Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 13th, '07

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"We will listen to free music, look at free art, watch free film and read free books. We refuse to accept a future of digital feudalism." – Students for Free Culture


"Why should [superstar acts] subsidize their label's new talent roster – or for that matter their record company's excessive expenditures and advances?" – Guy Hands


"The EC (European Commission) has ignored the simple fact that four companies control 95 percent of the music most citizens hear throughout the world." – Patrick Zelnik


"I'm looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. $250,000 won’t get me to Central Park West." – "Spectacularly beautiful 25 year old girl"


"Your offer, from the prospective of a guy like me, is plain and simple a cr@ppy business deal. Your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity...in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won't be getting any more beautiful!" – Potential husband


"Who drives motorbikes anymore? Fuel is too expensive and these have no emissions so they are better for the environment – it's popular to think about that these days." – Zhang Guangyi


"I think she thought a jury from Duluth would be naïve. We're not that stupid up here. I don't know what the fuck she was thinking, to tell you the truth." – Michael Hegg


"I was stunned by the extremity of the punishment for taking songs I could have bought for a few cents. It seemed grossly out of proportion." – Zachary McCune


"Nothing seems to be stable or constant anymore. But I am very, very hopeful that this is the last major change to voting systems in Florida for some time." – Kurt S. Browning














Dear Jack,

I'm looking for an easy way to get back in the game as far as outside augmentation of my library. Most, if not all, of things like live bootleg tracks and outtakes that I have, I got pre-Waste, usually from WinMX and the like. These days, of course, one has to be even more careful about privacy. I'm on a state university network and never really know if/when anyone has a dragnet out about certain things. What is a good way for me to go that keeps things private, but has easy access to a diversity of files, and doesn't require too much hands-on?

Plus, I’d like to meet some girls.

- Anxious in Alabama



Dear Anxious,

Your question regarding safe and effective is a dicey one because it requires knowing how safe is safe and how much content is effective, for you. Nevertheless I’ll jump. Skipping the obvious like starting your own dorm mesh using the aforementioned WASTE, DC or some other private client, what everyone seems to be doing today is joining so-called invitation only trackers. They’re similar to the piratebay or on again off again demonoid except as the name implies, someone has to invite you. Open to the public yes but much more restrictive than the piratebay.

For the last year or so the best one for music has been Oink out of the UK> Lots of content and rips that range from very good to excellent. Better bulletin boards including this one are nice places to query members and friends for other sharing sites, especially ones catering to specific interests like punk or FLACs.

Be advised invite sites all have strict quotas and will dump you for life if you don't upload a large portion of what you've downloaded (usually half or more). Naturally, leechers loath these percentages and are increasingly finding themselves shunted off to older non-ratio P2P services. Right now invitation is the place to be and the image of some lesser network populated exclusively with frustrated leechers is a tasty added benefit.

Nevertheless before you spout "but Jack, I can't wait around for an invitation like a wallflower hoping for a date to the Big Game, I need my fix now!", might I suggest open but well-cultivated trackers like the ’novas, mini & mega (now seedpeer) and the zippy aggregator torrentz. No, they're not invisible to pesky college snoopers but they're loaded with such bounty that faster than you can shout "Pops! I need 3500 in settlement cash stat!" your hard drive will be packed with enough swag to impress the most discriminating coed pirate.

Thus armed you can explore more exciting possibilities later on.

There’s your instant fix.

As for meeting girls in the first place, that one’s easy. Females find well informed men irresistible. This fall as you peruse the quad, prominently display the Week in Review while you gaze out over the sea of softly swaying plaid. As the owners of those skirts glance discretely back at your laptop, they’ll see you’ve mastered all things dear to angora covered hearts: surveillance, complex copyright legislation and quantum hard drive technology. In less than a moment you’ll have them falling all over you.














Enjoy,

Jack













October 13th, 2007






File-Sharing Students Fight Copyright Constraints
Rachel Aviv

When Zachary McCune, a student at Brown, received an e-mail message from the university telling him he might have broken the law by downloading copyrighted songs, his eyes glazed over the warning and he quickly forgot about it. “I already knew what they’d say about file-sharing,” he said. “It’s become a campus cliché.”

But the next day, he realized the message had an attachment from the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group that is coordinating legal efforts by record companies to crack down on Internet piracy. The attachment told Mr. McCune he faced a lawsuit with potential fines of $750 to $150,000 for every illegally downloaded song.

“I was stunned by the extremity of the punishment for taking songs I could have bought for a few cents,” he said. “It seemed grossly out of proportion.”

Twelve Brown students received these letters; Mr. McCune ended up paying $3,000 to settle the claim. But the experience made him interested in changing intellectual property regulations. Last spring he co-founded Brown’s chapter of Students for Free Culture, a national organization sprouting up on college campuses that advocates loosening the restrictions of copyright law so that information — from software to music to research to art — can be freely shared.

“The technology has outpaced the law,” said Mr. McCune, who is now a sophomore.

Established at Swarthmore College in 2004, the group has chapters at more than 35 universities across the country. “We will listen to free music, look at free art, watch free film and read free books,” reads its manifesto, posted on its Web site, freeculture.org. “We refuse to accept a future of digital feudalism.”

Members assert that the Internet has made it necessary to rethink copyright law, and they talk about the group’s goals with something like the reverence that earlier generations displayed in talking about social or racial equality.

“People wonder why college students aren’t rallying more around the Iraq war,” Mr. McCune said. “If there were a draft, we probably would be. Students are so quick to fight for this cause because we’re the ones bearing the burden.”

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the popular technology blog Boing Boing, said the recording industry lawsuits were not “scaring students away from file-sharing, but scaring them into political consciousness.” Last year, Mr. Doctorow was an adviser to the Students for Free Culture chapter at the University of Southern California while teaching a course on the history of copyright law.

Opposition to the music industry and its efforts to protect copyrights often dominates discussions on campuses. Chapters have organized demonstrations in front of major record stores and held “iPod liberation” parties where students have downloaded software together that makes it possible to swap songs.

Many chapters have held forums to discuss legal decisions and developments in copyright, frequently debating what it means to “steal” something as amorphous as a digital file.

But in recent months, the group has made a point of branching out beyond music copyrights. At its first national conference, held at Harvard in May and attended by more than 130 people, speakers gave presentations on topics like enhancing Internet access in impoverished countries, and loosening patent regulations for pharmaceutical drugs.

“File-sharing may have brought these issues to public consciousness, but it’s not our only inspiration,” said Elizabeth Stark, founder of Harvard’s Free Culture group.

Some chapters have rallied around the Federal Research Public Access Act, a bill that would make it mandatory for government-financed research to be published in online journals, free to the public.

The movement is not without its critics. Early on, Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, said the group should pick more consequential problems to rally around than access to music.

“Part of what’s so tricky about this movement is trying to pry apart access to entertainment from some of the more serious issues, like access to medicine,” he said. “The movement does itself a disservice by blending all the issues together.”

There are student dissenters, too. At Brown, David Harrington, a senior who did not join the new chapter, said he sometimes felt like the “grumpiest, curmudgeonliest old man in the conversation” for understanding the position of the recording industry.

“I’m a musician, so I’m thinking, how are these artists going to earn a living?” he said. “The technology makes stealing so easy that it’s hard to tell whether this debate is about ethics or just convenience.”

Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the recording industry group, said he had never heard of Students for Free Culture. But he said his group did not plan to let up on its efforts to protect music copyrights.

“Some say illegal downloading couldn’t possibly hurt successful artists, which may very well be true,” he said. “But we rely on a few successful artists to compensate for all the new, risky ones who don’t recoup what’s invested in them.”

The movement has its roots in an incident at Swarthmore, when two sophomores posted online internal e-mail messages from Diebold Election Systems, which makes electronic voting machines. The company ordered the students to remove the documents, asserting that the messages were its own intellectual property, and threatening a lawsuit. Instead, the students won a lawsuit against Diebold for abusing copyright law.

Propelled by their victory, the students started the group, which they named after the 2004 book “Free Culture” by Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School. The book applies principles from the so-called free software movement — the idea that computer users should have the liberty to copy, distribute and modify software as they wish — to all aspects of culture. Too many copyright restrictions, Mr. Lessig argued, dampen creativity.

“Copyright should be a boring subject, but more and more people are realizing how big this is,” said Cameron Parkins, 21, a member of Students for Free Culture at the University of Southern California. “You mention the name Lawrence Lessig to the right people, and they’ll just go bananas.”

Before beginning their meetings, the members of New York University’s chapter place a copy of “Free Culture” at the center of their conference table.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a bible, but we do often reference it,” said Fred Benenson, 23, president of the group and a master’s student in N.Y.U.’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. His group has held lectures, protests and an art exhibition, with all work licensed under Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that allows authors to change copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved” or “No Rights Reserved.”

There are around 15 regular members in N.Y.U.’s chapter, Mr. Benenson said, and the mailing list includes more than 600 people. He said he and others were working on composing a list of the top 10 universities with the most restrictive policies for licensing scholarly research, software and student work.

“Students want to know which universities are going to take away their freedom on the Internet,” he said. “The academy is meant to be this wonderful, separate part of the world that exists for the sharing and reusing of culture.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/ed...0students.html





New File-Sharing Bill Enters Congress
David J. Smolinsky

Months after a bill that could have required universities to police student downloaders was dropped on Capitol Hill, universities are already bracing for round two.

Last week, Rep. Ric Keller (R-Fla.) and Rep. Howard P. McKeon (R-Calif.) proposed the College Access and Opportunity Act, a measure that would require universities to monitor students’ online activity for illegal file-sharing.

The bill echoes Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) proposal, which was withdrawn in July after vocal opposition from universities and across the country.

Wendy Seltzer ’96, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, wrote in an e-mail that such legislation could “limit academic freedom” because existing software cannot distinguish between legal and illegal downloading, and would place pressure on universities.

“It would require them to allocate resources at the bidding of the entertainment industry, to report on work done to enforce others’ copyrights, to implement impossible technologies, and to be named-and-shamed if they ended up on the ‘25 worst’ list,” Seltzer wrote in an e-mail.

The legislation calls for the U.S. Secretary of Education to identify the 25 colleges and universities with the highest number of copyright infringement cases each year. These institutions would be required to inform students of their illegal downloading policies and review and develop mechanisms to prevent such action, including anti-piracy software.

Currently, Harvard advises students about copyright law and responds to notices of claimed infringement on its networks. Since 2000, it has dealt internally with a handful of copyright infringement cases.

The University has not received any pre-litigation notices, Seltzer said.

The bill has been met with criticism from universities nationwide, public advocacy groups, and major corporations including Apple, Microsoft, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard.

Some in the entertainment industry see the legislation as a step forward in the fight against piracy on college campuses.

Angela B. Martinez, spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America, said 44 percent of digital piracy occurs on college campuses.

“Many universities are taxpayer-subsidized,” she said, “and therefore should be concerned if illegal content is being passed over networks.”

Steven L. Worona, director of policy and networking programs for a nonprofit called Educause, said universities should be able to craft their own anti-piracy policies, rather than using blanket legislation.

Tim R. Hwang ’08, member of Harvard Free Culture, said the bill compromised the role of educators.

“[W]hen universities violate the privacy of students...they’re complicit in a kind of legalized thuggery that poisons their role as educational institutions,” he wrote in an e-mail.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=519944





No word on whether blocked IPs are bad guys

P2P Researchers: Use a Blocklist or You Will Connect to IPs on Blocklist
Nate Anderson

The old cliché "You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you" turns out to apply quite nicely to the world of P2P file-sharing. A trio of intrepid researchers from the University of California-Riverside decided to see just how often a P2P user might be tracked by content owners. Their startling conclusion: "naive" users will exchange data with such "fake users" 100 percent of the time.

Anirban Banerjee, Michalis Faloutsos, and Laxmi Bhuyan collected more than 100GB of TCP header information from P2P networks back in early 2006 using a specially-doctored client. The goal of the research was a simple one: to determine "how likely is it that a user will run into such a 'fake user' and thus run the risk of a lawsuit?" The results are outlined in a recent paper (PDF), "P2P: Is Big Brother Watching You?"

For years, P2P communities have suspected that affiliates of the RIAA, the MPAA, and others have been haunting P2P networks to look for those who might be swapping copyrighted files. It's more than a hunch; it's well documented that companies like SafeNet (formerly Media Sentry) engage in this sort of work, and that their testimony is routinely produced at trials. It helped to bring down Jammie Thomas, in fact.

But identifying these organizations is hard. The nature of their business is to remain shadowy, but P2P advocates have spent years compiling "blocklists" of IP ranges that are suspected of belonging to such companies. Connect to a "user" who has an IP address in one of the blocklists and bam: you've just been tracked swapping a file.

By parsing all of the TCP headers that they collected over the course of 90 days, the UC-Riverside researchers came to several conclusions:

1. If you don't use a blocklist, you will be tracked. Every one of the researchers' test clients that did not use a blocklist soon connected to an IP address found within those lists. It turns out that 12 to 17 percent of all IP addresses on the network belonged to these blocklisted ranges.
2. Trackers aren't that hard to avoid. While "naive" clients may all connect to blocklisted users, it wasn't that hard to stay away from the vast majority of such "fake users." Researchers found that "avoiding just the top 5 blocklisted IPs reduces the chance of being tracked to about 1 percent."
3. Content owners hide their tracks. Much of this tracking work is farmed out from content owners to companies like SafeNet and BayTSP, and these companies in turn take care to hide their tracks. When the researchers ran reverse DNS lookups on the blocklisted ranges, they found that only 0.5 percent of those addresses resolved back to media companies in an obvious way.
4. Meet the BOGONS. One of the strategies for remaining anonymous is to operate from BOGON IP ranges. These ranges are unallocated blocks of addresses that should ordinarily not be used on the public Internet. Of the top fifteen blocklist entities that were discovered during testing, 12 were in BOGON ranges. The researchers note that "these sources deliberately wish to conceal their identities while serving files on P2P networks," and reverse DNS queries on these addresses produce little useful information.

The takeaway here is simple: P2P users who don't utilize the blocklists are just about guaranteed to be tracked by "fake users" operating out of those ranges, and thus seem to open the door to possible litigation should the dice be rolled against them.

The study does have one major caveat, however; it does not attempt to determine if the blocklists actually correspond to tracking organizations like SafeNet. The researchers note that "this would be interesting and challenging future work." While using a blocklist makes it easy to avoid connecting to IP addresses found on that list, it's not clear that every range on the lists is really a tracker. Conversely, there's no way to know if addresses not on the list might in fact be tracking users.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-the-time.html





RIAA Juror: 'We Wanted to Send a Message'
David Kravets

It took the jury in Capitol Records v. Thomas only five minutes to find that 30-year-old Jammie Thomas had infringed recording industry copyrights on 24 music tracks, according to the first juror to speak out on the verdict.

The remaining five hours of deliberation was spent debating the appropriate financial penalty, with jurors haggling for both higher and lower awards, before settling last week on the final $222,000 figure, according to juror Michael Hegg, in an exclusive interview with THREAT LEVEL Tuesday.

At least two jurors, one of them a funeral home owner, wanted to award the Recording Industry Association of America the maximum $150,000 for each of the 24 copyright violations, while one juror held out hours for the $750 minimum for each violation of the Copyright Act, he said.

In the end, "after bickering," they settled on $9,250 for each song.

"That is a compromise, yes," said Hegg, a 38-year-old steelworker from Duluth, Minnesota. "We wanted to send a message that you don't do this, that you have been warned."

During a 45-minute telephone interview, Hegg said jurors found that Thomas' defense -- that she was the victim of a spoof -- was unbelievable.

"She should have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars," Hegg said. "Spoofing? We're thinking, 'Oh my God, you got to be kidding.' "

"She's a liar," added Hegg, who just returned home following his 14-hour night shift.

Thomas is among 20,000 people the RIAA has sued, and was the first to go to trial.

Thomas and her attorney have announced they're appealing the verdict, in part to contest a jury instruction that said Thomas could be found liable solely for sharing the music over the Kazaa file-sharing network, "regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown."

But Hegg said the jury in U.S. District Court in Duluth would have found her liable even if the plaintiffs had been required to establish that Kazaa users had actually downloaded the music.

"It would have been a lot harder to make the decision," he said. "Yes, we would have reached the same result."

He said the RIAA established that Kazaa existed for the sole purpose of file sharing. Also, a screen shot repeatedly displayed to jurors during the three-day case showed that more than 2 million people were on Kazaa sharing hundreds of millions of songs on Feb. 21, 2005, the night RIAA investigators from Safenet locked on to Thomas' share folder.

Hegg added that the jury believed Thomas' liability was magnified because she turned over to RIAA investigators a different hard drive than the one used to share music. "She lied," he said. "There was no defense. Her defense sucked."

Hegg, a married father of two who said he formerly raced snowmobiles, said he has never been on the internet. He said his wife is an administrator at a local hospital and an "internet guru."

The jury, he said, was convinced that Thomas was a pirate after hearing evidence that the Kazaa account RIAA investigators were monitoring matched Thomas' internet protocol and modem addresses.

Expert testimony from an RIAA witness also showed that a wireless router was not used, casting doubt on her defense that a hacker lurking outside her apartment window with a laptop might have framed her, he said.

Hegg pointed out that Thomas' Kazaa account username was "Tereastarr" -- the same username Thomas chose for her e-mail, online shopping, online dating and MySpace accounts.

"I think she thought a jury from Duluth would be naïve. We're not that stupid up here," he said. "I don't know what the fuck she was thinking, to tell you the truth."
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...uror-we-w.html





RIAA Conceals Overturned Case
NewYorkCountryLawyer

When a Judge agreed with the RIAA's claim that "making available" was actionable under the Copyright Act, in Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA was quick to bring this "authority" to the attention of the judges in Elektra v. Barker and Warner v. Cassin. Those judges were considering the same issue. When that decision was overturned successfully, however, they were not so quick to inform those same judges of this new development. When the defendants' lawyers found out — a week after the RIAA's lawyers learned of it — they had to notify the judges themselves . At this moment we can only speculate as to what legal authorities they cited to the judge in Duluth, Minnesota, to get him to instruct the jurors that just "making available" was good enough.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/06/228202





Thomas to Appeal RIAA's $222,000 File-Sharing Verdict
Eric Bangeman

In an appearance on CNN along with her attorney Brian Toder, Jammie Thomas announced her decision to appeal last week's $222,000 willful copyright infringement verdict. The basis of her appeal will be jury instruction no. 15, which told the jurors that they could find Thomas liable for copyright infringement if she made the recordings available over a file-sharing network, "regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown."

The "making available" argument is a contentious one. As we noted last night in "How the RIAA tasted victory," judges have gone both ways on this issue. The question of whether making a file available over a P2P network falls under the category of distribution as defined by the Copyright Act is by no means settled in the eyes of the law.

During the hearing over the jury instructions, the RIAA cited a number of cases in which a judge had ruled that making a file available constituted distribution. In one such case, Atlantic v. Howell, the judge has since reversed his decision. Copyright attorney Ray Beckerman reported late last week that Judge Neil V. Wake overturned his earlier granting of a summary judgment, in which he had followed the RIAA's interpretation of the making available argument.

According to a post on Thomas' MySpace page, the appeal will center around the "making available" argument. The hope is that the RIAA "would actually have to prove a file was shared and by someone other than their own licensed agent (read MediaSentry)," writes Thomas.

