with no clear cause submitted as reason — continue into this quagmire,” he said. Many of the images in “Thoughts on Democracy” can also be viewed as a rebuttal of the president’s call after Sept. 11 to keep shopping, lest the terrorists win. In Daniel Arsham’s gray and white poster, “WANT” is a building that towers over everything else. Chip Kidd, a well-known book-jacket designer, produced four posters, with “Freedom From Want” appearing above the image of an obese man’s stomach. The most powerful efforts tackle the tension between the American democratic ideal and its practice. The Map Office, a design studio in New York, produced three unequivocal images. One poster shows democracy as a green goo spread across a pristine landscape; another reads, “kiss the fist of democracy.” A third says, “Democracy is the Helvetica of Politics,” reflecting its ubiquity, openness and adulteration, the artists said. In some images, government seems to be the problem, a seller of enlightenment ideas that have been so used and reused that their meaning has been diminished. In George Mill’s poster, “FREEDOM” comes with a disclaimer. “Certain restrictions apply,” it says. “Subject to change without notice. The right of Freedom is made available ‘as is’ and without warranty of any kind.” Oh, and one more thing: “The right of Freedom may be exercised on the strict understanding that neither the Government nor its ministers, employees or agents shall be liable for losses of any kind.” A paradox is embedded in this round of cynicism and self-doubt. American ideas like free markets and democracy are on the march. Poverty has declined, with 18 percent of the world’s population living on $1 a day in 2004, down from 40 percent in 1981, as Fareed Zakaria points out in his book “The Post-American World.” And a recent poll of 17,000 people in 19 nations by researchers at the University of Maryland found that 85 percent agreed that “the will of the people should be the basis for the authority of government.” Tellingly, the most robust support surfaced not in Western democracies but in countries like Ukraine, Nigeria and Indonesia. Even at the Wolfsonian, a handful of posters suggest that the globalization of democracy can be a force for good. In a piece by the Zimbabwean-born artist Chaz Maviyane-Davies, “We the people” appears in five languages, including Arabic and Spanish. Why, then, are we so depressed? Perhaps, as the artists’ work suggests, because we are no longer so young and naïve. The spread of democracy has been messier than Rockwell’s generation expected, and better publicized. Iraq is a potent example, but there are so many others. Salvador Orara, a designer at The Map Office, said assassination attempts against his cousins who work in the Filipino government made him realize that American-exported democracy did not necessarily mean security. Mr. Mill recalls coming of age in the former Yugoslavia during the 1980s and believing deeply in freedom and human rights. A decade later, during the Balkan war, he said, “those values disintegrated before us in the name of ‘higher causes.’ “ In many cases the results feel more like heartbreak than like anger. The emotion in more subtle works, like Richard Tuttle’s simple drawing of Uncle Sam hidden behind a wall, reminded me of what I saw in the faces of Iraqis and Americans when things went horribly wrong. It was the marine frustrated by his inability to protect a Sunni ally from assassination; the reporter crushed to discover the lies of an American official; the Iraqi politician saddened by the circus of his country’s Parliament. Democracy often seems to grow uglier with age. But amid the happy, escapist shoppers at the Aventura mall, these thoughts felt as out of place as Rockwell’s proud posters. The sprawling darkness of Mr. Kuitca’s remake of “Freedom of Fear,” with the original tucked in the corner, seemed far more apt. “Thoughts on Democracy” is on view through Dec. 7 at the Wolfsonian museum at Florida International University, 1001 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach; (305) 531-1001, wolfsonian.org. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/ar...gn/09rock.html Want Some Torture With Your Peanuts? Jeffrey Denning Just when you thought you’ve heard it all... A senior government official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has expressed great interest in a so-called safety bracelet that would serve as a stun device, similar to that of a police Taser®. According to this promotional video found at the Lamperd Less Lethal website, the bracelet would be worn by all airline passengers. This bracelet would: • take the place of an airline boarding pass • contain personal information about the traveler • be able to monitor the whereabouts of each passenger and his/her luggage • shock the wearer on command, completely immobilizing him/her for several minutes The Electronic ID Bracelet, as it’s referred to as, would be worn by every traveler “until they disembark the flight at their destination.” Yes, you read that correctly. Every airline passenger would be tracked by a government-funded GPS, containing personal, private and confidential information, and that it would shock the customer worse than an electronic dog collar if he/she got out of line? Clearly the Electronic ID Bracelet is an euphuism for the EMD Safety Bracelet, or at least it has a nefarious hidden ability, thus the term ID Bracelet is ambiguous at best. EMD stands for Electro-Musclar