Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 8th, '07

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"It was a dark and stormy night." – Madeleine L’Engle


"An internet provider should block the subscriptions of people who use the internet to share copyright-protected material on a large scale." – Swedish Judge Cecilia Renfors


"If the court orders us to give it back to him, we will give it back to him." – Thomas Bertrand


"It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically." – Madeleine L’Engle


"Last night, I did the last one, and I got a little choked up. I’m going to miss this place." – Tim Isch



































September 8th, 2007





Is Comcast's BitTorrent Filtering Violating the Law?
Chris Soghoian

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I'm a cyber-security PhD student and take classes in the Indiana University law school, but this in no way makes me a legal expert. Caveat Lector.

Within the last few weeks, there have been a number of reports by Comcast customers claiming that their BitTorrent downloads and uploads have been capped or worse, blocked. Torrent Freak recently reported that Comcast, a major US cable company, is using an application from Sandvine to throttle such connections.

Many ISPs routinely filter the traffic on their networks. Many forbid customers from running email servers, web servers, and when the ISP detects that a customer's computer has been hacked, they often sever the Internet connection until the machine has been patched. Thus, the fact that a major ISP is now filtering yet another class of Internet traffic should not be major news--except for two factors: BitTorrent traffic accounts for upwards of 25% of US Internet traffic, and the techniques used by Comcast are essentially the same as those used by the Great Firewall of China.

Before we get deeply into this issue, let us step back for a brief, and high-level lesson in TCP/IP, and Internet filtering technologies. Most Internet applications use the TCP protocol to communicate. This protocol uses a three-way handshake to establish a connection.

The very first step in a three-way handshake involves the client sending a SYN packet to the receiving party. Modern firewalls block this packet for banned types of traffic--that is, they prevent the recipient from receiving it, and as such, the connection can never be established. Your home firewall does this, as well as those used by Comcast and other ISPs to prevent you from sending millions of email spam messages from their network.

Assuming that the SYN packet goes through, the three-way handshake is allowed to happen, then the two hosts will be able to begin communicating. Your ISP can still kill the connection later, should they wish to, merely by blocking the transmission of future packets.

According to Torrent Freak, Comcast is not doing this. They are instead sending a reset (or RST) packet to the Comcast customer, pretending to be from the host at the end of the BitTorrent connection. This RST packet is the TCP equivalent of stating "I don't want to talk to you anymore, please terminate the connection". It is extremely important to note that when Comcast creates and sends this packet, they do not identify themselves as the the source of packet, but instead impersonate one of the parties involved in the BitTorrent connection. This is where things get rather shady.

Last year, researchers from Cambridge University analyzed the Great Firewall of China and found that it used falsified RST packets to terminate connections that matched keyword filters. They were able to determine that users could evade the Chinese government's censorship system by ignoring these reset packets.

Ok, so the Chinese government and Comcast are using the same censorship techniques. Why should we care? The Chinese government doesn't have to pay attention to US law, but Comcast, being a US company, does.

Many states make it illegal to impersonate others. New York, a state notorious for its aggressive pro-consumer office of the Attorney General, makes it a crime for someone to "[impersonate] another and [do] an act in such assumed character with intent to obtain a benefit or to injure or defraud another." (See: NY Sec. 190.25: Criminal impersonation in the second degree). I do not believe that it would be too difficult to prove that Comcast obtains a benefit by impersonating others to eliminate or reduce BitTorrent traffic. Less torrent data flowing over their network will lead to an overall reduction in their bandwidth bill, and thus a huge cost savings.

New York is not the only state with such a law. Several other states including Connecticut and Alabama have similar laws on the books. Should any state AG's office decide to go after Comcast, it is quite possible that Comcast could be looking at a world of regulatory pain.

Comcast is perfectly within its right to filter the Internet traffic that flows over its network. What it is not entitled to do, is to impersonate its customers and other users, in order to make that filtering happen. Dropping packets is perfectly OK, while falsifying sender information in packet headers is not.
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13739_1-9769645-46.html





BitTorrent Continues to Dominate Internet Traffic
Ernesto

A recent analysis of the latest P2P trends wordwide shows that BitTorrent is still the most popular filesharing protocol. BitTorrent traffic is still on the rise and responsible for 50-75% of all P2P traffic and roughly 40% of all Internet traffic.

P2P traffic stats always cause quite a bit of controversy. In 2004 several respectable sources were reporting that BitTorrent was responsible for 35% of all internet traffic. This was probably a huge overestimation at the time, today this figure sounds more realistic.

Ipoque reports in a preview of their 2007 P2P survey that BitTorrent is generating between 50-75% of all P2P traffic. P2P traffic is responsible for 50%-90% of all Internet traffic which means that BitTorrent traffic is generating somewhere between 25% and 65% of all Internet traffic.

However, there is quite a bit of regional variance in the use of P2P applications according to Ipoque: “eDonkey exhibits a regionally varying popularity with shares between 5-50% of all P2P. In certain regions, other protocols have gained a significant importance. In the Baltic States, for instance, DirectConnect has a proportion of about 30% of all P2P traffic”

Ipoque reports that all P2P traffic is still growing. Joost is not yet posing a threat to ISPs, but media streaming services and VoIP applications show significant growth. For example, Ipoque reports that Skype generates up to 2% of the overall traffic in certain networks.

It is probably good to know that this Internet traffic research is often conducted by companies that offer broadband management and optimization solutions. It is in their best interest to overestimate these figures because they design the traffic shaping applications that help ISPs to manage their precious bandwidth.

The 2007 P2P survey will be presented at Technology Review’s Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT, more details later.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-d...raffic-070901/





Optimize BitTorrent To Outwit Traffic Shaping ISPs
Mike and Robb

These days, nothing worries an internet service provider more than peer-to-peer file trading. Depending on where you live, P2P can account for between 50 and 75% of broadband internet traffic. We mostly have the popularity of BitTorrent to thank for this crazy amount of data going to and fro.

This amount of traffic can raise the ISPs daily costs of delivering service, cause congestion either in your neighborhood or on the ISP's network, and force the ISP to buy increased bandwidth capacity.

But if you've been paying close attention to your BitTorrent transfers lately (or if you've simply been reading the news) you'll notice that ISPs have begun to take drastic measures to slow that flood of data currently clogging up their pipes.

Even though many of them deny it, most ISPs actively engage in traffic shaping, bandwidth throttling, connection denial or some such tactic to keep the amount of bandwidth consumed by high traffic applications on their networks to a minimum. While this does often ensure better performance for everyone in the neighborhood, it can mean painfully slow transfer speeds for those dabbling in P2P -- legit or not.

While there are valid arguments for and against shaping, we're not here to debate. We just want the fastest BitTorrent transfers possible.
Methods of Fooling ISPs

So how to get around an ISP that's throttling your BitTorrent traffic? You can try encrypting or your traffic, changing the default port number, changing the way the protocol behaves, reducing the amount of one-way traffic, or hiding your traffic within an encrypted tunnel.

Of course, different ISPs are employing different methods of control. None of these methods are guaranteed to work. But each one is known to work for some, and they are certainly worth a try.

How To Encrypt to Your BitTorrent Transfers:

The RC4 encryption offered by many popular BitTorrent clients today will obfuscate not only the header but the entire stream, which makes it considerably more difficult for an ISP to detect that you're using BitTorrent. Even if your ISP does not force you to enable encryption, you may be connecting to peers with ISPs that do.

Encryption began appearing on clients in late 2005. By the end of 2006, most actively-developed clients were updated with encryption. While not all torrent clients in a swarm will support encryption, most of them will. As a result, this small percentage of non-encryption capable peers may be a reason not to force encryption on a full-time basis, but there is no reason not to enable encryption that allows the falling back to a non-encrypted connection when needed.

If your favorite client is not listed below, check your documentation.

Azureus/Vuze
Azureus (which now calls its official client Vuze) is written in Java and therefore cross-platform. To turn on encryption, head to the Tools menu. Select Options, then Connection, then Transport Encryption. Check the "Require encrypted transport" box and select RC4 in the "Minimum encryption" drop-down menu.

Azureus/Vuze also offers an "Allow non-encrypted outgoing connections if encrypted connection attempt fails" option, which means you'll still be able to hop on torrents that don't have any encrypted seeders.

µTorrent
µTorrent (and now BitTorrent which is based on µTorrent) is a Windows-only client. In µTorrent, open up the Preferences panel and select the BitTorrent tab. Select Protocol encryption and then choose between "enabled" and "forced." µTorrent's "Enabled" option mirrors Azureus' option to allow unencrypted connections when no encrypted clients exist. It will give you more connections, but it won't be as effective at defeating traffic shapers.

µTorrent/BitTorrent also offers a option to 'Allow legacy incoming connections' which lets non-encrypted clients connect to you. This improves compatibility between clients but again, makes your traffic more vulnerable to shapers.

BitComet
BitComet is another popular Windows Client (98/Me/2000/XP). To turn on encryption in BitComet, head to the Options menu and choose Preferences. Then go to Advanced > Connection and select "Protocol encryption." There are options for "auto detect" and "always."

As with the others, "auto detect" will connect to more peers, but it won't hide traffic as well. You'll need to play with the settings in your program to see if it has any affect on your download/upload speeds.

Other clients that support encryption include KTorrent (Linux), rTorrent (Linux, Mac) and BitTornado (Windows).

How To Change Your BitTorrent Port Number:

The default port for BitTorrent transfers is port 6881, with some clients using different ports within the range of 6881-6999. As a result of ISP interference, all clients allow you to change the port number (or port range, sometimes) used for BitTorrent transfers. The setting is in the Options or Preferences for your client, or can be set using a command-line parameter.

Whenever you change your port, you need to adjust your router to allow incoming connections. An excellent service at http://www.portforward.com/ can guide you through the entire process of locating the current port being used (which allows you to change it), and then configuring your router to match.

How To Change the Way the BitTorrent Protocol Behaves:

The BitTorrent protocol has a distinct handshake. To control uploading by seeders, ISPs have learned to look for this handshake. The recent releases of both µTorrent and Azureus/Vuze include a "Lazy Bitfield" feature to hide seeders from ISPs. When Lazy Bitfield is enabled, the handshake is changed to make a BitTorrent seeder initially appear to be a non-seeding peer (sometimes called a leecher). This is done by sending a bitfield indicating missing pieces. Then, once the handshake is done, the client notifies its peer that it now has the pieces that were originally indicated as missing.

Azureus/Vuze
Azureus (which now calls its official client Vuze) is written in Java and therefore cross-platform. To turn on encryption, head to the Tools menu. Select Options, then Transfer. Enable Lazy-Bitfield here.

µTorrent
Lazy Bitfield is controlled in the Advanced section Preferences: peer.lazy_bitfield.

How To Reduce the Amount of One-Way transfers:

Most downloaders become seeders when they have 100% of the archive, then they spend the next several hours "paying back" the swarm until they have provided at least as many bytes uploaded that they downloaded -- a ratio of 1:1 or 1.00. As mentioned before, some ISPs make efforts to control seeders. Seeders generate one-way (outbound) traffic, and this traffic is sometimes the most troublesome for ISPs to handle.

Most clients are configured with a "speed limit" set Upload Maximum Limit in kB/s and an unlimited Download Maximum Limit. To reduce the amount of one-way transfers, the client needs to upload at the same rate (or less, overall) than it is downloading. While this means that the download will be a lot slower to complete, it also means that it will complete at a 1.00 ratio or above.

For example, perform your transfer with an Upload Limit of 30 KB/s and a Download Limit of 25 KB/s. When you first join you won't upload at all because you have no pieces to share yet. But after several minutes, the total bytes uploaded should be equal to or above the total bytes downloaded. When your download is complete, you will have little or no obligation to continue seeding as you already have uploaded enough to the swarm.

This tactic is not always effective or efficient. Some swarms have too few peers left that need data, making it difficult to reach your desired upload rates.

Many multi-torrent clients (Azureus/Vuze, µTorrent, BitComet, and others) provide the option of setting maximum upload and download rates on a per-torrent basis. These settings are found either in a right-click menu or in the Properties of each torrent. Some clients also allow Global Settings that affect all torrents being managed by the client, however the Global Settings do not provide a correct balance to ensure that a one-way transfer is avoided.

Azureus/Vuze provides the additional useful option of limiting the number of seed connections while downloading. This setting is found on the Options panel of each individual torrent.

How To Hide BitTorrent within an Encrypted Tunnel:

With the advent of Application-Layer Inspection, some ISPs may recognize and control BitTorrent traffic despite your best efforts.

You may be able to hide the BitTorrent traffic in an encrypted tunnel -- a transport path within the normal transport paths provided by TCP and IP. You can tunnel your traffic through cooperatives such as The Onion Router (TOR)* or I2P. Commercial Virtual Private Network (VPN) providers such as Relakks or SecureIX will also help keep your ISP from detecting exactly what you're doing. If you are familiar with SSH and SSH Tunneling, this is also a possibility. However, some ISPs even throttle or inhibit these encrypted tunnels.

Azureus provides in-client support for TOR and I2P. Other clients will have to set up the software as recommend on the TOR or I2P site.

*Note: TOR has been updated to allow peer-to-peer download data, despite any information to the contrary (it used to be prohibited).
Now For the Bad News

ISPs are taking advantage of more sophisticated shaping technology all the time, and many of the newer shapers won't be fooled by encrypted traffic. For instance, Sandvine (the shaping tool many believe Comcast and other ISPs employ) won't be fooled by obfuscating your traffic.

So what can you do beyond obfuscating?

The short answer is not much. There is no fool-proof way to do beat the shapers. You best choice is probably to switch to an ISP that doesn't employ anti-BitTorrent traffic shaping. In the long run, this also has the benefit of sending an effective message to your ex-ISP.

For a list of ISPs to avoid, have a look at the list maintained on the Azureus Wiki.

But what if you have no other option when it comes to ISPs? Start by calling customer service. Call now and call often. Disgruntled consumers often cost an ISP far more money than a large amount BitTorrent traffic. And by all means, try these ideas, though your results may vary considerably depending on what shaping tools your ISP is employing.
http://howto.wired.com/wiredhowtos/i...;category=Play





File-Sharing Battle Reaches Internet Providers

Internet service providers (ISPs) may soon be required by Swedish law to take greater responsibility for unlawful file-sharing.

The author of the official report - 'Music and Film on the Internet - Threat or Opportunity? -, appeals court judge Cecilia Renfors, has called for internet providers to shoulder the burden of defending against breaches of copyright.

"I propose that internet providers should be required to contribute to bringing all copyright infringement to an end," she wrote.

Renfors rejected the notion of introducing a broadband levy to be shared out among copyright holders, which was one idea put forward in the debate surrounding illegal file-sharing. Such a fee, according to the report, would would deny copyright holders the sole rights to their material in a controlled market.

"An internet provider should block the subscriptions of people who use the internet to share copyright-protected material on a large scale," said Renfors.

"While people are not permitted to download material, downloading alone is not sufficient to merit blocking a subscription," she added.

The proposal does not entail that ISPs will be called upon to hunt down file-sharers. Rather it is the copyright holders who may take action to prevent illegal file-sharing.

"If this does not result in a ban, the copyright holder can demand compensation from the internet provider," said Renfors.

Swedish broadband provider Bredbandsbolaget was critical of the report's conclusions.

"It is a bad proposal, ineffective and wrong in principle, and I don't understand how it's supposed to work in practice," said CEO Marcus Nylén.

"We as an operator can't act like we're the police and check where our customers are surfing. Scaring internet users is the wrong way to tackle the issue," he added.

The Swedish Film Institute however took a considerably more positive view of the report's findings.

"The proposal acts as a safeguard for those of us working in the film, television, music and other cultural industries. Internet protection for Swedish creative workers is currently among the worst in Europe.

"This is a step in the right direct to ensure that we get paid for our work," said film producer Joakim Hansson in a statement.
http://www.thelocal.se/8373.html





Father of WWW Tells Congress We Need Net Neutrality
Luke O'Brien

Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web, told a house subcommittee on Thursday that the US needs net neutrality to ensure the growth of an open Internet and remain competitive.

Berners-Lee gently but repeatedly emphasized the need for net neutrality during the questioning phase of a hearing in front of the House Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.

"Communications between people is what makes us a society, what makes the human race the human race," Berners-Lee said. He described the need to keep the Internet a universal "blank sheet" and said net neutrality was key. "A nondiscriminatory internet provision is very important for a society," he said.

When asked how failing to enshrine net neutrality into law could impact U.S. business, Berners-Lee replied that if he were starting a company and Europe had a more open internet policy than the U.S., he would be "very tempted to move." In other countries, he said, net neutrality is "assumed."

Unfortunately, most of the committee members had cleared out by then. The hearing, which focused on the "future of the world wide web," was interrupted by a vote on the House floor and got off to a slow start as members heaped praise on their august witness for nearly 40 minutes: "Philanthropic," "altruistic," "one of the great scientists and thinkers of the 20th century,' "a great man," "a visionary".

The obeisance, while not inaccurate, went on and on. Even Berners-Lee, a knight of the British empire and no stranger to the spotlight, began to squirm. Too bad. Because only a handful of the committee returned after the recess to see Berners-Lee, who joined hypertext to the Internet and created the first web browser, don his futurist cap and extemporize on where the online world could be headed.

He touched on a range of topics:

• making the internet more accessible to poor people by developing cheaper mobile devices.
• improving the performance of the health care system by increasing remote access and information sharing among doctors.
• using metadata to deal with copyright issues.
• developing a "semantic web" that would allow cutting-edge devices to communicate better and act as access points for information rather than storage systems that users depend on.
• the need to maintain open standards and keep the technology that forms the infrastructure of the internet royalty free.

The hearing was the first of a series on the future of the internet. Next time, hopefully, the flattery will be shorter and the attendance longer.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200..._of_www_t.html





Justice Dept Wary of "Net Neutrality" Proposals
Peter Kaplan

Antitrust authorities at the U.S. Justice Department on Thursday warned regulators against imposing "network neutrality" regulations that would bar broadband Internet service companies from charging extra to some content providers.

In comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission, the department said some net neutrality proposals "could deter broadband Internet providers from upgrading and expanding their networks to reach more Americans."

"Regulators should be careful not to impose regulations that could limit consumer choice and investment in broadband facilities," the department's antitrust chief, Thomas Barnett, said in a statement.

The concept of net neutrality is being studied by the FCC and has been the subject of much debate in Congress. Some lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to get net neutrality legislation passed last year.

Network neutrality proposals, backed by Internet content companies like Google Inc and eBay Inc, would bar Internet providers from charging extra fees to guarantee access to the Internet or give priority to some content.

However, the idea has been staunchly opposed by high-speed Internet providers such as AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc.

Companies like eBay and Google worry that AT&T and Verizon will charge them more to get access to consumers or make it harder for consumers to get access to unaffiliated content.

The network providers counter that they would not block access to public Internet sites but want to offer private Internet-based services with faster speeds for uses such as downloading movies.

Last year, the FCC approved AT&T's purchase of BellSouth Corp after AT&T promised to maintain net neutrality of its high-speed Internet platform for two years. It was one of several key concessions that AT&T made to ease concerns about competition.

The comments from the Justice Department come on the heels of a report in June by antitrust experts at the Federal Trade Commission that expressed similar views and recommended that regulators "proceed with caution" on any such proposals.

The department said proponents of the Internet regulation had failed to show that many consumers had been harmed in a way that would justify government intervention.

It said there was nothing unusual about the practice of setting different levels of service and pricing, citing as an example the various mail options offered by the U.S. Postal Service.

"These differentiated products respond to market demand and expand consumers' choice," the department said.

Advocates of the network neutrality idea criticized the department's conclusions, saying regulations were needed because many consumers had little or no choice of broadband providers.

"This lack of competition and consumer choice for broadband access is the reason why (we support) preemptive safeguards to ensure that cable and telephone companies do not destroy the Internet as we know it," said the Open Internet Coalition, a group comprised of consumer groups and Internet content companies such as Google.

On the other hand, the department's comments were met with praise from AT&T.

"We continue to urge policymakers to focus on the real issue of the broadband era, which is to promote the benefits of broadband services at affordable rates for all consumers," AT&T said in a statement.
http://www.reuters.com/article/compa...36163820070906





Review: After Smoke Clears, FiOS a Hit
John Wilen

If the installers hadn't almost burned my house down, I'd say Verizon's new cable television and high speed Internet service was fantastic.

In fact, ever since the smoke cleared, I've enjoyed more than 100 TV channels, a responsive remote and fast Internet connection that rarely falters. If the installers figure out how to tell where power lines run in a wall, the service is nearly flawless.

Verizon Communications Inc., for those keeping score, is a telephone company that's been branching out into other things, such as cable TV. Cable companies, meanwhile, are broadening their offerings to include high-speed Internet and telephone service.

Verizon, which serves 28 states and Washington, D.C., is spending $23 billion to make fiber-optic connections — which it calls FiOS — available to 18 million homes by 2010. By bypassing the old copper phone lines, the company has much more bandwidth available than anyone else. (AT&T Inc. also is upgrading its service with fiber, though the cables do not extend all the way to each home.)

While it's been available where I live for a while, it wasn't until I moved within the Philadelphia suburbs that the company made me a pitch that was too good to refuse: All my telecom services — landline, cell phone, cable and Internet — on one bill.

The package is about $200, $10 a month more than it used to cost me to buy cable from Comcast, and my landline, Internet and wireless services from Verizon or Verizon Wireless. But I figured that $10 was worth it for faster Internet speeds of up to 5 megabits per second downstream (and 2 Mbps upstream) and 150 free cable channels — dozens more than I was getting from Comcast. Verizon threw in a voice mail box, caller identification service and unlimited calling with no extra charge.

And, I'll admit, I was more than ready to stick it in Comcast's eye after years of consistent 5 percent annual price hikes, mediocre equipment and a remote that barely worked.

I knew I was taking a risk, but how bad can cable TV delivered by a phone company be? Pretty good, as it turns out.

Though my 26-inch Samsung set couldn't take advantage of the service's high-definition offerings, the standard-definition picture quality was at least as good as offered by Comcast.

Verizon's remote and set-top box provided work amazingly well, compared to the Comcast equipment I was using. All the usual channels appear to be there, plus some. On the sports front, I've gained several new versions of ESPN, I now have the NFL Network, and I didn't lose Comcast SportsNet (the two rivals inked a deal letting Verizon carry CSN, home of many local Phillies, Sixers and Flyers games, last year).

We've also benefited from channel inflation in home improvement and cooking networks, and gained a slew of new nature, science and history-related channels, many of which I'd never heard of. One, DIY, repeats some of our favorite shows from other networks, letting us catch programs we used to miss. We've also gained children's channels such as Noggin.

On the Internet side the service has been exemplary. Whereas our old DSL modem had to be reset frequently, I've only had to reset our FiOS modem once. It may be a tad slower than a cable connection, but unless you're downloading gobs of big files, who's the wiser? It's more than fast enough for Webkinz and the occasional cartoon or game.

The landline works and sounds just fine, though it's not your grandfather's phone service — power isn't supplied over the network. Verizon does provide an eight-hour backup battery to help you through blackouts (we've fortunately not experienced any yet).
There was no change to our cell phone service, which we've had through Verizon Wireless for several years now (for the record, the coverage in Bucks County, Pa., is better than Cingular, our previous provider).

One complaint is the lack of documentation. I'm not normally a big manual reader, but a simple channel guide would have been nice (I've since found one online). And to use the voice mail service that came with the FiOS phone connection, I had to call an operator, then an 800 number, then suffer through several transfers before finding someone who could give me basic instructions (such as which number to dial to retrieve voice mail messages, for instance).

And there is the small matter of installation. When Verizon runs fiber to your house, the company needs to install a box on an inside wall. It was in drilling through a wall to connect that box to a fiber conduit that our installer hit an electrical wire. That knocked the power out and left our electrical box — and the front of the house — smoking.

The technicians compounded this error by insisting that we pay for the electrical repairs, then bill them. We'd be reimbursed in 30 days, they assured us. My wife was having none of that. Verizon's insurance company cut us a check for the $2,650 repair within days.

We got a brand-new electrical box out of the deal, for free. But our electrician tells us ours was not the first botched Verizon installation he's been called out to fix.

For its part, Verizon was very apologetic. That's fine, but I want to know how many other people have had similar installation problems.

Very few, Verizon spokeswoman Sharon Shaffer assured me.

"This particular occurrence and the extent of the damage is rare," Shaffer said.

The technician did apparently get a talking-to.

"The training on installation procedures was reviewed with the technician," Shaffer said.

I'm sure the our incident was rare, and all's well that ends well, as far as I'm concerned.

Now, give me that remote.
http://www.localtechwire.com/news/te...story/1780294/





Cablevision CEO a Verizon FiOS Subscriber?
Mike Murray

Is the CEO of Cablevision a Verizon FiOS customer? Well... It appears so. Bernstein Research posted a picture on their site showing a Verizon FiOS can and drop directly above Chuck Dolan's Oyster Bay, Long Island mailbox.

Is the Chairman of Cablevision admitting that the service Verizon is offering is a superior service to that of his own company? Surely it's only installed for "Market Research" testing. Wink. Wink.

Cablevision and Verizon are in the middle of heated battle over Fiber-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband and video solutions. If it turns out Dolan's running FiOS as a regular customer, he's soon to be the laughing stock of the CEO world. At least amongst telco and broadband companies.
http://www.my-pc-help.com/OurBlogs/M...5/Default.aspx





Death of a Streamcaster: Web Radio Prepares for the Worst
Tom Corelis

Even after compromises from SoundExchange and the CRB, web radio broadcasters are not optimistic about the future

The U.S. Copyright Royalty Board’s new rates “would bankrupt us,” says Tim Westergren of Pandora, echoing a sentiment reflected widely by the webcaster community. Spurred by SoundExchange’s efforts to raise the cost of broadcasting music on the web to what is widely believed to be unreasonable levels, webcasters everywhere are vigorously fighting what may very well be their end.

In a pair of interviews with DailyTech, Proton Radio’s Jason Wohlstadter and Pandora’s Tim Westergren shared their thoughts on what SoundExchange’s revised royalties plan means to them and their stations. The CRB’s rates are “disruptive for everybody, rightsholders included: even if you increase your rates, and if it puts those rate-paying stations out of business, then you’re going to get nothing. These rates [don’t rely on the] economics of web radio,” says Westergren, “so, I think it’s a terrible ruling and one that needs to be fixed.”

“Kurt Hanson of RAIN estimates that the rate increase is around 400% ... that's pretty ridiculous no matter the reasoning is,” says Wohlstadter.

One of the biggest problems, argues Westergren, was that the original talks in 1998 and 2002 were hamstrung by politics and semantics, and as mentioned before, completely disconnected from reality. “The committee had to abide by language in the federal statute … and that language was monkeyed with.”

“The CRB just missed it,” says Westergren, “if you read the ruling and the rationale as it’s articulated by the royalty board and their subsequent followup to it, it demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the business that we’re in. I think that there were structural problems and I think that resulted in a really flawed decision handed down.”

Not everyone is affected equally by the CRB’s changes, however. In the case of some independent stations that deal primarily with underground music, deals have been worked out directly with the labels -- many of which are run by fellow enthusiasts. Such is the case for Proton, and Wohlstadler argues that the direct approach is far more valuable to niche artists:

“I see Proton as one of the main avenues of promotion for these artists and labels. We generate revenue for them by linking show tracklists directly to store fronts where listeners can buy songs they just heard. I believe this makes the labels more money than any royalty would. In our niche over 5,000 songs are released a week, our station is one of the few promotional outlets available to labels to extend shelf life.”

Westergren also touches on the challenges from working with niche music from Pandora’s collection of over 40,000 artists:

“We have over half a million songs in our collection. On a daily basis, 94% of those songs play … Of those 40,000 plus artists, 39,000 are not being aired or have never been played on any form of broadcast radio, so it’s a real vital channel for artists.”
The important thing to remember, both stations stressed, is that they have no problems paying the royalties if so compelled provided SoundExchange asks reasonable rates and existing agreements are understood.