Should the verdict be overturned due to faulty jury instructions, the RIAA and Thomas would both have expensive decisions to make on whether it would be worthwhile to try the case once again. Although the RIAA freely admits that its lawsuit campaign is a money-losing proposition, the prospect of paying for another trial and spending another week in Duluth, MN, can't be very attractive. Thomas, who is already facing legal fees of over $60,000 on top of the judgment, may not want to repeat the trial experience again, either, especially since much of the RIAA' evidence against her was strong.

Ars contacted both the RIAA and Toder for comment, but did not immediately receive a reply.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...g-verdict.html





Music Industry has Aussie Pirates in the Crosshairs
Asher Moses

The anti-piracy arm of the Australian music industry has threatened to start suing individuals for illegal downloading if internet providers do not exert more control over their users.

The threat by Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) comes as a single mother from Minnesota in the United States, who was fined $US220,000 ($244,000) for sharing 24 songs online, has appealed to the internet community for donations.

Jammie Thomas, 30, was found guilty of illegally sharing music using the Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing program last week, and has since been flooded with messages of support from the internet community.

The case was the first US trial to challenge the illegal downloading of music on the internet. While few disagreed with the guilty verdict, many have lashed out at the courts and the Recording Industry Association of America over the exorbitant fine.

Swarms of people commenting on news websites, blogs and online forums have accused the big record companies of using bully tactics to intimidate harmless internet users by making an example of Ms Thomas, instead of modernising their business models for the online world.

In Australia, Sabiene Heindl, general manager of MIPI, said the local music industry had not yet targeted individual downloaders. Instead, MIPI has been petitioning internet service providers (ISPs) to send warning notices and disconnect the internet connections of users who have been identified as illegal downloaders.

The idea, also being pushed by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), has so far been widely panned by ISPs who say they should not be responsible for policing their users.

The Internet Industry Association has written to AFACT and MIPI, saying there were already adequate procedures and remedies available to copyright holders through the courts and the Copyright Act.

"We would hope that the ISPs and the record companies could come up with an alternative solution," said MIPI general manager Sabiene Heindl.

"That said, if that solution cannot be reached, and at this stage it's because of the ISPs refusing to play ball, then we may have no alternative other than to take legal action [against individuals]."

MIPI has pleaded with the Federal Government to intervene by creating an ISP code under broadcasting or telecommunications legislation.

But in a letter sent to Heindl last month, the federal Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, said a legislative solution was not required and told the music industry and ISPs to re-establish discussions.

"If the discussions do not resolve the issue, the Government will consider other options, including legislative change," Mr Ruddock said.

In a blog post on her MySpace page, Thomas, who goes by the online handle Tereastarr, thanked her supporters and said she would reluctantly accept donations through her PayPal account.

The account could be accessed through a link on the website FreeJammie.com, created by a supporter to "make sure Jammie Thomas doesn't pay a cent to big record companies".

Thomas, a mother of two young boys, recently told the Associated Press she earned $US36,000 ($40,000) a year and had no hope of paying the fine.

She is one of 26,000 people sued by the record labels for illegal music sharing, but the only one who took the case to court. Many have accepted the industry's offer to pay a few thousand dollars in fines, but Thomas insisted she was wrongfully targeted.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation advocacy group has approached Thomas with offers from lawyers keen to help her mount an appeal, but Thomas has said she was still considering her next move.

On her MySpace page, she urged her supporters to spread word of her cause to everyone they knew.

"I will be a thorn in the sides of the record companies for the rest of my life if that is what it takes," she wrote.

"I will make this situation the worst thing the recording companies could have ever done to anyone. I will also do everything I can to help others who are in the same situation. I will not be bullied!!!"
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/...695804646.html





EMI Exec: Radiohead Decision A "Wake Up Call"
FMQB

Guy Hands, financier behind Terra Firma, the group that purchased EMI earlier this year, has reportedly penned a missive to the label in response to last week's announcement by Radiohead that the band would digitally self-release their new record In Rainbows.

According to the U.K.'s Telegraph, Hands sent an internal email to EMI staffers on Friday, calling the band's plan "a wake-up call which we should all welcome and respond to with creativity and energy."

"The recorded music industry... has for too long been dependent on how many CDs can be sold," Hands wrote. "Rather than embracing digitalization and the opportunities it brings for promotion of product and distribution through multiple channels, the industry has stuck its head in the sand."

Hands warned that more artists could follow Radiohead's lead and take their careers into their own hands. "Why should [superstar acts] subsidize their label's new talent roster – or for that matter their record company's excessive expenditures and advances?" asked Hands.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=490303





Dominoes

Madonna Quits Warner
Paul Cashmere

Following Radiohead's move to digital independence, Madonna is reported to be quitting Warner Music to sign a ten year agreement with Live Nation.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that Madonna is on the verge of leaving her long-time label for a $120 million, three record and touring deal with Live Nation.

The deal would commence as soon as she delivers her next album to Warner. It is the last album she owes the label under her current contract.

Under the Live Nation deal, Madonna will be given stock in the company in return for the company controlling her tours, merchandise and recorded music.

A shift of this caliber first presented itself when Robbie Williams became the first artist to sign over his merchandise and ticket sales to his record label EMI in exchange for a wad of cash.

The Madonna deal tips the Williams/EMI deal on its ear, with that deal paving the way for artists to withdraw from a major record label completely, as the case with the Live Nation deal. By making the live performance the central revenue stream, the recorded music can be used for promotional purposes to promote the gig.

The model is being adopted at a rapid rate. This week Radiohead released their new album 'In Rainbows' independently via digital download. Oasis have also indicated that their next album will be delivered to fans the same way. The Eagles also control the distribution of their next album.

In the UJ, Prince gave away over 3 million copies of his last album to promote his tour. Snow Patrol have included the CD as part of their ticket sales.
http://undercover.com.au/News-Story.aspx?id=3088





People Still Don’t Get That Music Labels Are Dead
Nick Gonzalez

Mike’s post on “The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free” stirred up a lot of controversy and oddly confused analysis from places I didn’t expect.

Mike’s marginal cost argument isn’t so much that music should be priced at their marginal cost of production, but that they will inevitably have to price at that level. It’s the economic law of gravity powered by competition, be it from legal or illegal sources. Music labels used to have a monopoly over distribution, but digital distribution has ensured that’s no longer the case. I find Mike’s statement that “every consumer is also a potential producer of any song” particularly poignant.

Freakonomics, one of my favorite blogs, had a great roundup of opinions digital music a couple weeks ago. I don’t agree with all the opinions, but Koleman Strumpf (Harvard) has a great empirical analysis of the situation.

The counter-arguments I’ve seen don’t dispute the fall in price, but rather counter the fairness or un-sustainability of the business model. To that I say that “fairness” isn’t a business model. I’m also getting really tired of the starving artist meme. The industry makes all its money off of the big names that hit it big, but always points to artists that didn’t make it when they want to curry favor with the public. The fact is that most artists don’t make it in the current system, and still won’t in the new one. However, the new system will give artists a greater control over their destiny as they can run around labels and connect directly to consumers.

The un-sustainability argument mainly complains that the analysis doesn’t take into account average costs and fixed costs. But consumers and competitors don’t care what your cost structure is. They just care about how much they have to pay.

It’s the same issue technology firms confront. Once the IP is created, it costs nothing to proliferate. To ensure continued innovation, these companies are awarded patents to protect their works. But a similar system doesn’t make as much sense in the case of music. First of all, labels aren’t the root of the creativity, the artists are. Second of all, there’s not a compelling public interest in managing such a costly system. The RIAA is already seeing how much of a money pit that enforcement can be.

The music industry will have to search for natural ways of wooing consumers to their products in ways they can make revenue. Live and exclusive content make sense. However, there’s also the value of convenience that consumers will pay for. iTunes will still make money because it’s become a convenient destination for buying music online. AllOfMP3 effectively charged for this convenience factor at their lower price point.

Labels are dead, long live artists.
http://runningwithfoxes.com/2007/10/...et-webonomics/





Sony BMG Merger Approved By European Regulators
FMQB

After a nine-month investigation, the merger of Sony and Bertelsmann's BMG has been officially approved by European anti-trust regulators. The European Commission, which oversees competition in the European Union, placed no conditions on the two companies in allowing the merger.

Sony and Bertelsmann had already won approval for the deal in 2004 and proceeded with the joint venture, but that decision was overturned by the Court of First Instance after opposition came from rival music groups. Sony and BMG then appealed to the EU's highest court, and the Commission opened a new investigation in January to determine whether the joint venture should have been allowed or whether it hurts competition in recorded music.

The Commission said in a statement that it did a thorough re-evaluation of the merger in the light of current market conditions, taking into account developments since 2004, including the growth of online music sales. "This means that the Commission was able to evaluate the actual impact of the merger on the market since 2004 and was not limited, as is usually the case, to an analysis of likely effects on the market in the future," read the statement. "The in-depth investigation has provided no evidence of coordinated behaviour prior to the merger or as a result of it. This finding relates to both the markets for music in physical format and in digital format."

The Commission's decision to allow the merger has angered independent music companies who feel that the concentration of the market only hurts competition, limits diversity and hinders consumer choices in the music industry. According to Reuters, Patrick Zelnik, President of the independent label trade group Impala, commented, "The EC (European Commission) has ignored the simple fact that four companies control 95 percent of the music most citizens hear throughout the world."

Impala also issued a statement calling for a formal inquiry into the decision. "The independents take the view that this is indefensible," it said. "The commission has ignored major findings of the European court in favour of Impala last summer."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=487521





Universal Music Takes on iTunes

Universal chief Doug Morris is enlisting other big music players for a service to challenge the Jobs juggernaut
Ronald Grover and Peter Burrows

Relationships in the entertainment world can be famously fraught. And few are more so these days than the one between Steve Jobs and Universal Music chief Doug Morris. You may recall that Morris recently refused to re-up a multi-year contract to put his company's music on Apple's iTunes Music Store. That's because Jobs wouldn't ease his stringent terms, which limit how record companies can market their music.

Now, Morris is going on the offensive. The world's most powerful music executive aims to join forces with other record companies to launch an industry-owned subscription service. BusinessWeek has learned that Morris has already enlisted Sony BMG Music Entertainment as a potential partner and is talking to Warner Music Group. Together the three would control about 75% of the music sold in the U.S. Besides competing head-on with Apple Inc.'s music store, Morris and his allies hope to move digital music beyond the iPod-iTunes universe by nurturing the likes of Microsoft's Zune media player and Sony's PlayStation and by working with the wireless carriers. The service, which is one of several initiatives the music majors are considering to help reverse sliding sales, will be called Total Music. (Morris was unavailable for comment.)

This isn't only about Jobs; Morris badly needs to boost his business, and Apple is the one to beat. The iTunes store has grabbed about 70% of downloads in the U.S. And the iPod--well, what's left to say about that juggernaut? Plus, music companies have been here before. A few years ago they launched services with the aim of defeating Napster-style file-sharing--and failed miserably. And let's not forget that existing subscription services have signed up only a few million people, vs. hundreds of millions of iTunes software downloads.

While the details are in flux, insiders say Morris & Co. have an intriguing business model: get hardware makers or cell carriers to absorb the cost of a roughly $5-per-month subscription fee so consumers get a device with all-you-can-eat music that's essentially free. Music companies would collect the subscription fee, while hardware makers theoretically would move many more players. "Doug is doing the right thing taking on Steve Jobs," says ex-MCA Records Chairman Irving Azoff, whose Azoff Music Management Group represents the Eagles, Journey, Christina Aguilera, and others. "The artists are behind him."

Morris and Jobs were once the best of allies. When Jobs began pushing his idea for a simple-to-use download store in 2003, Morris backed him. Industry insiders say Jobs felt that Morris, unlike many other music executives, understood that they had to adapt or die. And in the years that followed, Apple and Universal moved in near lockstep.

But before long, Morris realized he and his fellow music executives had ceded too much control to Jobs. "We got rolled like a bunch of puppies," he said during a recent meeting, according to people who were there. And though Morris hasn't publicly blasted Jobs, his boss at Universal parent Vivendi is not nearly so hesitant. The split with record labels--Apple takes 29 cents of the 99 cents--"is indecent," Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy told reporters in September. "Our contracts give too good a share to Apple."

After unilaterally breaking off talks with Apple in July, Morris continued offering Universal's roster--Eminem, 50 Cent, U2, and other artists--to Apple, but on a month-to-month basis. That freed Universal to cut special deals with other vendors, such as cell carriers eager to generate revenues. AT&T is packaging ringtones and music videos of Universal artists and is expected to start selling downloaded tracks with videos soon.

That's not all: In August, Morris announced a five-month test with Wal-Mart, Google, and Best Buy. The three companies will sell music downloads that can be played on any device--a freedom not available to buyers of iTunes songs, most of which play only on Apple devices and software. Morris wants to see if the downloads, which won't have copy protection, will help cut into piracy and hike sales. And of course he won't be upset if iPod owners bypass iTunes.

With the Total Music service, Morris and his allies are trying to hit reset on how digital music is consumed. In essence, Morris & Co. are telling consumers that music is a utility to which they are entitled, like water or gas. Buy one of the Total Music devices, and you've got it all. Ironically, the plan takes Jobs' basic strategy-- getting people to pay a few hundred bucks for a music player but a measly 99 cents for the music that gives it value--and pushes it to its extreme. After all, the Total Music subscriber pays only for the device--and never shells out a penny for the music. "You know that it's there, and it costs something," says one tech company executive who has seen Morris' presentation. "But you never write a check for it."

The big question is whether the makers of music players and phones can charge enough to cover the cost of baking in the subscription. Under one scenario industry insiders figure the cost per player would amount to about $90. They arrived at that number by assuming people hang on to a music player or phone for 18 months before upgrading. Eighteen times a $5 subscription fee equals $90. There is precedent here. When Microsoft was looking to launch a subscription service for Zune, Morris played hardball. He got the tech giant to fork over $1 for every player sold, plus royalties. Total Music would take that concept even further. "If the object is to wrest control of the market from Steve Jobs," says Gartner analyst Mike McGuire, "this is a credible way to try it."

Of course, Morris still needs Jobs. It's noteworthy that Universal has not pulled its music from iTunes--Morris simply can't afford to do that. Universal's earnings fell 25% in the first half. Jobs, of course, knows that and can afford to be magnanimous. "Doug's a very special guy," the Apple chief told BusinessWeek. "He's the last of the great music executives who came up through A&R. He's old school. I like him a lot."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...tm?chan=search





Movie Studios to Judge: TorrentSpy Defies Court Order
Greg Sandoval

To avoid having to turn over user information to the motion picture industry, BitTorrent indexing service TorrentSpy cut off access to its site in the United States. Apparently, that wasn't enough to satisfy Hollywood.

According to documents filed with the court last week and reviewed by CNET News.com on Wednesday, the studios still want to see information about the site's visitors. Lawyers representing the studios--armed with a court order--say TorrentSpy has refused to hand over the data. Because of that, the movie sector wants the judge to throw the book at the company.

"(TorrentSpy) took steps to make the Server Log Data unavailable for the express purpose of avoiding compliance with the (court) order," the movie studios said in their filing. "(The) conduct amounts to willfulness and bad faith."

The lawsuit, first filed a year ago, accuses TorrentSpy of encouraging copyright violations.

On May 29, Jacqueline Chooljian, a federal magistrate judge in Los Angeles, ordered TorrentSpy to hand over information about user activity. Part of what the judge wanted was to identify the BitTorrent files that visitors requested and the dates and times of those requests.

TorrentSpy executives told the judge that they never tracked visitors' activity. She responded by telling them to retrieve the information from their servers' random-access memory, or RAM.

In an unprecedented decision that drew plenty of media attention, the judge ruled that data found in RAM is a tangible document that can be stored and must be turned over in civil litigation. TorrentSpy argued that RAM is far too ephemeral to be considered "stored data."

In August, TorrentSpy appealed the decision but lost. The company then shut down access to U.S. residents. If TorrentSpy had no U.S. users, then there wouldn't be any information stored in the company's RAM under the judge's purview, legal experts said. Only data on International users would be logged and U.S. courts don't have authority over them.

But the studios didn't go away.

The film companies have asked the judge to impose evidentiary sanctions against TorrentSpy for not complying with the court order, according to the court filings. As part of the sanctions, the studios want the judge to establish for the record that the movies belonging to the studios found on TorrentSpy's site infringed on their copyright, and also find that the site has no "substantial noninfringing uses."

Should the judge agree to the sanctions she would effectively label TorrentSpy a pirate site. That would make it very difficult for TorrentSpy to prevail in its civil trial.

TorrentSpy executives said in court documents filed late Tuesday that the company's reasons for not turning over information are pegged to a few tweaks made to the site while the company's appeal was being heard.

Chief among the changes are that TorrentSpy stopped providing users with cached downloads of BitTorrent files, the technology favored by many for file sharing, according to court documents. This means that searches for BitTorrent files at TorrentSpy would return only links to third-party sites.

Clicking on those links would not ping TorrentSpy's servers, and as a result, none of the data that the film companies are after can be found in the company's RAM.

To the studios, TorrentSpy is trying to duck the judge's order.

"This claim should be seen for what it is: another illegitimate attempt by defendants to evade authority of this court and the May 29 order," the film companies said in their filing with the court.

Rothken denied the allegation.

"The primary reason for the changes was to protect end-user privacy worldwide," Rothken said. "Web sites are allowed to evolve their technology during litigation especially if they evolve to protect user privacy. The irony here is that studios are blowing hot and cold. On one hand they asked in their lawsuit for TorrentSpy in essence to shut down U.S. traffic. When the company did, the plaintiffs complained that TorrentSpy is in violation for not supplying information under the log file order. They're never satisfied."

Just how long it will take for the judge to rule on the studios' application for sanctions is unclear. Rothken said he expects that the judge will call for more briefings.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9795571-7.html





In Movie Labor Talks, Past Issues Cloud Future
Michael Cieply

A funny thing happened when Hollywood’s writers and producers sat down a few months ago to begin negotiating about the future: They wound up fighting about the past.

And an entertainment industry that was supposed to be fretting over next-wave technology finds itself on the verge of a shutdown over issues that have mostly been off the bargaining table since home video came on clunky cassettes and the movie mogul Lew Wasserman was brokering labor deals.

A mail-in strike authorization vote is set to conclude on Thursday. Some 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America East and the Writers Guild of America West are widely expected to give their leaders authority to call a strike at any time after the Oct. 31 expiration of their contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

Meanwhile, both sides — with back-channel help from lawyers, agents and other players who want to keep Hollywood working — are struggling to reboot a bargaining dynamic gone awry.

“The producers’ playbook has been ‘Let’s scare the bejesus out of everyone,’” said Peter Dekom, a lawyer with the Hollywood firm Weissmann Wolff Bergman Coleman Grodin & Evall. The writers, Mr. Dekom added, have already effectively gotten themselves locked out by one of their bargaining tactics. As the unions sent a message to the studios and networks that any script due beginning in November would probably not be delivered in advance of a strike, the studios stopped making new assignments.

What began as a dispute over compensation for future use of programming on the Internet, over cellphones or in media yet to be invented has unexpectedly turned into a brawl over a decades-old residuals system. That formula pays writers and others when movies and television shows are sold on DVD or on cable television.

In July producers offered writers a choice: Delay their request to set compensation for new media pending a study of the market, or accept a radical change in the residuals system that would permit additional payments only after a company had recouped the cost of a movie or television show.

Writers angrily rejected both options, while demanding that companies double the base on which they pay home video residuals, from 20 to 40 percent of the studios’ and networks’ actual revenue from sales.