Disruption. Again, according to the promotional video the bracelet can completely immobilize the wearer for several minutes. So is the government really that interested in this bracelet? Yes! According to a letter from DHS official, Paul S. Ruwaldt of the Science and Technology Directorate, office of Research and Development, to the inventor whom he had previously met with, he wrote, “To make it clear, we [the federal government] are interested in…the immobilizing security bracelet, and look forward to receiving a written proposal.” The letterhead, in case you were wondering, came from the DHS office at the William J. Hughes Technical Center at the Atlantic City International Airport, or the Federal Aviation Administration headquarters. In another part of the letter, Mr. Ruwaldt confirmed, “It is conceivable to envision a use to improve air security, on passenger planes.” Would every paying airline passenger flying on a commercial airplane be mandated to wear one of these devices? I cringe at the thought. Not only could it be used as a physical restraining device, but also as a method of interrogation, according to the same aforementioned letter from Mr. Ruwaldt. Would you let them put one of those on your wrist? Would you allow the airline employees, which would be mandated by the government, to place such a bracelet on any member of your family? Why are tax dollars being spent on something like this? Is this a police state or is it America? As we approach July 4th, Independence Day, I can’t help but think of the blessing we have of living in America and being free from hostile government forces. It calls to mind on of my favorite speeches given by an American Founding Forefather, Patrick Henry, who said, “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” http://www.washingtontimes.com/weblo...-your-peanuts/ Crowd-Controlling MEDUSA Ray Gun Puts Voices Inside Your Head The Sierra Nevada Corporation claimed this week that it is ready to begin production on the MEDUSA, a damned scary ray gun that uses the "microwave audio effect" to implant sounds and perhaps even specific messages inside people's heads. Short for Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio, MEDUSA creates the audio effect with short microwave pulses. The pulses create a shockwave inside the skull that's detected by the ears, and basically makes you think you're going balls-to-the-wall batshit insane. The MEDUSA can also "produce recognizable sounds" and is aimed primarily at military uses, but New Scientist revealed there are other uses in the works, too. And if you're thinking ear plugs are this thing's Kryptonite, think again. Lee Sadovnik of Sierra Nevada Corp. said normal audio safety limits are off the table since the sound bypasses the eardrums and emanates from within the skull. "The repel effect is a combination of loudness and the irritation factor," he said. "You can’t block it out." Wet blanket James Lin of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois in Chicago wants more testing done, however, because of the perceived health ramifications of such a device. Lin said lower, whisper-level intensities work fine, but the higher incapacitating levels expected by the military could fry more than a few brains out on the battlefield. "I would worry about what other health effects it is having," Lin said. "You might see neural damage." And those "other uses" hinted at above? Try subliminal advertising; or suggestive subconscious comments that you don't really "hear" but can influence decision-making anyway. Or, alternatively, the beam can be ramped up to 11 and just kill you outright. WIN! Fun Gizmodo Fact: The MEDUSA is useless against a raging pack of schizophrenics. [New Scientist via Danger Room] http://gizmodo.com/5022355/crowd+con...side-your-head Russian Blogger Sentenced for "Extremist" Post Chris Baldwin A Russian man who described local police as "scum" in an Internet posting was given a suspended jail sentence on Monday for extremism, prompting bloggers to warn of a crackdown on free speech online. Savva Terentiev, a 28-year-old musician from Syktyvkar, 1,515 kilometres (940 miles) north of Moscow, wrote in a blog last year that the police force should be cleaned up by ceremonially burning officers twice a day in a town square. Convicted on charges of "inciting hatred or enmity", Terentiev was given a one-year suspended term on Monday, Russian news agencies reported. Free speech campaigners said the ruling could create a dangerous precedent for free speech on the Internet, a vibrant forum for political debate in a country where the mainstream traditional media is deferential to authority. "This was an absolutely unjustified verdict," Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the SOVA centre in Moscow, a non-governmental group that monitors extremism, told Reuters. "Savva for sure wrote a rude comment ... but this verdict means it will be impossible to make rude comments about anybody." The verdict was discussed in Russian blogs on Monday. "I don't know now if I should be writing here or not," blogger Likershassi posted on one website. "The fact that Terentiev got a conditional sentence is unimportant. What's important is the precedent," a blogger named Puffinus wrote. Bonfire Contacted by Reuters on Monday, Terentiev confirmed the sentence but said he was unable to make further comment. The blog entry for which he was prosecuted has been removed from the Internet. Russia's Kommersant newspaper