“My hope is that if SoundExchange comes to us requesting royalties for Artist A on Label Z, our contract in place with Label Z would take us out of any obligations,” says Wohlstadler. Web radio, according to Westergren, “needs to survive and it needs to be nurtured. Not to say it gets a free pass, but as we resolve this rate debate, we need to really keep in mind the value that it’s offering for musicians.”
http://www.dailytech.com/Death+of+a+...rticle8677.htm





Airing Their Differences About Pay for Play

Musicians and radio station owners turn up the volume in debate over royalties vs. free promotion
Marc Fisher

George W. Bush got perhaps his biggest laugh of the summer when he responded to a question from a voter in Nashville seeking the president's thoughts about forcing radio stations to pay royalties to performing artists:

"Maybe you've never had a president say this," Bush replied. "I have, like, no earthly idea what you're talking about. I'm totally out of my lane. I like listening to country music, if that helps."

That's probably not going to do the trick, but Congress can use all the help it can get as it tries to arbitrate the latest conflict to emerge from the digital revolution's body blow to the music industry.

Artists such as Judy Collins, Don Henley, Tony Bennett and Sam Moore (of the R&B duo Sam & Dave) argue that radio stations ought to pay for the music they play on the air -- but station owners counter that for all the promotion they do for the record industry, it's the labels that should be paying them. Lawmakers can be forgiven for feeling as if they've landed inside a fraternal brawl.

They have. This summer's lobbying effort by a new recording industry-sponsored group, MusicFirst, has breathed new life into the drive to make radio pay artists -- and not just writers and publishers -- for playing their songs, but the issue is as old as Top 40. What's different now is that the music industry, in deep trouble, is casting around for ways to make up for the steep decline in revenue that hit the recording business after digital downloading changed the business's basic structure.

"The issue here is simply, it's about fairness," folk singer Collins told a congressional panel in August. "Radio is a multibillion-dollar business built on our creativity, our passion and our soul." Collins and other artists who rose to fame singing other people's songs say they must tour well into their golden years in good part because they never got paid for all the radio play their music received.

Besides, they argue, with Internet and satellite radio stations now paying royalties to performers, why shouldn't broadcast AM and FM stations have to do the same?

Because as much as the record business is hurting, so is radio, says Dennis Wharton, executive vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters, who notes that radio revenue has been flat for several years and says his industry is in no position to carve out a new entitlement for artists.

Rep. Howard Berman, the California Democrat who chairs the House subcommittee on intellectual property, is expected to introduce a bill this month that would grant royalties from radio stations to performers -- the latest salvo in a battle that has been fought about once a decade since the 1940s.

The original fight over royalties pitted performers against both radio and the record companies. Back then, artists saw the two businesses as connected pieces of a larger system that made megabucks on the backs of the artists who provided their content.

But the record and radio industries in the '40s successfully drove a wedge between composers and songwriters on one side and performers on the other, creating an anomaly that persists to this day. Radio station owners continue to pay about 2 percent of their revenues, a total of $450 million last year, to the people who write and publish the songs played on the air, but leave it to the record companies to pay performers through their contracts for new albums.

There's no special reason to make that distinction. "It's just always been that way," says Wharton of the NAB, which has a deep interest in keeping it that way.

Broadcasters argue that performers shouldn't be paid by radio stations because radio is primarily a promotional device for new music: Airplay gets listeners interested in a song or artist and drives them to go buy the music, providing revenue to the record companies, which therefore should be the ones paying the artists.

The problem is that the business model that has supported the music industry for the past half century is collapsing, thanks to online music sharing, the demise of the CD album, the rise of the iPod and the diminishing roles that both radio and record companies are playing in the economics of music. Sales of music CDs dropped by 13 percent last year, according to the recording industry's trade association.

In the radio business, this drive by artists and record companies to squeeze money out of radio stations is seen as a desperate move by an industry that completely blew the digital revolution. Record companies failed to cultivate new talent, resisted new technologies and alienated an entire generation of potential customers by suing grandmothers and teenagers rather than embracing a new economic model, radio executives argue.

Alfred Liggins, the outspoken chief of Radio One, the nation's largest owner of black-oriented stations, says it's the record industry that should pay radio for promoting their product, not the other way around (though there is a slight legal problem with that scenario, since that kind of financial relationship runs the risk of triggering payola prosecutions).

The new debate over performance rights is a battle of words and influence waged by two mammoth industries, a confrontation between deep-pocketed lobbyists with everyone involved claiming to be economically stressed and on the side of what's right and good.

But history reminds us that at almost every step up technology's ladder, the music industry has resisted change, arguing that giving listeners free access to recorded music would wipe out the market for selling those recordings. When radio moved from live orchestras and bands to spinning records in the late 1940s, the musicians union predicted the loss of thousands of jobs and the record industry hurled lawyers at radio companies.

It turned out that the more radio played records, the more listeners wanted to go out and buy those songs.

Again, in the 1970s, when cassette tapes made it easy for listeners to record music off the radio, the record industry howled in protest, only to find that while some people did create their own bootleg mix tapes, far more happily spent their dollars on prerecorded cassettes.

This time, downloading and file sharing are choking off the record industry's revenue stream, while Web and satellite radio eat away at AM and FM radio's audience.

"The record business is in a world of hurt right now," Wharton says. "And obviously our guys are apoplectic about what they would regard as a money grab by the foreign-owned record companies." (Four of the top five record companies are based in Europe or Japan.)

In the end, new revenue sources are likely to emerge in the reshaped media economy. Already, concerts and direct sales by artists are playing a larger role in the income mix for some performers, and online social communities are becoming essential to the economic model that some bands are cobbling together. But in the history of media, the big players don't always show the flexibility they need to adapt to new technologies. On occasion, they resort to eating their own.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...=moreheadlines





MTV Aims to Return to Its Days of Glory
Jeff Leeds

Pop culture oddsmakers might have trouble figuring out who faces a tougher road on the comeback trail: Britney Spears or the television giant that helped vault her to stardom, MTV. Both will be trying to recapture better days on Sunday as the music network shows its annual presentation of the Video Music Awards.

After reigning as a primary tastemaker for years, MTV lately has suffered some stumbles (though, unlike Ms. Spears’s, they haven’t become paparazzi fodder). For one thing, critics say the Video Music Awards, intended as a raucous counterpoint to more staid ceremonies, has become stale itself; the show has endured a four-year ratings slump, including a 28 percent drop last year.

Another issue is the channel’s slow response to the explosion of video and social networking online. Music fans are regularly watching music videos on its Web site, mtv.com, which drew about 8.5 million visitors in July. But Yahoo’s music service, which has long showcased videos, attracted 23 million, and MySpace’s music site drew more than 21 million.

To many, the missteps have meant that MTV for once has had trouble keeping up with the shifts in how young fans live, watch and consume. “They were the innovators, and now they’re kind of a step behind,” said Laura Caraccioli-Davis, executive vice president of entertainment for the media-buying firm Starcom MediaVest. “The brands that are talking to this audience are forced to innovate every day. MTV stayed still for a second too long.”

In response, MTV executives are doing what people do when they’re hungry for a quick change in fortune: they are heading to Las Vegas. This year’s Video Music Awards will be shown live from the Palms Casino Resort (where MTV also recorded a recent season of its reality series “The Real World”) and will be substantially revamped. Instead of the usual production built on a single stage, MTV is taking a shotgun approach, scattering cameras around the hotel, with artists performing and receiving awards in decorated suites and the hotel’s own concert hall.

MTV has also shortened the show to two hours, packing in performances by artists like Fall Out Boy, 50 Cent and a resurgent Ms. Spears, who will perform her new single, “Gimme More.”

MTV has a big stack of chips on the table this year. In shaking up its showcase event, the channel is not only aiming to reverse declines in the awards show’s viewership, but also to generate buzz about several new efforts to connect with tech-savvy young viewers drawn to upstart brands like YouTube.

The show’s loss of cachet has paralleled the overall decline of the recording industry, which has long relied on exposing its artists to mass audiences to rack up platinum sales. As a result, MTV may be saddled with the burden of trying to extract a wide audience from a splintered market where no genre is king.

“There isn’t any one movement right now, but rather this gigantic appetite for all things music,” said Amy Doyle, MTV’s senior vice president of music and talent. “The key is being everywhere, but being everywhere in the way the audience wants.”

MTV’s own correspondents, as well as fans at the awards show, will snap candid camera-phone moments and post them on a new area of MTV’s Web site called “You R Here.” The most compelling photos or video recordings from Las Vegas may be presented during the channel’s news segments. Eventually, the site could blossom into MTV’s answer to YouTube.

MTV has its own take on computer-animated “virtual” worlds as well. Even before the awards show takes place, fans can go “in-world” through mtv.com and tour the Palms’ suites and, on Saturday, see performances by computerized re-creations of acts including Boys Like Girls and Peter, Bjorn & John.

Television viewers will see big changes too. To start, there will be only one presentation of the awards program in its original form. In a departure from MTV’s practice of plastering the channel with repeat showings, programmers this year are hoping to attract interest with alternate versions.

The first will be shown with running commentary from celebrities at the show who will chat about their favorite moments. The next will replace portions of the original with previously unshown performances or other moments chosen by visitors to MTV’s Web site. (Visitors to mtv.com are expected to be able to view and choose from unseen performances in the Palms suites and other events recorded in Las Vegas before the broadcast.) MTV plans a third iteration that will highlight the strongest musical performances.

Dave Sirulnick, MTV’s executive producer for the event, said the idea was to add unusual moments to keep viewers of the first show coming back. “Even if you saw it and loved it and watched every moment of it, there’s still more to see,” he said.

For MTV, whose schedule is thick with dating and reality shows like “The Hills,” the awards show also coincides with an effort to raise its stature as a music tastemaker.

One of the biggest initiatives, though, has nothing to do with television programming, let alone music videos. It is Rock Band, a much-buzzed-about game from the MTV-owned game developer Harmonix that lets players perform famous songs with mock instruments. MTV has been coy about its plans for marketing Rock Band, but a version of it will be set up this weekend in the Palms suite where Fall Out Boy is to perform, and — who knows? — it might accidentally end up on camera.

There is also a new effort to introduce up-and-coming performers to MTV’s general audience during commercial breaks. In the 52/52 campaign, MTV spotlights one new act each week by featuring it in skits or short performances during the channel’s promotions of its own programs. In the first few weeks participants like Paramore and Rodrigo y Gabriela have seen their album sales rise after exposure in the ads, sometimes referred to as bumpers.

“Is someone seeing a bumper going to make them buy the record?” said Bob McLynn, whose talent management firm represents acts including Fall Out Boy. “Definitely not. If you combine that with maybe they heard it on the radio, maybe they saw the whole video someplace else, all that combines. It’s all about impressions. There’s still something to putting a face to the music, and that’s what MTV can do for you.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/ar...ion/06mtv.html





Do the Mash (Even if You Don’t Know All the Steps)
Anne Eisenberg

POP music has its mash-ups that combine tunes and vocals from different songs. YouTube viewers do it, too, mixing together segments from various music videos.

Now mash-ups are poised to hit the mainstream, and to spread well beyond music. Yahoo, I.B.M., Microsoft and others are creating systems to let ordinary people who’ve never been near a Java class create useful computer applications by combining, or “mashing up,” different online information sources.

If the technology catches on, many of us may become part-time programmers, instead of waiting for the people in information technology to help.

Here’s just one example: An employee at a chain of hardware stores creates a mash-up that combines inventory data, storm forecasts and the telephone numbers of branch managers. Then, when snow is on the way, the application sends text messages to the managers’ cellphones, telling them how many shovels to order.

Devising that sort of mash-up, which handles multiple data sources to produce a customized solution, is typically the province of a professional. But the new systems are designed, their creators say, so people with modest technical skills can tailor applications to their needs — while writing little or no code.

For now, the technology is free, as its creators race to sign up customers, extend their franchises and perhaps someday dominate the field. Some of the new systems are aimed at businesses, others at consumers who want to entertain themselves by creating games or ornamenting a blog.

Yahoo’s mash-up tool, Pipes, was introduced in February; no separate software plug-ins are required to try the technology.

Imitating someone else’s program on Pipes is a good way to get started, said Jonathan Trevor of Yahoo, who is one of Pipes’ creators. For instance, a user could start by choosing a sample mash-up that combines apartment listings in a neighborhood with addresses of nearby day care centers, then change the neighborhood and services as needed. “Pipes can be a gradual introduction to Web programming,” he said. “You can start by tweaking someone else’s program and then branch out on your own.”

People can view thousands of mash-ups, created by Pipes users, that are displayed on the site. One program starts with messages people send one another when participating in Second Life, the virtual world. The messages are combined with a translation service, Babel Fish, and converted to the recipient’s language, for example, English.

Pipes is currently in a testing phase. “We’re evolving and changing as people tell us what they need,” Dr. Trevor said.

Another new mash-up system, Popfly from Microsoft, was released in a test form in April. John Montgomery, a program manager on the Microsoft team building Popfly, and one of its originators, said his goal from the start was to build an entirely Web-based tool that ran on a browser, and was easy to use. “We wanted to make the programs so simple,” he said, “that people could use them without writing a line of code.”

Popfly’s target audience is consumers, starting with the MySpace generation. “We want to give them a rich set of tools,” he said, so that they can embed their favorite mash-ups on their Web pages. In a typical application, Popfly mashes together the feed from Twitter, a messaging service, with a tool that resolves the location of the twitterer into latitude and longitude and plots the information on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. Then users can see exactly where their twittering friends are.

Popfly requires users to install extra software, called Silverlight, that creates striking, three-dimensional representations of the data that users drag and drop in a central area of the screen and combine to create mash-ups.

Mr. Montgomery said Popfly might eventually include advertising. “For now, though, it’s more about getting people to try the platform technology,” he said. People can sign up for invitations at www.popfly.com.

THE program from I.B.M., QEDWiki — the QED stands for quick and easily done — is aimed not at consumers, but at sales staff, accountants and others who need to mash up data from different sources to solve business problems.

Soon there will be a downloadable version of QEDWiki that companies can copy and use within their businesses, said Rod Smith, vice president for emerging Internet technologies at I.B.M.’s software group. For now, the program can be tried at http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/qedwiki.

I.B.M. has posted a 10-minute tutorial on YouTube that takes viewers through QEDWiki.

People want to be able to write programs to exploit new business opportunities, he said. “Companies have lots of databases they want to make mashable,” he said, “and share with their business partners.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/te...novelties.html





No experience necessary

Terra Firma Brings EMI Down to Earth
James Hall

The party could soon be over at EMI. Terra Firma, the new private-equity owner of the record label, is to stamp out any signs of creative extravagance and financial excess at the company, which is home to artists such as Robbie Williams and Lily Allen.

Late last week Terra Firma said it is replacing Eric Nicoli, EMI's chief executive, and Martin Stewart, its chief financial officer, with three executives with no experience of the music industry. Chris Roling, until this year head of finance, procurement and logistics at ICI, the chemicals company, Ashley Unwin, a former management consultant, and Julie Williamson, a Terra Firma insider, will now set about reviewing the business from top to bottom.

An executive close to Terra Firma said the new management's remit is clear: "The assumption is that business discipline has been lacking in this industry. Yes, you need people who know Pete Doherty, but you also need discipline. This assumption could be wrong and arrogant, but the trio are going in to see if it is correct."

EMI insiders said although Nicoli and his predecessor Alain Levy went a long way cutting costs and cracking down on music industry excess, the company is still populated by record industry old-timers. The arrival of the distinctly un-rock 'n' roll management triumvirate has left some EMI executives quaking in their cowboy boots.

"EMI still has a quirky way of working. You are not viewed with credibility until you've served an apprenticeship standing in a North London pub with your arms folded watching some unsigned band," said one former record industry executive.

Even Nicoli, who joined EMI in 1999, was seen as an outsider by many in the industry because he trained as a physicist and spent most of his career in the food-manufacturing sector.

"Eric had been a non-executive before he became chairman but some in the business always viewed him with scepticism.

"He was seen as a man in a suit who occasionally put on a Johnny Cash-style black shirt to give himself credibility," said the former executive.

However, another source said most vestiges of music industry largesse have already been cleared out of EMI. "Had Terra Firma done all of this four or five years ago it would have found very rich pickings. But Nicoli grappled with the historic excess the industry had and instilled a more cost-focused, business-like approach. A lot of the low-hanging fruit has gone," he said.

The most notorious excesses were during the era of Ken Berry, the head of EMI's recorded music division until his departure in 2001, and his wife Nancy, who headed Virgin Music, which was bought by EMI. Berry left with a £6.1m payoff on top of his £3.7m salary.

Media figures have always tended to be larger than life because they need to be risk-takers in a hit-driven industry where most films and most albums lose money. But the Berry's reign at EMI was also commercially chequered. As head of Virgin, his wife signed Mariah Carey, the US diva, on a rumoured £50m five-album contract. However, in January 2002 EMI ditched Carey after her much-hyped album Glitter sold just 2m copies. EMI paid £19.6m to terminate Carey's contract and wrote off the £18.5m it had spent promoting her.

The media world has had clear-outs of creatives before. Just after the millennium a raft of high-profile showmen bosses such as Steve Case at AOL Time Warner, Tommy Mottola from Sony Music and Jean-Marie Messier at Vivendi left their positions. They were replaced by "suits" such as Andrew Lack at Sony and Jean-Rene Fourtou at Vivendi, neither of whom had worked in the record industry before.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/mai...2/cnemi102.xml





Copyright Challenge To Go Before Judges
Jack

A wide-ranging group of teachers, orchestra conductors, film archivists and distributors is challenging two acts of congress in federal court (pdf); the Copyright Term Extension Act and the Uruguay Round Agreements Act. The aim of the appeal is to roll back so-called Mickey Mouse bills which increase the length of copyrights on material already created. Critics charge the acts unconstitutionally steal works from the public domain and put them into private hands.

A previous challenge failed before the U.S. Supreme Court.





EFF Looks Back at Four Years of RIAA Lawsuits
Christopher Null

This Saturday marks the fourth anniversary of the RIAA's first lawsuits against consumers, alleging that they were violating copyright by sharing songs on peer-to-peer networks. More than 20,000 (and probably about 30,000) people have been targeted since, and the RIAA shows no signs of slowing down. And yet, P2P networks continue to grow in popularity. Are the lawsuits having any effect?

The EFF takes us on a candid and interesting history lesson [PDF link] in this report, walking us through the RIAA's initial attempts to sue the technology companies out of existence, then, when that failed, to issue "DMCA subpoenas by the thousands," which eventually led to the first wave of settlements: One of the first to settle was a 12-year-old girl living in NYC public housing, forced to publicly apologize for her actions and pay a $2,000 settlement. But the RIAA started on the wrong foot, as well, withdrawing lawsuits against the obviously innocent, like a grandma accused of downloading hardcore rap using Windows software... though she had a Mac.

By 2004 the RIAA began suing "John Doe" defendants, basically filing lawsuits against IP addresses without bothering to subpoena the ISPs for a name attached to the IP address. Meanwhile, suits against the poor, disabled, and the dead piled up. The tales of those sued wrongly are legion and, in many cases, quite frightening.

Are the lawsuits working? Doesn't look that way: Globally, the number of P2P users has risen from 3.8 million in August 2003 to 8.9 million by June 2005.

What does the EFF propose to get the RIAA back to sanity? A reasonably-priced, DRM-free, all-you-can-eat P2P system in exchange for, say, $5 a month. While I'm sure the RIAA would never go such a deal (it might jump on a $150 a month plan), I'm hard-pressed to come up with anything better. Anyone got any good ideas on curtailing piracy while keeping artists fairly paid? How about getting rid of the RIAA altogether and sharing the cost of running the organization?

This PDF is a lengthy essay (8 of the 25 pages are footnotes), but if you're at all interested in how the music industry has ended up in the messy state it's in, it's a history lesson definitely worth the read, and the remembrance.

Thanks, Ars Technica!
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/41308





Staff Editorial: ASUN to Warn About RIAA Suits, Aid Those Already Affected

ASUN will launch a campaign this fall to educate students about the dangers of illegal file-sharing and to give students who have been slapped with lawsuits by the RIAA some legal help.

We applaud this effort by our student government leaders. As college students, and particularly as University of Nebraska-Lincoln students, we need all the help we can get since the Recording Industry Association of America released the hounds on us last year.

This summer, the number of UNL students threatened to be sued by the RIAA topped 90, making UNL the only school to be targeted in each of the first three rounds of pre-litigation letters.

If all the UNL students targeted by the RIAA so far settled out of court, the RIAA would extort more than a quarter million dollars from those settlements alone.

Meanwhile, students who refuse to settle - and some have - could face fines of at least $750 per illegally downloaded song.

The Association of Students of the University of Nebraska's plan, which was presented during the ASUN meeting Wednesday, includes educational handouts to students and information on the student government's Web site about the dangers of illegal downloading. The plan also includes help from Student Legal Services for targeted students and suggestions for legal music downloading alternatives.

We're glad ASUN - after lengthy debate Wednesday - is opposed to any kind of software geared to block peer-to-peer sharing. Such software could inhibit legitimate uses of file sharing - say, for sharing an academic study, paper or sound file. P2P blocking software is also impractical and nowhere near foolproof.

Advising students about downloading dangers and helping those who have been caught in the RIAA's web is all well and good. But we would also like to see more proactive measures.

You see, we have no sympathy for the RIAA.

As its clutches on the music industry slip, the association is lashing out - and making mistakes.

It's not good business for the RIAA to sue its own audience. And it's even worse policy to sue students just because they are unable and unlikely to fight back.

Remember: The money collected by the RIAA in these lawsuits does not go to artists and musicians. Instead, it gets plowed back into funds for more lawsuits.

The association ought to look at other methods - such as a licensing system with makers of large-capacity hard disks or Internet service providers - to recoup losses from illegal music downloading.

Meanwhile, our student government should continue to pressure the university to refuse to forward pre-litigation letters to students - or, at the very least, to demand compensation for forwarding such letters.

In an op/ed piece in Wednesday's Daily Nebraskan, ASUN President David Solheim suggested two legal alternatives to so-called "music piracy": Ruckus, which offers 3 million free downloadable songs to students with .edu e-mail addresses, and Pandora, which is like a free custom online radio.

Both of these alternatives have downsides. And iTunes has the obvious downside of a 99-cent per-song cost.

Lastly, remember that UNL IP addresses are being monitored explicitly by the RIAA. So your risk of getting caught illegally downloading on campus is significantly magnified.

While there is no end in close sight to the RIAA's childish mischief, the public eye isn't going to leave it anytime soon. Until a resolution is at hand, support the efforts of our student government in reasonably defending students' privacy rights.

And - especially if you're still out there downloading - watch your virtual back.
http://www.dailynebraskan.com/news/2...-2952565.shtml





Who Founded Facebook? A New Claim Emerges
John Markoff

Mark E. Zuckerberg is considered the founder of Facebook, the popular social networking Web site estimated to be worth upward of $1 billion.

Three Harvard classmates, the founders of ConnectU, have long claimed that Mr. Zuckerberg stole the idea from them, and they are suing him in Federal District Court in Boston.

Both parties seem to have forgotten Aaron J. Greenspan, yet another Harvard classmate. He says he was actually the one who created the original college social networking system, before either side in the legal dispute. And he has the e-mail messages to show it.

As a Harvard student in 2003 — six months before Facebook started and eight months before ConnectU went online — Mr. Greenspan established a simple Web service that he called houseSYSTEM. It was used by several thousand Harvard students for a variety of online college-related tasks. Mr. Zuckerberg was briefly an early participant.

An e-mail message, circulated widely by Mr. Greenspan to Harvard students on Sept. 19, 2003, describes the newest feature of houseSYSTEM, as “the Face Book,” an online system for quickly locating other students. The date was four months before Mr. Zuckerberg started his own site, originally “thefacebook.com.” (Mr. Greenspan retained his college e-mail messages and provided The New York Times with copies of his communications with Mr. Zuckerberg.)

Later the two students, who both graduated in 2004, exchanged e-mail about their separate projects. When Mr. Greenspan asked what Mr. Zuckerberg was planning and suggested the two integrate their systems, Mr. Zuckerberg responded, a month before starting his own service: “I actually did think about integrating it into houseSYSTEM before you even suggested it, but I decided that it’s probably best to keep them separated at least for now.”

Despite Mr. Greenspan’s entrepreneurial ambitions, Mr. Zuckerberg was the first to move to Silicon Valley, raising venture capital and eventually transforming Facebook from a social networking site for college students into one of the fastest growing Internet sites for both social and business contacts.

Indeed, Mr. Greenspan, who is now 24 and moved to Silicon Valley last year to start a company, appears to be a clear example of a truism in this high-technology region: establishing who is first with an idea is often a murky endeavor at best, and frequently it is not the inventor of an idea who is the ultimate winner.

Mr. Zuckerberg declined to be interviewed, saying through a spokeswoman that he was not sure how to respond. He did not dispute the chronology of events or the authenticity of Mr. Greenspan’s e-mail messages. Mr. Zuckerberg is seeking to dismiss the ConnectU suit.

Mr. Greenspan said that Mr. Zuckerberg’s lawyer contacted him this year in connection with the ConnectU lawsuit but that he had declined a request to serve as a witness, fearing that he would become embroiled in the legal battle.

In an interview at a cafe here this week, Mr. Greenspan said he had mostly made peace with the fact that Mr. Zuckerberg will be the first of his classmates to become a billionaire.

If Mr. Zuckerberg did borrow some of Mr. Greenspan’s concepts, he may have simply been working in a grand Harvard tradition. After all, it was a young Harvard dropout, Bill Gates, and his classmate, Paul G. Allen, who almost three decades earlier copied a version of the BASIC programming language, designed by two Dartmouth college professors, to jump-start the company that would grow into the world’s most powerful software firm.

“I’ve had a long time to think about this, and I’m not as bitter as I was a year ago,” Mr. Greenspan said. “Things like this aren’t surprising to me anymore.”

Still, he does not seem to be entirely at peace with the way things have turned out, and he wants to have the last word.

He has described the original creation of houseSYSTEM, ConnectU and Facebook in “Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions,” a 306-page unpublished autobiography about his adventures as a college student.

“This book is partly a search for justice,” he wrote in the introduction. “You don’t write an autobiography in your early 20s unless there’s something you need to get off your chest.”

In “Authoritas,” he described his collision with Harvard authorities when he first started his system. He also explained his frustration in getting the student paper, The Harvard Crimson, to write about houseSYSTEM, which was then being used by about 100 students.

Mr. Zuckerberg, by way of contrast, had no difficulty attracting the interest of the paper, Mr. Greenspan said. It wrote about him first because he had developed MP3-playing software, called Synapse, as a high school student. The paper then published frequent follow-up articles.

College classmates describe Mr. Greenspan as extremely bright and an unusually productive software designer. Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Zuckerberg had much in common, said William Most, who was a classmate. “They were both computer guys and self-starters.”

Mr. Greenspan remains extraordinarily energetic and envisions ideas for new projects. Indeed, in an effort to find a publisher for his Harvard manuscript he developed an automated system that generated personalized query letters to more than 800 literary agents nationwide.

Although he has yet to find a publisher, he has deployed his system as a commercial Web service for other potential authors as part of CommonRoom, a social networking and business Web site that he established last year.

He attained brief notoriety on several Internet news sites last year when he published an open letter to Mr. Zuckerberg after reports surfaced that Yahoo had offered his college classmate $900 million for Facebook just two years after the founding of the company.

With barely hidden bitterness, he wrote: “Remember the Web site you signed up for at Harvard two days before we met in January, 2004, called houseSYSTEM — the one I made with the Universal Face Book that predated your site by four months?

“Well, I’ve relaunched it as CommonRoom,” he continued, “and just like its predecessor, it has all sorts of features that might seem familiar: birthday reminders, an event calendar, RSVPs, how you know someone, photo albums, courses posters.

“After all, when you saw all of those features in houseSYSTEM three years ago, you called them ‘too useful,’ but I stood by them as valuable. Fortunately, even though I shut down houseSYSTEM, I can still use those same features on Facebook — and I didn’t even have to write any more code!”

Although CommonRoom has just 1,500 users, compared with Facebook’s 37 million, Mr. Greenspan has not given up on the idea of social networking. He is starting his second company — he founded his first, Think Computer, when he was 15 — with a new partner. He said he has been promised venture capital backing for the new company, Qubescape.

“I’ve been doing consulting and software for business for several years now, and I’ve noticed the same problems again and again in business,” he said. “I think there’s a fairly good chance we’ll turn business software on its head.”

Mr. Greenspan says that he has learned some important lessons since leaving school, although he has no love for the thought of becoming one of the serial entrepreneurs common in Silicon Valley.