Producers recoiled at what they saw as newly militant guild leaders trying to undo an arrangement — basing residuals on only a fraction of actual home video revenue — that writers and others in Hollywood had resented from the moment they agreed to it in the early 1980s.

Looking backward, many union members concluded that they simply should have fought harder for a bigger share of what was then a new market, and resolved never to let it happen again.

In recent years at the powerful Writers Guild of America West, an aggressive slate of fresh leaders headed by the union’s president, Patric Verrone, ousted an executive director who had been regarded as too sympathetic to the companies, installed new managers with labor union backgrounds and resolved to re- establish what they saw as their guild’s eroding power. All of this has contributed a tone of personal animosity to exchanges between the sides in the current bargaining.

But even highly compensated writers who might have more to lose than gain from a strike have been galvanized by what they viewed as an attack on a sacred principle: the right to residuals. The proposal was seen as doubly insulting because of the notion that studio accounting could be trusted to tell when costs had truly been recovered. (To allay suspicion, producers offered to let an independent auditor keep an eye on the books.)

“I’m booked morning to night, that’s how freaked out everyone is,” said Dennis Palumbo, a screenwriter turned psychotherapist whose practice serves a number of Hollywood writers. Among working writers, Mr. Palumbo said, the prevalent feeling is that “if residuals are not off the table, we should strike.”

Linda Lichter — whose firm, Lichter, Grossman, Nichols & Adler, has many writers among its clients — said, “The companies are big multinational corporations, and all of them are pushing back at talent as much as possible.” At the same time, she said, “You have rage on the part of writers and other guilds about how they got taken on DVDs in the past.”

Some observers now contend that company representatives acted from a mistaken belief that threatening the residuals system would chase writers back to what studios and networks really wanted: a delay in setting pay schedules for the rapidly changing world of new media.

“The studios used brinkmanship too early,” said Bruce Feirstein, a screenwriter who has written about Hollywood for The New York Observer. Faced with a long-term decline in studio script development, he added, even the guild’s less aggressive writers had come to see residuals as “a way to send kids to school between projects,” and not fair game in a negotiation.

For producers, of course, a next move might be to withdraw their residuals plan, possibly in return for a private assurance that writers would respond with a similar movement, and perhaps in time to undercut the strike authorization vote.

A spokesman for the producers declined to discuss possible tactics. Neal Sacharow, director of communications for the Writers Guild of America West, said in a statement, “If the companies were to take their rollbacks off the table, it would be a signal that they were prepared to engage in serious negotiations.”

That would leave only the problem of figuring out where entertainment industry unions fit in the digital future.

The path to a solution might well lead back to a study group, if the sides could find a mechanism to establish trust, for instance by positing that any new pay mechanism would be retroactive to the beginning of the contract being negotiated.

But ultimately, determining the real value of new electronic distribution systems may not be any easier.

Speaking at a Hollywood panel discussion this week, Michael Rogers, a consultant who has served as The New York Times’s futurist in residence, reckoned that the remaining task would be no harder than pinning “jelly to the wall.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/movies/13guil.html





Is Canada falling behind?

While Canadian leaders such as Industry Minister Jim Prentice, Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Chair Konrad von Finckenstein, and Competition Commissioner Sheridan Scott have done little to address the lack of transparency issue, their counterparts in other countries have been far more proactive.

For example, earlier this year the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission released guidelines for ISPs when advertising their broadband services to "prevent consumers being misled as to the speeds achievable on various technologies."

The ACCC backed the guidelines with the threat of million-dollar fines for those ISPs that fail to comply.


Canadians Deserve Better ISP Transparency
Michael Geist

Online auction giant eBay Canada last week released the results of a survey it commissioned on Canadians' attitudes toward "Net neutrality," a rapidly emerging issue that focuses on the need for Internet service providers (ISPs) to treat all content and applications in an equal, non-discriminatory manner.

Conducted by Leger Marketing, the survey found that Canadians are generally unaware of Net neutrality issues, yet, when informed of the concern, strongly support the principles that provide the foundation for Net neutrality legislation.

Most Canadians can hardly be faulted for being unaware of the issue since ISPs have done their best to keep it off the radar screen. While solving the Net neutrality issue will not happen overnight, addressing the lack of transparency associated with Internet services would go a long way toward creating a more informed debate.

For example, Rogers, one of Canada's largest ISPs, has faced regular criticism over its failure to come clean on "traffic shaping" practices on its network. Traffic shaping limits the amount of bandwidth available for certain applications such as peer-to-peer file sharing.

The company markets its high-end Extreme package as "its fastest residential service for sharing large files." But the reality is that consumers are promised service offering specific speeds and a cap on data transfers, yet are secretly unable to make full use of the service for which they have paid.

Rogers maintains that it needs to manage its network with traffic shaping technologies in order to provide a better quality of service for all its customers. It continues to shroud its practices in secrecy, however, as its website does not include a single mention of traffic shaping or limits on peer-to-peer applications and company spokespersons have provided inconsistent explanations for what is happening behind the scenes.

Last week, a company executive told an industry meeting that Rogers shapes traffic by limiting the percentage of bandwidth available for peer-to-peer file sharing. From a consumer perspective, that means that upgrading to faster products will only yield limited benefits, since the faster bandwidth is partially offset by traffic shaping.

Rogers maintains that the traffic shaping is essential, yet it is disappointing that the company seemingly refuses to level with its customers. In contrast, some of Rogers' competitors have opened up on the traffic shaping issue – Bell recently advised customers that it may engage in network management to address excessive bandwidth use.

While Bell's acknowledgement is a welcome development, it still faces criticism for the uncertainty associated with other services. Last month, Bell unveiled a new "unlimited" data plan for laptop computers using a PC card slot. Consumers who took the time to read their contract quickly realized that the offer was not quite what it seemed as the fine print prohibited "multi-media streaming, voice over Internet protocol or any other application which uses excessive network capacity."

The contract went further, prohibiting any use that "consumes excessive network capacity in Bell's reasonable opinion, or causes our network, or our ability to provide services to others, to be adversely affected." In other words, while the company markets its service as unlimited, the reality is that consumers face significant, largely unknown restrictions.

Net neutrality proponents and critics unquestionably remain far apart on many issues. Indeed, a senior Bell executive recently acknowledged that the company would like to retain the right to establish a two-tier Internet where they can levy fees on both consumers and websites for the traffic that runs on their networks. That proposition that strikes fear into the hearts of Net neutrality advocates, such as emerging e-commerce companies and creators, who can ill-afford such additional costs.

While bridging that divide will clearly require much discussion, tackling the lack of transparency provides a good starting point for addressing the new neutrality concerns that the Leger Marketing survey suggests are shared by the majority of Canadians.
http://www.thestar.com/article/264504





BT to UK Customers: Share Your WiFi. Please!
Nate Anderson

ISPs aren't known for encouraging users to share bandwidth, but that's exactly what BT wants UK customers to do. The Spanish WiFi specialist FON offers routers that enable people to "securely" share their high-speed connections with strangers; in return, the sharers get access to any other FON access point in the world. Now, the model is coming to the UK as BT partners with FON.

BT will encourage its three million broadband users to pick up a FON router and start sharing signals. The router provides two channels: one for public access, and one for access by the owner. The public channel is bandwidth-limited so as not to disrupt the user's own connection. Other "Foneros" can access the public channel for free, while non-Foneros can pay a few dollars a day to use the access points.

FON has currently signed a similar deal with Time Warner Cable in the US. For those who travel often, one of the benefits of the system is its global reach. FON members can freely access any of the 190,000 FON hotspots around the world.

For BT, the move makes its broadband offering more useful to customers, who can access the Internet from more places, and BT doesn't need to build out a new wireless network itself. BT's Gavin Patterson, a managing director, holds out hopes that the FON scheme can someday "cover every street in Britain."

"We are giving our millions of Total Broadband customers a choice and an opportunity," he added in a statement. "If they are prepared to securely share a little of their broadband, they can share the broadband at hundreds of thousands of FON and BT Openzone hotspots today, without paying a penny."

Assuming that FON's routers really do keep home networks secure, this sounds like an excellent idea. Given WiFi's limited range, though, it may prove to be of limited value outside of urban areas, unless you like sitting with an open laptop in the front yard of total strangers.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...fi-please.html





Wi-Fi Sharing Plan Launched in UK
BBC

The UK's wireless net credentials have been boosted with the launch of a wi-fi sharing community by BT.

BT has backed a global wireless sharing service called Fon, billing it as the "world's largest wi-fi community".

The firm's three million broadband customers will be able to share their wi-fi with others in the Fon community.

BT's scheme with Spanish firm Fon will boost the 500,000-strong community of users around the world and add to the existing 190,000 Fon hotspots.

The BT Fon service lets people share a "small portion" of their home broadband connection by opening up a separate secure channel on their wireless router.

Fon users can access broadband when in range of another community member's hotspot.

Gavin Patterson, BT Group's managing director, said the plan was to create "the people's network of wi-fi, that could one day cover every street in Britain".

Free access

Joining the BT Fon scheme is free of charge and community members will also have free access to existing BT hotspots in its Openzone network.

"If they are prepared to securely share a little of their broadband, they can share the broadband at hundreds of thousands of Fon and BT Openzone hotspots today, without paying a penny," added Mr Patterson.

Meanwhile, Freedom4, known formerly as Pipex Wireless, is launching a Wimax service in Manchester, offering wireless broadband without the need for a phone line.

Wimax is a wireless technology that has a greater range than wi-fi and operates at faster speeds.

It is seen as a potential rival to wi-fi and mobile phone networks, which have struggled in recent years to persuade people to use their handsets for high-speed net connections.

Most operators in the UK offer 3G networks, which are slow in comparison to wi-fi and Wimax.

Some operators are beginning to use HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) networks which are faster, but they are limited by the speed of the handset used and are also capped below their maximum bandwidth in many cases.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/7027871.stm





Net Firms Quizzed on Speed Limits

Bosses at six of the UK's top net providers are being asked to explain why consumers do not get the broadband speeds firms advertise.

The six executives are being questioned by Ofcom's Consumer Panel which acts as the regulator's customer champion.

The panel wants consumers to get more information so they are not misled about the speed they sign up for.

The panel also has proposals on what net firms should do to improve how they sell and advertise broadband.

Penalty clause

"We believe that broadband customers are not at the moment getting enough information," said Colette Bowe, chairwoman of the Ofcom Consumer Panel.

In the letter to the net firms, Ms Bowe recognised that there were good technical reasons for the gulf between advertised and actual speeds.

She asked the net firms to find ways to deal with the technical problems so consumers are more informed about the potential broadband speeds in their neighbourhood.

The panel has asked net firms to consider lengthening cooling off periods so customers can test connection speeds before they sign a contract.

It also wants them to think about letting customers terminate a contract early and without penalties if speeds are well below what is advertised.

The panel was set up in 2003 and gives the view of the consumer to Ofcom when the regulator consults on industry issues.

Its approach comes after a series of events that have highlighted the gulf between the net speeds firms claim and what consumers experience.

In mid-September, Computeractive magazine revealed a survey which showed that 62% of the 3,000 readers who carried out speed tests got less than half the top broadband speed advertised by their provider.

In response to the findings Ofcom said it was "aware" of the issue and was investigating what could be done about it.

Research by analyst firm Point Topic has shown that few people will be able to enjoy the top speeds advertised by broadband firms. It estimates that only about half the UK's population will be able to use the web at speeds of 8Mbps.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/7037278.stm





AT&T Grabs 700Mhz Spectrum

$2.5 billion nets them massive chunk...
Karl

AT&T today announced that the company has acquired spectrum licenses covering 196 million people in the 700 MHz frequency band from Aloha Partners. The company paid $2.5 billion, gaining 12 MHz of spectrum covering 196 million people in 281 markets -- including 72 of the top 100 metro markets. That makes AT&T the largest owner of 700Mhz spectrum in the industry ahead of next year's auction.

"Customer demand for mobile services, including voice, data and video, is continually increasing," says AT&T executive Forrest Miller. "Aloha's spectrum will enable AT&T to efficiently meet this growing demand and help our customers stay connected to their worlds." AT&T says they'll either use the spectrum for broadcast video or two-way communications like voice, data or on-demand content.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/A...Spectrum-88279





Chinese Internet Censorship Machine Revealed
Antone Gonsalves

The Chinese government has instituted an elaborate system for Internet censorship that employs tens of thousands of censors and police responsible for maintaining control over the flow of information, a report released by international free press advocates showed..

Entitled "China: Journey To The Heart Of Internet Censorship," the report issued by Reporters Without Borders outlines the inner workings of a bureaucracy that effectively clamps down on dissent, quashes articles the communist government deems unsuitable for publication, and uses online companies to distribute its own propaganda.

The report, much of which is based on information provided by an unidentified Chinese technician who works for the government's Internet sector, was published Wednesday, five days before the start of the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the nation's biggest political event in five years.

The Chinese have embraced the Internet in a big way, creating a market second only to the United States. The phenomenal market growth has attracted an army of U.S. technology and online companies, many of which have partnered with Chinese businesses in order to navigate the country's political system.

As of July 1, about 12.3 percent of China's population, or 162 million people, used the Internet, according to the China Internet Network Information Centre. In addition, there are at least 1.3 million Web sites, and 19 percent of Chinese Internet users have their own blogs.

Troika Of Control

To control the information flow over such a vast network, three leading government agencies have evolved over the last several years: the Internet Propaganda Administrative Bureau, the Bureau of Information and Public Opinion, and the Internet Bureau, the report said. In Beijing, where most of China's leading commercial Web sites are based, a powerful local agency has been established called the Beijing Internet Information Administrative Bureau.

In general, the Internet Propaganda Administrative Bureau issues licenses to commercial Web sites, which entitles them to provide news stories and reproduce reports disseminated by official media. The licenses, however, do not allow for independent news gathering and publishing.

The Bureau of Information and Public Opinion is responsible for organizing weekly meetings with commercial sites to discuss online public opinion and to pass along reports on the meetings to Communist Party officials. The organization also publishes periodicals on its monitoring of online news, and sends the publications to a variety of security and propaganda officials.

Finally, the Internet Bureau, created by the Communist Party in 2006, exercises ideological control. Employees of propaganda agencies take bureau-sanctioned courses on censorship, and executives and editors of online companies are required to take an annual historical field trip on the birth of communism in China and then publish an article on the trip. A total of 18 companies were invited on the trip; Yahoo is the only U.S. company listed. Yahoo's partner, Chinese marketplace Alibaba.com, runs the online company's operation in China.

Chinese supervisory bodies often use instant messaging and text messages sent via mobile phones to communicate quickly with commercial Web sites. The purpose is to tell them which articles or comments are not to be published, and which events or issues are taboo.

The Beijing Internet Information Administrative Bureau holds weekly meetings with 19 of the leading Web sites based in the capital to evaluate the subjects that Internet users find most interesting that week. Based on those meetings, the bureau decides the subjects to be covered in the coming week, the articles to be written under its supervision, and the articles to be eliminated.

Despite self-censorship and the filtering of government-banned words or phrases from articles, sites do occasionally broach subjects inadvertently. Penalties for such mistakes range from criticizing the site, imposing a fine, ordering the dismissal of the employee responsible, or closing down the site section or the entire site, the report said.

One incident that led to a section closure involved the Web site Netease, which published a 2006 poll asking that if their readers were reborn, would they want to be Chinese again. Of the 10,000 respondents, 64 percent said they would not want to be Chinese. The main reasons were being Chinese is not honorable, you can't buy a house in China, happiness is too inaccessible, you can't crack jokes in China, and you can't see good cartoons.

To elude government censorship, Reporters Without Borders advises the Chinese to use a proxy server that sits between a user's computer and a Web site to hide the user's Internet Protocol address. For people looking to post sensitive articles, the advocacy group suggests using smaller Web sites outside Beijing that aren't as closely monitored by authorities. In addition, the group recommends the use of new Internet technologies, such as blogs, discussion forums, Internet telephony, peer to peer, and VPNs.
Chinese censorship, and the use of information gathered on the Web to arrest and jail dissidents, has become a public relations nightmare for U.S. Internet companies, which are forced to abide by Chinese laws in order to do business in the country.

The U.S. State Department last year established a task force to investigate the problems posed to the Internet by repressive regimes, such as China. The move followed a call for help by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/62931,...-revealed.aspx





A Made-for-TV Boss Helps Revive ABC
Brooks Barnes

YOU know Michael Eisner. You know Barry Diller. Meet Stephen McPherson, the latest Hollywood executive cast in the dual roles of entertainment genius and volatile bulldozer.

Mr. McPherson, 42, runs the Walt Disney’s broadcast television empire. As president of ABC Entertainment, he woos Hollywood divas and indulges advertisers, tweaks prime-time schedules and manages affiliates. Most important, he identifies hit scripts while balancing huge budgets, exhibiting what colleagues and competitors describe as an unusual combination of creative and business acumen.

Still, Mr. McPherson finds himself on perpetual thin ice. Modern Hollywood — with its reduced budgets, fraying business models and corporate overlords — prefers its executives to showcase themselves as cogs toiling for shareholder returns. The brand-conscious Disney, in particular, expects its division chiefs to keep a modest profile, stay on message and play nice with corporate siblings.

Mr. McPherson does few of those things. He exhibits a blunt, temperamental style that at times creates a frosty relationship with his superiors and leaves subordinates ducking for cover, say current and former Disney executives. He fires off nuclear e-mail messages, fumes over downbeat ratings and once yanked a $10 million comedy after a single broadcast because he didn’t like its creative direction.

“He’s confident in his opinions. He doesn’t sugarcoat. His position doesn’t sway in the wind,” said Rich Frank, former president of Walt Disney Studios. “That can leave people raw.”

Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, will decide in the coming months whether to renew Mr. McPherson’s contract, which expires next spring. How ABC’s schedule fares this fall — anchored by hits like “Grey’s Anatomy” and featuring promising newcomers including “Pushing Daisies” — will factor prominently in that verdict. Mr. Iger’s decision will also signal the kind of leadership he seeks for a crucial business unit that has only recently emerged from a long run of problems.

“Steve is a great television programming executive,” Mr. Iger said. “He knows what he likes and he works extremely hard to make ABC’s shows better.”

Keeping the broadcast unit humming is more important than ever for Disney. Its consumer products and theme-park businesses are facing a tougher economy than they did in recent years, and the film studio is grappling with an industrywide slowdown in DVD sales. ABC has its own problems, not the least of which is figuring out how to make money in the age of ad-skipping digital video recorders.

MR. McPHERSON (pronounced Mc-FUR-son) is by all accounts a programming ace. He was responsible in full or in part for developing 5 of the top 15 shows for the 2006-7 television season, including “Grey’s Anatomy,” “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and “Desperate Housewives.” Among his other credits are critical favorites like “Scrubs” and the drama “Monk,” both of which he helped develop in his previous role as head of Disney’s internal television studio.

Writers credit him with making specific creative tweaks that helped some of these shows become hits. Marc Cherry, the creator of “Desperate Housewives,” said Mr. McPherson persuaded him to rethink the casting of the show’s narrator. “He suggested — not ordered, suggested — that I consider a voice with more theatrics in it,” Mr. Cherry said. “I will be forever grateful for that observation.”

When Mr. McPherson took over ABC three years ago, he made some important operational changes, too. He stopped marketing new shows equally, a vestige of the pre-cable era intended to keep producers happy. And he was the first Big Four network executive to aggressively court the country’s growing Hispanic audience (including dubbing shows into Spanish and pushing his staff to cast more Hispanic actors).