quoted him as saying in the post: "Those who become cops are scum," and calling for officers to be put on a bonfire. After the prosecution was launched, Terentiev wrote an open letter to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev protesting his innocence. "It is our duty to take responsibility for words on the Internet but ... I did not call for the inflaming of social hatred towards the employees of the police department," he wrote in the letter, posted at one of his sites, www.zasavva.ru. Most Russians receive their news and information from television stations and newspapers controlled by the state or by businessmen with links to the Kremlin, with opposition voices confined largely to the Internet, talk radio and low-circulation publications. Medvedev has said he views freedom of speech and a flourishing civil society as essential and that Russia should use a light touch when policing the Internet. "Thank God we live in a free society," Medvedev said last month in an interview with Reuters. "It's possible to go on to the Internet and get basically anything you want. In that regard, there are no problems of closed access to information in Russia today, there weren't any yesterday and there won't be any tomorrow," he said. (Additional reporting by Aydar Buribaev; Editing by Catherine Evans) http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/200807...r-566e283.html Chinese Bloggers Evade Censors by Writing Backwards Mark O’Neill You have to hand it to Chinese bloggers - they are determined to get the truth out, no matter what. OK, they are not facing the death sentence like their fellow counterparts in Iran but nevertheless, they still face prison for their opinions. At the very least, their work will be deleted by faceless humorless bureaucrats. So the bloggers are trying out new methods to evade Chinese government censors - the latest one is they are using tools and software to write backwards. Or write vertically instead of horizontally. This is apparently confusing the censors because they now cannot automatically track “objectionable phrases” (aw my heart bleeds for them). One such “text flipping” tool is here. Obviously the government will eventually find a way around it but the resourceful bloggers will probably have found another solution by then and will have moved on. It’s easy for us in the democratic west to take our freedom of speech for granted. We don’t think twice about giving an opinion online and then hitting the “publish” button. We don’t have to fear the knock on the door or awkward questions being asked about our loyalty to the state. We take our freedoms for granted because they’ve always been there. But our fellow bloggers in China and Iran are not so lucky. They have to look over their shoulder all the time and resort to text flipping tools, codes and guarded language to protect themselves and their family, while at the same time trying to break through all the officially sanctioned propaganda and get the real truth out to the world. These are the unsung unrecognised heroes of the world. It’s time we should recognise them more. Plus if Iran passes that idiotic and insane death sentence law, we should all as an international community collectively do something, short of invading the country. http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2008/07/...ing-backwards/ The Pirate Bay Wants to Encrypt the Entire Internet The team behind the popular torrent site The Pirate Bay has started to work on a new encryption technology that could potentially protect all Internet traffic from prying eyes. The project, which is still in its initial stages, goes by the name “Transparent end-to-end encryption for the Internets,” or IPETEE for short. It tackles encryption not on the application level, but on the network level, the aim being that all data exchanged on your PC would be encrypted, regardless of its nature — be it a web browser streaming video files or an instant messaging client. As Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij (a.k.a. Tiamo) told me, “Even applications that don’t supporting encryption will be encrypted where possible.” Neij came up with the idea for IPETEE back when European politicians were starting to debate a Europe-wide move to DMCA-like copyright enforcement efforts, which were eventually authorized in the form of the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive in the spring of 2007. “I wanted to come up with something to make it harder for data retention,” said Neij. But he didn’t publish the initial draft proposal until early this month, when the discussion about privacy and surveillance online suddenly became urgent again. The Swedish parliament passed a new law in June that allows a local government agency to snoop on “the telephony, emails, and web traffic of millions of innocent individuals,” as the EFF’s Danny O’Brien put it. Neij promises that his new encryption scheme will be ready before the law takes effect next January. IPETEE will likely be implemented as an add-on to operating systems like Windows and OS X. It will essentially do its work in the background, handling all incoming and outgoing IP traffic without any further interference from the user. Let’s say you want to open a video download from a remote machine. IPETEE would first test whether the remote machine is supporting the crypto technology; once that’s confirmed it would then exchange encryption keys with the machine before transmitting your actual