“I’ve written a lot about Harvard’s motto being ‘veritas,’ ” he wrote recently in an instant message, “and how uncomfortable I was when I discovered that Harvard actually didn’t abide by the ideals of truth at all times. But it’s a good motto. Possibly the best there is, because if you wait long enough, the truth will come out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/te...1facebook.html





A Tool to Organize Our Many Organizers
Michael Fitzgerald

WHEN he started his software company, Faizan Buzdar and three friends worked from a spare bedroom in the home of another friend. Their view was inspiring: the lovely house of an entrepreneur who had made a mint from his own start-up. “We would look at it and say we would buy it when we succeeded,” Mr. Buzdar said last week.

He may get the chance. His start-up, the Scrybe Corporation (www.iscrybe.com), which developed a personal information manager, recently said it had received an undisclosed amount of venture funding from Adobe Systems and L.M.K.R., an information technology services company based in Dubai.

Scrybe might have seemed a long shot to get even this far. Mr. Buzdar, 31, is based in Pakistan’s capital city, Islamabad, hardly known as a haven for software entrepreneurs. And Scrybe is trying to enter a well-established market dominated by Microsoft Outlook in the business world and by Google, Yahoo and a host of smaller companies on the Web. But Mr. Buzdar’s product, which is also called Scrybe and made its debut in a seven-minute YouTube video in October 2006, has drawn sustained interest. The reasons suggest he has figured out something fundamental about how we want access to schedules and related information.

Scrybe’s tools include a clever interface that features zooming calendar boxes that become bigger when scrolled over, the ability to print in multiple formats, including wallet- and pocket-friendly versions, and a novel notepad that accepts text and images from the Web as well as the usual typed-in notes. It also works offline, something that Outlook and other existing programs cannot do.

One user, David Gerboni, who works for a community bank in New York, said he had adopted Scrybe because of its interface and because it did a better job of pulling together data than any other calendar he has used, including Outlook.

All of this has made Scrybe, which remains in beta testing, the most anticipated software at the Museum of Modern Betas, a Web site that tracks emerging Web 2.0 projects. More than 300,000 people have watched the YouTube video. Given that the company had a public relations budget of zero dollars, Mr. Buzdar had told his co-founders (three friends he knew from the Pakistani outsourcing industry), that they might attract 10,000 users in six months. Instead, he said, “we had about 100,000 users in a few weeks.”

Of course, Scrybe is not the only new company trying to build a better way to organize personal information. Last week, the Open Source Applications Foundation released a much-delayed preview version of a product called Chandler. Another such tool that is planned to emerge this month is IWantSandy, which aims to handle calendar functions via e-mail.

While calendar sharing may sound mundane, the problem vexes people like David Weinberger, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and author of “Everything Is Miscellaneous,” a book that looks at how things should be organized — or not — in the online age. “I go through contortions like everybody else to sync up my BlackBerry with my Google calendar,” he said.

Mr. Weinberger said that the calendar issue symbolized a much bigger problem with information: It is atomized into various databases and hard to pull together.

“What we need is the ability to associate the people and the times and the places of our lives with the broad messy context of our lives,” he said. He added that the new tools are an early but important step toward giving people and companies a better way to manage their increasingly complicated existence.

A McKinsey & Company study of United States economic activity in 2005 said that 40 percent of labor activity, the biggest chunk, came not from making things or from traditional transactions but from what McKinsey called “the interaction economy,” the part in which people collaborate, solve problems and design products and such. One might also call it “the meeting economy.” It is the least commoditized part of the economy, and the hardest to measure and manage — and it involves the highest-priced labor.

“The nature of work has changed, and so has the technology that matters to businesses,” said James M. Manyika, a senior partner at McKinsey. Personal productivity applications like Scrybe matter more than big companywide applications like enterprise resource planning systems. “You’re not trying to automate the task a human does; you’re trying to complement what the human is doing,” he said.

MR. BUZDAR acknowledged that Scrybe might never solve the problems of large companies. Indeed, John Leckrone, director of venture development at Adobe, said he expected Scrybe to expand the market for organizing software rather than displace existing products. Scrybe’s initial version is basically a personal organizer. But Mr. Buzdar said that he plans to link the tool more closely with Outlook in the near future, and that a version for small and medium-size businesses was in the works.

For its part, Microsoft is certain to continue to adapt its products for the increasingly collaborative world of Web business, as is I.B.M., the other large provider of corporate calendar and information sharing tools.

Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley, says Scrybe is among a wave of companies that are forcing businesses to rethink what they do with information. Doing business increasingly means pulling together people across different time zones and companies. E-mail and phones aren’t efficient ways to organize these things, so there is pressure to create publicly viewable calendars.

Mr. Saffo said the big difference between these new personal information managers and those of the past “is that these new things share.”

He said the situation reminded him of the way personal computers broke down corporate information bureaucracies and gave all workers greater access to data. Companies are being forced to deal with such sweeping change again, and it will create confusion and consternation, but ultimately more effective communication.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/te...s/02proto.html





Go to Software Download...
Press Release

Computer scientists at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, in collaboration with colleagues from the Netherlands, are using a novel peer-to-peer video sharing application to explore a next-generation model for safe and legal electronic commerce that uses Internet bandwidth as a global currency.

The application (available for free download at http://tv.seas.harvard.edu) is an enhanced version of a program called Tribler, originally created by scientists at the Delft University of Technology and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam to study video file sharing. The software exploits the power of peer-to-peer technology, which is based on forming networks among individual users.

“Successful peer-to-peer systems rely on designing rules that promote fair sharing of resources amongst users. Thus, they are both efficient and powerful computational and economic systems,” says David Parkes, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard. "Peer-to-peer has received a bad rap, however, because of its frequent association with illegal music or software downloads.”

Unlike traditional, centralized approaches, peer-to-peer systems are incredibly robust, as they can scale smoothly since the software adjusts to the number and behavior of individual users. The researchers were inspired to use a version of the Tribler video sharing software as a model for an e-commerce system because of such flexibility, speed, and reliability. “Our platform will provide fast downloads by ensuring sufficient uploads,” explains Johan Pouwelse, an assistant professor at Delft University of Technology and the technical director of Tribler. “The next generation of peer-to-peer systems will provide an ideal marketplace not just for content, but for bandwidth in general.”

The researchers envision an e-commerce model that connects users to a single global market, without any controlling company, network, or bank. They see bandwidth as the first true Internet “currency” for such a market. For example, the more a user uploads now (i.e. earns) and the higher the quality of the contributions, the more s/he would be able to download later (i.e. spend) and the faster the download speed. More broadly, this paradigm empowers individuals or groups of users to run their own “marketplace” for any computer resource or service.

Another idea the researchers believe has enormous but untapped potential is the combination of social network technology with peer-to-peer systems. “In the case of sharing and playing video, our network-based system already allows a group of ‘friends’ to pool their collective upload ‘reserve’ to slash download times. For Internet-based television this means a true instant, on-demand video experience,” explains Pouwelse.

The researchers concede that the greatest challenge to any peer-to-peer backed e-commerce system is implementing proper regulation in a decentralized environment. To keep an eye on the virtual economy, Parkes and Pouwelse envision creating a “web of trust,” or a network between friends used to evaluate the trustworthiness of fellow users and aimed at preventing content theft, counterfeiting, and cyber attacks.

To do so they will use a feature already included in the enhanced version of the Tribler software, the ability for users to “gossip” or report on the behavior of other peers. Their eventual goal is to find a way to create accurate personal assessments or trust metrics as a form of internal regulation.

“This idea is not new, but previous implementations have been costly and are dependent on a company and/or website being the enforcer. Addressing the ‘trust issue’ within open peer-to-peer technology could lead to future online economies that are legal, dynamic and scaleable, have very low start-up costs, and minimal downtime,” says Parkes.

By studying user behavior within an operational “Internet currency” system, with a particular focus on understanding how and why attacks, fraud, and abuse occur and how trust can be established and maintained, the researchers imagine future improvements to everything from on-demand television to online auctions to open content encyclopedias.
http://tv.seas.harvard.edu/press.php





Don't Dismiss Online Relationships as Fantasy
Regina Lynn

Last month, three unrelated stories challenged the idea that internet relationships are just fantasy and therefore less important, less powerful and less real than offline relationships.

They aren't.

First, I read the Wired magazine piece about Thomas Montgomery, a married father of two in New York state. Montgomery invented two alternate identities and got both of them involved online with the 17-year-old girl persona of Mary, a forty-something married woman in West Virginia, whom he met at the games site, Pogo.com. He then became so jealous that she was also seeing his co-worker online, that he shot the guy dead in the parking lot after work.

In real life. Where you can't just get a snack, go pee and log back in.

This is "just fantasy"? No. At least, it's no more fantastic than any other murderer's fantasy image of himself as a tough guy out to keep other men off his woman. Montgomery's was a real -- albeit twisted -- relationship, based on power and manipulation rather than love or sex, and one that resulted in real tragedy.

A Wall Street Journal article described a couple who met online three years ago and whose offline marriage is now on the rocks because of the husband's immersion in Second Life. Or maybe he initially immersed himself in Second Life because the marriage wasn't going so well; it's hard to tell.

Either way, his dedicated online involvement includes owning several businesses, adopting two dogs and getting married. He downplays his in-world marriage as "part of the game," a fantasy he and his Second Life partner have no intention of pursuing offline.

Yet I find it unlikely that a person would devote the majority of his working hours to something that is simply "a game."

Virtual worlds are boring when there's no one to play with; you don't go in there just to defy gravity and buy new costumes for your dolls. You're there for the people -- and you don't spend all day every day with mere casual acquaintances, either. Only relationships with real emotional attachment could foster such commitment.

Last week the Houston Chronicle reported that one in three women who met partners through online dating sites had sex with them "on the first date" -- and that 75 percent of those women didn't use condoms.

The study contrasts this apparently risky behavior with the extensive care women take to stay safe in other ways, like doing formal background checks, meeting in a public place, telling a friend whom they're meeting, and setting up check-in calls.

In this story, an MIT professor of behavioral economics is quoted as saying, "When somebody's sitting by their laptop at home and writing these sterile e-mails to each other, there's no sense of emotionality.... But when they meet and they get aroused, life changes."

Believe me, professor. If the e-mails were sterile or lacking in emotionality, the men would never get to the "first date" stage, much less sex.

Those pre-date e-mails and chats and dancing in virtual clubs build a relationship quickly. A real relationship. Sometimes, it's a relationship so hot that if you climax en route to the "first date," you don't consider it premature.

The common thread among these stories is that people get deeply involved in online relationships and make decisions about their real lives. Calling any of these online relationships "fantasy" dismisses the impact they have on the people involved and on those closest to them.

We all know we do things in the heat of the moment that we might not if we stepped back and thought about it for a while. Online environments can extend that "heat of the moment" feeling over long periods of time; physical environments often don't. And then we do stupid things, like completely ignore our other relationships to be with our online lovers, instead of staying in balance. Or we get caught having IM sex at work and get fired.

Very rarely does someone lose it as completely as Montgomery did. And yet, sexual jealousy is not a new motive for murder. This one is news because of the twists that can only happen online: Two baby boomers successfully fooled each other into believing they were barely legal. But the bonds that formed, however unhealthy, turned out to be all too real.

Even people who might point to the Montgomery case as an example of why the internet should be turned off forever know it's an extreme example. Meanwhile, the rest of us can say, "That's absurd, that doesn't apply to me at all," and still rush blindly into troubles of our own.

For all that I have broadened my horizons since the first Sex Drive column more than four years ago, I have yet to encounter anything that challenges my core belief: Relationships are real wherever they form.

That's why we're so desperate to pretend it's all fantasy if it's online, so we can make the hard, painful, life-crushing parts go away. And that's why I get my panties in a bunch when people try to dismiss the reality of sex in virtual spaces. I'm all for cybersex, of course, but let's not pretend it doesn't have real consequences.

Sex educator Cory Silverberg notes on his blog that "maybe we want to pretend that what happens online stays online because so often, we want it to."

But anyone who has been affected by online love knows the emotions don't turn on when we log on and turn off when we log off.

I mean, just look at Jazz Asylum and Chelle Moore, also known as Joe Trykoski and Michelle Pignatano. They met in Second Life last October and got married in-world. This spring, Michelle moved across four states into Joe's apartment, and they continued to play together in Second Life.

Last month in Chicago, Joe stopped the music at the Second Life Community Convention Masquerade Ball (which felt a lot like being in-world with the props, music and costumes), dropped to one knee, and proposed to Michelle. No one doubted the emotion in her voice when she said yes. The crowd cheered, and the dancing continued.

Now tell me it's just fantasy.

See you next time,
Regina Lynn
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifesty.../sexdrive_0907





As Prostitutes Turn to Craigslist, Law Takes Notice
Bruce Lambert

The eight women visited Long Island this summer along with vacationing families and other business travelers, staying in hotels and motels in commercial strips in middle-class suburbs like East Garden City, Hicksville and Woodbury. Their ages ranged from 20 to 32.

Three had come all the way from the San Francisco Bay area, one from Miami. Two lived less than 60 miles away, in Newark and Elizabeth, N.J. and two even closer, in Brooklyn.

All eight were arrested on prostitution charges here, snared in a new sting operation by the Nassau County police that focuses on Craigslist.org, the ubiquitous Web site best known for its employment and for-sale advertisements but which law enforcement officials say is increasingly also used to trade sex for money.

Nassau County has made more than 70 arrests since it began focusing on Craigslist last year, one of numerous crackdowns by vice squads from Hawaii to New Hampshire that have lately been monitoring the Web site closely, sometimes placing decoy ads to catch would-be customers.

“Craigslist has become the high-tech 42nd Street, where much of the solicitation takes place now,” said Richard McGuire, Nassau’s assistant chief of detectives. “Technology has worked its way into every profession, including the oldest.”

Augmenting traditional surveillance of street walkers, massage parlors, brothels and escort services, investigators are now hunching over computer screens to scroll through provocative cyber-ads in search of solicitors.

In July raids, the sheriff of Cook County, Ill., rounded up 43 women working on the streets — and 60 who advertised on Craigslist. In Seattle, a covert police ad on Craigslist in November resulted in the arrests of 71 men, including a bank officer, a construction worker and a surgeon.

And in Jacksonville, Fla., a single ad the police posted for three days in August netted 33 men, among them a teacher and a firefighter. “We got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hits” in phone calls and e-mail messages, said John P. Hartley, the assistant chief sheriff there.

Sex and the Internet have been intertwined almost since the first Web site, but the authorities say that prostitution is flourishing online as never before. And while prostitutes also advertise on other sites, the police here and across the country say Craigslist is by far the favorite. On one recent day, for example, some 9,000 listings were added to the site’s “Erotic Services” category in the New York region alone: Most offered massage and escorts, often hinting at more.

Law enforcement officials have accused Craigslist of enabling prostitution. But the company’s president, Jim Buckmaster, said its 24-member staff cannot patrol the multitude of constantly changing listings — some 20 million per month — and counts on viewers to flag objectionable ads, which are promptly removed.

“We do not want illegal activity on the site,” he said. Asked whether the company supported the police’s placing decoy ads on Craigslist, Mr. Buckmaster said: “We don’t comment on the specifics” of law enforcement.

Craig Newmark, the site’s founder and chairman, deferred all questions to Mr. Buckmaster.

The police have also occasionally turned to Craigslist to trace stolen goods offered for sale or make drug arrests. In June, in Nassau, spotting code words like “snow” or “skiing” to refer to cocaine, they set up a sting with an undercover officer to arrest a man who advertised cocaine for sex.

Experts say that under the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996, the ads are legal and Web site owners are exempt from responsibility for content posted by users. Craigslist, for example, last fall won dismissal of a suit that alleged housing discrimination in ads posted on its Web site. “You hold the speaker liable, not the soapbox,” explained Kurt B. Opsahl, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group based in San Francisco.

While Mr. Buckmaster said Craigslist was no different from old-media publications that have long carried sex-oriented ads, law enforcement officials say its scope and format are especially useful to the sex industry. With listings for some 450 cities around the world, Craigslist claims to have 25 million users and 8 billion page views a month. Posting advertisements, except those in the employment and some housing categories, is free, as is responding to them by e-mail.

“The Internet has allowed people to make contact in a way not possible before,” said Ronald Weitzer, a sociology professor at George Washington University and a researcher on prostitution. “Ten years ago this was not happening at all.”

As Nassau’s district attorney, Kathleen Rice, said of Craigslist: “It’s as easy as it gets.”

Tracy Quan, a member of the advocacy group Prostitutes of New York and author of the autobiographical novel “Diary of a Married Call Girl” (Harper Perennial, 2006), acknowledged that “the Internet became a virtual street for people in the sex industry,” but said that “the police are as inventive and as wily as sex workers are.” She said that the stings amounted to entrapment of consenting adults, and that “it seems like an enormous waste of time resources by authoritarian busybodies.”

The police say that Craigslist has changed prostitution’s patterns, with people roaming the country, setting up shop for a week or two in hotels — often near airports — where they use laptop computers and cellphones to arrange encounters for hundreds of dollars, then moving on to their next location.

“They like to move around, that’s for sure,” said Assistant Chief McGuire. “They’re flying in from out of state because there is money here” on Long Island.

In Westchester County this spring, the police in Greenburgh, Rye, Rye Brook and Elmsford formed a joint task force to investigate ads on Craigslist, resulting in 30 arrests. Some of those arrested were out-of-town prostitutes who booked numerous dates in advance, then whisked in for a busy couple of days, the police said.

In Sandpoint, Idaho, population 8,105, R. Mark Lockwood, the police chief, said that an arrest this summer involving Craigslist “was probably our first prostitution case since World War II.”

Amid the police crackdown, in a game of electronic cat-and-mouse, the authorities say that Web site users who get wind of enforcement sometimes post warnings to thwart investigators.

The Craigslist modus operandi provides mobility, helping prostitutes keep a few steps ahead of the law, law enforcement officials say. It also affords a degree of anonymity — if they are caught, being away from home makes an arrest less embarrassing.

Pimps have also adapted to the computer age, the police say. Among those arrested here in August, on charges of promoting prostitution, was Victor Teixeira, 31, of Mineola. “He was managing the technology of it,” said Assistant Chief McGuire. “He recruited the women on the Internet. He put different ads up sometimes three times day. He would screen the calls and make the appointments.”

Mr. Teixeira pleaded not guilty; he could not be reached for comment.

Most of the arrests are on misdemeanor charges, with convictions resulting in fines of a few hundred dollars; only repeat offenders risk jail time. The real penalties are the disruption of business, the cost of lawyers and the seizures of computers and cash — as much as several thousand dollars at a time. The police say the focus on such misconduct is worthwhile because prostitution is often linked to other crimes involving drugs, weapons, physical abuse and exploitation of minors and immigrants.

Law enforcement officials ask why Craigslist even includes Erotic Services among its 191 categories. Mr. Buckmaster, the company president, said the site created that category “at the request of our users” for legitimate massage, escorts and exotic dancers. In an e-mail interview, he said that the police had praised the company’s cooperation, though he did not give examples.

Despite police complaints that Craigslist facilitates prostitution, some experts say the Web site also aids enforcement.

“Craigslist is a very open site, and it leaves digital footprints,” said Leslie A. Harris, president of the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. “It makes it easier for the police.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/ny...raigslist.html





Convicted Peeper Sues to Get Porn Back
AP

A man recently jailed for secretly videotaping a woman and a teenage girl has sued a police department for the return of his massive porn collection taken during the investigation.

Dennis Saunders, 59, filed suit against San Rafael police in Marin County Superior Court after the department refused to give back some 500 pornographic movies and 250 magazines his lawyer described as unrelated to the peeping case.

"There's absolutely no legal foundation for them withholding perfectly legal adult-oriented material," Tiburon attorney Jon Rankin said.

The video collection alone was likely worth at least $10,000, Rankin said.

Saunders was arrested in 2002 and charged with taping the 45-year-old woman and 16-year-old girl in their bedrooms and bathrooms at an apartment complex where he worked. He was convicted of 48 misdemeanors and sentenced to more than eight years in jail, but was released last month with credit for good behavior.

A lawyer representing the city said authorities wanted direction from a judge on whether it would be "lawful or appropriate" to return the material to Saunders, who has a history of peeping-related arrests dating back to 1979.

"If the court orders us to give it back to him, we will give it back to him," city lawyer Thomas Bertrand said.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/nation...eper_Sues.html







"Halloween" Slashes Holiday Box Office Record
Dean Goodman

A re-imagining of the classic slasher movie "Halloween" broke the record for a new release during the U.S. Labor Day holiday weekend, according to studio estimates issued on Sunday.

The movie, directed by rock star-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie, earned about $26.5 million since opening on Friday, easily beating the rosiest predictions.

After two weekends at No. 1, the teen comedy "Superbad" slipped to No. 2 with $12.2 million for the three-day period.

Two other films debuted in the top 10. The martial arts movie parody "Balls of Fury" came in at No. 3 with a modest $11.6 million, while the Kevin Bacon vigilante thriller "Death Sentence" barely registered a pulse at No. 8 with $4.2 million. Their respective studios said the results were in line with expectations.

"Halloween" distributor Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer expects its film will hit $30 million when sales for the Monday holiday are included. Observers had expected it to make $20 million for the four-day period. Final data will be released on Tuesday.

The three-day sum smashes the $16.5 million Labor Day opening record set two years ago by "Transporter 2," which added $3.6 million on Monday. The all-time record for the four-day period is $29.3 million set by 1999's "The Sixth Sense" in its fifth weekend.

"Halloween," the eighth film to be spun off from John Carpenter's 1978 original, focuses on the grim childhood of its villain, Michael Myers. It cost about $15 million to make, said Bob Weinstein, co-founder of the film's closely held producer, the Weinstein Co.

Despite its success, the former Miramax Films chief doubted there would be another "Halloween" film.

"I never say never never ... but it would have to be something very, very different," he told Reuters.

The studio does plan to make two more movies with Zombie, whose real name is Rob Cummings. Zombie, 42, rose to fame in the 1990s at the helm of the heavy metal band White Zombie. He made his feature directing debut with 2003's "House of 1000 Corpses."

After three weekends, "Superbad" has earned $89 million, and the film will easily pass the $100 million mark, said Columbia Pictures, a unit of Sony Corp.

"Balls of Fury" was released by Rogue Pictures, the genre division of NBC Universal's Focus Features. "Death Sentence" was released by 20th Century Fox, a unit of News Corp.
http://www.reuters.com/article/domes...19801620070902





As Labor Talks Near, Studios Play Down Numbers
Brooks Barnes

Hollywood had one of its best summers in recent history, crossing the $4 billion mark in ticket sales for the first time and stockpiling hits to release on DVD. But the movie studios are not quite popping the Champagne — at least publicly.

Indeed, to hear many studio executives talk, the movie business is closer to the edge of a cliff than ever. The 18-week summer season ending today looks great on paper, with 16 movies selling at least $100 million in tickets. But executives quickly point out that $4 billion is not a record when ticket sales are adjusted for inflation. Attendance was also lighter than in years past.

And those blockbuster movies, ranging from “Spider-Man 3” to “Rush Hour 3,” were also some of the most expensive films ever made.

“You have to first realize that before the first ticket is sold, you can have $300 million in costs to recoup,” said Dan Fellman, president of domestic distribution at Warner Brothers Pictures. “It’s hard to judge the health of an entire business based on one summer.”

Some people see a strategy in all of the black bunting: the studios are in the middle of tough labor negotiations with the Hollywood guilds.

“You don’t want to celebrate too much at a time when you’re negotiating new contracts,” said Brandon Gray, publisher of Box Office Mojo, a Web site about the movie business.

Particularly this time around. Agitated by the increasing distribution of movies and television shows online, the unions are more intent than ever on securing pay increases. Negotiations with two of the writers unions are expected to resume on Sept. 19.

“A record summer plays right into our hands, especially from a public perception standpoint,” said one Writers Guild of America executive, who asked for anonymity because he had not been cleared to speak publicly on behalf of the union.

A spokesman for the guild did not respond to requests for comment, but John F. Bowman, the chairman of the union’s negotiating committee, echoed the sentiment in a recent interview. “The studios are reaping windfall profits but pleading poverty to the talent community,” he said.

Studio chiefs say no strategy is at play. They are pleased with the financial performance of the summer — a window in which movie companies can make up to 40 percent of their yearly revenue — but say unsettling spots of weakness cannot be ignored.

Unlike in past years, no independent movie became a sleeper hit along the lines of “Little Miss Sunshine” in 2006. Romantic comedies failed to perform (“No Reservations” took in less than $40 million in the United States), as did lucrative torture-themed horror movies (“Captivity” bombed with $2.6 million). Stars with significant wattage — like Nicole Kidman and Angelina Jolie — drew yawns.

Moreover, Wall Street’s infatuation with movie financing is starting to ease, most studio chiefs say, because of the credit crisis and some high-profile investing mistakes like “Evan Almighty.” The comedy, which cost an estimated $200 million to produce and market, took in about $100 million at United States theaters.

Then there are the glass-half-empty statistics: Despite the glut of big-budget films, the box office failed to beat the summer of 2002 after inflation is taken into account. The total for that summer was $3.79 billion, or $4.39 billion adjusted for inflation.

Movie theaters sold about 606 million tickets from the first weekend in May through yesterday, according to the tracking firm Media by Numbers, down from a peak of 653 million in 2002. “There was certainly brisk business at theaters this summer, but I think a lot of people expected attendance would rebound to a larger degree,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Media by Numbers.

In contrast to some recent summers, all of the major studios got a turn at the feeding trough this year, said Gitesh Pandya, editor of the Web site Box Office Guru. Among the top 10 movies were films from Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal, Walt Disney and Warner Brothers.

The top three movies of the summer, as judged on their global popularity, were “Spider-Man 3” (Sony); “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” (Disney); and “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” (Warner Brothers). All three movies are hovering in the $900 million range, according to Mr. Pandya, with “Shrek the Third” not far behind.

“For these big sequels, international growth was the story,” Mr. Pandya said.

Paramount led the summer in market share, largely because of the performance of movies incubated at its DreamWorks unit. The studio’s “Transformers” grew into a monster hit, selling more than $300 million in tickets in the United States alone.

Also notable was Universal’s performance. The studio was responsible for the summer’s biggest flop in “Evan Almighty,” but racked up impressive receipts for the raunchy comedy “Knocked Up” and the thriller “The Bourne Ultimatum,” which critics praised and which managed to outperform two previous installments, a rare feat for the third movie in a franchise.

“We’re thrilled that business was so strong,” said Nikki Rocco, president of Universal Pictures distribution.

The summer is poised to end on a quiet note. Through yesterday, overall ticket sales for the Labor Day weekend declined compared to last year, according to Box Office Mojo. In first place was “Halloween,” a remake of the classic horror film from the Weinstein Company and distributor MGM, with $26.5 million. The performance shows that the horror genre, while troubled, still has legs when packaged correctly, box office analysts said.

Rounding out the top five for the weekend were: “Superbad” ($12.2 million); “Balls of Fury” ($11.6 million); “The Bourne Ultimatum” ($10.2 million); and “Rush Hour 3” ($8.6 million).
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/03/bu...movies.html?hp





Keeping Piracy in Perspective
Dan Mitchell

THE Motion Picture Association of America’s home page this week showed a big picture of Batman swooping out of the sky, wings outstretched. “The Magic of the Movies,” the caption read.

But while the picture was the dominant element on the home page, nearly every item was about movie piracy — how bad it is for the industry and how severe the penalties can be. There was even an item bragging about how many arrests had been made and how many pirated DVDs had been seized (81 million since last year). That Hollywood film studios just finished their best summer ever at the box office wasn’t mentioned.

Thus the headline on an Ars Technica article: “Movie biz obsesses about pirates even as it plunders box office booty.” And at Techdirt.com, Mike Masnick wrote that though the industry group is “constantly screaming about how piracy is killing the movie industry, putting poor stagehands and grips out of work, you’d be hard pressed to see the problem when you hear that the box office take this summer passed $4 billion for the first time ever.”

Both of the technology news sites, along with many bloggers, used the record numbers to call on Hollywood once again to change its antipiracy strategy. Rather than treating their customers as criminals, they say, movie studios should work harder to make moviegoing and DVD-viewing more enjoyable experiences.

Piracy is, of course, a huge problem, wrote Nate Anderson of Ars Technica (arstechnica.com). “It’s just that the level of concern is out of proportion to how well the industry is actually doing.” Studios, he added, should “make it easy for users to buy and use the legitimate product.”