“I didn’t do that because I’m a nice guy,” he said recently over breakfast near ABC’s headquarters in Burbank, Calif. “I did it because it’s smart business.”

He also does not dispute that he has left a long trail of hurt feelings and bruised egos in his wake, but he says disagreements are to be expected in any creative business. He also says that he is misunderstood. “I don’t see myself as a bully,” he says. “I know I’m demanding. My biggest gift and curse is that I want to win.”

Mr. McPherson’s unit has emerged as an important engine behind Disney’s recent earnings momentum. The division reported $733 million in operating income for the first nine months of its 2007 fiscal year, compared with $320 million for the first nine months of 2004. Last spring, ABC secured fat increases in advertising prices, prompting some analysts to upgrade Disney’s stock.

Because more of Mr. McPherson’s programming bets are paying off, ABC did not need to make as many pilots in 2007, leading to about $50 million in cost savings, analysts estimate.

Though impressive, these critical and financial successes don’t guarantee a continued climb for Mr. McPherson at Disney. In an industry built as much on relationships and image as anything else, personal style still matters.

Mr. McPherson, who professes a distaste for Hollywood’s schmoozy brand of politics and massaging of the press, is well known in the television business for baring his teeth. When Fox extended an episode of “American Idol” by 12 minutes in March in an attempt to torpedo ABC’s premiere of “Dancing With the Stars,” he fired off an angry e-mail message to Fox’s top scheduling executive.

When bidding on new projects, Mr. McPherson sometimes threatens to cease doing business with the people involved if things do not go his way, say agents who have negotiated with him.

His personality was on display in May at the industry’s high-stakes “upfront” presentations, where advertisers place some $9 billion worth of ads for the coming television season. While his counterparts wore dark suits and read scripted remarks off teleprompters, Mr. McPherson strutted the stage with no tie and improvised. Part of his opening line was “I’m a little upset.”

What followed was a joke about his presentation at the same event a year earlier, when he danced a suggestive cha-cha-cha on stage at Lincoln Center to mark the success of “Dancing With the Stars.” Mr. McPherson cracked that he was upset because NBC’s president did not up the ante with a splashy performance of his own.

And that was Mr. McPherson being diplomatic. On other occasions, his comments have made his superiors wince. In July, he called an NBC executive “either clueless or stupid” at a press event after the executive sidestepped a question about his involvement in a management shake-up at the network. At a television critics convention, he told a group of reporters that he hoped their absent colleague had been in a car crash, according to two people who were present.

Mr. McPherson says he does not recall that situation but says he was probably just blowing off steam. “This is a business where people are constantly throwing bricks at your head,” he says. “You would never walk up to a bank officer and say, ‘Gee, I really hated that loan.’ But people think nothing of ripping apart something I have put my heart and soul into.”

HIS public comments add to an already strained relationship with his boss, Anne Sweeney, co-chairwoman of the Media Networks Group at Disney. The two are an odd couple in many ways, but their differences are particularly pronounced when it comes to their public personas. To put it in Disney theme-park terms: If she is a perfectly scripted animatronic figurine from It’s a Small World, he is a Matterhorn bobsled veering off its track.

Credit for ABC’s turnaround can be a sensitive subject. Ms. Sweeney usually serves as the public face of Disney’s television operation, which makes Mr. McPherson worry that his accomplishments go unseen. “This is a one-person job,” he said, referring to his ability to run ABC without heavy supervision.

The pair’s working relationship may not have hindered the division’s growth — at least not so far — but Mr. Iger has made it clear in comments and actions since taking over the company that he does not view warring executives as a healthy dynamic.

Mr. McPherson said, “People love to gossip about office politics, but I think our success together speaks for itself.”

Ms. Sweeney said, “Steve’s passion is one of the many things that makes him good at his job.”

In recent months, he has worked to dispel tension between himself and other executives, particularly his successor at ABC Studios, Mark Pedowitz. At a company team-building retreat in July, he matched up with Mr. Pedowitz on stage to kick off a night of corporate karaoke. Their song was “What the World Needs Now Is Love.”

In April, Mr. McPherson doled out dollops of thanks to his staff — literally. To recognize their work on the network’s spring pilots, he flew in 12 tubs of ice cream from a New Jersey parlor and pushed a cart up and down the aisles of ABC’s corporate headquarters, scooper in hand.

Unlike many of his peers, Mr. McPherson did not grow up obsessing over television. For a large portion of his childhood, he lived in Europe, where his father was headmaster at the American School of Paris. His television diet consisted of reruns of “Love Boat” and “M*A*S*H.”

After graduating from Cornell with a political science degree, he went to work on Wall Street as a foreign exchange broker. He handled Australia, which meant going to work in the middle of the night.

Fed up with Wall Street, he decided to try his hand in the entertainment business in 1990. He set off for Hollywood, where a fraternity buddy, Kevin Reilly, was working in television. With Mr. Reilly’s help, he was hired as a production assistant for a producer of “The Golden Girls.” His duties, for which he was paid $180 a week, included baby-sitting and chauffeuring.

He eventually got a programming job at Fox, and moved to Disney’s TV studio in the mid-’90s, climbing the ladder to become chief of the division.

ABC was largely written off by competitors when Mr. McPherson arrived in April 2004. The network, losing the ratings race, had limped along for years. Its handling of the game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” had become the textbook example of how to kill a franchise through overscheduling. Some affiliates were in open revolt. Ad sales lagged behind those of some rivals by more than 20 percent.

Guided by Mr. McPherson, ABC reversed course. The network is now home to a parade of hits, including “Dancing With the Stars,” the family drama “Brothers & Sisters” and the fish-out-of-water comedy “Ugly Betty.” This year, ABC received 70 Emmy Award nominations, the most of any broadcast network. And the network may have another successful series in “Private Practice,” which had its debut two weeks ago and is a spinoff of “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Lucky timing helped. Mr. McPherson’s predecessors started “Desperate Housewives” and the castaways drama “Lost,” although Mr. McPherson nurtured them. He also got a big boost from Mr. Iger, who ripped up the network’s cumbersome decision-making process, giving Mr. McPherson more power to make programming choices. Now, ABC has been better positioned to beat rivals to hot projects.

While Mr. McPherson’s style may ruffle corporate feathers, it has made him beloved to many actors and producers. In an industry known for its knife-in-the-back approach to business, Mr. McPherson’s knife-in-the-front manner stands out and is appreciated, and has been the reason ABC has nabbed some ratings-grabbing stars.

The Oscar winner Sally Field, the star of the drama “Brothers & Sisters,” says she initially had no interest in the show after an earlier, “horrible” experience at ABC. Ms. Field, then starring in a series called “The Court,” said she got a call one day from an ABC executive professing love for the series. She says she learned a few days later — by watching an episode of “Entertainment Tonight” — that the network was canceling her series.

Ms. Field says Mr. McPherson changed her mind about returning to ABC. “He sent me the loveliest notes about how the network has changed and about his support for me and the show,” she says. “It felt like if ABC ended up canceling us overnight, at least someone would call me this time.” Ms. Field, who won an Emmy Award last month for the role, keeps the e-mail messages on her bulletin board.

Mr. McPherson has won respect from writers by developing a different kind of reputation. They see him as a type of Mr. Fix-It who has a unique ability to pinpoint subtle script problems.

Damon Lindelof, executive producer of “Lost,” said that he originally planned to kill off the show’s hero, Jack, in the first episode but that Mr. McPherson convinced him that it was a bad idea. “He made us realize that if we killed Jack, the audience would never trust us again,” Mr. Lindelof said.

With “Grey’s Anatomy,” Mr. McPherson made the unusual decision to halt production after just a few episodes because he didn’t like the tone of the show. He said some central characters were emerging as too unlikable. Such calls are rare because of the tight production schedule for television shows, and any interruptions can cost millions of dollars.

“I don’t think the heads of the other networks would have done that,” said Shonda Rhimes, the “Grey’s Anatomy” creator. “It took guts.”

ALTHOUGH the new television season is only two weeks old, ABC is off to a robust start. It currently ranks No. 1 among adults age 18 to 49, the demographic group that most advertisers pay a premium to reach, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Of particular note is “Cavemen,” a comedy based on a popular series of Geico insurance commercials; it had its premiere on Tuesday. The comedy lured a strong 4.5 million young-adult viewers and was particularly popular with young men — a group that ABC, heavy on soapy dramas, has struggled to attract.

If the series is successful, it could rewrite the relationship between programmers and advertisers. Marketers have long depended on so-called product placement, where items are written into the storyline. But as commercial-skipping DVRs become ubiquitous, some advertisers are pressing networks to create programming that subtly reminds viewers of a brand name.

The network race is a brutal one, but Mr. McPherson still counts Mr. Reilly as one of his closest friends — despite the fact that they are professional rivals. Mr. Reilly runs programming at Fox, a job he also held at NBC.

“As a friend, he would do anything for me,” Mr. Reilly said. “But as a competitor he would like nothing more than to cut off my head.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/bu.../07disney.html





Just One More Before Bedtime!
Mayrav Saar

CELEBRITIES were starting to pour out of the Declare Yourself party, a get-out-the-vote event at the Beverly Hills Post Office, and Blaine Hewison was eager to get to work.

Standing in a crowd of mostly sullen paparazzi with rumpled clothes and tired expressions, he rocked back and forth in his black Emerica sneakers, waiting for his chance on this chilly night to take a money-making photograph of Justin Timberlake, Hayden Panettiere or any of the other tabloid-worthy subjects who had been partying inside.

His fellow photographers had barely taken notice of Lady Victoria Hervey, a British socialite and staple of the English press, when Blaine dashed out in front, getting the shot. And unlike the other paparazzi, he didn’t have to shout her name to get her attention.

“You are so young!” Lady Victoria exclaimed amid the barrage of flashing strobes. “You should be in bed. Where are your parents?”

In an era when even the most mundane images of the marginally famous are fodder for magazines and Web sites, almost anyone with a camera, it seems, can make a living as a celebrity photographer. Even a couple of kids who haven’t starting shaving.

Since February, Blaine, 15, and his best friend, Austin Visschedyk, 14, have been spending late nights skulking around nightclubs, restaurants and private parties, staking out the likes of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton (older women, all), declaring themselves the youngest paparazzi in the business.

“They’re pretty shocked to see us,” said Blaine, a thin, soft-spoken shutterbug who runs his own photography company, Pint Size Paparazzi.

In one sense, the boys are another example of precocious Hollywood youngsters, following their show-business dreams a little ahead of schedule. Viewed another way, however, they may be unprepared innocents, colliding with one of the roughest sides of the entertainment industry.

A few months ago, Austin said, the singer Erykah Badu ripped his camera out of his hands and deleted his photos. Blaine was recently pushed to the ground by a bouncer outside a restaurant; as he hit the pavement, Blaine said, he tried to tell the guard that he was just a kid.

“Why did you tell him that?” said a videographer, an adult, as Blaine recounted his war story at a recent red carpet event. “There’s no innocence in the paparazzi business, homey. I told you, once you cross over, you’re done. You’re on the dark side, homes.”

As residents of celebrity-filled West Hollywood, the boys have benefited from their everyday exposure to famous figures. When he was in second grade, Blaine photographed David Spade jogging by his house (the actor called him “pipsqueak paparazzi”). Seven months ago, the kids realized they could profit from this proximity, and Austin, the more outspoken of the two, suggested to Blaine’s father that he buy his son a $6,000 camera.

“I said, ‘Yeah, right,’” recalled Robert Hewison, 36, who owns a film production company. But Mr. Hewison relented, and the boys took to their skateboards, chasing after celebrity hot properties — Christina Aguilera, David and Victoria Beckham and Jenna Jameson — in hopes of making money, and maybe, a few famous friends.

“I’m going to let this go as far as it takes me,” said Blaine, fidgeting with his V800. “I want to be friends with the celebrities more than take photos of them. I kind of wish I was going to the parties with them.”

Austin has sold photos to The Daily News in New York and OK! magazine, among other publications, while an image Blaine shot of Ms. Spears extending her middle finger recently fetched $500 at a local art show.

“What struck me originally about them is that they both have a good eye,” said Brad Elterman, an owner of Buzz Foto, an agency that brokers sales of celebrity photos.

Initially, Mr. Elterman — who was 16 when he sold his first photograph of Bob Dylan — said the boys reminded him of himself. “These kids are so cookie-cutter American-looking,” he said. “It reminded me of a Spielberg film.”

When Mr. Elterman sold one of Austin’s photos of Kim Kardashian, a mischievous confidant of Ms. Hilton, to TMZ.com, he said, “The photo editor called me up and said, ‘This is the best photo of Kim Kardashian I have ever seen.’ I’ve been in this business for three decades, and I’ve never had a photo editor call about a photo. Ever.”

But Mr. Elterman no longer represents the diminutive pair. “I want to be able to sleep at night,” he said. “If something happened to one of these kids, I don’t know what I would do.”

Other professionals are disturbed at seeing Blaine, a high school sophomore, and Austin, a freshman, lingering outside nightclubs with thousands of dollars’ worth of camera equipment around their scrawny necks.

“In my opinion, 1,000 percent, they should not be doing this,” said Alison Silva, 27, a photographer who has a cast on his left arm (the result, he said, of being hit by Keanu Reeves’s car in the line of duty). “They don’t think like we do. Fights break out. A lot of the guys, they’re like, ‘What are these little guys doing here?’”

Even celebrities seem perplexed by their presence. A video on TMZ documented the actress Rose McGowan as she left a restaurant and discovered she was being photographed by Austin. “What’s wrong with this town?” she asked. Austin continued to coax a few extra poses out of the clearly conflicted Ms. McGowan, the star of “Grindhouse,” as she stepped into her car. “This is so wrong!” she exclaimed.

Initially, Blaine’s and Austin’s parents felt the same way. “I was apprehensive at first,” Mr. Hewison said. “I thought, ‘My kid is going out there with a bunch of paparazzi?’ But I’ve since come to really like a lot of them. There are some I’d be more than happy to have over for a dinner party.”

Jane Sieberts, Austin’s mother and a furniture manufacturer in her early 50s, said, “I’m very supportive of it.” She added: “He’s a real bright kid. He’s careful. He can get just as injured in sports at school.”

Both boys say they “do school” two times a week, visiting the City of Angels Independent Study School to drop off the tests and assignments they’ve completed at home. (Both enrolled at the school before pursuing their photography careers.)

This affords them free time to shoot during the day, as they bike and skateboard around Sunset Plaza and other close-to-home hot spots. At night, their parents play chauffeur; Mr. Hewison has even installed a dashboard DVD player in his Porsche 911 to wile away the time as he waits for Blaine to finish work.

“I go out every day,” Austin said during a recent conversation in his mother’s bedroom, his blue eyes glued to the shoot-em-up video game “Halo 3.” “I start at like 9 a.m. until about 12:30, then break and then go back out at like 9 until whenever.”

“Blaine hardly ever goes out anymore,” Austin quickly added. “I go out, like three times as much as him.”

Blaine and Austin, friends for eight years, have always tried to outdo each other at sports, but their professional rivalry has a fiercer, more grown-up tenor. The two initially worked together on a single Web site, pintsizepaparazzi.com, but disagreements between the two boys’ parents over business matters led Austin to start his own site, austinseye.com.

“I didn’t like the idea that they were lumped together, because I don’t know what Blaine’s goals are,” Ms. Sieberts said. “Austin does a lot of art photography; he is not a paparazzi. So it was like, well, maybe they shouldn’t be so linked because they are going to be on separate paths.”

The boys are quick to point out the differences in their work. “My style is better,” Blaine said. “I have a more artsy look to my photographs. They’re not so posed.”

Asked who he thought was the better photographer of the two, Austin filled five “Halo 3” competitors full of virtual lead before answering, “Who do you think?”

While they are professional rivals, the boys call themselves “best friends forever.” And some in the entertainment business want to make sure of that.

“You do have the Hollywood access, you have the unusual after-school-job sort of thing, but to me that’s all backdrop,” said Jeffrey Wank, a talent agent who read a news account of Blaine and Austin, and got them a deal to develop a reality show with a production company, World of Wonder, which has produced such series as “Tori & Dean: Inn Love” and “Wife, Mom, Bounty Hunter.”

“The core of it is the personalities of Blaine and Austin, and the relationship the two share,” Mr. Wank said. “That’s where the story is.”

So far, the boys don’t see a dark side to that narrative — just a chance to burnish their own stars and stay up late on school nights. “Oh, look. Here comes Blaine. Late again,” Austin said on a stakeout at Mr. Chow’s, the popular Beverly Hills restaurant, as he noticed his pal’s arrival. “Oh, and there’s stupid Josh.”

Josh Dempsey, 15, recently took Austin’s place at Pint Size Paparazzi and now shoots videos for the Web site. Austin greeted him with a couple of slugs on the arm.

“I swear, I hate that guy,” Josh told Blaine.

Blaine tucked a few strands of shaggy blond hair under his Dodgers cap and changed the subject.

“I shot Jaime Pressly today,” Blaine said.

“It was the worst picture ever,” Austin taunted.

“It was not bad,” he said.

“No, it wasn’t bad,” Austin conceded. Just then he spotted a familiar car and sprinted to catch up with it. But this S.U.V. wasn’t being driven by a starlet: It was his dad, arriving to pick him up.

Austin wouldn’t say where he was going, only that he was off to shoot “an exclusive” of the actress Drew Barrymore. Would he be joining up with his friends later that night?

“Yeah,” Austin said.

“No,” his father said before driving off. “He’s going to bed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/fa...07kids.html?hp





Britney’s Loss, Their Gain
Mireya Navarro

AFTER years of being fodder for the celebrity press, Britney Spears’s train wreck of a story hit a news high this past Monday when a judge with less tolerance for her antics than the public took away custody, at least temporarily, of her two young sons. The stern ruling lent her saga a dose of poignancy. For all her recent bizarre, unexplainable behavior, Ms. Spears is now a mother in danger of losing permanent custody of her two toddlers, age 2 and 1.

But the latest installment also showed that the attention paid to this long-running public drama has become a force of its own — one that sells magazines and music, increases Web traffic and gives obscure characters their minutes of fame.

Who won and who lost in the latest twists of the Britney story?

A Gusher for the Web

When it comes to traffic, “Britney is Old Faithful,” said Harvey Levin, the managing editor of TMZ.com, one of the top gossip Web sites, adding that both page views and unique visitors spike when an item on her appears, though he declined to give exact figures. Since the custody ruling Monday, which was followed by an order that allows Ms. Spears monitored visits every other day, the site has run numerous updates, some as brief as a video of Ms. Spears making a left turn onto the Pacific Coast Highway.

The site heaps ridicule upon Ms. Spears — mimicking her “y’all” in most items that track her comings and goings, including when she checked into a Beverly Hills hotel the day she turned over her children, smiling and causing a paparazzi commotion.

Mr. Levin said interest in Ms. Spears outweighed that of any other celebrity among TMZ’s users. “There are people who love her and there are people who think she’s a train wreck,” he said, “and everybody wonders how it’s going to end.”

Yesterday’s News

TMZ.com and other paparazzi sites like X17online.com have owned the story; certainly they were able to move faster than celebrity magazines. Neither Us Weekly nor People, which arrive on newsstands Wednesday and Thursday, gave over its cover this week to the Spears story, citing the saturation of news already available.