request and sending the video file your way. All data would automatically be unscrambled once it reaches your machine, so there would be no need for your media player or download manager to support any new encryption technologies. And if the remote machine didn’t know how to handle encryption, the whole transfer would fall back to an unencrypted connection. Neij told me that IPETEE could be easily implemented for data transfers between end users, such as files shared through P2P. “The proof-of-concept code will be available both on Windows and Linux,” he explained, but the next step would be to make it scalable and available for operations in a server-based environment so that administrators could use IPETEE to protect their users’ web or email transmissions. IPETEE could be a big step towards standardizing the encryption of web, email and even VoIP traffic, but it wouldn’t protect against all types of interference. Your ISP could still kill your video downloads via BitTorrent, because newer traffic management solutions can identify P2P transfers by simply looking at the patterns of your uploads and downloads and not at the individual data packets. It could also potentially slow down certain transfers, because it takes time to establish encrypted connections. There might be other flaws in the architecture of the IPETEE system as well, which is why Neij’s team is currently talking to crypto and network experts. But he seemed optimistic that he would have at least a proof of concept implementation ready by the end of the year. Of course, the Pirate Bay folks don’t exactly have a good track record when it comes to following through with their plans. NewTeeVee alumn Jackson West pointed out back in March that long-planned projects like The Video Bay, the music site PlayBle and a new and secure P2P protocol have yet to be launched, and that’s still true today. Adding an ambitious project like IPETEE to the list doesn’t seem likely to solve that problem, but maybe this time Neij and his crew will overcome their ADD. http://newteevee.com/2008/07/09/the-...net/#more-4585 Intro to StealthNet What is StealthNet? StealthNet is based on the original RShare client and has been enhanced by a developer team who consists of Planet Peer community members. In comparison with the current RShare client StealthNet offers a lot of new features like download resuming (interrupted downloads can be resumed), multilanguage support, a search filter for several file types and much more. In the early stages StealthNet was known as RShare Community Edition (RShare CE). However, due to several reasons we had to rename this project to its new name StealthNet. This is the reason why the RShare forums on the Planet Peer Board also have been renamed to RShare/StealthNet. Both clients are open source and source code is available. They are released under the GPL. How does it work The RShare network as well as the network protocol were developed by Lars Regensburger with strong anonymity/security and acceptable download rates in mind. All traffic in the RShare network is routed trough other nodes in the network. Furthermore, traffic is encrypted with point-to-point encryption. In combination this two techniques provide a very high level of anonymity. If you want to learn more about RShare/StealthNet and his tech specs the Planet Peer Wiki is highly recommended: a) RShare: http://www.planetpeer.de/wiki/index.php/RShare_(English) b) StealthNet: http://www.planetpeer.de/wiki/index....thNet_(English) Advantages over other anonymous P2P networks As a matter of course StealthNet is not the only client for anonymous file sharing. There are a lot of others available, like ANts or MUTE. However, StealthNet has one important advantage: In comparison with its competitors it is under _active_ development by a developer team and feature requests from the community are incorporated. Some more advantages are: • Straightforward handling, even for beginners: Install, enable port forwarding and you are good to go! Anonymous P2P can´t be easier • Modern and user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI): Due to a GUI similar to eMule users are able to work in no time with StealthNet • Fast file transfers: As measured by the fact that StealthNet is an anonymous P2P client it has great download rates, especially when it comes to small files (depends on several factors) • Has anti-flood-measure in place to avoid network sabotage like flooding the network with useless data packets or so • Command line client for systems with Mono support like Linux, OSX and so on is available Why should one use StealthNet instead of eDonkey & co.? That´s pretty simple. StealthNet was primarily developed with strong anonymity and security in mind. It offers a great level of protection which other networks lacks of. In comparion with regular P2P networks like eDonkey it is nearly impossible to locate users who provide content within the RShare network. The complete traffic within the network is encrypted by approved and popular encryption techniques and downloads are routed through several other nodes so nobody can correlate what´s going on between the nodes. http://stealthnet.de/en_index.php Until next week, - js. Current Week In Review  Recent WiRs - July 5th, June 28th, June 21st, June 14th, June 7th, May 31st Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved. "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black |
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