“Think of how much more they could earn by adopting smarter business models to combat piracy in the marketplace, rather than the courts.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/08/te.../08online.html





The Price of War, Front and Center
Bill Carter

In the HBO documentary “Alive Day Memories” Dawn Halfaker, 27, a former Army first lieutenant, is sitting in a chair on a stark stage, talking, somewhat incongruously, to James Gandolfini, the star of “The Sopranos.”

Mr. Gandolfini serves as the interviewer in the film, set to have its premiere Sunday night at 10:30. It deals with the recovery of American veterans from devastating injuries inflicted during the war in Iraq.

Ms. Halfaker, whose right arm and shoulder are gone, blasted away by a rocket-propelled grenade, says she has wondered whether her child, if she ever has one, will be able truly to love her. And then a look of intense emotion clouds her face. Ms. Halfaker’s eyes flutter, seemingly looking at some image far, far away. Finally, after a long pause, Mr. Gandolfini asks quietly, “What were you just thinking about?”

And Ms. Halfaker tells him: “The reality of, will I be able to raise a kid? I won’t be able to pick up my son or daughter with two arms.”

Mr. Gandolfini manages to maintain his composure through that and nine other interviews with disabled veterans. As he put it in a telephone interview: “What the heck do I know? I never had the experiences these kids had. How much do they even want to remember?”

For the most part the ex-soldiers in the film — the title refers to the day they sustained, and survived, their injuries — are willing to share memories of what happened to them and to talk about their lives. Three of them — Ms. Halfaker; Jacob Schick, 24, an ex-corporal in the Marines; and John Jones, 29, a former Marine staff sergeant — said in telephone interviews that they had concluded the documentary would provide a valuable service. “I just thought it was important to get my story out,” said Mr. Schick, whose leg was amputated above the knee. “I want the American people to see this is what it’s like.”

Ms. Halfaker said: “When I first got injured, I wouldn’t talk as much. I didn’t want to acknowledge the reality of it. But then I saw the value of bringing some awareness of the things that are going on in Iraq. I think it was a little bit therapeutic.”

On the face of it Mr. Gandolfini makes for an unlikely questioner, as he acknowledged. But his fame, and the familiarity of his character, Tony Soprano, put the soldiers at ease. Mr. Gandolfini was “really respectful with us,” Mr. Schick said. “He didn’t want the cameras on him.”

Mr. Gandolfini is barely seen in the film and only occasionally heard. He insisted on that, Sheila Nevins, the president of HBO’s documentary division, said. “He played a tough guy on TV, but Jim knows these are the real tough guys,” she said.

The film sprang from a visit Ms. Nevins and Mr. Gandolfini made to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. “He wandered the halls,” Ms. Nevins said. “Everyone knew him. They’d show him their Purple Hearts. I could see him internalizing the whole experience.”

At the time HBO was coming up to the premiere of the documentary “Baghdad E.R.,” which chronicled the extraordinary efforts of military medical personnel and the lives they were saving. The film was at first widely praised in the military. But just before a screening in Washington the Pentagon refused to allow military personnel to appear at the HBO event. Ms. Nevins said she concluded that the Pentagon had decided it was an antiwar film.

She has no hesitation in declaring herself personally opposed to the war, but she argued that “Baghdad E.R.” presented military doctors heroically. And in the visit to Walter Reed, Ms. Nevins saw a follow-up: a look at some of the lives those doctors saved.

She said all was set for production until military officials stepped in, two weeks before shooting was to start, and made Walter Reed off limits to the filmmakers. “There was no explanation why,” Ms. Nevins said.

Of course she suspected similar fears of an antiwar message. And they were not entirely unwarranted. But Ms. Nevins said she was personally overwhelmed by what she saw and heard from the veterans. “I didn’t really understand patriotism until we made this film,” she said.

After losing access to Walter Reed, Ms. Nevins said, “I got to thinking about how we had the operating theater in the first film. And here we heard all about the theater of operations. And Jim was kind of an Off Broadway guy.”

Ms. Nevins put all the theater references together and wound up renting a small downtown performance space in Manhattan, creating an understated theatrical look for the interviews: a stage, a minimal set of just a couple of chairs, a few lights.

Mr. Gandolfini “didn’t pretend to be a journalist,” Ms. Nevins said. “But in that moment where Dawn talks about not being able to hold a child, he just waited, like a good actor in a great scene.”

The soldiers quickly found a comfort level with Mr. Gandolfini. Mr. Jones, who has two prosthetic legs and feet, had reason to be home with Mr. Gandolfini, for his lieutenant would project DVDs of “The Sopranos” on a bathroom wall when stationed in Iraq.
“We began to base ourselves off Tony Soprano and all his gang,” he said. “We’d talk about the godfather” — his commanding officer — “and the lieutenant would tell us to go out and put a hit on a guy.”

Mr. Gandolfini said he wanted to do something for the injured vets: “I think these guys are so ignored.” Not that the experience has made him feel especially good about his contribution. “If somebody gets hurt, and you take them to the hospital, should you feel good about it?”

The film includes video shot by insurgents, of whom Mr. Gandolfini said: “You hear them saying prayers after they blow up a jeep. It makes you want to pick up a gun and kill somebody.”

The soldiers themselves express a range of feelings, from anger to emotional distress. They all acknowledge living with constant pain, physical as well as psychological. One subject, Dexter Pitts, 22, a former Army private, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

“It’s day to day,” Mr. Jones said. “You’re emotional. You have mood swings. I’ll get up in the morning, and it’s O.K., and come home really ticked off. You fight depression.” But he manages to get on ice skates with two prosthetic legs and skate around Bryant Park in Manhattan with his two young children.

Mr. Schick said: “I’m a Christian guy. I try to deal with it as best as I know how. Some days you think: Man, what could I have done differently? At the same time I believe there’s a reason for this. God’s not done with me yet.”

One reason, he said, was to win this battle. “I’ve got the rest of my life to beat my enemy,” Mr. Schick said. “Every day I just have to get out of my bed, and I beat him.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/ar...on/06aliv.html





2 Venice Films Look at Iraq War Horrors
Colleen Barry

Two Hollywood films that take up the politics of the Iraq war grew out of the conviction that the American public was not getting the full picture of the violence.

Oscar-winning director Paul Haggis' "In the Valley of Elah," starring Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron, focuses on the psychological scars that haunt returning soldiers and provides a powerful commentary on how society is treating veterans and their families.

Brian De Palma says he wants to stop the war with his film, "Redacted" by exposing a wider audience to images of horror that he says are not being delivered by the mainstream media.

With Vietnam, "we saw pictures of the destruction and the sorrow of the people who were traumatized. We saw the soldiers ... being brought back in body bags. We see none of that in this war," De Palma told a news conference Friday. One of his previous films, "Casualties of War," dealt with the Vietnam war.

The title, "Redacted," is a term meaning edited that is often used when sensitive material is expunged, or blacked out, from a document.

De Palma's film, inspired by material he found on the Internet, is shot on video to present the film as though it were a series of clips that could be downloaded to your computer. Inspired by actual events, the movie tells the fictionalized story of a group of young soldiers who rape a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, kill her family and then shoot her.

De Palma said he wanted to examine how the soldiers had gone so wrong. The movie doesn't present the judicial resolution, but it does show one soldier who came forward being treated with hostility by the military, in contrast to the more comfortable interrogations of the two main perpetrators.

In reality, four soldiers have been convicted in the case that inspired the film and handed sentences of up to 110 years in prison. A fifth man, who left the Army before being charged, faces a federal death penalty trial. The case has received wide media coverage.

The filmmakers had to negotiate a "legal minefield" to present real events as fiction, De Palma said, and the film opens with a disclaimer, which is slowly blacked out. The final scene is a montage of real-life photographs of Iraqi war dead, including maimed and dead women and children, their eyes blacked out on the advice of lawyers because the film used actors and is not a documentary.

"The irony of 'Redacted' is that it was redacted," De Palma said.

While De Palma said he wants the film to help stop the war, Haggis said he tried to keep his own well-known anti-war politics off the screen.

"I felt I owed it to the audience to put that aside, to tell the story ... and let them decide," Haggis told reporters Saturday ahead of his movie's premiere.

Haggis said he also was driven by an absence from the Iraqi war of the sort of images that shocked the public into opposing the Vietnam war.

"I think that when that doesn't happen, it's the responsibility of the artist to ask those questions," said Haggis, who won an Oscar for 2002's "Crash."

In the film, Jones plays Hank Deerfield, the father of a U.S. soldier who disappears just days after returning from a tour in Iraq. A former soldier himself, he drives across the country to find out what happened to his son and learns hard truths about his son's Iraq tour, while challenging some of his own long-held ideals. Charlize Theron plays a New Mexico police detective drawn into the investigation.

Both movies explore how exposure to war _ both its horrors and its endless tense hours of patrol and manning roadblocks _ desensitizes soldiers to violence, and how that triggers even more tragedy.

Haggis' film takes a very hard look at how society is responding, including in a tight subplot. Early on, the wife of an Iraqi veteran reports to local police her husband's violent drowning of the family's Doberman in the bathtub. Theron's detective refers the woman to the local U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, saying "crimes against dogs are particularly hard to prosecute."

Later, she answers a call where the woman, too, has been drowned in the bathtub.

Inevitably, the film is political, acknowledged Haggis. "All films are political when your country is at war," he said.

"Redacted," which opens in the United States in December, premiered Friday here, and "In the Valley of Elah," making its U.S. opening in coming weeks, premiered Saturday.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...090101337.html





Young Fliers See the Film, Be It PG or R
Bob Tedeschi

A husband shoots his wife in the face, then drags her body from the pool of blood. A 12-year-old boy is crushed against a fence by a car. A teenager zips up her jeans in the bathroom after a sexual encounter.

These are images from movies shown to passengers recently on overhead screens in airlines, and they are sources of a new and vigorous outcry from parents, flight attendants and children’s advocacy groups who say that in-flight entertainment has become anything but family-friendly.

Critics say their anger comes as airlines, eager to cater to current tastes and acceding to more permissive standards for the entertainment media, have relaxed their rules for what they show.

Movies with R ratings are more frequently shown, though with editing, along with television reruns including sexual content, violence and other fare intended for teenagers and adults.

Because federal broadcast laws do not apply to in-flight entertainment, and because airlines need not adhere to Motion Picture Association of America ratings or television standards, parental advocacy groups have begun lobbying for change. At least one group has asked federal legislators for laws to curb violence shown on overhead screens.

Flying with children, the critics say, has become a scary experience.

“It’s almost routine now when you’re on a plane to sit there and go, ‘Whoa!’ ” said James Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, which reviews entertainment products for parents. “But you’re a captive audience, and you have almost no control.”

Thomas Fine and Sara Susskind of Cambridge, Mass., recently spent two hours on a United Airlines flight distracting their 6-year-old son, Zachary, from the R-rated “Shooter,” which depicts multiple gory killings. The sound of gunshots from nearby earphones alerted Zachary to look up, Mr. Fine said. “It’s not like he can look away when he hears the sound, and he’s sitting on a plane bored, and he’s 6,” Mr. Fine said.

The airlines counter that they are trying to appeal to the widest possible audience while respecting parents’ needs, and that parents can avoid shows if they wish.

“Parents have to be responsible for the actions of their kids — whether they shouldn’t look at the screen or look away,” said Eric Kleiman, director of product marketing for Continental Airlines.

Last month, Continental featured the R-rated thriller “Fracture,” in which a character played by Anthony Hopkins shoots his wife in the face. The scene shown on the airplane is edited slightly from the version shown in theaters, though it depicts the gunshot and then blood pooling around the victim’s head.

Mr. Kleiman said the changing tenor of airline entertainment was in keeping with the changing standards of network television and other media. “Our approach is consistent with where society is going with this,” he said.

Gavin Minton, an editor with Crest Digital, which edits airline movies, said carriers might be choosing more films in which violence is core to the plot. “Movies in general are more violent,” he said. “No matter how edited it is, there will still be an aspect of it that seems violent.”

It is difficult to quantify the change in programming offered by the carriers, but there is heavy anecdotal evidence that airlines, which buy the movies of their choice from Hollywood, are breaking old barriers as they seek to improve on their shrinking list of amenities.

The Association of Flight Attendants-C.W.A., a union whose members hear complaints from parents, said that the percentage of R-rated movies had jumped in the last two years and that the observed trend was toward more graphic and violent content. Delta started showing R-rated films in December, while United and US Airways have increased the frequency with which they show such films. The three airlines also featured “Fracture” last month.

Also on overhead screens are television programs like “Monk” and “Desperate Housewives,” deemed appropriate by parental review organizations for teenagers but not for children.

Parents have noticed. “You don’t have to have ‘Leave it to Beaver’ on, but for Pete’s sake, you don’t have to have Eva Longoria seducing the high school kid on the dining room table, either,” said Timothy Winter, president of the Parents Television Council, which offers parents advice on program selections. Mr. Winter said he received weekly complaints about airline movies from parents, whereas last year he received none.

Mr. Kleiman, of Continental, said that at times there were not enough popular romantic comedies and other lighter movies to fill the available slots in his airplanes. When an airline chooses to feature R-rated movies, he said, movie studios send an uncut version to the airlines, along with a list of suggested cuts.

Jeff Crawford, who oversees the division of Warner Brothers that markets movies to airlines, said his editors “know what to do,” adding, “They’re doing it both for the airline and for TV, down the road, where we’d obviously try to tone down the graphic violence or blood.”

Nina Plotner, an account manager with Inflight Productions Inc., which works on behalf of many airlines to review and acquire films, said of the editing procedure, “If we take all the good things out, there’s not going to be a lot left to play.”

Ms. Plotner added: “If you get a complaint, you get a complaint. You can’t please everybody.”

Mr. Kleiman, of Continental, agreed, saying: “People love Pepsi, and we don’t serve that, so there you go, we just ruined their flight. That’s an accurate analogy.” Airlines said they received relatively few complaints.

The debate about suitable content in airlines comes against the backdrop of a continuing debate about movie violence in Hollywood. Researchers have determined, for example, that standards for films rated PG-13 (parental guidance suggested for those 13 and under) have become more lax in recent years, with such films often featuring violence, sexual situations and profanity that would have been R-rated (suitable for age 17 or over) a decade ago. Indeed, many airline movies cited by parents and critics have been rated PG-13, including “King Kong.”

Shari Maser of Ann Arbor, Mich., spent part of last year sitting up at night with her 7-year-old daughter, who had nightmares after seeing a preview for “King Kong” on a US Airways flight. It showed people being attacked by dinosaurs.

Researchers who study child psychology said graphic images could stay with small children well into adulthood.

“Children can have nightmares from seeing literally a few seconds of a scene from a horrible movie,” said Joanne Cantor, who taught communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Young children don’t have the cognitive ability to put the visual aside and say, ‘That’s just a movie.’ ”

Jesse Kalisher, a photographer in Chapel Hill, N.C., this spring introduced KidSafeFilms.org, a Web site on which he is gathering support for restrictions on airline films. Mr. Kalisher said 1,600 people had so far signed an online petition. He has begun lobbying federal legislators to curb violence shown in airline movies.

Airline executives said that as old planes were replaced, passengers would have personal screens with a range of children’s shows and unedited films and cable TV series, as they do on JetBlue and Virgin Atlantic. But even those systems are flawed, critics said.

Children can see the screens of people nearby, and one parent recently did not hear a JetBlue flight attendant telling passengers how to turn off the screens. When the preview for the horror film “28 Weeks Later” appeared on every screen in the aircraft, he hastily unplugged his 9-year-old daughter’s earplugs and ordered her to look away. In front of her, zombies, citizens and soldiers battled in the streets until jet fighters incinerated them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/us/01plane.html





For Studio Chiefs, the End of the Revolving Door?
Michael Cieply

THIS week, on Thursday to be exact, Brad Grey will be entitled to celebrate the 32-month anniversary of his appointment to the top post at Paramount Pictures.

Two years and eight months on the job normally isn’t much of an occasion. But in Mr. Grey’s case — assuming that he gets that far — it seems fair to make an exception.

For fully half of his tenure, after all, this ambitious 49-year-old has been reading that he’s already out the door as Paramount’s chairman.

A year ago this week, when his boss, Tom Freston, was fired as chief executive of Viacom, Paramount’s parent, by his own boss, Sumner M. Redstone, Mr. Grey woke to predictions that he would be next. “Many in Hollywood Expect Ouster of Studio Chief, Too,” declared The New York Times.

Two weeks before that, Mr. Grey was supposed to be on slippery ground when Mr. Redstone undercut him by tossing Tom Cruise off the lot. And only a bit earlier, BusinessWeek hinted that Mr. Grey’s standing might be damaged by his past dealings with Anthony Pellicano, the disgraced private eye to the stars. Earlier still, everybody who knows about these things detected the makings of a palace coup when David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, having sold their DreamWorks SKG to Paramount, parked the former Universal Pictures chairwoman Stacey Snider — their ally, and whom many consider a perfect replacement for Mr. Grey — in an office on the Paramount lot.

All of which points to a real if little-noticed shift in the once notoriously deadly business culture of Hollywood. In brief, studio chiefs are a lot safer than they used to be.

The change occurred something like this:

Over the last decade or so, managers of big companies like Sony, the owner of Columbia Pictures, and the News Corporation, owner of 20th Century Fox, came to realize that the film business is less about scoring the odd hit than keeping the pipeline full of something other than losers. That happened as the DVD explosion and growing sales abroad showed that even a modest success at the box office could bring home a substantial profit.

Stability trumped brilliance. The cool of a John Calley, the longtime producer who took charge of Sony Pictures Entertainment in the period, replaced the heat of a Peter Guber, whose stormy reign preceded him. High-tension types like Michael D. Eisner and Michael S. Ovitz left the stage.

For studio chairmen, an increasingly colorless lot, the shift in values brought with it a level of job security that was only occasionally achieved a generation ago. Michael Lynton has been chairman of Sony Pictures for four years, while Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos have run Fox for seven. Barry M. Meyer took charge of Warner Brothers in 1999, Dick Cook of Disney’s movie group in 1996, and Ron Meyer of Universal in 1995.

In other words, they’ve been around for a while.

With his nearly three years at Paramount, Mr. Grey remains the junior member of this peer group. Yet he’s already been in place a full year longer than, say, Jon Peters, whose term in Sony’s executive suite ran about 19 months, from first rumor through the end of his gig as co-chairman.

In fact, Mr. Grey has outlasted a litany of Hollywood powers from tumultuous times past, including Dawn Steel, David Puttnam, Frank Price, Larry Gordon, Leonard Goldberg, Joe Wizan, Sidney Ganis and, of course, Mr. Ovitz, whose tenure as president of the Walt Disney Company bridged about 16 months, from August 1995 to December 1996.

Durable so far, Mr. Grey nonetheless became a lightning rod for speculation, driven in no small part by those he swept out of Paramount.

“What he had to do was not just pick movies, he had to change the culture of the studio,” Michael Shamberg, co-chairman of Double Feature Films, said of Mr. Grey’s push to move Paramount into the high-volume, high-profile mode. Mr. Shamberg, a Grey ally whose company has a deal with the studio, added, “He’s done a good job of that.”

Mr. Grey, who declined to be interviewed for this column, probably wouldn’t be cheered to know that moviedom and its many chroniclers thrill to his perceived misadventures mostly because they miss the blood sport that once came with a top executive’s fall.

But the Paramount chief, fingers ever seeming to be slipping from the edge, actually provides a spectacle.

He has enemies, including a legion of former Paramount executives who were bounced when he took charge and are now hot-wired together in a personal anti-fan club.

He has foibles, enough to keep the likes of Liz Smith and Defamer busy tracking his Oscar-night snubs and marital woes. He has that wonderful problem with the DreamWorks crowd, who voice their contentment in public but emit signals of something less.

More, Mr. Grey has to contend with Mr. Redstone, who, at the age of 84, has turned into the media world’s own Red Queen, having put relationships with Mr. Cruise and Mr. Freston and within Mr. Redstone’s own family on the block of late.

What’s not to love? With every flap of the blue Paramount flag, another tidbit slips down Melrose Avenue to Ago, where the lunch crowd can tell you who had coffee with him yesterday at the studio’s own Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, and what that supposedly means.

For those who thrive on drama, the real danger, of course, is that things will eventually settle down. As Mr. Grey approaches the three-year mark, his pipeline — hitherto heavily dependent on DreamWorks-supplied hits like “Transformers” and “Norbit” — is beginning to fill with movies of his own.

IF “Beowulf,” from the director Robert Zemeckis (in partnership with Warner Brothers), survives the holidays, and “Iron Man,” from Jon Favreau (with Marvel Enterprises), beats the averages next May, Mr. Grey’s operation will begin to look as stable as the rest of them.

At least, that’s what his Viacom seniors are betting.

“Paramount in its illustrious history has had many studio chiefs with long tenures,” Philippe P. Dauman, Viacom’s chief executive, noted in a recent phone interview. “When history is written,” he added, “Brad will go down as a man who had one of the longest.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/bu...a/02steal.html





Studios Think Inside the Box as DVD Sales Slip
Thomas K. Arnold

When times in home video get tough, the industry has a way of finding a lucrative new revenue source. Now that DVD sales have flattened, a growing number of industry fingers are pointing to premium-priced gift sets of popular movies or TV shows, packaged in fancy boxes and commanding hefty price tags.

"Collector's sets are a half-billion dollar market, with revenue growing at a nearly double-digit pace," said Jeff Brown, senior vp television and family product at Warner Home Video. "Core fans of popular franchises will buy the sets if they deliver on value."

Brown points to Warner research that shows that while DVD sales overall are in a slight decline, sales of the high-end gift sets are up 7% for the year so far and expected to climb further because 72% of sales occur in the second half.

Gift sets first began popping up several years ago, with such early entries as HBO Video's complete series set of "Sex and the City," packaged like a hardbound book and listing for $300, and Universal Studios Home Entertainment's "Scarface Deluxe Gift Set" ($60), housed in a faux leather box and including such trinkets as a Tony Montoya money clip and a set of collectible lobby cards.

But lately the trend has accelerated, with handsomely boxed complete series sets of such popular TV series as "Friends," "M*A*S*H" and "The West Wing," as well as elegant movie gift sets like the complete collection of "Superman" movies that comes in a tin case along with a reproduction of a vintage Superman comic book and a mail-in offer for five movie posters. All 125,000 copies of the "Superman" tin sold out.

Warner has done so well with its gift sets that it is picking up the pace this year, offering no fewer than 14 sets before Christmas. On the TV side, the studio has complete series sets of such shows as "Gilmore Girls" (coming November 13 for $260), "The O.C." (due November 27 at $200) and "Full House" (hitting stores November 6 at $170), the latter packaged in a replica of the sitcom's trademark row house.

On the movie side, highlights include a five-disc collector's edition of "Blade Runner" packaged in a gray metal briefcase ($79) and a boxed set of all five "Harry Potter" movies so far, which comes in a suitcase and includes five collectible silver-plated bookmarks, available exclusively with the DVD. The "Potter" set will be available on DVD ($119) as well as both next-generation formats, Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD ($149).
http://www.reuters.com/article/indus...24927820070808





High-Speed Video Store in the Living Room
David Pogue

If you had to make a master list of all the world’s problems, “limited access to movies” probably wouldn’t appear until Page 273,996.

Truth is, life is teeming with opportunities to see movies: movie theaters, video stores, DVD-by-mail services, TV movie channels, pay-per-view, video-on-demand, Xbox 360, iTunes, Internet downloads, hotel rooms, airplanes and so on.

But according to the team at Vudu, all of those outlets are flawed.

Video stores: you have to drive back and forth, and the movie you want might be out of stock. Netflix and Blockbuster by mail: you have to wait a day or two for each movie to arrive. Pay-per-view, video-on-demand, Xbox, iTunes and hotel rooms: puny movie selections. Internet downloads: they arrive on your computer, not your TV.

Vudu’s new $400 movie box, to be available at month’s end, has none of those problems. It’s a little black box (about 7 by 9 by 2 inches) that connects to your TV and to the Internet through a high-speed link — and it comes darned close to putting a video store in your house. Its built-in hard drive permits your choice of 5,000 movies to begin playing instantaneously. There’s no computer involved, no waiting and no monthly fee.

There are four really great things about the Vudu box. First, the picture quality is terrific — like a DVD. If you have an HDTV, the box even “upconverts” the picture into pseudo-high definition. Moreover, Vudu will offer movies in true high definition once it finishes negotiating with the movie studios. (Tech note: The Vudu box will play high-def movies through its HDMI connector only — not its component, S-video or composite jacks.)

Second, the remote rocks. It has only four buttons, plus a clickable scroll wheel like the one on a computer mouse. The wheel is a breakthrough; it lets you zoom through lists of movies and categories. During playback, the wheel is a rewind/fast-forward shuttle control. It lets you jump almost instantly to any spot in the movie; it does not, however, actually “seek” — that is, speed up playback while you’re scanning for a certain scene.

The remote is not illuminated, but it doesn’t have to be; if you cannot memorize the four buttons in five minutes, you have bigger problems.

Third, you pay by the movie, not by the month. When life gets busy, you don’t pay anything. You can either rent a movie (usually $2 to $4) — you have 24 hours to finish watching it — or you can buy it ($15 to $20), meaning that it stays on your Vudu hard drive forever.

The 250-gigabyte drive holds 100 full-length movies. In about six months, Vudu plans to activate the box’s U.S.B. jack, so you can attach another hard drive to hold more movies.

Finally, Vudu movies begin playing instantly. There’s nothing to it. Find a movie, either by typing part of its name or by browsing the New Releases, Genres, Staff Favorites or Most Popular lists. Click past the price/confirmation screen. Start watching.

How can one hard drive hold 5,000 movies? This is the best part: it doesn’t. It actually holds only the first 30 seconds of each movie — typically the movie studio logos. While you watch that, the rest of the movie quietly begins to download; the handoff from the starter stub to the downloaded portion is undetectable.

This impressive engineering feat also explains two other quirks of the Vudu box. First, you cannot fast-forward into a movie that just started. Second, you cannot use the Vudu box without a fast Internet connection — preferably a wired one. Cable modems are great, but basic D.S.L. and dial-up connections are not fast enough. Higher-tier D.S.L. plans might have the required speed; a speed-testing button appears at Vudu.com.

(Here’s another clever backstage tech trick: the Vudu boxes communicate with one another, using a peer-to-peer system. When you start watching, say, “The Last Mimzy,” your box receives chunks of that movie from the Vudu boxes of other people who have already downloaded it. None of this affects you one bit — it’s all invisible to you — but it’s a pretty clever way for Vudu, the company, to save money, since it does not have to pay for its own servers to pump out those gazillions of gigabytes.)

The box itself runs cool, it is totally silent, and its remote uses radio waves rather than infrared. That way, you can put the box in a closet; it does not require line-of-sight with the remote. That’s lucky, because the box’s oddball size and shape mean it does not stack well with standard DVD players, VCRs and so on.

The catalog of movies is updated with 10 or 20 new titles each week, and an equivalent number is retired. Since you always have 5,000 to choose from — Vudu plans to expand the list to 10,000 — the odds are excellent that when you’re in a movie mood, you will find something you like. The movies come from every major Hollywood studio, plus a healthy number of independents.

But if you look for one particular movie, you might sometimes be disappointed.

One reason: plenty of the movies are pure filler. They range from no-name horror cheapies (“San Franpsycho” or “Night Fangs,” anyone?) to superniche flicks like “The History of Texas Longhorns Football” and “Yoga for Depression and Gastro-Intestinal Disorders.”

Another reason: Vudu’s catalog is a victim of what Hollywood calls distribution windows. After a movie leaves theaters, it becomes available through other channels in a strict order: (1) hotels and airlines; (2) DVD; (3) pay-per-view television; (4) movie channels like HBO and Starz; (5) TV and everywhere else.

Vudu, as it turns out, gets movies during Phases 2, 3 and 5. Weirdly, that means that a movie might appear on your box, disappear during the HBO window and reappear a year later.

Maybe that’s why the Vudu box, at introduction, has 41 out of 50 movies on Formovies.com’s current Top Rentals list (it has “300” and “Blades of Glory”), but only 10 out of the 50 on Moviefone’s “Best of 2006” list (it is missing “Dreamgirls,” “The Departed” and so on).