But a competitor in the crowded celebrity glossy field, OK!, did play the story big on the cover (with the headline “Goodbye Mommy”), in no small part because of the fond memory of a summer cover, “Britney’s Meltdown,” which was OK!’s best-selling issue ever, at 1.2 million copies (compared with recent average sales of about 930,000), the magazine’s representatives said.

No. 3 With a Bullet

Staying in the public eye, even scandalously, has generated a high amount of interest in Ms. Spears’s artistic comeback. Despite her lethargic performance at the MTV Video Music Awards last month, derided by critics and viewers, her single “Gimme More” is selling strongly. It has been the No. 1 singles download on iTunes and sold more than 179,000 copies in its first week on sale on digital services. Largely as a result of those sales, the song pole-vaulted from No. 68 to No. 3 in the week ending Sunday, Sept. 30, on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, which tracks sales, radio airplay and other types of demand.

Ms. Spears's record company released a video of "Gimme More'' on Friday, which quickly moved into the top five downloads on iTunes.

Is controversy good for sales? Geoff Mayfield, Billboard’s director of charts, said the strong sales of “Gimme More” reflected pent-up demand since the single only recently became available after weeks of radio play. He and others in the music industry said it remained to be seen how all the attention Ms. Spears is getting for her personal life will affect sales of the album, which, they noted, must appeal musically if it is to sell well.

But one way her personal troubles are undermining a comeback is the time they take away from her ability to promote her music. “Without a doubt, her personal life has prevented her from keeping the focus on the video, the song and everything that should accompany the release of a worldwide superstar’s record,” said Jeff Rabhan, a talent manager who represents the singer Michelle Branch and other artists.

Michael Pagnotta, a music manager and publicist who most recently represented the Olsen twins, said Ms. Spears, who has hired and fired numerous publicists, managers and lawyers, risks irreversible damage to her career. “There’s a tipping point and she’s close to it,” he said. “Michael Jackson found this out.”

Sympathy for Ex-Devil

Kevin Federline, Ms. Spears’s former husband, who at one point was one of her backup dancers, was the subject not long ago of much derision for his own questionable behavior.

After the judge in the custody case declared Ms. Spears a habitual user of drugs and alcohol and ordered regular testing, Mr. Federline is looking like the responsible parent. Some instant polls on the Web show that many people favor him for full custody.
A Sliver of Fame

Right after Ms. Spears’s MTV appearance, Chris Crocker, a fan, made a two-minute video for YouTube in which he rails against Ms. Spears’s detractors while sobbing. The “Leave Britney Alone!” video has become one of the site’s most viewed entries of all time, with more than 10.8 million viewers, and Mr. Crocker is making appearances on national talk shows.

A former bodyguard, Tony Barretto, who worked for Ms. Spears from March to May, hired the media-savvy lawyer Gloria Allred to inject himself into the custody case (and onto television news shows), by reporting that he had seen Ms. Spears snorting cocaine at a nightclub and driving unsafely with the kids, among other transgressions. On Wednesday, Mr. Barretto met with officials from the Department of Children and Family Services for about two hours and asked for an investigation of Ms. Spears’s behavior.

Ms. Allred said her client, the father of two young children, was motivated by concern over the well-being of Ms. Spears’ children, not personal gain.

The New Social Workers?

It appears that the 24/7 coverage of Ms. Spears worked to her disadvantage in recent days. TMZ says lawyers for Mr. Federline subpoenaed one of its videos showing the pop star driving with her children last weekend without a valid license, in direct violation of an order by the judge presiding over the custody case.

Janice Min, editor in chief of US Weekly, said, “I’m not sure that the change in custody would have occurred so quickly had the press not actually been so closely following her role as a mother.”

Mr. Levin of TMZ said Ms. Spears needed “a wake-up call.”

“It’s not a frivolous story anymore,” he said. “This is a woman who loves her kids who doesn’t have her kids. It’s now taken tragic elements.”

Paula Schwartz contributed reporting.





New Video Can’t Save Troubled Radio Star
Kelefa Sanneh

Might there be, after all, such a thing as bad publicity? The Britney Spears formerly known as a pop star has spent the past few years undertaking grueling research on that topic, but the results are as yet inconclusive.

And yet, in the middle of another unpleasant week — punctuated with updates from her continuing custody dispute with Kevin Federline, as well as long-distance diagnoses from mental-health professionals who should probably know better — there was some good news for Ms. Spears. Her current single, “Gimme More” (Jive), zoomed up the charts; thanks largely to an avalanche of digital downloads, it leapt from No. 68 to No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. (Take away downloads and the song is still doing pretty well; it sits at No. 14 on the Pop 100 Airplay chart.) The news came as a rude but pleasant shock, a hint that Ms. Spears might once again become a pop juggernaut.

The appearance on Friday of the song’s official video, directed by Jake Sarfaty, was a more ambiguous development. It was made available on iTunes for $1.99, though many fans doubtless found other ways to watch it online, for about $2 less. And MTV, which in an earlier era might have scored the exclusive preview, was left to chronicle the reaction.

Suffice it to say that no one was very impressed. An article on mtv.com, posted early on Friday afternoon, reluctantly delivered the bad news: “Even though the people polled by MTV News are fans, many of them expressed disappointment, calling the lip-synching too obvious, the hair extensions too fake, the energy level too low.”

Of course, the video isn’t nearly as bad as her disastrous performance of the song at the MTV Video Music Awards last month. But in the aftermath of that performance, the loose lip-synching in the video underscores the impression of a singer who isn’t fully engaged with the song, or fully in control of her self-presentation. At times it looks disconcertingly like one of those posthumous Tupac Shakur videos, cobbled together using whatever raw material the director could find.

The “plot” is simple enough: a blond Britney Spears sits at a bar with friends, watching a black-haired Britney Spears writhing around a stripper’s pole. Anyone who remembers the events of February — when Ms. Spears famously shaved her own head, inadvertently producing some of the most riveting photographs ever taken of her — knows that both characters are wearing wigs. In that sense you might say each character is a put-on, a fantasy.

Mainly forgotten in all the hubbub is the fact that “Gimme More,” which was produced by Timbaland’s protégé Danja, is an infectious little song: an elegant and half-robotic rebuke to all the voyeurs who claim they want her to settle down even as they gawk at her misadventures. What no one really knows yet is how two separate but related figures — the fierce pop star and the mixed-up paparazzi victim — affect each other. Everyone wants to see the new Britney Spears video. But how many times?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/ar...ic/06brit.html





The Fakebook Generation
Alice Mathias

THE time-chugging Web site Facebook.com first appeared during my freshman year as the exclusive domain of college students. This spring, Facebook opened its pearly gates, enabling myself and other members of the class of ’07 to graduate from our college networks into those of the real world.

In no time at all, the Web site has convinced its rapidly assembling adult population that it is a forum for genuine personal and professional connections. Its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has even declared his quest to chart a “social graph” of human relationships the way that cartographers once charted the world.

Just a warning: if you’re planning on following the corner of this map that’s been digitally doodled by my 659 Facebook friends, you are going to end up in the middle of nowhere. All the rhetoric about human connectivity misses the real reason this popular online study buddy has so distracted college students for the past four years.

Facebook did not become popular because it was a functional tool — after all, most college students live in close quarters with the majority of their Facebook friends and have no need for social networking. Instead, we log into the Web site because it’s entertaining to watch a constantly evolving narrative starring the other people in the library.

I’ve always thought of Facebook as online community theater. In costumes we customize in a backstage makeup room — the Edit Profile page, where we can add a few Favorite Books or touch up our About Me section — we deliver our lines on the very public stage of friends’ walls or photo albums. And because every time we join a network, post a link or make another friend it’s immediately made visible to others via the News Feed, every Facebook act is a soliloquy to our anonymous audience.

It’s all comedy: making one another laugh matters more than providing useful updates about ourselves, which is why entirely phony profiles were all the rage before the grown-ups signed in. One friend announced her status as In a Relationship with Chinese Food, whose profile picture was a carry-out box and whose personal information personified the cuisine of China.

We even make a joke out of how we know one another — claiming to have met in “Intro to Super Mario Re-enactments,” which I seriously doubt is a real course at Wesleyan, or to have lived together in a “spay and neuter clinic” instead of the dorm. Still, these humor bits often reveal more about our personalities and interests than any honest answers.

Facebook administrators have since exiled at least the flagrantly fake profiles, the Greta Garbos and the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butters, in an effort to have the site grow up from a farce into the serious social networking tool promised to its new adult users, who earnestly type in their actual personal information and precisely label everyone they know as former co-workers or current colleagues, family members or former lovers.

But does this more reverent incarnation of Facebook actually enrich adult relationships? What do these constellations of work colleagues and long-lost friends amount to? An online office mixer? A reunion with that one other guy from your high school who has a Facebook profile? Oh! You get to see pictures of your former college sweetheart’s family! (Only depressing possibilities are coming to mind for some reason.)

My generation has long been bizarrely comfortable with being looked at, and as performers on the Facebook stage, we upload pictures of ourselves cooking dinner for our parents or doing keg stands at last night’s party; we are reckless with our personal information. But there is one area of privacy that we won’t surrender: the secrecy of how and whom we search.

A friend of mine was recently in a panic over rumors of a hacker application that would allow Facebook users to see who’s been visiting their profiles. She’d spent the day ogling a love interest’s page and was horrified at the idea that he knew she’d been looking at him. But there’s no way Facebook would allow such a program to exist: the site is popular largely because it enables us to indulge our gazes anonymously. (We might feel invulnerable in the spotlight, but we don’t want to be caught sitting in someone else’s audience.) If our ability to privately search is ever jeopardized, Facebook will turn into a ghost town.

Facebook purports to be a place for human connectivity, but it’s made us more wary of real human confrontation. When I was in college, people always warned against the dangers of “Facebook stalking” at a library computer — the person whose profile you’re perusing might be right behind you. Dwelling online is a cowardly and utterly enjoyable alternative to real interaction.

So even though Facebook offers an elaborate menu of privacy settings, many of my friends admit that the only setting they use is the one that prevents people from seeing that they are Currently Logged In. Perhaps we fear that the Currently Logged In feature advertises to everyone else that we (too!) are Currently Bored, Lustful, Socially Unfulfilled or Generally Avoiding Real Life.

For young people, Facebook is yet another form of escapism; we can turn our lives into stage dramas and relationships into comedy routines. Make believe is not part of the postgraduate Facebook user’s agenda. As more and more older users try to turn Facebook into a legitimate social reference guide, younger people may follow suit and stop treating it as a circus ring. But let’s hope not.

Alice Mathias is a 2007 graduate of Dartmouth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/op...06mathias.html





73 and Loaded With Friends on Facebook
John Schwartz

WHEN Amy Waldman first signed on to Facebook last year and started to send joking messages about good grammar back and forth with a new 18-year-old friend, Ms. Waldman’s 19-year-old daughter, Talia, upbraided her for not revealing that she was actually in her 40s.

“You have to tell her you’re old,” she explained, “because on Facebook, that’s creepy.”

Ms. Waldman created a Facebook group to commemorate the incident: “over 40 is ‘facebook creepy.’”

It’s no secret that Facebook, which started as a networking playground for college kids, is graying, and that the percentage of active members who are over 25 years old and out of school has risen to some 40 percent of the overall population of about 45 million.

The influx raises questions. Will the loss of the campus sensibility and the youthful gestalt dilute the Facebook experience? And will the newcomers use the site — and change it? Or is it just another example of the fact that Americans age, but never seem to mature?

Joe Uppal, a University of Michigan undergraduate studying anthropology and philosophy, said the age wave “does kind of undermine the ties between Facebook and the college community.

“If everyone and anyone is able to go on Facebook, then belonging to it no longer indicates a college-student identity,” he added.

Similar sentiments have been heard whenever Facebook has expanded, said Matt Cohler, the company’s vice president for strategy and business operations. When the fledgling company first expanded beyond its roots at Harvard to include Yale, he said, “The people at Harvard complained about it and said, ‘Hey, this used to be just for us!’” The fretting subsides each time, he said, “as soon as they go back to using the program and realize this hasn’t done anything to deteriorate their experience.”

FOR the most part, in fact, the entry of millions of people with, you know, jobs and stuff, has been greeted with an epic “whatever,” said Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s interactive telecommunications program. “The average Facebook user isn’t going to care that people utterly unlike them are doing things they utterly don’t care about on some other corner of the site,” he said.

Facebook can avoid its “there goes the neighborhood moment,” he said, as long as it allows people to stay in their silos and gives them control over who can peek at their profiles. “As long as the individual users still feel their culture is preserved in their corner of Facebook, the growth won’t bother them.”

But the grown-ups are everywhere.

Take a look, for example, at Carl Kasell’s page. Mr. Kasell, the 73-year-old announcer on the NPR news program “Morning Edition,” sends up his own stodgy image on the weekly news quiz show “Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me!” and he now has 1,602 “friends.” Under personal information, Mr. Kasell gives his favorite quote as: “For NPR News, I’m Carl Kasell.”

Don’t worry, though, if you, gentle reader, don’t have a Facebook page of your own yet; Mr. Kasell isn’t that much hipper than you. He does not actually maintain the page himself. He reads the messages and comes up with responses, and Melody Joy Kramer, the 23-year-old associate producer for the show, enters them onto the page, in a cross-generational partnership.

Ms. Waldman — she of the creepy 40s — finds herself using Facebook in many of the ways that younger people do, except for the sexual cruising: she keeps up with old friends, makes new ones and uses the network to, well, network.

For instance, it turned out that Ms. Waldman’s age, 48, was just fine with the young woman, Lisa Szczepanski, with whom she traded grammar jokes. Ms. Szczepanski lives in Queens and Ms. Waldman lives in Milwaukee, but they have become as close as electrons allow. Ms. Waldman calls Ms. Szczepanski “My Facebook kid,” and got a Mother’s Day card from her last spring. (“Even my own kids don’t do that!” she joked.)

Ms. Waldman also used Facebook in her volunteer work. She leads 12-week family education programs through the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and last spring, she needed a speaker for one of the classes. She posted a request on a Facebook page about mental health, asking for “someone with a mental illness who has experienced breakdown and recovery to talk about their experience with the class.”

She soon heard from Megan Banner, a 20-year-old who had suffered a bout of mental illness in her high school years, recovered and now attends college in Milwaukee. Ms. Banner said she had been thinking about getting involved with advocacy for mental illness issues when she saw Ms. Waldman’s note, and “It was as if it was meant to be.”

They chatted over Facebook and met at a local Starbucks. Ms. Banner spoke to the class and, in a message via Facebook, recalled, “I had the crowd crying.” She said she believed that she “gave some people the hope to continue.”

Since then, Ms. Banner has engaged in more advocacy and speaking about mental health. The evening with Ms. Waldman’s class, she said, “just changed my whole life.”

Young and old will inevitably use the technology of Facebook differently, said Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor in the telecommunications, information studies and media department at Michigan State University.

Students define themselves through membership in many social networks in the real and virtual worlds, including classroom, dorms, extracurricular activities and hobbies. “There are fewer of those for adults,” Ms. Ellison said, who “will not be as interested in sharing their love of R.E.M.”

To some extent, a generation gap is already apparent in the Facebook population, said Mr. Shirky, of N.Y.U. Younger people will use it more naturally and differently than older folks, who for the most part will see a Facebook page as something like the dreaded Christmas letter, with its prosaic updates on one’s life events, and less the sense of “living your social life online, hammer and tongs,” the way younger people tend to.

That is only natural, he said, because “People our age are going to find uses for the tool that have to do with the maintenance of life already in process, rather than making one up out of whole cloth” — in part, he added, because “our social lives are more boring.” And that, he said, is only logical: “We’ve made the mistakes we’re going to make, God willing, and we’ve settled down.”

Some longtime observers of technology also wonder if Facebook will hold the interest of adults. Paul Saffo, a technology consultant who teaches as Stanford, said that Facebook’s rapidly multiplying programs and widgets might compromise the simple, clean design that made the site popular in the first place — which could be especially irritating to adults. “We want fewer steps, not more,” he said.

Worse, he said, is that social software means “we all get to be in fourth grade again,” renegotiating the rules of engagement with others. Do you respond to every friend request? Is it rude to cut someone away as part of a friend-list pruning? Once again, he said, “You have to worry about bruised feelings.”

Each new technology for communication, from the telephone to e-mail to Facebook “poking,” goes through a similar cycle, he said. “First we invent the technologies, then we figure out the social norms that tame the technology and allow it to occupy a nondistracting part of our life.” In other words, for Facebook to truly succeed, he said, it will have to recede.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/fa...4facebook.html





New Apps Put the Hate in Online Networking

Enemybook, Snubster allow Facebook users to link up with their nemeses
Jenn Abelson

Now that Internet users have forged online relationships with the people they like, they can turn their attention to shaming the folks they hate.

With Enemybook, a new program that runs on the social networking site Facebook, you can connect to people you loathe, display their photos and evil deeds, and give them the virtual finger.

Enemybook is one of several new online applications developed by computer-savvy twentysomethings who say they are tired of bogus online friendships. In a dig at the notion of virtual networking, they hope to encourage people to undermine, or at least mock, the online social communities sites such as Facebook were designed to create.

Over the summer, Kevin Matulef, who is doing a doctoral thesis on algorithms at MIT, designed Enemybook, a software application that lets people list enemies below friends on their personal Facebook page. He describes the program as "an antisocial utility that disconnects you to the so-called friends around you."

Matulef, 28, got the idea from undergraduates at the dorm where he tutors, after hearing one student talk about how someone was a "Facebook friend," but not a "real friend." (Facebook users sign up for a profile and can request friends through different networks -- high school, college, or at random. Some users have even created fake profiles for celebrities).

At the time, Matulef joked that maybe the two students should be Facebook enemies instead. And Enemybook was born.

"People are yearning to express the ridiculousness of some of the features of Facebook -- having all these friends that aren't genuine," Matulef said. "For some people, Enemybook is about expressing their distaste for political figures or celebrities. And for other people, it actually is about spreading hatred for their despised co-workers and exes."

Since May, Facebook has opened its platform and allowed developers to build applications to run on its site. According to Facebook's website, more than 3,000 applications have been built on the platform and 100 new ones are added each day. The most popular, a utility to highlight a user's best friends called Top Friends, has 3.1 million daily active users.

Enemybook is not in that stratosphere. It currently has 1,200 users, who cumulatively have recorded nearly 2,300 acrimonious relationships. Many people are "enemying" fake Facebook profiles for public figures and celebrities. So far, Matulef has the most foes, followed by President Bush, British rock band Coldplay, Republican gadfly Ann Coulter, and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook (and a Harvard dropout).

"It seems worth pointing out that Facebook was initially developed at Harvard; MIT had to counter with something," Matulef quipped.

Others have taken Enemybook more seriously, using it to publicly express their distaste for exes, bad bosses, and former friends.

"How many times have you been friend requested by someone you don't even like, know isn't really your friend, battle on a day to day basis, and is really your sworn enemy who is just friending you to discover your weakness," read a petition circulated by David Newkirk, who started a group on Facebook last year called "Official Petition to Facebook for an 'Enemies List."'

Now armed with Enemybook, Newkirk, 19, a sophomore at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, has listed six nemeses, including a former roommate, whose enemy details include hooking up with Newkirk's best friend, insulting Newkirk's dignity, and living with Newkirk and not getting along.

"Any person who rubbed me the wrong way, or showed disrespect will not be able to escape the electronic acknowledgement of their wrongdoings through Enemybook," Newkirk said.

A Facebook spokeswoman would not comment on Enemybook. Zuckerberg did not return messages posted to his Facebook account.

Enemybook is not the only asocial utility available on Facebook.