Vudu’s dependence on the notoriously conservative, profit-driven movie studios also explains many of its frustrating inconsistencies. Some Vudu movies are available for purchase or rent; others, only for purchase. Some movies have previews (movie trailers); others do not. The list includes hundreds of movies from some studios (Paramount, Sony, Warner) and only a handful from others (Disney).

While we’re nit-picking, it’s worth noting that Vudu offers no DVD extras — deleted scenes, subtitles and so on. Be prepared, too, for a less obvious loss: serendipity. With other movie sources, the limited selection or the wait for the mail carrier can provide a moment of happy surprise when you find something good or open the mailing envelope. Vudu is more like shooting fish in a barrel.

If Vudu sounds familiar, by the way, that might be because of its similarity to MovieBeam, which has been around for a couple of years. MovieBeam’s hard drive contains only 100 movies at a time, but it costs only $150 and does not require an Internet connection (its movies are beamed through the air).

Vudu is clearly a more high-end offering, which may be why it will be initially sold only through www.vudu.com, Amazon.com and home-theater retail stores.

Vudu is a clear win if you, like 30 million other Americans, make several trips to the video store each month. It’s also great if you like pay-per-view but wish you had a better selection. Vudu may not be a Netflix killer, though, unless you think Vudu’s instant access is more important than Netflix’s much larger selection (more than 70,000 movies).

If you do do Vudu, with the time you would have spent driving to the video store or waiting for the mailman, you can do other things — like solving the world’s more pressing problems.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/te...ogue.html?8dpc





Toshiba Leads Industry in Bringing Discrete Track Recording Technology to Prototype of 120GB Hard Disk Drive

New technology boosts recording density on an 80GB 1.8 inch single platter drive by 50%
Press Release

Toshiba Corporation today announced a prototype hard disk drive (HDD) that uses Discrete Track Recording (DTR) technology to boost capacity to a record-breaking 120 gigabytes (GB) on a single 1.8-inch platter. The drive is the first in the world to apply DTR, a breakthrough technology that boost the areal density of a perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) by a full 50 percent. Toshiba plans to start mass production of HDDs integrating DTR technology in 2009.

DTR technology increases recording density by forming a "groove" between the tracks on the PMR medium. The groove reduces signal interference between adjacent data tracks, allowing the pitch of the tracks to be shortened. The improved signal quality also contributes to raising the recording density by 50 percent.

The DTR "groove" forming process is most easily applied to small form factor HDDs, such as 1.8 inch and 2.5 inch drives. It will take these drives to a new level of enhanced capacity.

DTR technology utilizes an electron beam lithography system developed in research related to the "Nanometer-Scale Optical High Density Disk Storage System", a national project supported by Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/a.../06/c5819.html





Years After Completion, a Persistent Film Makes It to the Screen
David M. Halbfinger

Anton Yelchin’s voice was still changing when, at barely 15 years old, he starred alongside Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland in “Fierce People,” an offbeat, surprisingly dark coming-of-age movie that Griffin Dunne directed in the spring of 2004.

Three and a half years later Mr. Yelchin, 18, is preparing to play his first grown-up — as Pavel Chekov in J. J. Abrams’s updating of “Star Trek” — and “Fierce People” is finally headed for theaters, opening Friday in New York and Los Angeles under the new label of Autonomous Films, a sister company of Lionsgate.

That a film with such a pedigree could sit on the shelf for so long (it’s already available on DVD in Argentina, Finland, Greece and Hungary) is one of the vagaries of a business in which too many movies from too many distributors are vying for too few weekends, good ones that are released theatrically often fail to attract an audience, and countless others go straight to video.

That “Fierce People” did not ultimately get tossed in the celluloid waste bin is a testament both to the persistence of its backers — among them the No. 2 executive at Lionsgate — and to the importance to a film’s marketing of not just money but attention.

The story began, inauspiciously enough, several years ago when Dirk Wittenborn, a New York author, ran into writer’s block and showed an unfinished novel to Mr. Dunne, a friend.

“He had written himself into a hole,” recalled Mr. Dunne, who is best known for his acting roles, including a leading role in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours.” “I said, ‘How does it end?’ And he said, ‘That’s why I gave it to you.’ ”

But Mr. Dunne said he was so taken with the tale — an East Village 15-year-old and his drug-addled mother, circa 1978, are taken in by an aristocratic crowd in rural New Jersey — that he optioned the movie rights to what became “Fierce People” even before the book’s publication by Bloomsbury in 2002. (Both the movie and the book draw parallels between the boy’s new patrons and the primitive tribe whom his absent father, a scientist, has made his life’s work.)

Lionsgate agreed to an $8 million budget, and Ms. Lane, whom Mr. Dunne said he had long envisioned for the mother’s role, quickly accepted. He shot the movie in British Columbia, and included some 16-millimeter footage supposedly of an anthropological study in the Amazon.

Lionsgate announced a Christmas 2004 release for “Fierce People.” But it was soon abandoned, the first of half a dozen delays, and that inevitably generated bad buzz despite mixed-to-strong reviews after the movie’s premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2005.

Mr. Dunne said the movie posed a conundrum for its marketers. “We always knew there was tough subject matter in this,” he said. “It doesn’t play like an obscure, obtuse art house picture. It’s quite a commercial and involving, populist approach. But it’s also a social commentary, with anthropological metaphors, and it’s got a climactic, rather brutal attack that changes the tone of the picture. That’s something that appeals to me, but it’s also a challenge from a marketing standpoint.”

Michael Burns, the vice chairman of Lionsgate and a friend of Mr. Dunne’s who shepherded the movie, praised its sharp turn. “You get a little sick of predictability,” he said. “Nobody sees that coming.”

But he agreed that it posed a “very tricky” distribution challenge. “In a weird way the question is whether it’s a wide or a platform release,” Mr. Burns said, using the industry jargon for opening movies in either one large burst or slowly building the number of theaters as word of mouth spreads. “It’s always more difficult for us to focus on platform releases. It’s just not our core business anymore.”

Adding to the worry was that Lionsgate was still smarting from having spent heavily to market several other narrative dramas — “Shattered Glass” in 2003, “Happy Endings” and “Hard Candy” in 2005 — all of which received critical acclaim while taking a bath at the box office. What was needed was a partner who could afford to focus on a movie as small as “Fierce People,” Mr. Burns said. “When you gear up to release a movie in a platform way, you spend just as much time on it as you would on a wide release,” he said.

That partner emerged a year ago, when Lionsgate cut a new distribution deal with Courtney Solomon and Allan Zeman of After Dark Films. Though already notorious for the explicit marketing campaign earlier this year surrounding the torture film “Captivity,” Mr. Solomon said he wanted to model his company after Miramax, releasing more mainstream films under the Autonomous name and horror movies under After Dark.

Mr. Solomon said the deal he struck for “Fierce People” required him to put up less than $2 million toward prints and advertising, which he will recoup from box-office proceeds before Lionsgate is reimbursed for its costs; any profits will be shared 50-50. Lionsgate, which previously sold off the rights in some international markets, will get the proceeds from home video and other markets. Mr. Solomon in turn gets to start his Autonomous Films label for relatively little. For the filmmaker and stars, meanwhile, seeing “Fierce People” at its Los Angeles premiere last week was its own weird trip back in time. Ms. Lane, Mr. Sutherland, Mr. Yelchin and Elizabeth Perkins, who also stars in the film, all attended, and Mr. Dunne brimmed over with relief.

“It’s like that line of Ronald Reagan’s in ‘Kings Row,’ when he wakes up without his legs and says, ‘Where’s the rest of me?’ ” Mr. Dunne said. “I’ve been saying, ‘Where’s the rest of me?’ for the last two years.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/movies/06fier.html





V.6

New "Blade Runner" Cut is "How it Should Have Been"
Silvia Aloisi



Twenty-five years after "Blade Runner" was panned by critics and pulled from theaters, British director Ridley Scott savors revenge with the final cut of the science-fiction film now considered a cult classic.

Presenting the new version of what he considers his most accomplished movie, Scott recalled the difficulties he had when he first pitched the work to Hollywood.

"I was a new kid on the block in Hollywood, so driving to those studios every day was a magical mystery tour. But it was hard, the whole process of making the movie became quite difficult," he told reporters at the Venice film festival after a press screening.

"I wasn't used at that point in my career to having too many cooks in the kitchen, and I think there were many people who started to get involved.

"So out of it came a hybrid version of what I'd originally intended. Consequently ... we had a bad opening, bad previews, confused previews. I was killed by some critics ... then I thought it would be gone away for ever," Scott said.

The futuristic thriller is set in the year 2019 and follows policeman Deckard (Harrison Ford), a "blade runner" trying to catch and kill four human replicants who have escaped from a space-based colony.

The response at early sample screenings before the official release in June 1982 was so weak that the producers forced Scott to add voice-overs to the film and change the final scene to make it a more "happy ending".

"I thought I'd really nailed it, I really thought I'd nailed it. And the person I used to show it to was my brother (director Tony Scott). And my brother, he loved it so much. Then we preview, and the previews are really, really bad, and my confidence is really dented," said Scott.

The reworking of the film led to "voice overs which started to explain what was about to happen, who the characters were and who was going to do what to who, which is the antithesis of a good movie making process," he said.

Cult Movie

Despite the changes and two Oscar nominations, bad reviews and the almost simultaneous release of Steven Spielberg's hugely popular "E.T." ended the theater run of "Blade Runner" prematurely.

Yet the film eventually achieved cult status through re-issue on television and home video.

Scott, 69, said he had almost forgotten about it until he saw clips on music television channel MTV and realized that his film "was having a strong influence on younger generations."

Over the years, five versions of the film have been released, including a director's cut in 1992. But Scott said the "Final Cut" -- which will be issued as a collector's DVD edition later in the winter -- was "really as it was intended to be."

"A good film is like a good book, you might go to the shelf and take it off and revisit it. There are not a lot of films I can do that with from my collection of material," said Scott, whose other titles include international hits such as the first "Alien," "Thelma & Louise" and "Gladiator."

At present, Scott is working on "Body Of Lies," one of several Hollywood movies on the war in Iraq due for release in the next few months. But he said he would like to make another science fiction film.

"I am continuously looking for that so if anyone has got a science fiction script in their briefcase, give it to me."
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...26047520070902





KTLA-TV's Iconic Home in Hollywood Goes on the Block

The Tribune property, where the first talking motion picture was filmed in 1927, also houses production facilities.
Roger Vincent

The historic former Warner Bros. studio on Sunset Boulevard, now occupied by television station KTLA-TV Channel 5, has been put up for sale by Tribune Co. amid a wave of high-stakes real estate investment in Hollywood.

No price has been set for the block-size property at the southeast corner of Sunset and Bronson Avenue that also houses Tribune Entertainment and Tribune Studios. In recent years, other studios and historic properties in the neighborhood have sold for millions of dollars as investors race to take part in Hollywood's resurgence.

A real estate expert who asked not to be identified because he may become involved in the bidding process valued the property at about $175 million. Nearby Sunset-Gower Studios, the former Columbia Pictures headquarters, sold this month for more than $200 million.

KTLA occupies the prominent Colonial-style mansion facing Sunset that was built by Warner Bros. in 1919.

City officials expressed hope that the property would remain entertainment industry-oriented. Several historic properties in Hollywood are being turned into condos, apartments and shops.

Television shows filmed at Tribune's production facilities on the property -- but separate from KTLA -- include "Judge Judy," "Judge Joe Brown" and "Hannah Montana."

Chicago-based Tribune, which also owns the Los Angeles Times, has retained real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield "to explore strategic alternatives for the property," said Gary Weitman, a Tribune spokesman.

Even after a sale, KTLA would remain at its current location as a tenant for an indefinite period, said Carl Muhlstein, a Cushman & Wakefield broker. "They hope to start planning for a new facility either somewhere else on the site or nearby. KTLA has a long-term commitment to Hollywood."

KTLA needs to update its facilities, General Manager Vinnie Malcolm said. "We have been working around a lot of not-very-efficient uses of space. There is no question we could use a better physical plant."

Tribune is moving quickly to sell the property by year-end, Muhlstein said. That could coincide with the company's pending $8.4-billion buyout by Chicago real estate magnate Sam Zell, expected to close in the fourth quarter.

A representative for City Councilman Eric Garcetti said the councilman hoped the property would continue to be a hub for entertainment businesses.

Garcetti "looks forward to having a continuing conversation with the new owners to ensure that we keep vital entertainment-related jobs right here in Hollywood," said David Gershwin, the councilman's chief of staff.

"This stretch of Sunset Boulevard and its surrounding neighborhoods have a critical mass of post-production facilities, entertainment venues and cultural institutions that makes this a prime location for film and television production in the years ahead," Gershwin said.

The Colonial-style building and a sound stage on the former Warner Bros. lot are registered historic properties, Gershwin said, and could not be demolished or substantially altered.

The studio, situated just west of the Hollywood Freeway, was the site of Warner Bros.' first studio. It is where talking pictures were born when Al Jolson recorded his first words in "The Jazz Singer" in 1927. In later years, Warner used the site to produce musicals and dramas.

Paramount Pictures Corp. purchased the studio in 1954 as an annex to its studios a few blocks to the south at Van Ness and Melrose avenues. In 1956, KTLA, then owned by Paramount, moved onto the lot, according to KTLA. Cowboy star Gene Autry bought KTLA and the studio from Paramount in 1964. It was sold to Tribune Broadcasting in 1986.

The site, which includes about 10 sound stages, has plenty of room for expansion, broker Muhlstein said. He predicted that a buyer would add more film and television production buildings and office space. There is little vacant office space in Hollywood, and Technicolor Inc. agreed months ago to rent an entire six-story office building under construction at Sunset-Gower Studios.

Other studio space has been taken off the market, creating a shortage of facilities, Muhlstein said. In recent years, about 70 acres' worth of production facilities such as KTTV's Metromedia Square, KCOP Studios and CBS Columbia Square have been closed to make way for residential and commercial redevelopment, Muhlstein said.

KTLA "is the only active television lot left in Hollywood," City Councilman Tom LaBonge said during a phone call from Ireland. "I hope Channel 5's beacon still stands brightly there as an active television production center. It's so much a part of Hollywood."

Hollywood's largest commercial landlord, CIM Group, will be among those evaluating the property, said Shaul Kuba, a company principal. "We are definitely going to be very interested."

The site is potentially big enough to accommodate studio production, housing, office and retail uses, he said, "but it would require a huge amount of planning to find the right balance."

The site will be marketed to large potential buyers such as CIM Group that are capable of closing the deal by year-end, said broker Michael DeSantis, also of Cushman & Wakefield.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...ck=2&cset=true





Cold War Bunker Now Shelters Archive

A Virginia facility that once held $3 billion in cash will protect the world's biggest audiovisual collection.
Susan Decker

"Casablanca" and "Gone With the Wind" are finding refuge in a Cold War-era bunker near Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.

The original negatives of those classic films are part of the world's biggest audiovisual collection, held by the Library of Congress.

Their new home is a radiation-hardened building once used by the Federal Reserve to store cash and emergency supplies in the event of a nuclear attack.

Archivists are filling the facility with more than 6 million items -- films, audio recordings, television shows, posters, screenplays and musical scores -- gathered from storage sites across the United States. They're on the lookout for treasures such as the recently unearthed 1957 Carnegie Hall concert by Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane and the uncensored version of the 1933 Barbara Stanwyck film "Baby Face."

"I'm rediscovering film history through material that's been unseen for decades," said Gregory Lukow, chief of the library's motion picture, broadcasting and recorded sound division.

By January, the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center will open to scholars for research. Its 45-acre campus sits aside Pony Mountain near Culpeper, an hour's drive southwest of Washington.

The audiovisual collection holds copies of the first films ever made, including "The Great Train Robbery" in 1903. It has kinescopes of the earliest black-and-white television shows of comedians such as Milton Berle and Ernie Kovacs; copies of every U.S. movie produced since 1940 and many before that, and radio broadcasts of historic events such as troops landing on Guam in World War II.

"This facility will allow us to preserve them and make them accessible to the public at a faster rate than ever before," Lukow said.

Only a portion of the 420,000-square-foot facility will be open to everyone: an entry hall with exhibition area and a 208-seat Art Deco movie theater, which has a replica of an old Wurlitzer organ to play the soundtracks for silent films.

Nonprofessionals may gain access to the collection at the library's 21 reading rooms on Capitol Hill and via the Internet. New technology is being used to convert artifacts to digital form.

"We have a lot of things here that really help us to preserve this material for future generations," said Mike Mashon, head of the library's moving-image unit.

For sound recordings, the facility has a turntable developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that uses optical images to read deep into the grooves of LPs and 78s, even ones that are warped or broken.

Some items, such as Thomas Edison's first film, a seven-second short from 1894 known as "Fred Ott's Sneeze," will remain in Washington at the Library of Congress, the world's largest repository of books, recordings, photographs and maps.

The setting for the audiovisual collection, Culpeper, is a 248-year-old town of 13,000 where Confederate and Union troops camped. Thousands of tourists visit its Civil War sites each week.

The Federal Reserve built its underground shelter in Culpeper in 1969 to house $3 billion in coin and currency, to pump into the economy if the U.S. underwent a nuclear attack. The bunker was decommissioned in 1993.

The building was sold to the Packard Humanities Institute, a nonprofit group run by David Woodley Packard, son of the founder of Hewlett-Packard Co.

The institute spent $155 million to convert it into a storage area for the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. The group then returned the building to the government -- the biggest gift to the legislative branch in American history, Lukow said.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...,1436370.story





Even if You Do Great Art, the Bills Must Still Be Paid
Matt Zoller Seitz

The talking-heads-with-clips format so dominates the contemporary nonfiction film that Daniel Kraus’s “Musician” feels radically fresh: It simply observes its title character, the avant-garde jazz musician Ken Vandermark, in the manner of a 1960s fly-on-the-wall documentary like “Salesman.”

“Musician” is a follow-up to Mr. Kraus’s similarly austere “Sheriff” and the latest in a projected series of features about people doing their jobs, shot and edited with the same inquisitive spirit that defined Studs Terkel’s oral history “Working.”

We are introduced to Mr. Vandermark as he toils on a new composition at his workshop in the basement of his Chicago home, and watch him scratch out phrases on paper, then test them on saxophone and piano. We see him perform for various audiences; hear him explain his optimistic but uncompromising theory that atonal music suits the tone of modern life; and listen in as he figures out how he’s going to maintain his artistic integrity while making the rent.

In one early scene the director splits the screen to show Mr. Vandermark working the phone in his home office, effusively thanking a patron for a gig, and then sheepishly informing a creditor that he won’t be able to settle up until next month. Those seeking a nutshell definition of what it means to be a committed artist need look no further.

MUSICIAN

Opens today in Manhattan.

Directed and edited by Daniel Kraus; director of photography, Mr. Kraus; music by Ken Vandermark; produced by Jason Davis and Mr. Kraus; released by Sheriffmovie. At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village. Running time: 60 minutes. This film is not rated.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/movies/05musi.html





Seeking Special Someone but Finding a Giant Pirate
Matt Zoller Seitz

Imagine Larry David’s HBO’s series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” without the bile. That’s the tone of “I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With,” the rambling debut feature by Jeff Garlin, a “Curb” regular and one of its executive producers.

Mr. Garlin wrote, directed and stars in this feature, playing James Aaron, a veteran of the Second City improv troupe in Chicago who still lives with his mother (Mina Kolb). He fidgets through Overeaters Anonymous meetings, turns down auditions arranged by his impatient agent (Richard Kind), obsesses over landing the lead in a remake of his favorite movie, “Marty,” and gads about town with his best friend and partner in sarcasm, Luca (David Pasquesi).

He also develops a mild crush on a droll, jazz-loving teacher (Bonnie Hunt) and falls hard for a shockingly funny ice cream parlor employee (Sarah Silverman).

But James’s inevitable personal growth takes a back seat to Mr. Garlin’s digressive sense of humor. The movie carves out space for a late-night candy-hunting trip to a drugstore (where James sees a successful but pompous and neurotic colleague, brilliantly played by Wallace Langham) and a hilarious encounter with another fellow actor (the reliably excellent Joey Slotnick), who is handing out free hot dog samples while wearing a pirate outfit with a huge papier-mâché head.

Laid back and affectionate, “Cheese” is the movie version of a dear friend you could spend all day with.

I WANT SOMEONE TO EAT CHEESE WITH

Opens today in Manhattan; also on Video on Demand.

Written and directed by Jeff Garlin; director of photography, Peter Biagi; edited by Steven Rasch; music by Rob Kolson; production designer, Margaret M. Miles; produced by Mr. Garlin, Erin O’Malley and Steve Pink; released by IFC First Take and the Weinstein Company. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 80 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Jeff Garlin (James Aaron), Sarah Silverman (Beth), Bonnie Hunt (Stella Lewis), Amy Sedaris (Ms. Clark), David Pasquesi (Luca), Gina Gershon (Mrs. Piletti), Mina Kolb (Mrs. Aaron), Wallace Langham (Claude Cochet), Joey Slotnick (Larry) and Richard Kind (Herb Hope).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/movies/05chee.html





Doctor Links a Man’s Illness to a Microwave Popcorn Habit
Gardiner Harris

A fondness for microwave buttered popcorn may have led a 53-year-old Colorado man to develop a serious lung condition that until now has been found only in people working in popcorn plants.

Lung specialists and even a top industry official say the case, the first of its kind, raises serious concerns about the safety of microwave butter-flavored popcorn.

“We’ve all been working on the workplace safety side of this, but the potential for consumer exposure is very concerning,” said John B. Hallagan, general counsel for the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association of the United States, a trade association of companies that make butter flavorings for popcorn producers. “Are there other cases out there? There could be.”

A spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration said that the agency was considering the case as part of a review of the safety of diacetyl, which adds the buttery taste to many microwave popcorns, including Orville Redenbacher and Act II.

Producers of microwave popcorn said their products were safe.

“We’re incredibly interested in learning more about this case. However, we are confident that our product is safe for consumers’ normal everyday use in the home,” said Stephanie Childs, a spokeswoman for ConAgra Foods, the nation’s largest maker of microwave popcorn.

Ms. Childs said ConAgra planned to remove diacetyl from its microwave popcorn products “in the near future.”

Pop Weaver, another large microwave popcorn producer, has already taken diacetyl out of its popcorn bags “because of consumer concerns” but not because the company believes the chemical is unsafe for consumers, said Cathy Yingling, a company spokeswoman.

The case will most likely accelerate calls on Capitol Hill for the Bush administration to crack down on the use of diacetyl. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been criticized as doing little to protect workers in popcorn plants despite years of studying the issue.

“The government is not doing anything,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who leads a subcommittee with jurisdiction over the food and drug agency’s budget.

Exposure to synthetic butter in food production and flavoring plants has been linked to hundreds of cases of workers whose lungs have been damaged or destroyed. Diacetyl is found naturally in milk, cheese, butter and other products.

Heated diacetyl becomes a vapor and, when inhaled over a long period of time, seems to lead the small airways in the lungs to become swollen and scarred. Sufferers can breathe in deeply, but they have difficulty exhaling. The severe form of the disease is called bronchiolitis obliterans or “popcorn workers’ lung,” which can be fatal.

Dr. Cecile Rose, director of the occupational disease clinical programs at National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, said that she first saw the Colorado man in February after another doctor could not figure out what was causing his distress. Dr. Rose described the case in a recent letter to government agencies.

A furniture salesman, the man was becoming increasingly short of breath. He had never smoked and was overweight. His illness had been diagnosed as hypersensitivity pneumonitis, an inflammation of the lungs usually caused by chronic exposure to bacteria, mold or dust. Farmers and bird enthusiasts are frequent sufferers.

But nothing in the Colorado man’s history suggested that he was breathing in excessive amounts of mold or bird droppings, Dr. Rose said. She has consulted to flavorings manufacturers for years about “popcorn workers’ lung,” and said that something about the man’s tests appeared similar to those of the workers.

“I said to him, ‘This is a very weird question, but bear with me. But are you around a lot of popcorn?’ ” Dr. Rose asked. “His jaw dropped and he said, ‘How could you possibly know that about me? I am Mr. Popcorn. I love popcorn.’ ”

The man told Dr. Rose that he had eaten microwave popcorn at least twice a day for more than 10 years.

“When he broke open the bags, after the steam came out, he would often inhale the fragrance because he liked it so much,” Dr. Rose said. “That’s heated diacetyl, which we know from the workers’ studies is the highest risk.”

Dr. Rose measured levels of diacetyl in the man’s home after he made popcorn and found levels of the chemical were similar to those in microwave popcorn plants. She asked the man to stop eating microwave popcorn.

“He was really upset that he couldn’t have it anymore,” Dr. Rose said. “But he complied.”

Six months later, the man has lost 50 pounds and his lung function has not only stopped deteriorating but has actually improved slightly, Dr. Rose said.

“This is not a definitive causal link, but it raises a lot of questions and supports the recommendation that more work needs to be done,” Dr. Rose said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/us/05popcorn.html





Some Food Additives Raise Hyperactivity, Study Finds
Elisabeth Rosenthal

Common food additives and colorings can increase hyperactive behavior in a broad range of children, a study being released today found.

It was the first time researchers conclusively and scientifically confirmed a link that had long been suspected by many parents. Numerous support groups for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have for years recommended removing such ingredients from diets, although experts have continued to debate the evidence.

But the new, carefully controlled study shows that some artificial additives increase hyperactivity and decrease attention span in a wide range of children, not just those for whom overactivity has been diagnosed as a learning problem.

The new research, which was financed by Britain’s Food Standards Agency and published online by the British medical journal The Lancet, presents regulators with a number of issues: Should foods containing preservatives and artificial colors carry warning labels? Should some additives be prohibited entirely? Should school cafeterias remove foods with additives?

After all, the researchers note that overactivity makes learning more difficult for children.

“A mix of additives commonly found in children’s foods increases the mean level of hyperactivity,” wrote the researchers, led by Jim Stevenson, a professor of psychology at the University of Southampton. “The finding lends strong support for the case that food additives exacerbate hyperactive behaviors (inattention, impulsivity and overactivity) at least into middle childhood.”

In response to the study, the Food Standards Agency advised parents to monitor their children’s activity and, if they noted a marked change with food containing additives, to adjust their diets accordingly, eliminating artificial colors and preservatives.
But Professor Stevenson said it was premature to go further. “We’ve set up an issue that needs more exploration,” he said in a telephone interview.

In response to the study, some pediatricians cautioned that a diet without artificial colors and preservatives might cause other problems for children.

“Even if it shows some increase in hyperactivity, is it clinically significant and does it impact the child’s life?” said Dr. Thomas Spencer, a specialist in Pediatric Psychopharmacology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“Is it powerful enough that you want to ostracize your kid? It is very socially impacting if children can’t eat the things that their friends do.”

Still, Dr. Spencer called the advice of the British food agency “sensible,” noting that some children may be “supersensitive to additives” just as some people are more sensitive to caffeine.

The Lancet study focused on a variety of food colorings and on sodium benzoate, a common preservative. The researchers note that removing this preservative from food could cause problems in itself by increasing spoilage. In the six-week trial, researchers gave a randomly selected group of several hundred 3-year-olds and of 8- and 9-year-olds drinks with additives — colors and sodium benzoate — that mimicked the mix in children’s drinks that are commercially available. The dose of additives consumed was equivalent to that in one or two servings of candy a day, the researchers said. Their diet was otherwise controlled to avoid other sources of the additives.

A control group was given an additive-free placebo drink that looked and tasted the same.

All of the children were evaluated for inattention and hyperactivity by parents, teachers (for school-age children) and through a computer test. Neither the researchers nor the subject knew which drink any of the children had consumed.

The researchers discovered that children in both age groups were significantly more hyperactive and that they had shorter attention spans if they had consumed the drink containing the additives. The study did not try to link specific consumption with specific behaviors. The study’s authors noted that other research suggested that the hyperactivity could increase in as little as an hour after artificial additives were consumed.

The Lancet study could not determine which of the additives caused the poor performances because all the children received a mix. “This was a very complicated study, and it will take an even more complicated study to figure out which components caused the effect,” Professor Stevenson said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/he...h/06hyper.html





Childhood TV Viewing Linked to Teen Attention Problems

Watching television more than two hours a day early in life can lead to attention problems later in adolescence, according to a large long-term study.

The roughly 40% increase in attention problems among "heavy" TV viewers was observed in both boys and girls, and was independent of whether a diagnosis of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder was made prior to adolescence.

"Those who watched more than two hours, and particularly those who watched more than three hours, of television per day during childhood had above-average symptoms of attention problems in adolescence," Erik Landhuis of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, wrote in his report, published in Pediatrics on Tuesday.

Symptoms of attention problems included short attention span, poor concentration, and being easily distracted. The findings could not be explained by early-life attention difficulties, socio-economic factors, or intelligence, says the team.

"This latest study adds to the growing body of evidence that suggests parents should take steps to limit the amount of TV their children watch," adds Bob Hancox, one of the researchers.

Mundane reality

The team studied the long-term habits and behaviours of more than 1000 children born in Dunedin, between April 1972 and March 1973. The children aged 5 to 11 watched an average of 2.05 hours of weekday television. From age 13 to 15, time spent in front of the television rose to an average of 3.1 hours a day.

Young children who watched a lot of television were more likely to continue the habit as they got older, but even if they did not, the damage was done, the study said.

"This suggests that the effects of childhood viewing on attention may be long lasting," Landhuis notes. He offers several possible explanations for the association.

One is that the rapid scene changes common to many TV programs may overstimulate the developing brain of a young child, and could make reality seem boring by comparison.

"Hence, children who watch a lot of television may become less tolerant of slower-paced and more mundane tasks, such as school work," he writes.
Net effects

It is also possible that TV viewing may supplant other activities that promote concentration, such as reading, games, sports and play, he says. The lack of participation inherent in TV watching might also condition children when it comes to other activities.

The study is not proof that TV viewing causes attention problems, Landhuis notes, because it may be that children prone to attention problems may be drawn to watching television. "However, our results show that the net effect of television seems to be adverse."

Previous studies have linked the sedentary habit of TV watching among children to obesity and diabetes, amongst other public health issues, see Childhood TV and gaming is 'major public health issue).
http://technology.newscientist.com/a...ine-news_rss20





Rumors

North Korea Cracks Down on 'Korean Wave' of Illicit TV

Authorities in North Korea are intensifying a crackdown on imports of South Korean popular culture, especially television dramas, but the South’s “Korean Wave” may already have taken a strong hold in the isolated Stalinist state.

South Korean music, soap operas, and movies have already taken the rest of East Asia by storm, and, according to North Koreans now living in the South, the South's arch-rival North Korea is no exception.

One of the smash-hit TV dramas to emerge from South Korea in recent years has been “Winter Sonata,” a delicate and emotional love story that has spawned its own fashions as people seek to imitate details from the story.

“I watched ‘Winter Sonata’ in North Korea and I even recall the name of the leading actor, Bae Young Joon,” said a defector to South Korea identified only by his surname, Kim.

Korean wave

There have been two or three reports of public executions of North Korean young people in major cities including Chungjin, as punishment for having illegally copied and distributed South Korean visual material.

Kang Chul Hwan, vice-chairman of the Seoul-based Committee for the Democratization of North Korea

“North Koreans enjoy South Korean TV drama because it is interesting and realistic,” said Kim, who arrived in the South in 2002. “North Koreans love the fact that South Korean TV drama is not about politics, but about love and life, the fundamentals of human existence anywhere in this world,” he told RFA’s Korean service.

Kim said nowadays, so many North Koreans cross the border into China in the hope of buying food that they are easily exposed to South Korean video material sold in the border regions of northeast China.

The Korean Wave is already lapping on the shores of the communist North, where cultural productions inevitably praise the ruling Korean Workers’ Party and glorify leader Kim Jong Il, he told reporter Young Yoon Choi.

“A lot of people get together in groups and watch South Korean drama on DVDs. DVD players are available at foreign currency stores in North Korea,” he said, adding that in some parts of North Korea people have good reception of Chinese TV signals and watch South Korean drama directly.

But such apparently innocent pleasures can carry a high price tag.

Death sentences reported

“There have been two or three reports of public executions of North Korean young people in major cities including Chungjin, as punishment for having illegally copied and distributed South Korean visual material,” said Kang Chul Hwan, vice-chairman of the Seoul-based Committee for the Democratization of North Korea.

“It is not an overstatement to say that the Kim Jong Il regime is waging war on the South Korean TV drama,” he said, adding that the North Korean authorities have intensified surveillance and searches to prevent South Korean videos from entering North Korea.

But the effectiveness of these efforts is questionable, he said, pointing out that even the politically upright officials who carry out raids on anyone hoping to surf the Korean Wave aren’t immune.

Kang said the agents of the North Korean National Security Agency who conduct the searches for South Korean visual material often end up watching the DVDs they confiscate.

“Can the North Korean authorities prevent people from watching South Korean TV drama? If the people really want to watch it, they will find a way to watch it,” he said.

Movie director John Woo said he believed the Korean Wave would bring change in its wake.

“Culture is always the vanguard of understanding other cultures,” Woo told a recent panel discussion on Korean culture. “The Korean Wave is beginning to reach the North Korean people as well, and they are becoming aware of what South Korean culture is about. I believe that culture has the potential to invite changes in North Korea.”

Region-wide phenomenon

The Korean Wave found its biggest fan base among East Asian women in their 20s and 30s, before spreading out into the wider population, according to U.S.-based Korean culture expert Ji-Hong Lee.

“[It] has by now won the hearts of entire families, and consequently it has tremendous economic value and it boosts the image of Korea,” he said.

Meanwhile, Michael Shin, professor of modern Korean art and literature at Cornell University, said a distinctive feature of South Korean TV drama is that it emphasizes women’s role in society, particularly as mothers, transcending previous male-centered patriarchal stereotypes.

“The South Korean TV drama ‘Winter Sonata’ is the first classic example of this newly emerged matriarchal view of society,” Shin told a recent meeting of the U.S.-based Korean Society in New York.

“The main character doesn’t know who his father is, but his mother is still by his side. This is the key to understanding the popularity of Korean dramas. East Asians sense that they’ve somehow lost their stable identity and seek comfort in the mother figure.”

The Korean Wave of TV drama, movies, and music first made its impact in China in the late 1990s, quickly spreading across the region as broadcasters were quick to buy slick, high-quality productions at bargain prices.

Historic premiere

The themes, which embraced love, family and Confucian ideals, were easily embraced throughout North and East Asia. South Korea has one of the world’s largest film industries, with top stars now commanding as much as U.S. $5 million to appear in a movie.

In May 2007, Hwangjini became the first South Korean movie ever to be publicly previewed in North Korea.

The main character, an artistic and learned woman of great beauty known as a kisaeng, is played by Song Hye Gyo, one of the most popular Korean Wave stars of the moment. The story is based on a novel by North Korean author Hong Seok Jung, and it was previewed at Mount Kumgang in North Korea.

Original reporting in Korean by Chang-Kyun Lee, Jinhee Bonny, and Young Yoon Choi. RFA Korean service director: Jaehoon Ahn. Translated and researched by Greg Scarlatoiu. Written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie and edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
http://www.rfa.org/english/korean/20...17/korea_wave/





Virtual Khabris to Zoom-In on Terrorists
Vinod Kumar Menon

Mumbai police will have access to new software connected to 500 cyber cafes in the city that will send them logs

The Mumbai police will soon have khabris deployed (not physically) at over 500 cyber cafes in the city. A new software will allows cops to swoop down on terrorists the moment a keystroke is pressed at any cyber café across the city.

Investigations into the recent Hyderabad and Mumbai blasts have revealed that the planning was done using the Internet especially, chat rooms.

In fact, it is a well-known fact that terrorists all over the world do not use paper and pen or the phone to communicate. Everywhere, all over the world, it’s the net.

Vijay Mukhi, President of the Foundation for Information Security and Technology says, “The terrorists know that if they use machines at home, they can be caught. Cybercafes therefore give them anonymity.”

“The police needs to install programs that will capture every key stroke at regular interval screen shots, which will be sent back to a server that will log all the data.

The police can then keep track of all communication between terrorists no matter, which part of the world they operate from.This is the only way to patrol the net and this is how the police informer is going to look in the e-age,” added Mukhi.

The Mumbai police are in dialogue with M/s Micro Technologies for procuring a software called CARMS (Cyber Access Remote Monitoring System), a powerful monitoring tool that seeks to curb cyber crime.

CARMS monitors web browsing, file transfers, news, chats, messaging and e-mail, including all encoded attachments. In a sensitive environment, CARMS can also be used to restrict user or group access to only approved external and internal sites, explained a company official.

All cyber cafes in the city will now need a police license to keep their business going. All cafes need to register at the police headquarters and provide details on the number of computers installed, type of computers and technical details like the IP address of each machine.

Privacy breach?

A senior ATS official confirming the move said that those cyber cafes who do not meet the norms will be fined under the Bombay Police Act and the police also reserve the rights to take stringent action for violation of norms.

“The question we need to ask ourselves is whether a breach of privacy is more important or the security of the nation. I do not think the above question needs an answer,” said Mukhi. “

As long as personal computers are not being monitored. If monitoring is restricted to public computers, it is in the interest of security,” said National Vice President, People Union for Civil Liberty.
http://www.mid-day.com/news/city/2007/august/163165.htm





Germany Defends Plan to Use Spyware in Terror Investigations
AP

German officials on Friday defended a proposal to use "Trojan horse" software to secretly monitor potential terror suspects' hard drives, amid fierce debate over whether the measures violate civil liberties.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble wants to include the measure in a broader security law being considered by conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government.

Carried in e-mails that appear to come from other government offices, the software would allow authorities to investigate suspects' Internet use and the data stored on their hard drives without their knowledge.

Use of the government-produced technology for spying on terror suspects "will cover a serious and scandalous hole in our information that has arisen through technical changes in recent years," Stefan Kaller, a spokesman for Schaeuble told reporters.

The proposal stems from a Federal Court decision earlier this year to block clandestine remote searches of suspect computers until there was a law governing the practice.

It has met with strong criticism from opposition parties and civil liberties groups.

Max Stadler, a security expert with the opposition Free Democrats, insists such practices would weaken citizens' trust in government.

"It is an invasion into the private sphere," Stadler told ZDF television.

Schaeuble's office has not yet released a copy of the bill, but elements of it that were leaked to German media include allowing investigators to send e-mail messages that appear to be from the Finance Ministry or the Youth Services Office, but which actually carry the Trojan horse software.

Thomas Steg, a spokesman for Merkel, said the chancellor supports the broader bill, but expects "a difficult and intensive discussion with the ministries, the coalition and the experts" on it before it is passed into law.

Details about how the technology works were not released.

In February, Germany's Federal Court of Justice rejected federal prosecutors' attempts to search hard drives through the Internet. Prosecutors had argued that the legal reasoning used to allow telephone surveillance and other electronic eavesdropping techniques should also be applied to evidence gathering over the Internet.

Germany, unlike Britain or Spain, has been spared a major terrorist attack, but German and U.S. officials have warned recently of increased dangers, prompting tighter security measures.

In recent weeks, German troops and others working in Afghanistan have been targeted by Islamic radicals in suicide bombings and kidnappings aimed at forcing the withdrawal of the nation's 3,000 troops deployed with the international security force there.

The heightened threat level only makes the matter more urgent, Kaller said, insisting that, "Any delay can mean a security risk."
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_6770364





Logged In and Sharing Gossip, er, Intelligence
Scott Shane



AMERICA’S spies, like America’s teenagers, are secretive, talk in code and get in trouble if they’re not watched closely.

It’s hard to imagine spies logging on and exchanging “whuddups” with strangers, though. They’re just not wired that way. If networking is lifeblood to the teenager, it’s viewed with deep suspicion by the spy.

The intelligence agencies have something like networking in mind, though, as they scramble to adopt Web technologies that young people have already mastered in the millions. The idea is to try to solve the information-sharing problems inherent in the spy world — and blamed, most spectacularly, for the failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.

In December, officials say, the agencies will introduce A-Space, a top-secret variant of the social networking Web sites MySpace and Facebook. The “A” stands for “analyst,” and where Facebook users swap snapshots, homework tips and gossip, intelligence analysts will be able to compare notes on satellite photos of North Korean nuclear sites, Iraqi insurgents and Chinese missiles.

A-Space will join Intellipedia, the spooks’ Wikipedia, where intelligence officers from all 16 American spy agencies pool their knowledge. Sixteen months after its creation, officials say, the top-secret version of Intellipedia has 29,255 articles, with an average of 114 new articles and more than 4,800 edits to articles added each workday.

A separate online Library of National Intelligence is to include all official intelligence reports sent out by each agency, offering Amazon.com-style suggestions: if you liked that piece on Venezuela’s oil reserves, how about this one on Russia’s? And blogs, accessible only to other spies, are proliferating behind the security fences.

“We see the Internet passing us in the fast lane,” said Mike Wertheimer, of the office of the Director of National Intelligence, who is overseeing the introduction of A-Space. “We’re playing a little catch-up.”

It remains to be seen, however, whether technology alone can bring to secretive bureaucracies the connectedness that comes naturally to cybersurfers in the outside world.

Skeptics say turf — the curse of the spy world — might keep analysts from using the tools. Mr. Wertheimer acknowledges that some managers discourage their people from adding to the Web encyclopedia, fearing that their agencies will lose credit for scoops.

And for the intelligence world, putting the Web tools to work requires a cultural revolution. “Need to know” has long been the agencies’ mantra. The juiciest stuff is still called S.C.I., or Sensitive Compartmented Information, and walling off data offers protection against leaks and moles, or so the theory goes.

But the Sept. 11 attacks revealed how hoarding information could lead to catastrophe. In a report released last month, the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general described a dysfunctional spy family, in which the National Security Agency refused to share intercepts from Al Qaeda with the C.I.A., and the C.I.A., in turn, withheld information from the F.B.I. More than 50 C.I.A. officers read cables in early 2000 about two future hijackers but failed to ask the State Department to put them on a watch list, the report said.

To prevent such blunders, Congress created the post of director of national intelligence in late 2004 with orders to rope the 16 spy agencies into a single enterprise. The National Counterterrorism Center serves as a hub for threat information. There are plans to train analysts from different agencies together.

And now there are high hopes that a virtual community, linking all of the 100,000 employees of the intelligence world, could help make information-sharing as automatic for spies as it is for middle school students. Agency officials will discuss the new Web tools with private-sector gurus this week at an open meeting in Chicago.

Intelligence veterans and experts generally applaud the new technology, but some warn that it is no panacea.

Amy Zegart, associate professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “Spying Blind: The C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the Origins of 9/11,” identified 23 moments when the C.I.A. or F.B.I. might have stopped the plot. But she said she saw “almost zero chance” that the Web would have made a difference, because intelligence officers didn’t recognize the significance of the information they had.

“I think we overemphasize what technology can do,” Ms. Zegart said. “The most important fusion takes place inside people’s brains.”

When Mark M. Lowenthal became the C.I.A.’s assistant director for analysis and production in 2002, he set out to survey the reports the agency was writing — and found that security barriers, clumsy technology and overwhelming volume made the task difficult.

“If A-Space and Intellipedia make it easier for analysts and managers to know what’s being produced across the board, that will be a great thing,” said Mr. Lowenthal, who left the agency in 2005. But he said he had doubts. “My concern about blogs and wikis is the confusion of opinion with expertise,” he said. “Intelligence is expertise.”

Whether A-Space will permit analysts to create personal pages viewable by others remains to be decided; managers are as wary of preening and time-wasting on the Web as parents. But its creators say A-Space will incorporate both secret and unclassified e-mail and chat functions, permit collective editing of documents and allow analysts to type in a name and instantly discover what far-flung agencies have dug up on it.

A Somalia specialist, for instance, will be able to link up with counterparts in other agencies, post to blogs on East Africa and get an alert when the Intellipedia page on Mogadishu is changed.

Aware that such a system could be vulnerable to a mole, officials say computers will flag users who download masses of data or repeatedly seek information outside their work area, just as credit card companies scan transactions for patterns indicating fraud.

But some old-timers still fear that the spy Web could give away the nation’s secrets to hackers and turncoats.

Chris Rasmussen, an analyst turned “knowledge manager” at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and an evangelist for the new tools, has been called a “traitor” and compared to the C.I.A. supermole Aldrich Ames in comments left on his internal blog, he said in a talk in May.

But Mr. Rasmussen, 32, who like half of all intelligence officers was hired within the last five years, is undeterred. To combat turf consciousness, he and about 30 like-minded intelligence officers patrol Intellipedia to remove agency names that are used to label content.

Mr. Wertheimer, who spent 20 years as a code-breaking N.S.A. mathematician, said he was aware of the obstacles but saw encouraging signs. When a crisis breaks, he said, and an article goes up on Intellipedia, “within a few hours we’ve got all 16 agencies contributing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/we...w/02shane.html





Satellite Imagery Raises Security Questions
Andrew Scutro

Throughout the Cold War, satellite and spy plane imagery of military sites was the sort of valuable, close-hold information that could start or stop a war or spawn a new arms race. Only people with the highest of security clearances got to see those photos.

Today, much of that same information is just a computer keystroke away. And you don’t need to be a spy to see it.

Global information companies such as Google and Microsoft provide millions of regular folks a bird’s-eye view of everything from U.S. military installations to their very own backyards — sometimes with incredible detail.

This widespread availability of overhead imagery has raised serious questions about the security of military personnel, installations and hardware.

With little effort, one can search Google for a forward operating base in Iraq and map out vehicles, berthing areas and security positions. Multiangled photos of highly sensitive facilities such as nuclear submarine maintenance stations are also there for the asking.

Last week, the issue gained a higher profile with the appearance on the Internet of a photograph of the propeller on a Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine while in dry dock at the intermediate maintenance facility in Bangor, Wash. A key to the strategic submarine’s ability to deploy and remain undetected, propeller designs have been kept under wraps for years — literally. When out of the water, the propellers typically are draped with tarps.

The image of the sub with its prop clearly visible appeared on Microsoft’s mapping tool, Virtual Earth. It was discovered accidentally by Dan Twohig, a deck officer on the Washington state ferry service who was using the program to examine real estate on the west side of Puget Sound.

While looking for a new home, Twohig stumbled on the exposed submarine and the surrounding facility. He was shocked.

“My initial reaction was ‘oops’. Then I looked around a while and looked at other things,” he said.

Interestingly, Twohig runs a Web site for mariners and he posted a link to the Microsoft images there.

“My intention of bringing the prop photos to the attention of my readers was in no way malicious,” he said. “I did want to point out the apparent lack of accountability for this type of information being out there for the average Joe to find if he is looking for it.”

Sometimes, the average Joe doesn’t even have to look.

Because of his posting, anyone with an e-mail alert set to the word “navy” received the photograph.

Such accessibility and dissemination has heated up the debate about what’s secret and what’s not in today’s hyper-reactive digital age.
‘Just the world we live in’

Nathan Hughes — a military analyst at Stratfor, a global intelligence company — says it was a major mistake that the sub propeller was exposed at all.

“It’s very sensitive naval technology,” he said. “You always hide that from above.”

He noted that such equipment has been concealed for decades, during and since the Cold War. Just because the Soviet Union collapsed doesn’t mean it’s no longer secret information, he contends.

“The SSBN, especially, with its acoustic signature, [tries] to be as quiet as possible. That [propeller] is national secret,” Hughes said. “This is something that should not be seen from space or an airplane or any other way.”

Such imagery, including pictures of a new Chinese ballistic missile submarine that were splashed across monitors around the world, now appear with increasing — and troubling — frequency, he said.

“This is just the world we live in these days,” Hughes said.

Several Navy watchers said the now widespread Ohio-class sub propeller photo marks a first.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen that in open source. In fact, it’s the first time I’ve seen that ever,” said one naval source who asked not to be named due to his involvement with ongoing Navy programs. “You have to think spy satellites from Russia could have taken pictures of it, too, depending on where they are.”

The source said while knowledge of the propeller has been widespread for some time, its appearance and design have not.

Asked about their policy on publishing such imagery, Microsoft officials offered a statement claiming that the company is willing to blur such imagery if asked.

But to the naval expert, that doesn’t mean much.

“Waiting until you are asked will not be a foolproof way to discourage these instances,” he said. “And that creates a situation where a lot more horses will get out of the barn before the doors can be closed.”

Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, says that even if the U.S. government has not protested the new image proliferation, other nations have. In April, India protested Google Earth’s display of its government infrastructure, including “military bases, offices of the prime minister and the president, as well as nuclear facilities,” according to a BBC report.

Dixon said several other countries have been “very unhappy” with the efforts to photograph the world from above.

“I call this the race to the bottom,” she said.

But it’s all aboveboard, according to Google.

Company spokeswoman Megan Quinn said that satellite and aerial imagery is available from several sources and that Google is conscientious about what it releases.

Further, the U.S. government has not tried to interfere under “a policy that favors the public availability of commercial remote imaging data, on the grounds that the benefits to the public vastly outweigh the potential risks,” she wrote in an e-mail. “The government has the power to limit the capturing of satellite images whenever appropriate. Google both supports the federal government’s decision and understands the government’s interest to set limits wherever appropriate.”
How big of a breach?

Norman Friedman, a highly regarded authority and author on naval and military topics, has been to the Bangor submarine base and knows any pictures he could have taken there would have landed him in serious trouble.

He acknowledged the Ohio-class submarine propeller configuration was once very secret, but that it’s no longer the case.

“But I still don’t think the Navy likes people hanging around refit sites for nuclear submarines,” he said. “It will be interesting to see if the Navy has the temerity to go after Microsoft ... I don’t believe the public needs to know that an Ohio-class submarine has a [certain sort of] propeller.”

Some experts argue that even with a picture of a secret propeller, a competitor or enemy still has to build it, and in the case of an Ohio-class design, that’s a daunting technical feat.

In a way, Friedman agrees. He doesn’t believe the propeller issue means that much when compared to the proliferation of detailed photographs of sensitive military installations, from submarine piers to combat bases in Iraq.

“I’d be less interested in the propeller and more about someone who can casually take pictures and figure out how the place is laid out,” he says. “Forget about the propeller. Think about the security arrangements on the base.”

Since most of the rest of the world doesn’t have reconnaissance satellites, such publicly available information provides a previously unavailable tool.

“To make it easy for someone to get into a base like that is obscene. And that is something that can kill people. In huge numbers,” Friedman said. “Right now there are people out there in places like Waziristan who want us dead. They don’t have satellites, but they have wonderful fantasies. Why the hell make it easier for them?”

In the days following Sept. 11, 2001, news reports surfaced of suspicious figures photographing New York landmarks. Later, captured terrorists were found to have similar photos, ostensibly for attack planning.

“If you’re not supposed to take pictures of bridge abutments, why are you supposed to take pictures of this stuff?” Friedman asked. “It goes beyond the question of, ‘Are we serious about terrorism?’ A lot of people, with the Internet, think there are no rules.”

Apparently, there are no rules. Not yet, anyway.

“There is a no-fly zone around Navy installations that applies to aircraft,” according to a Naval Sea Systems Command statement. “However, the Navy can not speculate on the type of platform or equipment [that was] used to take the [submarine propeller] image. Additionally, the Navy cannot control the trajectory or orbit of privately owned satellites.”

The Navy says it was not aware the photos were being taken at the time. It has not asked for photos to be obscured in any way.

“The Navy has no agreements with overhead digital imaging companies that control/limit the content of photographs taken of Navy facilities,” according to the statement.

Air Force Maj. Patrick Ryder, a public affairs officer at the Pentagon, said the Defense Department has never asked that such imagery be obscured or removed.

“It is not DoD’s policy, nor do we have the legal authority, to request or demand the degrading of commercial imagery (aerial or satellite) hosted on Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth,” he said in an e-mail. “DoD is not in the business of censoring information in the public domain.”
http://www.navytimes.com/news/2007/0...urity_070819w/





The First Amendment, Satellite Imagery and National Security
Dan Twohig

The correspondence that I have received regarding the Bangor sub photos has sparked a much needed conversation in the world of Post 9/11 National Security.

The Navy Times’ investigative reporter discovered that the prop photos first reported on MonsterMaritime.com were not taken from a satellite but by an airplane on a mapping run of the area. The company that took the photos made them available to the pubic (for a price) then Microsoft Live Search picked them up and broadcast them on the internet for anyone to see. I am certain that I am not the first person to see this photo but I was just the first person to point it out and say, “Whoa, I don’t think that the military is going to be happy with this…” Satellites are one thing, but frankly, I am surprised that the air space over sensitive bases like Bangor is not better controlled.

A month or so later, I was interviewed about my discovery of the photos by a reporter for the Navy Times. He asked me what I thought about this accidental discovery of sensitive data on the internet and I remarked that my pointing this out on my blog was in no way malicious but it certainly has raised the issue in some pretty high places. Hence the controversy.

I recently made a comment on another person’s blog regarding the decision of the Seattle Post Intelligencer not to publish photos of suspicious persons on the Washington State Ferries that were released to the media by the FBI. My personal opinion as to whether the photos should have been published was not at issue. I defended the PI’s First Amendment right to choose not to publish the photos and have since born the brunt of all kinds of negative comments from readers. The Washington State Ferries takes security very seriously and this is of course is a serious matter. But that is not the issue. I hold that a news organization has a duty to report the news. It does not have a duty to publish photos that may or may not violate any persons rights. However, it can publish them if it wishes to and risk the consequences. The PI reported the release of the photos but chose not to publish them. It is a difficult ethical question to deal with. I think the Seattle PI dealt with it in a ethical manner.

What are the needs of National Security with regard to the internet and what is the danger to the Bill of Rights? Where do we draw the line? Is it domestic wire tapping without a warrant? Is a spy satellite directed at a back yard BBQ in Oklahoma really a good use of our resources?

We (the US) throw tons of money at all kind of things in the name of Homeland Security and we get conflicting reports from the news media and various government agencies about the effectiveness of these efforts and the value of funding these programs. As with anything else in our society, security has become big industry and many entities are circling around like sharks looking to pick up the drops that fall in the pond. After 9/11, fear and anger have been tools used to manipulate the populace and bend them back and forth for gain whether political or corporate. A person can be pretty smart. People in a group are pretty dumb. Our political and corporate systems prey on this.

When the government first started doling out the security dollars, states, cities and towns fought tooth and nail for their piece of the security pie. As with many aspects of our system, this security money was dumped into the pork barrel and we have seen all manner of “projects” that are touted as in the interest of Homeland Security. We are building a fence across our southern frontier but not our northern one.

I fear mob mentality. I fear giving up the civil rights that our county’s founding fathers worked so hard to design for us. I fear giving away the rights that our armed forces have sacrificed to protect. I fear a future where the majority of our county’s citizens are OK with being told what to think and what to believe.
I was discussing this topic with an electrician who was doing some work for me last week and he summed it up pretty well. He said, “Personally, I would rather die free than die afraid.”

Me too…

http://www.monstermaritime.com/2007/08/





Lawmakers Challenge Plan to Expand Spying

Concerns Focus on Domestic Use of Satellite Technology and How U.S. Will Protect Civil Liberties
Spencer S. Hsu

Senior House Democrats called on the Bush administration yesterday to delay a planned Oct. 1 expansion of the use of powerful satellite and aircraft spy technology by local and federal law enforcement agencies, challenging the plan's legality and charging that the administration is failing to safeguard the privacy of Americans.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and two Democratic subcommittee chairmen jointly asked the Department of Homeland Security to provide the legal framework for the domestic use of classified and military spy satellites, and to allow Congress to review privacy and civil liberties protections.

"You let this thing go, it may be another blank check to the executive. It may morph into things that will terrify you if you really understand the capabilities of satellites," said Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), former ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee.

Their demand was made in a letter after DHS officials testified about the spying program at a hearing, and signaled that administration officials had not succeeded in quieting Democrats' concerns about the intrusiveness of the satellite technology -- which was created primarily for foreign surveillance -- and the novelty of its proposed use by state and local police officials.

Responding to the request for a delay, DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said the department will provide "timely responses . . . and with that information we believe the committee will be satisfied.''

Invoking the controversy over President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program, which was kept secret from most lawmakers for years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Harman contended that the administration gave incomplete or misleading briefings about that program and disregarded laws passed by Congress.

"Since we've been rolled, I intend not to get rolled again," Harman said, although she acknowledged the potential value of the new program.

The hearing was set after news reports in August said that beginning this fall, intelligence officials and DHS will allow broader domestic use of some of the nation's most secret and advanced spying technology.