Snubster, which has allowed users to alienate each other since 2006 on its own website, Snubster.com, recently launched an application on Facebook.

With Snubster, you can put people "On Notice," give them an opportunity to redeem themselves, set a deadline, and if they fail to clean up their act, list them as "Dead to Me."

Bryant Choung, 26, a software engineer in Washington, D.C., who created the program, said he was bothered that Facebook had become little more than an online popularity contest and designed Snubster to provide "a backlash against the ridiculous phenomenon that was social networking."

"It's nice because Snubster was supposed to be a parody of Facebook, and by being able to work directly in and around Facebook makes it work so much better," Choung said.

The act of online snubbing can have its perils. Last month, Choung received a request from a man to remove a snub made by someone he was suing. At first, Choung told him to contact the person directly so they could resolve it on their own. But after a few rounds of e-mails, Choung decided removing the snub was the easiest way not to be involved.

"People have always been mean and petty and now, with the culture of putting everything online and the reality shows that thrive on voting people off the island or telling people you're fired, it's not surprising that people want to blast their enemies to the world," said Patrice Oppliger, assistant professor of mass communications at Boston University.

"The entertainment of being mean is almost elevated to a new level."

Still, there are the tactical drawbacks of enemying. Enemybook allows Facebook users to add enemies who are not their friends. But only people who are already friends receive notification when they are added to the enemy list. Enemies you have never liked never find out about your wrath.

Despite the potential pitfalls, some Facebook users think Enemybook and Snubster are long overdue.

Helen Parker, of London, said she used Enemybook to go after school bullies, bad bosses, and friends of friends she dislikes, listing secrets about their behavior. But then, the 24-year-old student at Aberystwyth University, had a change of heart and deleted her enemies.

"It just seemed a bit petty," Parker said. "Plus, not enough people I hate are on Facebook."
http://www.boston.com/business/techn...ne_networking/





The Web, Despite Its Promise, Fails to Snare Iowa Voters
Julie Bosman

Jean M. James, a retired art historian, has never read a blog, visited a candidate’s Web site, watched a video on YouTube or lingered over a MySpace page.

“I can’t be bothered,” Ms. James, sitting at a barbecue for Johnson County Democrats, said crisply before burying her nose in a Seymour Hersh article in The New Yorker.

It’s not that the Democratic presidential campaigns in Iowa haven’t tried to reach out. Their staffs have bombarded prospective caucusgoers with e-mail and text messages and with recorded voice mail from celebrities. They have built elaborate MySpace and Facebook pages in the candidates’ names, adding thousands of online “friends.” And aides adorned with new titles like “director of e-strategy” talk rapturously of how the Internet is transforming politics.

Yet even the campaigns concede that many caucusgoers in Iowa are happily encased in an old-media bubble, immune to the digital overtures of the modern presidential campaign and much more tuned in to commercials on television than to videos on a candidate’s Web site.

“It’s clearly true,” said Joe Trippi, a senior adviser to former Senator John Edwards, “that blogs and Web sites, and even some of the cool stuff that our team is doing in Iowa, has got less of an impact in Iowa.”

One reason is that the state’s population is older, and so are its caucus voters. According to the 2004 National Election Pool entrance poll in Iowa, 27 percent of Democratic caucusgoers were 65 or older — people less likely to download candidate podcasts, though more inclined to withstand the rigors of caucusing, which can require hours of votes and revotes.

Using technology to attract younger, first-time voters was crucial to Howard Dean’s strategy four years ago, and Mr. Edwards and Senator Barack Obama have tried to mimic it. (Indeed, Mr. Obama in particular appears to have plenty of young supporters, although it is unclear whether they will actually caucus.)

But privately, campaign aides say the ramped-up Internet efforts are intended to build buzz and positive press, with little expectation that they will translate directly into votes. (Mr. Dean, once considered the 2004 Democratic front-runner, finished third in Iowa.)

Though the typical caucus voters here are avid followers of the news, they get their information in traditional ways. They read the morning papers, watch the network news and tune in to the Sunday news programs with the fervor of Washington political operatives. As Brenda Brenneman, a graphic artist from Lone Tree, Iowa, gushed, “If ‘This Week With George Stephanopoulos’ wasn’t on, I wouldn’t get out of bed on Sunday morning.”

Talk radio, still a hugely influential medium, even reaches farmers out in the fields, whose tractors often come equipped with satellite radio.

But new media?

Even in a crowd of Democrats in the college town of Iowa City, mingling over lemonade and apple pie at their annual barbecue, it was hard to find many people who had so much as heard of the king of all liberal blogs, Daily Kos. (“Daily Post?” one man repeated quizzically.)

Rick Zimmermann, a lawyer in Iowa City, said he picked up two or three newspapers a day but never read blogs or online commentary. “That stuff has never seemed important to me,” he said.

According to a poll commissioned by The Des Moines Register, newspapers and television are still the predominant sources of information for likely Iowa caucus voters.

The poll, conducted by Selzer & Company, a firm based in Des Moines, asked likely caucus voters in May how they got their information, and found that the traditional media were still the favorites.

While more than 70 percent of the respondents said they watched candidate debates, read newspaper articles about campaigns and took in campaign advertisements on television or radio, only about 7 percent visited candidate pages on the social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook.

J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Company, said that while the occasional Internet phenomenon — like the “Obama girl” video several months ago — could trickle down to Iowa voters, it remained a rare event.

“People were hoping to see an explosion of new media — blogs and Web sites — but it really isn’t that strong,” Ms. Selzer said.

Some of the campaigns are realizing that.

Mr. Edwards in particular has embraced the Internet just as Mr. Dean did in 2004, even hiring Mr. Trippi, the Internet Svengali who managed Mr. Dean’s campaign.

In July, Mr. Trippi said in an interview that “you need to use the Internet, blogs, technology, YouTube, to reach out to people.”

Elizabeth Edwards, the candidate’s wife, who is known as a close reader of political blogs, echoed his sentiments. “The Internet is the principal way we are communicating with voters right now,” she said.

But in a recent interview, Mr. Trippi made a slight amendment. “It’s less true in Iowa,” he said. “Iowa is the older generation of Americans in terms of the way it skews demographically. In terms of being wired or connected, Internet penetration is relatively low.”

New Hampshire voters, by contrast, appear more plugged in. Many residents live in the Boston media market and work in the technology industry. And while local blogs are scarce in Iowa, they have proliferated in New Hampshire.

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor seeking the Republican nomination, is one candidate whose campaign has relied on old-fashioned methods of reaching voters in Iowa. Mr. Romney has been saturating the airwaves with television commercials in both Iowa and New Hampshire — at least 10,000 spots so far.

“By every measure, Iowa caucusgoers still get their news through traditional media,” said Tim Albrecht, a spokesman for Mr. Romney in Iowa. “We still do the traditional postcard and phone call.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/us...3blogging.html





In the Race to Buy Concert Tickets, Fans Keep Losing
Ellen Rosen

LISA SENAUKE, a Bruce Springsteen fan since 1973, tried to get tickets to his Oct. 26 concert in Oakland, Calif. The tickets were to go on sale at 10 a.m. on Sept. 17, and starting at 9:58 a.m., she logged into her Ticketmaster.com account, credit card in hand. But though she tried again and again for the next hour to buy tickets, she was always told the same thing: nothing available.

“I never even had a chance,” she said the other day. “Who, then, got those tickets? How many people managed to log in, in between me, and sweep up the tickets?”

Ms. Senauke’s frustration is not isolated. The coming concerts of 14-year-old Miley Cyrus, the daughter of the country singer Billy Ray Cyrus and the star of the Disney show “Hannah Montana,” sold out in minutes. And the same thing happened with tickets to recent reunion tours by the Police and Van Halen.

While some fans just quietly give up, others have complained to government officials, particularly after they found tickets to the same concerts or sporting events available — sometimes at many times the face value — on secondary sellers like Stubhub.com and TicketsNow minutes after the public sale began.

After hearing from some would-be ticket buyers, the Missouri attorney general announced Thursday that the state was suing three ticket resellers on charges they violated state consumer protection laws. That same day, the Arkansas attorney general said he was seeking documents from five resellers. And the attorney general’s office in Pennsylvania is also looking into the ticket sale business after receiving several hundred complaints over the recent sale of tickets for a Hannah Montana concert in Pittsburgh, said a spokesman, Nils Frederiksen.

“All hell broke loose with Hannah Montana,” said Justin Allen, the chief deputy attorney general in Arkansas. “The tickets were gone in 12 minutes and when people turned around, they were selling at online sites for sometimes as much as 10 times the face value.”

Ticketmaster, the subsidiary of the IAC/Interactive Corporation that bills itself as the biggest seller of concert and sports tickets in the world, is also facing questions from angry fans and has sent representatives to meet with state and local officials. They argue, in part, that the number of tickets available to the public at a concert is often far less than the total number of seats in the arena.

Ticketmaster has also filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Los Angeles against a software company based in Pittsburgh, RMG Technologies, and several ticket brokers contending that they have discovered a way to get around Ticketmaster’s defenses.

They “are bombarding Ticketmaster’s Web site with millions of automated ticket requests that can constitute up to 80 percent of all ticket requests made,” Ticketmaster states in its suit. These actions deny “the public access to tens of thousands of tickets so that RMG’s customers can purchase and resell those tickets to the same public at inflated prices,” it contends.

A lawyer for RMG, Jay M. Coggan, denied the allegations. He said in an interview that RMG provides a specialized browser for ticket brokers but would not discuss the company’s services in detail, saying such information was proprietary. He added, “Ticketmaster isn’t losing any money — they’re getting paid full dollar for every ticket sold.”

A hearing on Ticketmaster’s suit is scheduled for Oct. 15.

The fact that tickets to popular events sell out so quickly — and that brokers and online resellers obtain them with such velocity — is clouding the business, many in the music industry say. It is enough, some longtime concertgoers say, to make them long for the days when all they had to do to obtain tickets was camp out overnight.

Joseph Freeman, the assistant general counsel for Ticketmaster, said that in some cases, demand for tickets simply exceeded the supply. Even in large arenas, a certain number of tickets are reserved by the artist, the promoter and the concert site and some may also be set aside for fan clubs or presales, like ones frequently held by American Express or Visa. But thousands of tickets are still typically left to be sold to the general public.

In Kansas City, for example, there were “only 11,000 seats available for the Hannah Montana concert,” Mr. Freeman said. “We got about 8,400. Of those, half went to the fan club while the other half was sold to the general public.” Mr. Freeman added that more tickets are often released after the initial sale date once the stage configuration is known.

While Ticketmaster refused to disclose how many hits it receives when tickets go on sale, Mr. Freeman said the company had the ability to sell several thousand seats a minute.

But how do hundreds of tickets show up on online sites minutes after individuals have been shut out? Officials at resellers like Stubhub.com, now owned by eBay, guarantee the authenticity of the tickets. “What’s often mistaken about our marketplace,” Sean Pate, a spokesman for Stubhub, said in a statement, “is that we procure and price tickets when, to the contrary, we simply provide a secure and managed online marketplace for those who wish to sell tickets they possess.”

The Ticketmaster suit includes a statement from a former ticket broker, Chris Kovach, who was originally named as defendant but later settled with Ticketmaster. He said that he used RMG’s “automated devices to enable me to access Ticketmaster’s Web site.” Mr. Kovach said in the statement that he paid a monthly fee for access to RMG’s site and that its software enabled him to simultaneously search and request tickets — sometimes more than 100 sets at a time.

Mr. Kovach asserted in the statement that RMG’s system is “specifically designed to navigate or otherwise avoid various security measures on Ticketmaster’s Web site,” including what is known as the Captcha feature — those squiggly letters in a box that users must retype before they can proceed.

In denying the allegations, Mr. Coggan, RMG’s lawyer, said, “Ticketmaster didn’t get it right.”

So what’s a dedicated fan to do? If tickets sell out within minutes, keep checking the online ticketing company for tickets in case additional seats are released. Don’t rush to buy from brokers or online sites because prices sometimes come down if resellers find they have acquired too many seats, Mr. Pate of Stubhub said. And sometimes, the artist decides to add an extra show, which can provide extra tickets — at face value — to satisfy demand.

In the meantime, potential ticket buyers continue to try various means to capture their prey. Lisa Nicholls of Houston, for example, had already been unsuccessful last winter in buying tickets to a Hannah Montana concert for her children, Alexandra, 10 and Robbie, 8. When the Toyota Center, the Houston arena, announced a new concert, her husband, Rob, sat at home with three computers logged on to the arena’s site at precisely 10 a.m., when tickets were to go on sale.

Mrs. Nicholls, meanwhile, had left the house hours earlier to wait at a ticket outlet at a local supermarket. Despite arriving at 7:30 a.m., she was not the first on line. Still, within minutes, she and her husband were both out of luck.

“I went there thinking we would hedge our bets and do it every which way,” Mrs. Nicholls said. “But only the first person on line got tickets — and I was 10th.”

Jessica Fricke, a Minnesota mother who also failed to get Hannah Montana tickets, tried to put the best face on it. “We are trying to teach our children the law of supply and demand. It’s a lesson for our family. It’s a hard one for an 8- year-old, but a good one.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/business/06money.html





The Cult of the Lads From Manchester
Dennis Lim

IAN CURTIS, the frontman of the beloved post-punk British band Joy Division, has been dead 27 years, longer than he was alive, but his moment in the film spotlight has only now arrived. Mr. Curtis hanged himself on May 18, 1980, two months shy of his 24th birthday and on the eve of what would have been his band’s first American tour. The Joy Division story, a sacred narrative to legions of cultish fans (and a natural for the movies, complete with doomed, charismatic hero), is now the subject of two new films, the biopic “Control” and the documentary “Joy Division.”

Both were made with the cooperation of those who best knew Mr. Curtis. “Control,” the feature directing debut of the portrait photographer Anton Corbijn, is loosely based on “Touching From a Distance,” a 1995 memoir by Mr. Curtis’s widow, Deborah, of their life together. “Joy Division,” directed by the music-video veteran Grant Gee and written by the author and critic Jon Savage, takes a panoramic approach, combining archival footage with revealing interviews of firsthand observers and Mr. Curtis’s surviving bandmates, who went on to form New Order.

In Mr. Corbijn’s film, as in Ms. Curtis’s book, the other members of Joy Division, which formed in Manchester in 1976, recede into a blur. The story homes in on Mr. Curtis’s personal pain: his struggles with epilepsy, overmedication and a guilt-inducing love triangle. By contrast, what emerges in “Joy Division” is a picture not just of Mr. Curtis and his band, but also of the social and existential conditions that produced them. The music’s coiled, haunted sound and nihilist lyrics, the documentary argues, are inseparable from the decaying postindustrial dystopia that was Manchester at the time.

The two projects, which evolved separately, are complementary but also work in similar ways. Intentionally or not, both return a mythic figure to life-size proportions.

The Weinstein Company is releasing the two films, having acquired “Control” at the Cannes Film Festival in May and “Joy Division” at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. (“Control” opens Wednesday at Film Forum in Manhattan. No release date has been set for the documentary.)

Mr. Corbijn’s hefty résumé includes four coffee-table volumes (mostly of celebrities and rock stars) and dozens of music videos for the likes of Depeche Mode and U2. But before “Control” he had no feature film experience. Speaking at the festival in Toronto, he said he had initially turned the project down but changed his mind, figuring that an “emotional connection to the material” would serve him well on his first feature. Born in the Netherlands, Mr. Corbijn, 52, was drawn to London in his early 20s by the flourishing music scene and, in particular, Joy Division.

Within two weeks of relocating there, he had tracked the band down for a shoot and taken what is perhaps the most defining photograph of Joy Division: the members walking into a tube station’s neon-lighted tunnel, Mr. Curtis looking back at the camera.

Like that image — and many others of Joy Division — “Control” is in black and white. “That felt like the proper approach,” Mr. Corbijn said. The covers for “Unknown Pleasures” and “Closer,” the group’s two studio albums, use black and white imagery. And an inky, gloomy palette, Mr. Corbijn added, corresponds with his memories of ’70s England.

Ms. Curtis’s book was the primary basis for the screenplay, but Mr. Corbijn and the screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh also wove in details of Mr. Curtis’s affair with Annik Honoré, a Belgian journalist. It took some persuasion before Ms. Honoré would talk to the filmmakers, but she eventually assented and even shared letters that Mr. Curtis wrote to her, heard in voice-over in the film.

Samantha Morton signed on to play Deborah. For Ian, Mr. Corbijn chose Sam Riley, 27, who had previously appeared in a few bit parts but was folding shirts in a warehouse when he landed the role. For Mr. Riley, whose magnetic performance is the film’s scarred heart, playing Ian Curtis was a draining feat of psychological immersion and physical mimicry. He had to enact the grand mal seizures that plagued him as well as the manic, uncoordinated flailings that were his signature dance moves. (Filming the scenes between Ian and Annik were easier because “I was falling in love in real life,” he said. He and Alexandra Maria Lara, who plays Annik, are now a couple.)

To populate the concert scenes in “Control,” the filmmakers rounded up Joy Division fans, which did not exactly calm Mr. Riley’s nerves. “It was big pressure going out there and having 150 extras discussing my merits and my failures,” he said. To make things trickier, the actors in the band were also performing — not simply miming — Joy Division originals.

Mr. Riley, who had briefly been the singer in a band called 10000 Things, could manage a credible copy of Mr. Curtis’s hectoring baritone, but the other actors were essentially learning to play their instruments (not unlike Joy Division in the early days). “We practiced for hours, between rehearsals and late into the night,” Mr. Riley said.

“Control” and “Joy Division” are both necessarily elegies, not merely to Mr. Curtis but also to a host of people and places that are no longer around. “To be brutal about it, the equity of Factory is death,” Mr. Savage said, referring to Factory Records, the now-defunct label that made its name with Joy Division. In addition to Mr. Curtis, Rob Gretton, who managed Joy Division and New Order, and Martin Hannett, the producer responsible for the band’s crystalline studio sound, are also dead. Tony Wilson, the mythomaniacal founder of Factory, a producer of “Control” and the subject of Michael Winterbottom’s “24 Hour Party People” (which touches on the Joy Division story), died in August.

As with other rock star suicides, Mr. Curtis’s final hours have been sifted for clues, retraced in near fetishistic detail. He was found dead by Deborah in their kitchen on a Sunday morning. The night before, he had gotten drunk, argued with her (she left), watched Werner Herzog’s “Stroszek” on television and played the Iggy Pop album “The Idiot.” As depicted in “Control,” which largely resists the temptation to assign blame or explanations, his suicide seems an impulsive act. “I think it was a moment,” Mr. Corbijn said. “I don’t think it was planned.”

The documentary, even less willing to indulge in the romance of suicide, doesn’t get into Mr. Curtis’s death until late in the film. “The ultimate romantic application of the myth is that Ian validated his art when he died,” Mr. Savage said, adding in no uncertain terms that he thought it was nonsense.

In a sense, the process of stripping the myth away from Ian Curtis began with his widow and her plaintive, clear-eyed book. Ms. Curtis has stayed out of the publicity glare surrounding “Control.” Despite being credited as co-producer, she has not attended premieres or spoken publicly about the film until now. She recently consented to an e-mail interview.

Ms. Curtis said she spent a few days on the set and observed most of the scenes that were filmed on location, often right outside the house where she and Mr. Curtis had lived in Macclesfield, a town near Manchester. She was rendered “pretty much speechless,” she said, meeting Ms. Morton. “I think she plays Debbie in a forceful way. Samantha became the strong, determined woman I always wanted to be.” Meeting Mr. Riley, especially in character as Ian, was harder. “I didn’t know where to begin to talk to him really,” she said. “I think the difference is that Samantha could empathize with me and Sam’s role required him not to.”