Administration officials say the program can help domestic authorities deal with a variety of threats, from illegal immigration and terrorism to hurricanes and forest fires, by providing access to high-resolution, real-time satellite photos. Military sensors can peer through clouds and tree canopies, detect underground bunkers and penetrate buildings.

Charles Allen, Homeland Security's chief intelligence officer, told the committee that overhead satellite imagery has been used legally for decades to support domestic, federal, scientific, law enforcement and security uses. It has been used to create maps, monitor volcanoes and scout sports events.

The new program, he said, does not require additional laws or authority, and would relieve the need for other agencies to rely on ad hoc means of accessing powerful data tools. He said that state and local police requests for access would be approved on a case-by-case basis, using rules to be set by homeland and intelligence officials at a future date he did not specify.

Allen also said officials will use only imagery satellites and will not track individuals or use thermal sensors to peer inside buildings. "I assure you and the American people that the appropriate use of these . . . capabilities will make the nation safer while maintaining the privacy and civil liberties of Americans," Allen said.

Oversight of the data's use would be more layered than it is now, Allen said. It would come from officials at DHS and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which authorized the program in May following a 2005 study. The program will be managed by a new DHS office and reviewed by agency inspectors general, lawyers, and privacy and civil liberties officers.

Representatives of several civil liberties groups testified against the move. They said the government appears to be crossing a well-established line against the use of military assets in domestic law enforcement. "They say 'trust us,' " said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Project. Before such technology is directed at Americans, he said, "You need to verify that this technology will not be misused."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...090601128.html





Digital Video Rocket - Bird’s Eye View at a Down to Earth Price
Nigel Powell

The Digital Video Rocket soars to a majestic 500 feet, all the while recording a VGA video for you to gawp at on landing. Only 12 seconds of footage or 3 still images stored per flight, so you’d better make sure you’re pointing in the right direction. Fortunately the camera is impact resistant, which is probably more than you can say for your neighbour’s greenhouse. $59.95.

This rocket, made by Estes, makers of model rockets for nearly 50 years, provides enthusiasts a view of the rockets liftoff and flight from the rockets point of view thanks to the impact-resistant digital camera in the nose cone. From as high as 500′, the camera can record a 12-second video at 640 x 480 pixel resolution or take up to three pictures per flight (stores 15 pictures). It comes ready to fly, and the camera is oriented toward the earth during flight. The camera connects to a PC with the included USB cable to download the flight video.
http://www.redferret.net/?p=9187





P2P tagging



Tracking the Elusive Shipping ContainerLibraries

The world is a different place beyond the ocean horizon, where thousands of merchant ships ply the all the world's waterways. How do these ships come by their cargos, and in what untamed ports? Along the journey, pry open a container and what will you find? If you're not sure, that spells danger.

The world is a very different place out beyond the horizon. Even as you read this, there are some 40,000 large cargo ships plying the world’s waterways and oceans, not to mention innumerable smaller merchant craft, all pulling in and out of ports, loading, unloading, changing out crews and cargos, and steaming from one location to the next.

In what can be a very murky world of shadowy ship registry offices, lengthy manifests, and dockhands who change out faster than Barbosa’s crew, how all these ships come by their cargo, how that cargo is loaded, by what polyglot seamen and in what untamed ports, can be an amazingly scrambled and trackless story rivaling the Pirates of the Caribbean.

Scenario: A single ship starts out in Singapore with containers filled with electronics, passes through Indonesia where it picks up spices, sails to Calcutta to load cotton, Port Said where it boards an Egyptian crew, Piraeus where it stops for fuel, Tangier where it picks up leathers, Scotland where it packs in woolen sweaters, and finally sets sail for Newark, New Jersey. Eleven million containers packed with such goods reach U.S. ports every year.

At any point in a merchant ship’s journey, pry open a container mid-ocean, and what might you find? When you can’t be sure, that spells danger. The possibility that a single container has gone purposefully astray and might now be packed with explosives, or loaded with a virulent biologic destined for our shores, is not a fictional scenario. (In 1988, it was an Al Qaeda merchant ship that delivered the materials needed to bomb U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. That same ship was never seen again.)

Given endless time, customs agents could find all contraband. But, in the world of maritime shipping, time is the enemy. Try delaying a delivery, and you may face some rough characters down at the docks (think On the Waterfront). What's more, anything that hinders the swift transit of goods around the world can have a rippling effect on the world’s economy.

MATTS – Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate's Marine Asset Tag Tracking System – is a miniature sensor, data logging computer, radio transceiver, and GPS tracking system integrated into a compact and inexpensive black box, about the size of a deck of cards. Affixed to a shipping container, MATTS can use its on-board GPS chip to estimate its location if the GPS signal is lost. And, in the final version of the system, containers outfitted with MATTS tags will be able to transmit through shipboard communications systems, even if they are placed deep below deck. The tag’s signal will “jump” from container to container until it finds a path it can use. Better yet, this black box stores its location history and reports it back when in range (up to 1 km) of an Internet equipped ship, container terminal, or a cell phone tower. At any point in a container’s journey, its history can be examined, and if anything has gone amiss, authorities know instantly to scrutinize that particular container.

Ultimately, MATTS will be integrated with the Advanced Container Security Device, which will send an alert through MATTS when a container has been opened or tampered with on any side, providing even more security.

“MATTS will globally communicate in-transit alerts to Customs and Border Protection, and this capability satisfies a high-priority requirement,” says Bob Knetl, Program Manager for the MATTS research within S&T’s Borders and Maritime Division.

In late April 2007, one hundred MATTS-equipped containers started out in the Port of Yokohama, Japan, and are now making their trans-Pacific crossing to the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach, where they will then continue by rail to the Rochelle, Illinois, Rail Terminal and be unloaded and trucked to their final destination. This test, ending in August, will demonstrate that the communications can be used internationally (in this case, by Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transportation) and that transitioning to domestic drayage once portside in Long Beach also runs smoothly.

MATTS was developed under a DHS S&T Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract by iControl Incorporated, a small Santa Clara, CA-based company.

“A serious threat is posed by the cargo that containers may hold,” says Vinny Schaper, S&T's SBIR Program manager. “We have to view the ocean with grave concern, and realize that a maritime attack is not beyond the realm of possibility and if it comes, it will probably involve the use of merchant ships. Eleven million containers a year are brought onto our docks. Interrupt this with a terrorist attack, and the backup would reach around the world.”
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/533091/?sc=swtn





Chip Implants Linked to Animal Tumors
Todd Lewan

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved implanting microchips in humans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny transponders to access patients' medical records almost instantly. The FDA found "reasonable assurance" the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one of 2005's top "innovative technologies."

But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had "induced" malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats.

"The transponders were the cause of the tumors," said Keith Johnson, a retired toxicologic pathologist, explaining in a phone interview the findings of a 1996 study he led at the Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich.

Leading cancer specialists reviewed the research for The Associated Press and, while cautioning that animal test results do not necessarily apply to humans, said the findings troubled them. Some said they would not allow family members to receive implants, and all urged further research before the glass-encased transponders are widely implanted in people.

To date, about 2,000 of the so-called radio frequency identification, or RFID, devices have been implanted in humans worldwide, according to VeriChip Corp. The company, which sees a target market of 45 million Americans for its medical monitoring chips, insists the devices are safe, as does its parent company, Applied Digital Solutions, of Delray Beach, Fla.

"We stand by our implantable products which have been approved by the FDA and/or other U.S. regulatory authorities," Scott Silverman, VeriChip Corp. chairman and chief executive officer, said in a written response to AP questions.

The company was "not aware of any studies that have resulted in malignant tumors in laboratory rats, mice and certainly not dogs or cats," but he added that millions of domestic pets have been implanted with microchips, without reports of significant problems.

"In fact, for more than 15 years we have used our encapsulated glass transponders with FDA approved anti-migration caps and received no complaints regarding malignant tumors caused by our product."

The FDA also stands by its approval of the technology.

Did the agency know of the tumor findings before approving the chip implants? The FDA declined repeated AP requests to specify what studies it reviewed.

The FDA is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, which, at the time of VeriChip's approval, was headed by Tommy Thompson. Two weeks after the device's approval took effect on Jan. 10, 2005, Thompson left his Cabinet post, and within five months was a board member of VeriChip Corp. and Applied Digital Solutions. He was compensated in cash and stock options.

Thompson, until recently a candidate for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, says he had no personal relationship with the company as the VeriChip was being evaluated, nor did he play any role in FDA's approval process of the RFID tag.

"I didn't even know VeriChip before I stepped down from the Department of Health and Human Services," he said in a telephone interview.

Also making no mention of the findings on animal tumors was a June report by the ethics committee of the American Medical Association, which touted the benefits of implantable RFID devices.

Had committee members reviewed the literature on cancer in chipped animals?

No, said Dr. Steven Stack, an AMA board member with knowledge of the committee's review.

Was the AMA aware of the studies?

No, he said.

___

Published in veterinary and toxicology journals between 1996 and 2006, the studies found that lab mice and rats injected with microchips sometimes developed subcutaneous "sarcomas" _ malignant tumors, most of them encasing the implants.

_ A 1998 study in Ridgefield, Conn., of 177 mice reported cancer incidence to be slightly higher than 10 percent _ a result the researchers described as "surprising."

_ A 2006 study in France detected tumors in 4.1 percent of 1,260 microchipped mice. This was one of six studies in which the scientists did not set out to find microchip-induced cancer but noticed the growths incidentally. They were testing compounds on behalf of chemical and pharmaceutical companies; but they ruled out the compounds as the tumors' cause. Because researchers only noted the most obvious tumors, the French study said, "These incidences may therefore slightly underestimate the true occurrence" of cancer.

_ In 1997, a study in Germany found cancers in 1 percent of 4,279 chipped mice. The tumors "are clearly due to the implanted microchips," the authors wrote.

Caveats accompanied the findings. "Blind leaps from the detection of tumors to the prediction of human health risk should be avoided," one study cautioned. Also, because none of the studies had a control group of animals that did not get chips, the normal rate of tumors cannot be determined and compared to the rate with chips implanted.

Still, after reviewing the research, specialists at some pre-eminent cancer institutions said the findings raised red flags.

"There's no way in the world, having read this information, that I would have one of those chips implanted in my skin, or in one of my family members," said Dr. Robert Benezra, head of the Cancer Biology Genetics Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Before microchips are implanted on a large scale in humans, he said, testing should be done on larger animals, such as dogs or monkeys. "I mean, these are bad diseases. They are life-threatening. And given the preliminary animal data, it looks to me that there's definitely cause for concern."

Dr. George Demetri, director of the Center for Sarcoma and Bone Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, agreed. Even though the tumor incidences were "reasonably small," in his view, the research underscored "certainly real risks" in RFID implants.

In humans, sarcomas, which strike connective tissues, can range from the highly curable to "tumors that are incredibly aggressive and can kill people in three to six months," he said.

At the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, a leader in mouse genetics research and the initiation of cancer, Dr. Oded Foreman, a forensic pathologist, also reviewed the studies at the AP's request.

At first he was skeptical, suggesting that chemicals administered in some of the studies could have caused the cancers and skewed the results. But he took a different view after seeing that control mice, which received no chemicals, also developed the cancers. "That might be a little hint that something real is happening here," he said. He, too, recommended further study, using mice, dogs or non-human primates.

Dr. Cheryl London, a veterinarian oncologist at Ohio State University, noted: "It's much easier to cause cancer in mice than it is in people. So it may be that what you're seeing in mice represents an exaggerated phenomenon of what may occur in people."

Tens of thousands of dogs have been chipped, she said, and veterinary pathologists haven't reported outbreaks of related sarcomas in the area of the neck, where canine implants are often done. (Published reports detailing malignant tumors in two chipped dogs turned up in AP's four-month examination of research on chips and health. In one dog, the researchers said cancer appeared linked to the presence of the embedded chip; in the other, the cancer's cause was uncertain.)

Nonetheless, London saw a need for a 20-year study of chipped canines "to see if you have a biological effect." Dr. Chand Khanna, a veterinary oncologist at the National Cancer Institute, also backed such a study, saying current evidence "does suggest some reason to be concerned about tumor formations."

Meanwhile, the animal study findings should be disclosed to anyone considering a chip implant, the cancer specialists agreed.

To date, however, that hasn't happened.

___

The product that VeriChip Corp. won approval for use in humans is an electronic capsule the size of two grains of rice. Generally, it is implanted with a syringe into an anesthetized portion of the upper arm.

When prompted by an electromagnetic scanner, the chip transmits a unique code. With the code, hospital staff can go on the Internet and access a patient's medical profile that is maintained in a database by VeriChip Corp. for an annual fee.

VeriChip Corp., whose parent company has been marketing radio tags for animals for more than a decade, sees an initial market of diabetics and people with heart conditions or Alzheimer's disease, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The company is spending millions to assemble a national network of hospitals equipped to scan chipped patients.

But in its SEC filings, product labels and press releases, VeriChip Corp. has not mentioned the existence of research linking embedded transponders to tumors in test animals.

When the FDA approved the device, it noted some Verichip risks: The capsules could migrate around the body, making them difficult to extract; they might interfere with defibrillators, or be incompatible with MRI scans, causing burns. While also warning that the chips could cause "adverse tissue reaction," FDA made no reference to malignant growths in animal studies.

Did the agency review literature on microchip implants and animal cancer?

Dr. Katherine Albrecht, a privacy advocate and RFID expert, asked shortly after VeriChip's approval what evidence the agency had reviewed. When FDA declined to provide information, she filed a Freedom of Information Act request. More than a year later, she received a letter stating there were no documents matching her request.

"The public relies on the FDA to evaluate all the data and make sure the devices it approves are safe," she says, "but if they're not doing that, who's covering our backs?"

Late last year, Albrecht unearthed at the Harvard medical library three studies noting cancerous tumors in some chipped mice and rats, plus a reference in another study to a chipped dog with a tumor. She forwarded them to the AP, which subsequently found three additional mice studies with similar findings, plus another report of a chipped dog with a tumor.

Asked if it had taken these studies into account, the FDA said VeriChip documents were being kept confidential to protect trade secrets. After AP filed a FOIA request, the FDA made available for a phone interview Anthony Watson, who was in charge of the VeriChip approval process.

"At the time we reviewed this, I don't remember seeing anything like that," he said of animal studies linking microchips to cancer. A literature search "didn't turn up anything that would be of concern."

In general, Watson said, companies are expected to provide safety-and-effectiveness data during the approval process, "even if it's adverse information."

Watson added: "The few articles from the literature that did discuss adverse tissue reactions similar to those in the articles you provided, describe the responses as foreign body reactions that are typical of other implantable devices. The balance of the data provided in the submission supported approval of the device."

Another implantable device could be a pacemaker, and indeed, tumors have in some cases attached to foreign bodies inside humans. But Dr. Neil Lipman, director of the Research Animal Resource Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, said it's not the same. The microchip isn't like a pacemaker that's vital to keeping someone alive, he added, "so at this stage, the payoff doesn't justify the risks."

Silverman, VeriChip Corp.'s chief executive, disagreed. "Each month pet microchips reunite over 8,000 dogs and cats with their owners," he said. "We believe the VeriMed Patient Identification System will provide similar positive benefits for at-risk patients who are unable to communicate for themselves in an emergency."

___

And what of former HHS secretary Thompson?

When asked what role, if any, he played in VeriChip's approval, Thompson replied: "I had nothing to do with it. And if you look back at my record, you will find that there has never been any improprieties whatsoever."

FDA's Watson said: "I have no recollection of him being involved in it at all." VeriChip Corp. declined comment.

Thompson vigorously campaigned for electronic medical records and healthcare technology both as governor of Wisconsin and at HHS. While in President Bush's Cabinet, he formed a "medical innovation" task force that worked to partner FDA with companies developing medical information technologies.

At a "Medical Innovation Summit" on Oct. 20, 2004, Lester Crawford, the FDA's acting commissioner, thanked the secretary for getting the agency "deeply involved in the use of new information technology to help prevent medication error." One notable example he cited: "the implantable chips and scanners of the VeriChip system our agency approved last week."

After leaving the Cabinet and joining the company board, Thompson received options on 166,667 shares of VeriChip Corp. stock, and options on an additional 100,000 shares of stock from its parent company, Applied Digital Solutions, according to SEC records. He also received $40,000 in cash in 2005 and again in 2006, the filings show.

The Project on Government Oversight called Thompson's actions "unacceptable" even though they did not violate what the independent watchdog group calls weak conflict-of-interest laws.

"A decade ago, people would be embarrassed to cash in on their government connections. But now it's like the Wild West," said the group's executive director, Danielle Brian.

Thompson is a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, a Washington law firm that was paid $1.2 million for legal services it provided the chip maker in 2005 and 2006, according to SEC filings.

He stepped down as a VeriChip Corp. director in March to seek the GOP presidential nomination, and records show that the company gave his campaign $7,400 before he bowed out of the race in August.

In a TV interview while still on the board, Thompson was explaining the benefits _ and the ease _ of being chipped when an interviewer interrupted:

"I'm sorry, sir. Did you just say you would get one implanted in your arm?"

"Absolutely," Thompson replied. "Without a doubt."

"No concerns at all?"

"No."

But to date, Thompson has yet to be chipped himself.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...800997_pf.html





U.S. May Invoke 'State Secrets' to Squelch Suit Against Swift
Eric Lichtblau

The Bush administration is signaling that it plans to turn once again to a favorite legal tool known as the "state secrets" privilege to try to shut down a lawsuit brought against a Belgium banking cooperative that secretly supplied millions of private financial records to the U.S. government, court documents show.

The lawsuit against the banking consortium, which is known as Swift, threatens to disrupt the operations of a vital national security program and to reveal "highly classified information" if it is allowed to continue, the Justice Department said in several recent court filings asserting its strong interest in seeing the lawsuit dismissed. A hearing on the future of the lawsuit was scheduled for Friday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.

The "state secrets" privilege, allowing the government to shut down public litigation on national security grounds, was once a rarely used tool. But the Bush administration has turned to it dozens of times in terrorism-related cases in seeking to end public discussion of everything from an FBI whistle-blower's claims to the abduction of a German terrorism suspect.

Most notably, the Bush administration has sought to use the state secrets assertion to kill numerous lawsuits against telecommunications carriers over the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, but a judge in California rejected that claim. The issue is now pending before an appeals court, where judges in a hearing two weeks ago expressed skepticism about the administration's claims.

Asserting the state secrets privilege requires the certification of both the director of national intelligence and the attorney general about the potential harm to national security. If the administration makes good on its intention to invoke the secrets claim in the lawsuit against Swift, it would be one of the most significant cases to test the claim.

Swift is considered the nerve center of the global banking industry, routing trillions of dollars each day between banks, brokerages and other financial institutions. The group's partnership with the U.S. government, first revealed in media reports in June 2006, gave officials at the CIA access to millions of records on international banking transactions in an effort to trace money that investigators believed might be linked to terrorist financing. Swift agreed to turn over large chunks of its database in response to a series of unusually broad subpoenas issued by the Treasury Department beginning months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Bush administration officials have defended the banking data program as an important tool in its war on terror, but European regulators and privacy advocates were quick to denounce the program as improper and possibly illegal, and the pressure forced Swift and U.S. officials earlier this year to agree to tighter restrictions on how the data could be used.

Two U.S. banking customers sued Swift on invasion-of-privacy grounds. Many legal and financial analysts expected that the lawsuit would be thrown out because U.S. banking privacy laws are considered much more lax than those in much of Europe. But to the surprise of many, a judge refused to throw out the lawsuit in a ruling in June.
http://iht.com/articles/2007/08/31/america/swift.php





Judge Voids F.B.I. Tool Granted by Patriot Act
Adam Liptak

A federal judge yesterday struck down the parts of the recently revised USA Patriot Act that authorized the Federal Bureau of Investigation to use informal secret demands called national security letters to compel companies to provide customer records.

The law allowed the F.B.I. not only to force communications companies, including telephone and Internet providers, to turn over the records without court authorization, but also to forbid the companies to tell the customers or anyone else what they had done. Under the law, enacted last year, the ability of the courts to review challenges to the ban on disclosures was quite limited.

The judge, Victor Marrero of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, ruled that the measure violated the First Amendment and the separation of powers guarantee.

Judge Marrero said he feared that the law could be the first step in a series of intrusions into the judiciary’s role that would be “the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values.”
According to a report from the Justice Department’s inspector general in March, the F.B.I. issued about 143,000 requests through national security letters from 2003 to 2005. The report found that the bureau had often used the letters improperly and sometimes illegally.

Yesterday’s decision was a sequel to rulings by Judge Marrero in 2004 and a federal judge in Connecticut in 2005, both of which enjoined an earlier version of the law. Congress responded last year by amending the law in reauthorizing it.

The earlier version of the measure barred all recipients of the letters from disclosing them. The amended law changed the ban slightly, now requiring the F.B.I. to certify in each case that disclosure might harm national security, criminal investigations, diplomacy or people’s safety.

The law authorized courts to review those assertions, but under extremely deferential standards. In some cases, judges were required to treat F.B.I. statements “as conclusive unless the court finds that the certification was made in bad faith.”

In yesterday’s decision, Judge Marrero said that the revisions to the law did not go far enough in addressing the flaws identified in the earlier decisions and that in fact they created additional constitutional problems.

Recipients of the letters, he wrote, remain “effectively barred from engaging in any discussion regarding their experiences and opinions related to the government’s use” of the letters. Indeed, the very identity of the Internet service provider that brought this case remains secret.

The judge said the F.B.I. might be entitled to prohibit disclosures for a limited time but afterward “must bear the burden of going to court to suppress the speech.” Putting that burden on recipients of the letters, he said, violates the First Amendment.

The decision found that the secrecy requirement was so intertwined with the rest of the provision concerning national security letters that the entire provision was unconstitutional.

Judge Marrero used his strongest language and evocative historical analogies in criticizing the aspect of the new law that imposed restrictions on the courts’ ability to review the F.B.I.’s determinations.

“When the judiciary lowers its guard on the Constitution, it opens the door to far-reaching invasions of privacy,” Judge Marrero wrote, pointing to discredited Supreme Court decisions endorsing the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and racially segregated railroad cars in the 19th century.

“The only thing left of the judiciary’s function for those Americans in that experience,” he wrote, “was a symbolic act: to sing a requiem and lower the flag on the Bill of Rights.”

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the Internet company, said Judge Marrero had confirmed a bedrock principle.

“A statute that allows the F.B.I. to silence people without meaningful judicial oversight is unconstitutional,” said Jameel Jaffer, an A.C.L.U. lawyer.

Judge Marrero delayed enforcing his decision pending an appeal by the government. Rebekah Carmichael, a spokeswoman for the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, said the government had not decided whether to file one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/wa...atriot.html?hp





DHS Ends Criticized Data-Mining Program
Michael J. Sniffen

The Homeland Security Department scrapped an ambitious anti-terrorism data-mining tool after investigators found it was tested with information about real people without required privacy safeguards.

The department has spent $42 million since 2003 developing the software tool known as ADVISE, the Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement program, at the Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. It was intended for wide use by DHS components, including immigration, customs, border protection, biological defense and its intelligence office.

Pilot tests of the program were quietly suspended in March after Congress' Government Accountability Office warned that "the ADVISE tool could misidentify or erroneously associate an individual with undesirable activity such as fraud, crime or terrorism."
Since then, Homeland Security's inspector general and the DHS privacy office discovered that tests used live data about real people rather than made-up data for one to two years without meeting privacy requirements. The inspector general also said ADVISE was poorly planned, time-consuming for analysts to use and lacked adequate justifications.

DHS spokesman Russ Knocke told The Associated Press on Wednesday the project was being dropped.

"ADVISE is not expected to be restarted," Knocke said. DHS' Science and Technology directorate "determined that new commercial products now offer similar functionality while costing significantly less to maintain than ADVISE."

Earlier, DHS said testing would resume once appropriate privacy analyses and public notices were completed.

ADVISE was one of the broadest of 12 data-mining projects in the agency.

A DHS research official said in 2004 it would be able to ingest 1 billion pieces per hour of structured information, such as databases of cargo shippers, and 1 million pieces per hour from unstructured text, such as government intelligence reports.

The system was supposed to identify links between bits of information that could otherwise go unnoticed. And it would graphically display results in charts of relationships and links.

A DHS workshop report in 2004 said it hoped to answer queries like: "Identify any suspicious group of individuals that passed through customs at JFK (airport in New York) in January 2004."

The GAO said in March that DHS should notify the public about how an individual's personal information would be verified, used and protected before ADVISE was implemented on live data.

Then, in separate reports released without fanfare in July and August, the DHS inspector general and privacy office concluded that between 2004 and 2007, three pilot tests of ADVISE used personally identifiable information without first issuing required privacy impact assessments. The privacy office said this "created unnecessary privacy risks."

The errors were in pilot programs involving weapons of mass effect, immigration enforcement and the DHS intelligence analysis office, the privacy office said.

This is the second such error at DHS.

The Secure Flight program to screen domestic air travelers was blocked by Congress after it acquired live personal data for testing. That program has since issued a privacy impact assessment, dropped use of commercial data such as personal credit card histories, and will begin tests this fall.

"Data analysis programs hold real promise for protecting America, but they need to be tested using dummy data before being used on real data," said James Dempsey, policy director for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group. "Why this mistake keeps getting made over and over again, I don't understand."

Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., database tools "must be closely supervised to prevent abusing the rights and the privacy of ordinary Americans. All too often, the Bush administration has treated safeguards for databases as a disposable afterthought if at all."

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said DHS "must follow federal privacy laws — in this case the E-Government Act which requires privacy impact assessments before personal information can be used — in order to maintain public support for these new technologies."

Among the data the privacy office found had been plugged into ADVISE pilot projects were:

_The no-fly list of people barred from domestic air travel and the list of people who require special inspections before flying.

_More than 3.6 million shipping records from a commercial data provider with names of cargo shippers and consignees.

_Terrorist Screening Center lists of people who tried to cross the U.S.-Canadian border at a port-of-entry.

_Classified intelligence reports about illicit traffic in weapons of mass effect.

_Lists of foreign exchange students, immigrants under investigation and people from special interest countries.

Although Knocke said ADVISE "was never used in an operational environment" and DHS had assured Congress in 2006 it was not operational, the inspector general found that "on at least one occasion, the data was used to produce classified intelligence information."

At Lawrence Livermore, analysts used the pilot system "to uncover previously unknown connections between organized crime and terrorism," the IG found in a July report quietly made public last month.

The privacy office concluded that although required privacy analyses were ignored, the Privacy Act was not technically violated because the live data were covered by privacy notices issued earlier for other programs that originally gathered the information. Dempsey argued those were too vague to alert citizens how ADVISE would use their data.

___

DHS inspector general report:

http://www.dhs.gov/xoig/assets/mgmtr...7-56_Jun07.pdf

DHS privacy office report:

http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/p...rpt_advise.pdf

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/s...899815,00.html





"Loss Prevention"

Papers Please: Arrested At Circuit City

Today was an eventful day. I drove to Cleveland, reunited with my father’s side of the family and got arrested. More on that arrested part to come.

For the labor day weekend my father decided to host a small family reunion. My sister flew in from California and I drove in from Pittsburgh to visit my father, his wife and my little brother and sister. Shortly after arriving we packed the whole family into my father’s Buick and headed off to the grocery store to buy some ingredients to make monkeybread. (It’s my little sister’s birthday today and that was her cute/bizare birthday request.)

Next to the grocery store was a Circuit City. (The Brooklyn, Ohio Circuit City to be exact.) Having forgotten that it was my sister’s birthday I decided to run in and buy her a last minute gift. I settled on Disney’s “Cars” game for the Nintendo Wii. I also needed to purchase a Power Squid surge protector which I paid for separately with my business credit card. As I headed towards the exit doors I passed a gentleman whose name I would later learn is Santura. As I began to walk towards the doors Santura said, “Sir, I need to examine your receipt.” I responded by continuing to walk past him while saying, “No thank you.”

As I walked through the double doors I heard Santura yelling for his manager behind me. My father and the family had the Buick pulled up waiting for me outside the doors to Circuit City. I opened the door and got into the back seat while Santura and his manager, whose name I have since learned is Joe Atha, came running up to the vehicle. I closed the door and as my father was just about to pull away the manager, Joe, yelled for us to stop. Of course I knew what this was about, but I played dumb and pretended that I didn’t know what the problem was. I wanted to give Joe the chance to explain what all the fuss was for.