Watching the shoot naturally stirred up mixed emotions. “Part of me didn’t want to see the wedding scene,” she said, “especially as it was filmed outside the very same church” in which she and Mr. Curtis were married in 1975. She was present for the filming of one of the most painful scenes: as Ian and Debbie walk home from a party, he matter-of-factly tells her he no longer loves her.

“I felt emotional, not for me, but for the characters in the movie,” Ms. Curtis said. “It really was like watching someone else. And in that way I suppose it was a kind of release.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/movies/07lim.html





Radiohead Generation Believes Music is Free

As if the record labels didn't have enough problems, now bands such as Radiohead are putting albums on the internet for nothing. Juliette Garside reports
Thom Yorke of British rock group Radiohead

Supporting a rock band used to be an act of rebellion. In the face of today's mounting music piracy, it has become an act of conscience.
Embrace digital or die, EMI told

Radiohead, the contrarian giants of British rock, last week released their seventh album on an unsuspecting public with the challenge of paying as little or as much as they chose. In Rainbows is available on the internet only, and the only compulsory charge is a 45p credit card handling fee.

In the same week indie legends The Charlatans went one better and made their new single, You Cross My Path, available from radio station Xfm's website at no charge.

"I want the people to own the music and the artists to own the copyright. Why let a record company get in the way of the music?" says Tim Burgess, the Charlatans' lead singer.

These gestures are without doubt a two-fingered salute to the fat cats at the major record labels. More worryingly for the four international companies that account for 80 per cent of worldwide music sales, they could also sound the death knell for paid-for music.

With even diehard fans paying just a few pence for their album, Radiohead are not expecting a pot of gold at the end of In Rainbows. But the band has generated a fortune's worth of pre-publicity by making the release national news. And all this without the usual rigmarole of sending promotional copies to music reviewers and radio stations, only to see pirated versions all over the internet before the CD even reaches the shops.

When Prince wanted to publicise his 21-night residency at London's O2 Arena, he distributed his album as a covermount on a national newspaper. Artists with international pulling power are using the physical CD as a sampler for the real money-spinner – box office sales.

Free can work for new bands, too. It is already two years since Arctic Monkeys were propelled into music history by a fanbase that had discovered their music through illegal file sharing. With nothing to lose, they embraced free music distribution via platforms such as MySpace and eventually found a way to sell records too.

Alan McGee, who made Oasis a household name when he ran Creation Records and now manages the Charlatans, says: "It is definitely the beginning of the end of the old model. Trying to fight against these initiatives is like trying to close the stable door once the horse has bolted. With the losses in CD sales, the band will get paid more by more people coming to the gigs and buying merchandise. I believe it's the future business model."

Artists are increasingly making their fortunes from live events rather than records. In North America alone, figures by industry monitor Pollstar show ticket sales have more than doubled to $3.6bn (£1.8bn) in the past five years. The Rolling Stones made $139m from touring last year, and more the year before. Stuck behind computer screens all day, we enjoy our mass gatherings, and those who followed the Stones in their youth can afford £200 to see them on stage today.

With both new and established acts now capable of making money without the backing of a big company, McGee says record labels are being left out of the loop. He scoffs at their efforts to make up lost ground by developing into "multimedia entertainment companies that can manage bands and share in live income".

But try they must. Revenues from record sales in Britain have dropped by more than £130m since 2004. The true cost to the industry could be far greater. TNS, the market researcher, looked at the spending habits of file-sharers between 2003 and 2005 and estimated a £1bn loss to the country in retail spend.

The fall in income from CDs cannot be blamed solely on the web. The fortunes of specialist retailers such as HMV and Tower Records have declined because of undercutting by supermarkets such as Tesco and online shops such as Amazon, which in turn has hit profits at the labels.

The result has been consolidation. The European Commission has finally approved the Sony BMG merger, and EMI chief executive Eric Nicoli has handed over the keys to private equity. Financier Guy Hands now owns the biggest British music company, via his Terra Firma vehicle, and one of his exit strategies is likely to be a sale of the recorded music division to America's Warner Music Group.

Before then, Hands will have to worry about not only the decline in the price of CDs but the fact that file sharing among web-weaned youngsters has led to a change in attitudes towards paying for music.

"This is completely different to the home taping issue we had years ago," says the BPI, which represents record labels. "The reality of file sharing is a mass vehicle for copyright theft and it is absolutely undermining our whole business."

James, an 18-year-old studying in Sheffield, spends £30 a month on music but also uses Limewire, file-sharing software that gives users access to unlimited free — and illegal — downloads. He decided to pay 9p for his copy of In Rainbows.

"There is a generation growing up that believes music is free. All my friends are web-literate and regularly download music. They are unwilling to fork out what is generally considered to be an unreasonably high price for albums. However, they will buy an album if the band means a lot to them. Radiohead, on the other hand, simply do not need the money so I only gave them 9p. I haven't lost any sleep over it yet."

Charlotte, an 18-year-old A-level student from London, became a file-sharing addict when she discovered Limewire and downloaded more than 300 songs. She has now discovered Bitlord, which lets her download TV series and movies.

"You can set it up in the morning, come home from school and it's done," says Charlotte. "Everybody does it. I don't think many people know it's illegal. It's not like you're going into a shop and stealing something."

After years of protectionism and prosecuting file sharers, the majors have begun to explore new distribution methods and business models.

They are beginning to accept that legal digital downloads are unpopular because most of them contain software which prevents piracy, but also prevents users from transferring songs between, say, a computer and an iPod or a mobile phone.

Labels make just 10 per cent of their income from digital sales, and without wider adoption legal downloads have no hope of replacing lost CD revenues.

EMI was the first to buckle, releasing tracks by Lily Allen and others in unprotected form. In August, Universal Music Group began a six-month trial with unprotected downloads, distributing them through Google and Amazon.

Simon Gavin, head of Universal's A&M UK label, is among those leading the group's search for non-traditional revenues. He says giving away music sets a dangerous precedent. "It doesn't allow any reinvestment in new bands. Our superstar artists are on the roster to fund new music."

Gavin recently left Polydor Records to launch A&M's British arm with the aim of signing half-a-dozen unknown bands. Not all of them are expected to wash their faces through record sales. Instead, A&M puts £100,000 or so into funding tours and merchandise in exchange for a share of the takings. For Gothic gore band The Horrors, who can sell out venues of 1,000 people without topping the charts, tickets and flick combs will bring in more than CDs.

Gavin is also open to the Fame Academy route of breaking new talent, and A&M has launched a search for a new band on Channel 4, with sponsorship from Sony Ericsson and Orange. "What we get is the act and a serious profile immediately. You are leapfrogging 18 months of artist development, which is the costly part."

EMI, meanwhile, is having some success in generating new forms of income through its music publishing arm, which collects revenues on behalf of songwriters rather than performers.

Sales of CDs and downloads still account for the largest chunk of its income. But nearly 27 per cent is now generated by licensing music for games, mobile phone ringtones, even singing toy fish and lyrics printed on jeans.

Alison Wenham of the Association of Independent Music believes the CD will continue to find its way into music collections, but as a premium collector's item.

"It's hard to compete with free. It's our challenge to monetise usage which does not necessarily involve purchase." She points to alternatives such as sharing advertising revenues with YouTube in exchange for free music videos, or advertising-funded music downloads.

Not all is lost for the major labels. While people continue to buy music, they are still unbeatable as distributors of the physical product. Radiohead's managers admitted last week they were in search of a record company with the infrastructure to deliver the CD once it is released. The music industry is dead. Long live the music industry!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/mai...ccmusic107.xml





Sony BMG Exec Predicts Big Digital Sales In 2008
FMQB

Speaking at the Digital Music Forum West 2007, Sony BMG President of Global Digital Business & U.S. Sales Thomas Hesse addressed the future of online music sales and predicted they will make up a huge chunk of the company's income in 2008.

“2007 has been a difficult year”, said Hesse, who was the morning keynote speaker, according to DigitalMusicForum.com. He revealed that 30 percent of Sony BMG music sales are digital in the U.S. this year, and the company is projecting that number to reach 40 percent in 2008. "Unfortunately it is less abroad and it is not enough to make up for the overall decline in sales," he added.

Hesse also projected approximately 17 percent of Sony BMG's global sales coming from digital music in 2007. "We have seen a flattening of growth in the ring-tone business this year, but we see much potential in ringback tones. It is huge in Korea. Then we have the full track downloads to phone that is another big opportunity. Ultimately, all you can eat music services on the phone and sales of phones preloaded with music I think are the winning formulas”, Hesse said.

He concluded that he sees the "glass is half full" when it comes to digital music, "but we need to make access easier, the offerings more compelling and allowing music to be freely shared on social networks. That is the future."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=489106





'Classic TV' DVDs Weren't What Buyers Expected
Mike King

Let the DVD buyer beware.

Fans of vintage U.S. television programs around the world complain they have been duped over the Internet by a Montreal company.

On a popular consumer complaint website, dozens of them point the finger at Garcia Media Group Inc. and an associated website, tvboxset.com.

Westmount resident Brian Wrench said he recently had a bad experience ordering programs through tvboxset.com.

At the end of June, Wrench bought what was advertised on the site as all 278 uncut episodes of the Carol Burnett Show, spanning 11 seasons on eight DVDs.

The website, billing itself as "Your #1 Resource for Rare or Hard to Find DVDs," promises the regularly priced $139.99 box set on sale for $89.99 contains "excellent video and audio quality, 100 per cent in chronological order, commercial free and unedited," complete with "custom artwork and episode guides so you can find your favourite episode at any time."

That's not quite what Wrench received.

During a visit to Wrench's home yesterday, a Gazette reporter viewed a poor-quality program obviously taped from television. A logo for TV Land (a channel specializing in classic programming) appeared on the bottom left-hand side of the screen. Rather than the advertised original Carol Burnett Show, the programming Wrench received is a 48-hour Carol Burnett and Friends marathon, including some repeat episodes that were broadcast on TV Land. There was no sign of the custom artwork or an episode guide.

"I'm sorry they sent anything at all, since it was clearly just to cover themselves after they got inquiries from AMEX (he had paid by American Express)," said Wrench, who noted it took seven weeks to receive a product from a company in the same city.

Jeff Tabares, identifying himself as head of marketing and advertising campaigns for tvboxset.com, said Wrench's order was "duly delivered" last week. He said he was unaware there was a problem with the product.

Tabares explained that at tvboxset, "we buy bulk and resell." Although he wouldn't say from whom the firm buys, he admitted "we don't verify the product (before reselling it)."

There has been "a snowball effect of people jumping to conclusions for about the past month and asking for refunds" because of postings on ripoffreport.com , he said.

The site allows unhappy consumers to alert others to companies or individuals they have had problems with. It has been flooded with complaints from people saying they have been scammed by the Garcia Media Group and websites associated with it.

Despite dozens of complaints and demands for refunds on ripoffreport, Tabares said: "We were rarely asked for refunds before now. We're issuing a lot of refunds lately because of the (web) postings."

An executive at Montreal's SXR Inc., who asked that his name not be published, said his firm had been subcontracted by Garcia Media to process credit card orders for tvboxset in the past, but is now doing only damage control on behalf of Garcia, resolving delivery complaints.

He said his firm was asked to set up a customer service program to deal with what he described as "an issue with shipping that started about a month ago and caused a backlog." He said a toll-free line and email address - 877-797-7973 and tvboxset@sxr.ca - are available "to assure (customers) this is not a ripoff or scam."

As far as complaints about the quality of the products received, he acknowledged having "heard that," but said he couldn't comment.

During his firm's involvement with Garcia Media, he said, dissatisfied customers have always been reimbursed. In cases where the product was under $100, he said, customers were often allowed to keep it in addition to the refund.

The Quebec registry of companies lists Garcia Media's corporate headquarters at 5764 Monkland Ave., Suite 137. But that office number refers to a rented mailbox at the Core Business Centre located at the address, rather than an actual office.

François Garcia, named as president, administrator, secretary, treasurer and major shareholder of the firm, couldn't be reached because Garcia Media Group doesn't have a listed phone number.

Company lawyer Stephen Simmons of the firm Greenspoon Perreault said his client claims "he's being flamed by his competitors." (Flaming refers to the berating of a person in an Internet newsgroup, web forum or email list.)

"They are aware of that website (www.ripoffreport.com) and are taking steps (to deal with it)."

The Gazette attempted to arrange an interview last week with someone at Garcia Media through Simmons. But it was Tabares rather than someone from Garcia Media who returned the call.

Meanwhile, the Better Business Bureau of Montreal confirmed there has been "an enormous amount of people contacting us" with complaints from across Canada and the United States for at least the past three months.

Because the Garcia Media Group isn't a BBB member, however, the complainants are referred to Quebec's consumer protection office.

But Jean-Jacques Préaux, spokesperson for the Office de la protection du consommateur du Québec, said there isn't a file on Garcia because no formal complaints have been filed.

Canada Post - which is used to deliver the products - has an internal investigation under way, spokesperson Manon Clément confirmed.

"It seems like a pretty big dossier," she said, noting the company under investigation "is a client operating under a number of names."

The RCMP, Sûreté du Québec and Montreal police departments said they neither confirm nor deny that they are investigating individuals or firms.

If Garcia Media or anyone associated with it is dealing in bootlegs of copyrighted material, there are legal consequences.

David Collier, an intellectual property lawyer at Ogilvy Renault LLP consulted by The Gazette, said, "Any unauthorized reproduction of work protected by copyright is an infringement of the Copyright Act and is also a criminal offence under the federal Copyright Act."

Copyright holders have many recourses if they can prove infringement, Collier said.

"They can sue for damages, lost profits, statutory and punitive damages."

Disgruntled customers at ripoffreport.com complain they either did not receive their orders or got programs obviously taped from television rather than originals from copyright holders like Paramount Pictures Corp.

When contacted in Hollywood, the piracy department of Paramount Pictures Corp. - which owns the rights to the Carol Burnett Show - referred the matter to the Motion Picture Association of America, which serves as the voice of the film, home video and TV industries. MPAA spokesperson Kori Bernards in Los Angeles didn't immediately comment.

There is some protection for people who either don't receive their orders from websites or catalogues or are sent unoriginal material.

"It is general policy that if you do not receive the goods or services you purchased with your MasterCard card, you're entitled to a refund," Julie Wilson, director of public affairs for MasterCard Canada Inc., said from Toronto.

"It is important to gather all the information - receipts, email confirmations, etc. - and contact your card issuer as early as possible so your issuer can review your situation on an individual basis. The contact information for the card issuer can be found on the back of the payment card used to make the purchase."

Visa Canada and American Express Canada have similar policies.
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html





Electronic Arts to Add 2 Video Game Studios to Its Stable
AP

Seeking to fill gaps in its product lineup, video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. said Thursday it will acquire two software studios from Elevation Partners in a deal worth $860 million, the largest in its history.

The studios, BioWare Corp. and Pandemic Studios, are known for their action, adventure and role-playing games. Elevation owns their parent, VG Holding Corp.

EA, the world's No.1 video game publisher, is known for blockbusters such as "The Sims" and "Madden NFL," but it has at times had less than 10 percent of the lucrative market for role-playing, action and adventure games.

"These guys are powerhouses there, and this acquisition puts us in a strong competitive position now," Frank Gibeau, president of EA Games said in an interview.

Under the terms of the deal, EA will pay VG stockholders up to $620 million in cash and issue as much as $155 million in equity to some of the company's employees. The shares will be subject to certain time- and performance-restricted vesting criteria.

Redwood City-based EA will also assume about $50 million in outstanding VG stock options and has agreed to lend VG up to $35 million until the deal closes.

Company officials declined to elaborate on the financial terms.

Prior to this deal, EA's largest acquisition was its $680 million purchase of mobile game publisher Jamdat Mobile Inc. in 2006.

BioWare and Pandemic have a total of 10 games under development. Together, they employ about 800 people in Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, as well as in Canada and Australia.

Microsoft Corp. is planning to publish BioWare's Mass Effect game next month, and the studio is in the early stages of developing a multiplayer online game, EA said. Pandemic is planning to release "Mercenaries 2: World in Flames" and "Saboteur."

"We did this deal because we think it's going to accelerate our growth dramatically," Gibeau said.

The acquisition, which is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approval, is expected to close in January.

EA expects the deal to lower its 2008 earnings by about 30 to 40 cents per share. EA shares fell $1.22, or 2 percent, to close at $58.69 Thursday but regained $1.26 in extended trading following the news.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071011/...os_acquisition





FCC Won't Probe Disclosure of Phone Records

The head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission declined to investigate reports that phone companies turned over customer records to the National Security Agency, citing national security concerns, according to documents released on Friday.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin turned down a congressional request for an investigation as a top intelligence official concluded it would "pose an unnecessary risk of damage to the national security," according to a letter National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell sent to Martin on Tuesday.

Intelligence officials "support your determination not to initiate an investigation," McConnell wrote to Martin.

At issue are reports last year that some big telephone companies allowed the U.S. government access to millions of telephone records for an antiterrorism program.

The reports have prompted scrutiny by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Democratic Rep. Edward Markey, the chairman of a key Energy and Commerce subcommittee, asked Martin to investigate.

In his response, Martin included Tuesday's letter from McConnell. A representative for the FCC declined further comment.

Markey, of Massachusetts, said McConnell's stance was "unsurprising given that this administration has continually thwarted efforts by Congress to shed more light on the surveillance program."

"I believe the agency could conduct its own examination of such reports in a way that safeguards national security," Markey said in a statement.

The Energy and Commerce Committee also asked AT&T, Verizon Communications and Qwest Communications International on Tuesday to describe how U.S. government agencies sought to obtain information about customer telephone and Internet use.
http://www.news.com/FCC-wont-probe-d...3-6212116.html





AT&T Issues 'Censorship' Mea Culpa
Paul McNamara

As promised yesterday, AT&T has come across with new terms-of-use language that it hopes – a hope I share, frankly – will put to an end the tempest over the company’s alleged taste for tamping down public criticism.

According to an e-mail received from AT&T an hour ago:

AT&T will clarify the language in its Internet Terms of Service agreements to reiterate the company’s commitment to freedom of speech and open dialogue…whether that be via the Internet or elsewhere on the AT&T network.

AT&T’s Terms of Service follow the company’s longstanding respect for our customers’ freedom of speech, and clarifies that we will not terminate or suspend a customers’ Internet access service based upon their political views or criticism of AT&T. Our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy are designed to protect our customers, the public, and our network and the facilities used to provide service. As a responsible corporate citizen, we will review any complaints surrounding material that’s in violation of the law, compromises our network, or is abusive or otherwise threatening to the safety of any individual or group.

Specifically, the adjusted language will read:

5.1 Suspension/Termination. AT&T respects freedom of expression and believes it is a foundation of our free society to express differing points of view. AT&T will not terminate, disconnect or suspend service because of the views you or we express on public policy matters, political issues or political campaigns. However, AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; or (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines. Your Service may be suspended or terminated if your payment is past due and such condition continues un-remedied for thirty (30) days. Termination or suspension by AT&T of Service also constitutes termination or suspension (as applicable) of your license to use any Software. AT&T may also terminate or suspend your Service if you provide false or inaccurate information that is required for the provision of Service or is necessary to allow AT&T to bill you for Service.