I reopened the door to talk with Joe and at this point Joe positioned his body between the open car door and myself. (I was still seated in the Buick.) Joe placed his left hand on the roof of the car and his right hand on the open car door. I asked Joe if there was a problem. The conversation went something like this:

Me: “Is there a problem?”
Joe: “I need to examine your bag and receipt before letting you leave this parking lot.”
Me: “I paid for the contents in this bag. Are you accusing me of stealing?”
Joe: “I’m not accusing you of anything, but I’m allowed by law to look through your bag when you leave.”
Me: “Which law states that? Name the law that gives you the right to examine my bag when I leave a Circuit City.”

Of course Joe wasn’t able to name the law that gives him, a U.S. citizen and Circuit City employee the right to examine anything that I, a U.S. citizen and Circuit City customer am carrying out of the store. I’ve dealt with these scare tactics at other stores in the past including other Circuit Cities, Best Buys and Guitar Centers. I’ve always taken the stance that retail stores shouldn’t treat their loyal customers as criminals and that customers shouldn’t so willingly give up their rights along with their money. Theft sucks and I wish that shoplifters were treated more harshly than they are, but the fact is that I am not a shiplifter shoplifter and shouldn’t have to forfeit my civil rights when leaving a store.

I twice asked Joe to back away from the car so that I could close the door. Joe refused. On three occasions I tried to pull the door closed but Joe pushed back on the door with his hip and hands. I then gave Joe three options:
“Accuse me of shoplifting and call the police. I will gladly wait for them to arrive.”
“Back away from the car so that I can close the door and drive away.”
“If you refuse to let me leave I will be forced to call the police.”

Joe didn’t budge. At this point I pushed my way past Joe and walked onto the sidewalk next to the building. I pulled out my phone and dialed 911.

Two minutes later Brooklyn, Ohio police officer Ernie Arroyo arrived on the scene. As I began to explain the story leading up to Joe Atha preventing my egress from the parking lot, officer Arroyo began to question why I refused to show my receipt in the first place. I explained that I lawfully purchased the contents in the bag and didn’t feel that it was necessary for me to let a Circuit City employee inspect the bag as I left. Officer Arroyo disagreed. He claimed that stores have the right to inspect all receipts and all bags upon leaving their store.

At this point Officer Arroyo asked to see my receipt and driver’s license. I handed over the receipt, and stated that my name is Michael Righi. Again, Officer Arroyo asked to see my driver’s license. The conversation went something like this:

Me: “I’m required by law to state that my name is Michael Righi, but I do not have to provide you with my driver’s license since I am not operating a vehicle.”
Officer Arroyo: “Give me your driver’s license or I will place you under arrest.”
Me: “My name is Michael Righi. I am not willing to provide you with my driver’s license.”
Officer Arroyo: “Turn around and up against the wall.”

At this point I was placed in handcuffs, patted down, had my wallet removed from my back pocket and was placed in the back of Officer Arroyo’s police car. My three siblings sat in the back of the Buick crying their eyes out, which is the only part of today that I regret. I wish my little brother and sisters didn’t have to watch this, but I knew exactly what I was doing and was very careful with my words. Other than putting my family through a little scare I don’t regret anything that happened today.

Officer Arroyo ran my father’s license plate, my driver’s license and inspected my two receipts along with the contents of my bag. He also handed over my Circuit City bag to Joe Atha and allowed him to ensure that in fact I stole nothing from the store.

While being driven down to the station in the back of the police car I struck up a conversation with Officer Arroyo. I asked him if he was surprised that my receipts matched the contents in the bag and in a surprise moment of honesty he admitted that he was. I then asked Officer Arroyo what charges were going to be brought against me. He explained that I had been arrested for failure to produce my driver’s license. I asked him what would happen if I never learned to drive and didn’t have a driver’s license. After all, at the time that he arrested me I was standing on a sidewalk outside a Circuit City. I wasn’t driving a car, and even when I was seated in the Buick I was a back seat passenger. The officer never gave me a satisfactory answer to this question, but promised to explain the law to me after I was booked.

This morning I slept through my alarm clock and was in a hurry to drive to Cleveland. I didn’t have time to iron my shirt, and this is what I regretted while my mugshot was being taken. Listen up kids. Always press your clothes because you never know when you’ll be unlawfully arrested.

Shortly after being booked, fingerprints and all, Officer Arroyo presented me with my charges:

ORD:525.07: Obstructing Official Business (M-2)
(a) No person, without privilege to do so and with purpose to prevent, obstruct or delay the performance by a public official of any authorized act within the public official’s offical capacity shall do any act that hampers or impedes a public official in the performance of the public official’s lawful duties.

Not being able to find the law in the books that states that a citizen must provide a driver’s license while walking through a parking lot, Officer Arroyo had to settle for “obstructing official business.” Keep in mind that the official business that I was supposedly obstructing was business that I initiated by calling the police. I called for help and I got arrested.

My father posted the $300 bail that was needed to get me out of jail and back on my way to Park Avenue Place. (Sorry for the lame Monopoly joke, but it’s my first time being arrested. Cut me some humor slack.) After being released I stuck around the police station for a little while to fill out the necessary paper work to press charges against the Circuit City manager who physically prevented me from leaving the parking lot. I’m most interested in seeing my charges dropped for refusing to present identification, but I view that as a completely separate issue from the store manager interfering with my egress.

I understand that my day would have gone a lot smoother if I had agreed to let loss prevention inspect my bag. I understand that my day would have gone a lot smoother if I had agreed to hand over my driver’s license when asked by Officer Arroyo. However, I am not interested in living my life smoothly. I am interested in living my life on strong principles and standing up for my rights as a consumer, a U.S. citizen and a human being. Allowing stores to inspect our bags at will might seem like a trivial matter, but it creates an atmosphere of obedience which is a dangerous thing. Allowing police officers to see our papers at will might seem like a trivial matter, but it creates a fear-of-authority atmosphere which can be all too easily abused.

I can reluctantly understand having to show a permit to fish, a permit to drive and a permit to carry a weapon. Having to show a permit to exist is a scary idea which I got a strong taste of today.

My hearing is scheduled for September 20th, 2007. I will be contacting the ACLU and the IDP on Tuesday (the next business day), and I plan to fight these charges no matter what it takes. I will provide updates on this page as events unfold.

September 1st, 2007 @ 10:50PM EST Update:The police officer never read me my Miranda rights. I’ve heard differing opinions on how much this really matters and will certainly be bringing this up with my attorney.

September 1st, 2007 @11:34PM EST Update:I found the detail on Ohio’s “stop and identify” law. I encourage you to read it in its entirety, but I will spell out the important part:

2921.29 (C) Nothing in this section requires a person to answer any questions beyond that person’s name, address, or date of birth. Nothing in this section authorizes a law enforcement officer to arrest a person for not providing any information beyond that person’s name, address, or date of birth or for refusing to describe the offense observed.

I stated my name to the police officer, and if he had asked me for my address and date of birth I would have provided that as well. The officer specifically asked for my driver’s license and this is what I was unwilling to provide. If I’m reading this correctly it would appear that Ohio’s law specifically protects citizens from having to hand over driver’s licenses unless they are operating a motor vehicle. This is what I always believed, but it’s nice to see it in writing.

September 2nd, 2007 @10:01AM EST Update: I was speaking to my father this morning about what unfolded yesterday, and he told me something that I was not aware of until this point. While I was speaking to Joe Atha from the back seat of the car, Santura stood in front of my father’s vehicle with his hands out to the side as a way of preventing him from driving forward. My father would not have been able to drive forward because Santura stood in the way, and he would not have been able to drive backwards because the open door would have hit Joe who was leaning into the car.

September 2nd, 2007 @ 4:15PM EST Update

A few people contacted me wanting to know if I was accepting donations for my legal fund. Donations would be greatly appreciated. If more funds are raised than are actually needed I will donate the excess to the ACLU. Donations can be made via PayPal to: paypal@michaelrighi.com.

September 2nd, 2007 @ 5:05PM EST UpdateThank you for those of you who have submitted donations to help me fight these charges. I have been overwhelmed with the response that this story has received in the past twelve hours. A few people contacted me wanting more information about the case before they felt comfortable making a donation. Here are some answers to your questions:

Q: Which police department arrested you?
A: I was a arrested by a police officer working for the City of Brooklyn, Ohio located at 7619 Memphis Avenue Brooklyn, Ohio 44144. This is in Cuyahoga County.

Q: What is your case number?
A: I don’t know if my case number is the same thing as my ticket number, but the officer gave me a summons with the following across the top: “Ticket Number: A10514″

Q: Did you get Officer Ernie Arroyo’s badge number?
A: Yes, his badge number is #49. His surpervisor is Sgt. Knapp, whose badge number is #36.

Q: How do I know this isn’t a scam to raise money?
A: You don’t. However, I urge you to learn about my reputation by reading these articles.

Q: Should I be boycotting Circuit City?
A: At this time I am not recommending a boycott of Circuit City because Circuit City has yet to respond to my complaint. I want to give them a chance to respond to this incident before determining whether or not it makes sense for me to endorse a boycott.
Q: Should I be contacting the Brooklyn, Ohio Police Department?
A: Thank you for expressing an interest in taking this matter up personally, and thank you to those of you who already contacted the Brooklyn, Ohio police department. However, I urge you to please not tie up their emergency services with complaints. If you would like to voice a complaint I think it would be more appropriate to do so with the mayor or city council. Their contact information is available at the Brooklyn, Ohio City Government web site.

Q: What is the best way to reach you?
A: I can be reached by email at michael dot righi at field expert dot com.
http://www.michaelrighi.com/2007/09/...-circuit-city/





Big Brother is Routine-Screening You
Tobin Harshaw

Just as we were trying to decide whether John Edwards’s health care proposal would force us to visit the doctor, Britain’s minority Conservative Party is toying with the opposite idea.

“In a bid to ease spiralling levels of obesity and other health concerns, a Tory panel said certain treatments should be denied to patients who refuse to co-operate with health professionals and live healthier lifestyles,” reports the Evening Standard of London. “And those who do manage to improve their general health by losing weight and quitting smoking, for example, would receive ‘Health Miles’ cards. Points earned could then be used to pay for health-related products such as gym membership and fresh vegetables.”

Blogging lawprof Ann Althouse is, naturally, not impressed:

I’m picturing a whole weird future where we trade in government-granted points. Just tell me what you want me to do to get them and what I can buy with them. The parties could compete. One candidate says we should get points for having sex and writing blog posts and lets us spend them at ecologically correct resorts and restaurants that serve organic food. The other candidate is offering points for abstaining from sex and reading didactic books and lets us spend them on vitamins and memory foam beds. It will be endlessly engrossing, and after a while, you won’t even be able to remember what you actually like or want anymore.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...screening-you/





All UK 'Must Be On DNA Database'

Lord Justice Sedley is a senior appeal court judge

The whole population and every UK visitor should be added to the national DNA database, a senior judge has said.

The present database in England and Wales holds details of 4m people who are guilty or cleared of a crime.

Lord Justice Sedley said this was indefensible and biased against ethnic minorities, and it would be fairer to include everyone, guilty or innocent.

Ministers said DNA helped tackle crime, but there were no plans for a voluntary national or compulsory UK database.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown said to expand the database would create "huge logistical and bureaucratic issues" and civil liberty concerns.

'Largest in the world'

Shadow home secretary David Davis called for a Parliamentary debate and described the system for adding people to the database as arbitrary and erratic.

Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said there was "no earthly reason" why someone who has committed no crime should be on the database - "yet the government is shoving thousands of innocent people's DNA details on to the database every month".

The DNA database - which is 12 years old - grows by 30,000 samples a month taken from suspects or recovered from crime scenes.

There has already been criticism of the database - the largest in the world - because people who are found innocent usually cannot get their details removed.

In one case, Dyfed-Powys Police stored the DNA of Jeffrey Orchard, 72, from Pembrokeshire, after he was wrongly arrested for criminal damage - and refused to remove it.

But Home Office Minister Tony McNulty said the database had helped police solve as many as 20,000 crimes a year.

Since 2004, the data of everyone arrested for a recordable offence in England and Wales - all but the most minor offences - has remained on the system regardless of their age, the seriousness of their alleged offence, and whether or not they were prosecuted.

It includes some 24,000 samples from young people between 10 and 17 years old, who were arrested but never convicted.

WHO'S ON THE DATABASE?
5.2% of UK population
Nearly 40% of black men
13% of Asian men
9% of white men
Source: Home Office and Census

In Scotland, DNA samples taken when people are arrested must be destroyed if the individual is not charged or convicted.

Lord Justice Sedley, who is one of England's most experienced appeal court judges, said: "We have a situation where if you happen to have been in the hands of the police then your DNA is on permanent record. If you haven't, it isn't.

"It means where there is ethnic profiling going on disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities get onto the database.

"It also means that a great many people who are walking the streets and whose DNA would show them guilty of crimes, go free."

DNA PROFILING
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is found in virtually all cells
Only a tiny sample of saliva, blood, semen, etc, is needed for testing
At the molecule's core is a long sequence of chemical units, which is checked for a gender and 10 other 'markers'
Probability of a chance match is less than one in one billion
A match may be with a specific individual or hint at a relative
Profiles can provide indications of ethnic origin
They do not point to genetic disorders or susceptibilities

He said the only option was to expand the database to cover the whole population and all those who visited the UK, even for a weekend.

"Going forwards has very serious but manageable implications," he insisted. It means that everybody, guilty or innocent, should expect their DNA to be on file for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention."

Figures compiled from Home Office statistics and census data show almost 40% of black men have their DNA profile on the database. That compares with 13% of Asian men and 9% of white men.

Keith Jarrett, president of the Black Police Association, said the current system was "untenable" and backed the call for a universal database.

"You can't have a system where so many black youths who have done nothing wrong are perhaps going to the police station for elimination from a crime and find that their DNA is on the database," he said.

But Professor Stephen Bain, a member of the national DNA database strategy board, warned expansion would be expensive and make mistakes more likely.

"The DNA genie can't be put back in the bottle," he said.

"If the information about you is exposed due to illegal or perhaps even legalised use of the database, in a way that is not currently anticipated, then it's a very difficult situation."

'Ripe for abuse'

Mr McNulty said there were no plans to introduce DNA profiling for everyone in the UK, but "no-one ever says never".

He said Lord Justice Sedley's idea "has logic to it - but I think he's underestimating the practical issues, logistics, civil and ethical issues that surround it."

Mr McNulty denied the current database was unfair but accepted there was room for debate on the workings of the present system, including time limits on the storing of information.

He said any imbalance in the number of black and white youths whose DNA was stored reflected disproportionality in the Criminal Justice System rather than an inherent problem with the database.

But he added that he was glad a debate had begun and a review of how DNA samples were kept and used would be published next February.

Tony Lake, chief constable of Lincolnshire Police and chairman of the DNA board, said the DNA of people convicted or arrested for violent or sex offences should remain on the database for life, but that need not be the case for minor offences.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of human rights organisation Liberty, said a database for every man, woman and child in the country was "a chilling proposal, ripe for indignity, error and abuse".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk/6979138.stm





Chinese Military Hacked Into Pentagon
Demetri Sevastopulo and Richard McGregor

The Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network in June in the most successful cyber attack on the US defence department, say American #officials.

The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack.

Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the People’s Liberation Army.

One senior US official said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origins of the attack. Another person familiar with the event said there was a “very high level of confidence...trending towards total certainty” that the PLA was responsible. The defence ministry in Beijing declined to comment on Monday.

Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, raised reports of Chinese infiltration of German government computers with Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, in a visit to Beijing, after which the Chinese foreign ministry said the government opposed and forbade “any criminal acts undermining computer systems, including hacking”.

“We have explicit laws and regulations in this regard,” said Jiang Yu, from the ministry. “Hacking is a global issue and China is frequently a victim.”

George W. Bush, US president, is due to meet Hu Jintao, China’s president, on Thursday in Australia prior to the Apec summit.

The PLA regularly probes US military networks – and the Pentagon is widely assumed to scan Chinese networks – but US officials said the penetration in June raised concerns to a new level because of fears that China had shown it could disrupt systems at critical times.

“The PLA has demonstrated the ability to conduct attacks that disable our system...and the ability in a conflict situation to re-enter and disrupt on a very large scale,” said a former official, who said the PLA had penetrated the networks of US defence companies and think-tanks.

Hackers from numerous locations in China spent several months probing the Pentagon system before overcoming its defences, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Pentagon took down the network for more than a week while the attacks continued, and is to conduct a comprehensive diagnosis. “These are multiple wake-up calls stirring us to levels of more aggressive vigilance,” said Richard Lawless, the Pentagon’s top Asia official at the time of the attacks.

The Pentagon is still investigating how much data was downloaded, but one person with knowledge of the attack said most of the information was probably “unclassified”. He said the event had forced officials to reconsider the kind of information they send over unsecured e-mail systems.

John Hamre, a Clinton-era deputy defence secretary involved with cyber security, said that while he had no knowledge of the June attack, criminal groups sometimes masked cyber attacks to make it appear they came from government computers in a particular country.

The National Security Council said the White House had created a team of experts to consider whether the administration needed to restrict the use of BlackBerries because of concerns about cyber espionage.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9dba9ba2-5...0779fd2ac.html





China Denies Cyber Spying Charges
AP

From the German chancellery to the Pentagon, government computer networks have been targeted by cyber spies that media reports say were directed by China's military.

China denies backing such attacks, and foreign governments have declined to openly accuse Beijing. Yet, after the spectacular test of a Chinese anti-satellite weapon this year, the reports are shining a new light on China's pursuit of ways to confront a stronger foe with unconventional strategies.

The reported Pentagon attack was the "most flagrant and brazen to date," said Alex Neill, an expert on the Chinese military at London's Royal United Services Institute. Neill, quoted by the British newspaper The Guardian on Wednesday, said such attacks began at least four years ago.

Critics say motives range from the stealing of secrets or confidential technology, to probing for system weaknesses and placing hidden viruses that could be activated in a conflict.

Experts say responsibility is not conclusive, pointing out that China is home to many insecure computers and networks that hackers in other countries could use to disguise their locations and launch attacks.

However, Chinese military thinkers have long debated such strategies as part of "asymmetric warfare" - the use of attacks on satellites, financial systems and computer networks to strike at a stronger conventional foe.

"In the information age, the influence exerted by a nuclear bomb is perhaps less than the influence exerted by a hacker," a pair of Chinese colonels wrote in a key 1999 work on asymmetrical strategies titled "Unlimited Warfare."

The June cyber attack on the Pentagon forced officials to take down an e-mail system in the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates for more than a week, according to a report Monday in the Financial Times that quoted unidentified officials. It said the officials identified the People's Liberation Army as being behind the attack.

The Defense Department confirmed on Tuesday that the attack occurred, but it wouldn't identify the country from which it originated.

"It is often difficult to pinpoint the true origin of an intrusion into computer systems and even more difficult to tie the intrusion to a specific nation or government," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.

China denied being behind the attack, saying that the allegations were "groundless" and that it opposes cyber crime.

The report marked the third time in two weeks that China's military was accused of hacking into the computers of foreign governments.

The Guardian earlier said Chinese attackers launched online assaults on the network at Britain's Parliament, the Foreign Office and Defense Ministry. Citing unidentified government officials, the newspaper said some of the hackers were believed to be from the Chinese military, although the British government refused to comment on the claim.

Last month, the German weekly Der Spiegel said computers at the chancellery and three ministries had been infected with so-called Trojan horse programs, which allow an attacker to spy on information in a computer.

The report, which appeared on the eve of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's visit to Beijing, said Germany's domestic intelligence agency believed hackers associated with the Chinese army might have been behind the attack.

China also called those accusations groundless, and Chinese experts stood by the government's claims.

"My government has already designated them as fabricated. I can't understand why these foreign media would want to harm their reputations on such a serious issue," said Shen Dingli, director of the Institute of American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.

The January anti-satellite test, in which a Chinese missile blew apart a defunct Chinese weather satellite, was seen as a warning to the United States, whose military is heavily dependent on its eyes in the sky to monitor and coordinate military action.

China did not announce the test and delayed confirming it afterward, leading to speculation that political leaders might not have been fully informed in advance.

Whether or not cyber attacks are officially approved, China has become a growing focus of global anti-hacking efforts, partly due to the size of the country's Internet user population, now estimated at 140 million.

In a report earlier this year, security software maker Symantec Corp. listed China as having the world's second largest amount of malicious computer activity, after the United States.

"The country is one of the most recognized international black-hat nations," it said, using the industry's term for destructive or criminal hacking.

Experts say attacks originating in China often employ standard weaponry such as Trojan horses and worms, but in more sophisticated ways. In some cases, hackers slip in after launching viruses to distract monitors, or coordinate multiple attacks for maximum effect.

Officers at the Norfolk, Va.-based Naval Network Warfare Command told reporters earlier this year that attacks coming from China far exceeded those from elsewhere in "volume, proficiency and sophistication," according to Federal Computer Week, a technology trade publication.

The deliberateness and thoroughness of the attacks led officials to believe they must be government supported, an officer said, speaking on background.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_6809009





Love It? Check the Label
Alex Williams

UNTIL recently, Bill Allayaud, who works as a director for the Sierra Club in Sacramento, thought people who checked labels on clothing or toys to make sure they were “Made in the U.S.A.” were everything he was not: flag-waving, protectionist, even a little xenophobic.

But lately, he said, he is becoming one of them.

“Everything I buy now, I look at the label,” said Mr. Allayaud, 56, who explained that the “buy American” movement — long popular among blue-collar union workers and lunch-pail conservatives — no longer seemed so jingoistic, and was actually starting to come into vogue for liberals like himself who never before had a philosophical problem with Japanese cars or French wine.

He said the reasons for his change of heart are many: a desire to buy as many “locally made” products as possible to reduce carbon emissions from transporting them; a worry about toxic goods made in the third world; and a concern that the rising tide of imports will damage the economy and hurt everybody.

“Every time you see ‘Made in China,’ ” he said, “you think, ‘wait a minute, something’s not right here.’ ”

“Made in the U.S.A.” used to be a label flaunted primarily by consumers in the Rust Belt and rural regions. Increasingly, it is a status symbol for cosmopolitan bobos, and it is being exploited by the marketers who cater to them.

For many the label represents a heightened concern for workplace and environmental issues, consumer safety and premium quality. “It involves people wanting to have guilt-free affluence,” Alex Steffen, who is the executive editor of www.worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability issues, said in an e-mail message. “So you have not only the local food craze but things like American apparel, or Canadian diamonds instead of African ‘blood diamonds,’ or local-crafted toys.”

With so many mass-market goods made off-shore, American-made products, which are often more expensive, have come to connote luxury. New Balance produces less expensive running shoes abroad, but it still makes the top-of-the-line 992 model — which the company says requires 80 manufacturing steps and costs $135 — in Maine. A favorite in college towns from Cambridge, Mass. to Berkeley, Calif., each model 992 features a large, reflective “USA” logo on the heel, and an American flag on the box.

American Apparel, which carries the label “Made in Downtown LA” in every T-shirt and minidress, famously brought sex appeal to clothing basics that are promoted as “sweatshop free.” In the process it won the allegiance of young taste-makers.

Many of the American designers now showing collections at New York Fashion Week, which runs through Sept. 12, will have their goods stitched in foreign factories, a reflection of the battering of American garment manufacturing. From 2001 to 2006, clothing production in the United States declined by 56 percent, the American Apparel & Footwear Association said.

American high-fashion designers who do make clothes domestically tend to be too small, or in the case of Oscar de la Renta and Nicole Miller, willing to pay a premium in labor costs in order to maintain strict quality control.

But these brands have yet to exploit the cachet of “Made in the U.S.A.” in their marketing, in the way that some non-runway labels have seized upon. The designer Steven Alan, for one, while avoiding the Bryant Park tents, makes his distinctive rumpled dress shirts, which sell for $168, in factories in the United States, many in New York City. His “Made in the U.S.A.” labels include an embroidered American flag, which he said helps send a subtle message to his target consumer — downtown, hip, discerning — that his clothes are not just another mass-market knock-off from Asia.

Even though it is not always justified, “there is a perception that because it is made overseas,” he said, clothing is produced to the “lowest common denominator — there is not the attention to detail.”

Any move by the affluent left to conspicuously “Buy American” seems like an inversion of the internationalist sensibility that it always wore as a badge of distinction, said Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at the Johnson school of management at Cornell. These people tended to be ardent free-traders as recently the Clinton years.

“They always think of themselves as more sophisticated,” Professor Frank said. “The farther away something comes from, the presumption, the better it is.”

The evolving image of many American-made products as small-batch, high-craftsmanship products is true in other connoisseur-friendly industries as well. Fender, the guitar maker, builds entry-level electric guitars in Mexico, but it still makes higher-end Stratocasters and Telecasters — including its hand-made Custom Shop models, which sell for several thousand dollars — in California.

In bicycles, too, Schwinn and Huffy have decamped to Asia, leaving high-end specialty companies like Trek and Cannondale alone making bikes in this country, where there is “a greater sense of craft and small scale,” said Matthew Mannelly,the chief executive officer of Cannondale. The company recently started producing its “entry level” bikes, priced $500 to $1,000, in Asia, but says it still makes the bulk of its product line — and its best bikes — in Bedford, Pa.

The new prestige of “Made in America” was not lost on Elizabeth Preston, a cycling advocate in Washington. While Ms. Preston, 33 , said that politically she is as “as far left as you can go,” she nonetheless felt drawn to the Handbuilt in the U.S.A. sticker on the $1,250 Trek road bike she bought for her boyfriend a few weeks ago. Since then, she has been showing off the sticker to friends.

“There’s something about the idea of the workmanship and supporting the United States’s economy,” she said.

Stephanie Sanzone, a graduate student in environmental policy at George Mason University, says she has seen ample evidence that a “buy American” attitude is expanding.

Ms. Sanzone, 47, who lives in Alexandria, Va., started the Web site www.stillmadeinusa.comthree years ago to list and promote American-made products, for environmental and economic reasons, she said.

Unlike many “Buy American” Web sites, which feature images of weeping bald eagles or quotations from Pat Buchanan, Ms. Sanzone, a Democrat, keeps her site nonpartisan. In the last month, she said, traffic has jumped fourfold, with new visitors including vegans, green shoppers, “Free Tibet” activists and visitors from the Web site democraticunderground.com. Many said the recall of Chinese-made toys inspired them to act, but many also told her that they were starting to expand their focus beyond toys.

“I’m getting all these impassioned e-mails saying, ‘I’m never going to buy anything made in China again,’ and it really is from a different crowd,” she said.

The recent recalls of Mattel toys, made in China with lead-based paint, prompted many parents to seek American-made toys. Joan Blades of Berkeley, Calif., president of MomsRising.org, a mothers’ rights advocacy group with 100,000 members, predicts many parents are going to be checking labels and favoring American-made products, even if they are as simple as wooden blocks, as the holiday season approaches. “I think more and more mothers are going to be particularly distrustful of goods made in China,” she said.

Indeed, some domestic companies, such as Stack & Stick, which produces building blocks, or Little Capers, which makes superhero costumes, are working American flags and “Made in the USA” messages into their advertising, as well as marketing themselves as a safe alternative.

Skeptics say there are limits to how far the National Public Radio demographic will go as it flirts with a cause long associated with the Rush Limbaugh crowd. It is hard to imagine, say, that people who tote reusable cotton bags to Whole Foods will ditch their beloved Saabs for an American-made Chevrolet Cobalt.

“People like that don’t even know where the Chevy store is,” said Ernie Boch, president of Boch Automotive in Norwood, Mass., who operates Honda, Subaru and Toyota dealerships in the Northeast. “It’s kind of like people who stay at the Four Seasons. They’ve heard of Motel 6, but they don’t stay there. It’s not part of their vernacular.”

Nonetheless, the new interest from yuppies in seeking out domestically made products is evident to traditionalists like John Ratzenberger, best known as the actor who played Cliff in “Cheers,” who grew up in the factory town of Bridgeport, Conn., and is now the host of “John Ratzenberger’s Made in America,” a Travel Channel show that celebrates craftsmanship at factories.

“When we started doing this show, we were accused of being xenophobic, flag-wavers,” said Mr. Ratzenberger, whose show began five years ago. “The more we did our show, the more people are looking around in their own towns, realizing once these companies close, it’s going to affect the fabric of their communities. Things they took for granted, like sponsors for Little League for example, aren’t there.”

“This,” he said, “goes right across the political spectrum.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/fashion/06made.html