We feel that the clarifying language better reflects our actual long-held policy, which respects AT&T’s customers' rights to freely voice their opinions and concerns.

In addition, we are in the process of reviewing our entire Terms of Service to ensure it reflects AT&T’s ongoing and unblemished commitment to freedom of expression as outlined in the language above.

Our customers are our highest priority and we regret any confusion this may have caused.

The nitpicking will begin in 5, 4, 3, 2 … go.

(Update: Meanwhile, in another fine-print matter that is certain to have more real-life impact on more real-life AT&T customers, the company has knuckled under to pressure from the state of California and agreed that it will no longer exact payment from customers for calls made from lost or stolen cell phones. Heck, even the credit-card industry -- hardly known for its compassion -- doesn't try to get away with robbing the victim in such a cold-hearted way.)
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/20460





Radio Stations Want Congress to Look into Major Label Recording Contracts
Nate Anderson

Like a sunburned, squinting stranger riding into some tumbleweed town, the National Association of Broadcasters has called out the RIAA for a high-noon showdown before Congress. The NAB this week sent a letter to Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) suggesting that Berman's committee take a closer look at how labels pay—or don't pay—their artists. It's retaliation for the RIAA's attempt to force radio broadcasters to pay more to use music on the air, but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

At a hearing earlier this year, the big record labels and artists like Judy Collins showed up in Washington to ask the government for money. Not directly, of course; instead, they want the government to force radio stations to pay a performance royalty for the music that they use. Webcasters, satellite radio, and other broadcasters already pay this royalty, but radio stations have never been required to do so. They do pay money to the songwriters, but the performers and labels get nothing because radio is understood to be free promotion for a band.

With CD sales tanking, the RIAA now wants radio to pay up, and Rep. Berman has come out in support of their request. The pitch, made eloquently by Collins at the earlier hearing, is that aging musicians shouldn't have to spend their twilight years touring simply to pay the bills when radio stations are still playing their songs and not paying the performers a cent. Artists deserve better compensation.

In a gutsy move, the NAB agrees. Artists do deserve better compensation, and so the NAB respectfully suggests that Congress examine the notorious world of major label contracts. Should the committee not know where to begin, NAB President David Rehr offers seven helpful suggestions.

"Over the years, how much did the various record labels benefit financially from the sales of the performer witnesses at the July 31, 2007, hearing? How does that compare to the compensation actually paid to the performers who testified on the 31st?" he asks. Or again, "What is the minimum, maximum and average dollar amount the record labels receive from a performer's recording? What is the average amount that performers earn from the sale of each CD? From each download?"

This is a grossly self-interested move, of course, as it would take some of the pressure off the broadcasters and the major labels could look like the bad guys for a while, but that doesn't make it a bad idea. In fact, the more we at the Orbiting HQ consider the prospect of hearings on the matter of artist compensation, the more fascinating the idea sounds.

Interesting as it is, though, it's unlikely to distract Congressional attention from the fact that radio, alone of the broadcasters, doesn't pay a performance royalty. Basic fairness would seem to dictate either that webcasters also get a reprieve from the royalty or that radio cough up too, but webcasters don't have the incredible lobbying clout that the NAB has wielded in DC for decades.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...contracts.html





XM Shareholders To Vote Nov. 13 On Satellite Merger
FMQB

XM Satellite Radio shareholders will vote on November 13 on the proposed merger between the two companies. Shareholders of record as of October 1 are eligible to vote at the meeting. According to Reuters, Sirius has filed a preliminary proxy statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, announcing it will also hold its own meeting that day as well in New York City for a vote on issuing shares to complete the deal.

Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin taped an appearance on The Charlie Rose Show earlier this week, and revealed the Department of Justice is looking for further information in its investigation into the deal. "They continue to ask for information," Karmazin said, according to the New York Post. "We still think the timetable will be in the fourth quarter."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=488336





Kwik-Fit Sued Over Staff Radios
BBC

A car repair firm has been taken to court accused of infringing musical copyright because its employees listen to radios at work.

The action against the Kwik-Fit Group has been brought by the Performing Rights Society which collects royalties for songwriters and performers.

At a procedural hearing at the Court of Session in Edinburgh a judge refused to dismiss the £200,000 damages claim.

Kwik-Fit wanted the case brought against it thrown out.

Lord Emslie ruled that the action can go ahead with evidence being heard.

The PRS claimed that Kwik-Fit mechanics routinely use personal radios while working at service centres across the UK and that music, protected by copyright, could be heard by colleagues and customers.

It is maintained that amounts to the "playing" or "performance" of the music in public and renders the firm guilty of infringing copyright.

The Edinburgh-based firm, founded by Sir Tom Farmer, is contesting the action and said it has a 10 year policy banning the use of personal radios in the workplace.

Playing music

The PRS lodged details of countrywide inspection data over the audible playing of music at Kwik-Fit on more than 250 occasions in and after 2005.

It claimed that its pleadings in the action were more than enough to allow a hearing of evidence in the case at which they would expect to establish everything allegedly found and recorded at inspection visits.

Lord Emslie said: "The key point to note, it was said, was that the findings on each occasion were the same with music audibly 'blaring' from employee's radios in such circumstances that the defenders' [Kwik-Fit] local and central management could not have failed to be aware of what was going on."

The judge said: "The allegations are of a widespread and consistent picture emerging over many years whereby routine copyright infringement in the workplace was, or inferentially must have been, known to and 'authorised' or 'permitted' by local and central management."

He said that if that was established after evidence it was "at least possible" that liability for copyright infringement would be brought home against Kwik-Fit.

But Lord Emslie said he should not be taken as accepting that the PRS would necessarily succeed in their claims.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...st/7029892.stm





Google and I.B.M. Join in ‘Cloud Computing’ Research
Steve Lohr

Even the nation’s elite universities do not provide the technical training needed for the kind of powerful and highly complex computing Google is famous for, say computer scientists. So Google and I.B.M. are announcing today a major research initiative to address that shortcoming.

The two companies are investing to build large data centers that students can tap into over the Internet to program and research remotely, which is called “cloud computing.”

Both companies have a deep business interest in this new model in which computing chores increasingly move off individual desktops and out of corporate computer centers to be handled as services over the Internet.

Google, the Internet search giant, is the leader in this technology. But companies like Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and Microsoft have built Internet consumer services like search, social networking, Web e-mail and online commerce that use cloud computing. In the corporate market, I.B.M. and others have built Internet services to predict market trends, tailor pricing and optimize procurement and manufacturing.

Behind these services are data centers that typically use thousands of processors, store countless libraries of data and engage specialized software to tackle what scientists call Internet-scale computing challenges. This new kind of data-intensive supercomputing often involves scouring the Web and other data sources in seconds or minutes for patterns and insights.

Most of the innovation in cloud computing has been led by corporations, but industry executives and computer scientists say a shortage of skills and talent could limit future growth.

“We in academia and the government labs have not kept up with the times,” said Randal E. Bryant, dean of the computer science school at Carnegie Mellon University. “Universities really need to get on board.”

Six universities will be involved in the initiative. They are Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Maryland and the University of Washington.

Google is building a data center, at an undisclosed location, that will contain more than 1,600 processors by the end of the year. I.B.M. is also setting up a data center for the initiative.

The centers will run an open-source version of Google’s data center software, and I.B.M. is contributing open-source tools to help students write Internet programs and data center management software.

The data centers under way have a small fraction of the computing firepower behind Google’s Internet search service. But they will be big enough, scientists say, to do ambitious Internet research. Setting up and running such centers, including providing the electricity and technical staff, is difficult and expensive. The two companies, a person who was told of their plans said, have committed a total of $30 million over two years for the project.

“This is a huge contribution because it allows for a type of education and research that we can’t do today,” said Edward Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington.

The companies’ and academics’ long-term goal is to expand the data-center clusters so students from many schools can participate and to enlist the support of other companies and the federal government.

The companies and university scientists involved in the initiative have talked to the National Science Foundation and other agencies.

The collaboration began after a meeting in December between Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, and Samuel J. Palmisano, I.B.M.’s chief executive, at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Schmidt recalled that he had sketched out his vision of cloud computing on a whiteboard, emphasizing its potential economic and social importance, and urged the I.B.M. chief to cooperate to build the skills needed.

At the time, Mr. Palmisano said, he had just come out of a day of technology briefings at I.B.M., and his company is doing a lot of research in the same field. I.B.M. also has deep knowledge and experience in building and managing complex data centers.

Mr. Schmidt said, “I.B.M. has some of the best technology in the industry, and we couldn’t have done this without them.”

Mr. Palmisano noted that cooperation between the two companies was easier because Google is mainly a consumer company, while I.B.M. concentrates on the corporate market. “We’re more complementary than anything else,” Mr. Palmisano said. “We don’t really collide in the marketplace.”

And by helping university students, I.B.M. and Google hope to help themselves in the marketplace.

“We’re trying to create the easiest possible on-ramp for universities into this world of cloud computing,” said Stuart I. Feldman, a vice president of engineering at Google and a former senior researcher at I.B.M. “But yes, this kind of computing is core value to Google and I.B.M. We have an interest, no doubt.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/te...y/08cloud.html





Google Founders Pick Up Another Big Plane
Miguel Helft

Google’s billionaire founders, owners of a Boeing 767 that has been the talk of Silicon Valley, are apparently adding another unusually large private jet to their fleet: a Boeing 757.

Like the Boeing 767, and two other jets operated by a company controlled by Google’s most senior executives, the Boeing 757 has landing rights at Moffett Field, a NASA-operated airfield that is a few miles from Google’s Mountain View campus.

News of the new plane surfaced on Wednesday when the NASA Ames Research Center, which operates Moffett Field, released the text of a July agreement between the space agency and H211 LLC, a company controlled by Google’s top brass. The release was in response to a request filed by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act. On page 37, a table shows the four planes that are included in the agreement: two Gulfstream Vs, the Boeing 767 and the Boeing 757. A footnote adds that the 757 is not expected to start flying out of Moffett Field until November.

“When we negotiated this deal with H211 LLC, they requested that we build into the arrangement a 757, which at the time they had not purchased or leased,” said Steve Zornetzer, associate director for institutions and research at the Ames Center.

A Google spokesman, Matt Furman, said the company does not own any passenger aircraft and does not have a relationship with H211. Mr. Furman said the Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, would not comment about the planes. Ken Ambrose, an H211 vice president, who signed the agreement with NASA, did not return a call seeking comment.

Google has a broad research and collaboration agreement with NASA, as well as a preliminary plan to build a large facility at Moffett Field. The agreement between NASA and H211 allows the agency to put instruments on the planes for scientific missions. The granting of the landing rights has raised questions among some local officials and residents who do not want flight traffic to increase at the airfield.

“Google has long been an active and enthusiastic supporter of NASA and its research mission,” Mr. Furman said. “Independent of but entirely consistent with that formal arrangement, our company’s senior-most executives have entered into a notable public-private partnership with the space agency. As a result of that arrangement, NASA scientists now have access to aircraft for experiments they might not otherwise be able to perform, and fees are paid for landing rights and hangar access that help significantly defray the costs of running Moffett airfield.”

The Boeing 767 is designed to carry large groups, and its effect on the environment is mitigated through the purchase of carbon offsets, Mr. Furman said.

Word that Google’s founders might have another large jet first surfaced in Valleywag last week.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1.../index.html?hp





Microsoft's Ballmer: Google Reads Your Mail
Ed Moltzen

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took a knock at one of his chief rivals during a speech to an audience in the U.K., saying Google reads customer email as part of a failed bid to drive ad-based revenue.

The software giant's chief made the remarks during a discussion about consumer software revenue models, and Ballmer used the dialogue as an entry point to take his shot at Google. The video is available to watch via the web site Mydeo.com. Ballmer made his remarks after an audience member asked him if an advertising model could support software business in the future. The CEO said a combination of models - - commercial and ad-paid - - would go forward.

"What's a good example? Will online publications be largely ad-funded as things move from the physical world to the online world?" Ballmer said. "I think the answer is yes.

"Have we seen the migration of things even like email? . . . Our Windows Live Hotmail, in and of itself, doesn't generate much ad revenue. So we've had to put, essentially, a whole portal around it because the traffic around it is very valuable but it's not very easily monetized in the context of mail.

"Google's had the same experience, even though they read your mail and we don't," Ballmer said, to chuckles and and a couple of gasps in the audience. "That's just a factual statement, not even to be pejorative. The theory was if we read your mail, if somebody read your mail, they would know what to talk to you about. It's not working out as brilliantly as the concept was laid out."

Ballmer isn't the first to fire salvos at Google's Gmail privacy policy. Privacy advocates have been critical over the policy almost since the beginning, but the popularity of the service has skyrocketed nonetheless.

The event at which Ballmer spoke, the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Programme, took place on Oct. 1 and Lars Lindstedt, the head of Microsoft's U.K. Software Economy and Emerging Business programs, wrote about it on his blog.

Google, which operates the free Gmail service, publicly acknowledges that its "processes personal information" via cookies and on its servers, so it can provide "our products and services to users," as well as to keep its service running well.

It adds:

Google processes personal information on our servers in the United States of America and in other countries. In some cases, we process personal information on a server outside your own country. We may process personal information to provide our own services. In some cases, we may process personal information on behalf of and according to the instructions of a third party, such as our advertising partners.

Google doesn't say it "reads" email, however.

Microsoft and Google have been gearing up for a major war over software as a service and web-based applications, with Google offering Gmail and Google docs, and Microsoft offering Hotmail, Office and preparing for Windows Live Office.
http://www.crn.com/software/202300583





Tufts Research Aims to 'Read the Minds' of Computer Users
Heather Havenstein

Tufts University researchers have launched a three-year research project aimed at developing methods that would let computers respond to the brain activity of the people using the machines.

The effort is funded with a $445,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

The project will use light to measure blood flow in the brain, which can be used to identify feelings of work overload, frustration or distraction among computer users, said Robert Jacob, a computer science professor at the Medford, Mass.-based university. The computer would adjust its user interface based on the measurements of brain activity, he said.

"If the computer knew a little more about you, it could behave better," Jacob said. "If it knew your workload was increasing, maybe it could adjust the layout of the screen. If it knew which air traffic controllers were overloaded, the next incoming plane could be assigned to another controller."

Jacob and fellow project team member Sergio Fantini, a Tufts biomedical engineering professor, will use functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technology, which uses light to monitor the brain's blood flow to determine stress levels, Jacob said.

While light normally passes through human tissue, it is absorbed when it encounters oxygenated or deoxygenated hemoglobin, Jacob added. Researchers believe that a flow of oxygenated blood to a certain area of the brain happens to replenish blood that is used for taxing tasks.

As part of the project, computer users will wear futuristic-looking headbands that shine light on their foreheads. The devices will measure what areas of the brain are absorbing the light as the users perform increasingly difficult tasks, Jacob said. The information will be relayed to the computer, which will use machine-learning techniques to adjust the user interface.

Jacob said that one challenge facing researchers is ensuring that the system makes only gradual changes to the interface to avoid jarring users.

"We're picking up very lightweight, subtle information," Jacob said. "We're not always sure we're getting perfect information, so we have to respond in a lightweight way. We've got to respond in gentle ways."

The researchers are presenting the results of early tests to determine how user workloads can be monitored using fNIRS this week at the Association for Computing Machinery symposium in Newport, R.I.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...tsrc =hm_list





Adobe Confirms PDF Backdoor, Offers Unsupported Workaround
Ryan Naraine

Adobe has fessed up to a dangerous code execution vulnerability affecting software programs installed on millions of Windows machines.

The flaw, publicly disclosed more than three weeks ago, could allow hackers to use rigged PDF files to take control of Window XP computers with Internet Explorer 7 installed.

The bug affects Adobe Reader 8.1 and earlier versions, Adobe Acrobat Standard, Professional and Elements 8.1 and earlier versions, and Adobe Acrobat 3D.

In a pre-patch advisory, Adobe offered a complicated (and unsupported) workaround for its customers and promised a comprehensive fix will be ready before the end of October 2007.

The workaround involves disabling the mailto: option in Acrobat, Acrobat 3D 8 and Adobe Reader by modifying the application options in the Windows registry.

In its advisory, Adobe provided step-by-step instructions for manual editing of the registry but Windows users should be aware that careless registry editing can cause serious problems.

Adobe’s public acknowledgment comes a day after Heise Security warned of similar URI handling bugs affecting a wide range of Windows applications. These include Skype (silently fixed), AOL’s Netscape browser, mIRC and Miranda.

According to security alerts aggregator Secunia, this is a “highly critical” Windows vulnerability that should be fixed by Microsoft but Redmond’s security response officials have no such plans, insisting it is “very difficult” to put protections in place without breaking existing applications.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=566





Hackers Could Skew US Elections
Jessica Marshall

The web may not deserve its reputation as a great democratic tool, security experts say. They predict voters will increasingly be targeted by internet-based dirty tricks campaigns, and that the perpetrators will find it easier to cover their tracks.

While politicians have been quick to embrace the internet as an enabler for democracy, established security threats like spam emails and botnets – collections of "zombie" computers remotely controlled by hackers – all open new avenues for fraudulent campaigning. So said experts at an e-crime summit at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania last week.

Dirty tricks are not new. On US election day in 2002, the lines of a "get-out-the-voters" phone campaign sponsored by the New Hampshire Democratic Party were clogged by prank calls. In the 2006 election, 14000 Latino voters in Orange County, California, received letters telling them it was illegal for immigrants to vote.

But in those cases the Republican Party members and supporters were traced and either charged or named in the press. Online dirty tricks will be much less easy to detect, security researchers say.

Misinformation campaigns

Spam email could be used against voters, experts say, by giving the wrong location for a polling station, or, as in the Orange County fraud, incorrect details about who has the right to vote. Although a low proportion of people fall for spam emails, a larger audience can be reached than with posted letters, and in close races every voter counts.

Telephone attacks like the New Hampshire prank calls would be harder to trace if made using internet telephony instead of landlines, says Rachna Dhamija of the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society.

Calls could even be made using a botnet. This would make tracing the perpetrator even harder, because calls wouldn't come from a central location. What's more, the number of calls that can be made is practically limitless.

Internet calls might also be made to voters to sow misinformation, says Christopher Soghoian at Indiana University in Bloomington. "Anonymous voter suppression is going to become a reality."

The internet allows more direct attacks on other candidates possible too, as John McCain, Republican presidential candidate hopeful, discovered. His MySpace page used an image hosted on another person's site. When that person switched the image to one stating McCain had reversed his position on gay marriage, the change was reflected on McCain's page and he was left red-faced.

'Typo domains'

Although people who saw this probably realised it was a prank, it illustrates the ease with which campaign material can be altered with little chance of being caught. Making this kind of attack on hard-copy media, like newspapers or campaign leaflets, is near-impossible without leaving evidence that could lead to prosecution.

Manipulation can also happen in more subtle ways. In 2006, supporters of California's Proposition 87, for a tax that would fund alternative energy, registered negative-sounding domains including noon87.com and noonprop87.org and then automatically routed visitors to a site touting the proposition's benefits.

Similarly, people have registered hillaryclingon.com and muttromney.com. Although merely unflattering to US presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, such "typo domains" could be used to spread malicious software or take fraudulent donations, says Oliver Friedrichs of Symantec in Mountain View, California.

Vulnerable groups

Phishing – fraudulently obtaining personal information online – has already affected politics. In 2004, a fake website purporting to be for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry stole campaign contributions, as well as users' debit-card numbers.

Campaigns are vulnerable to phishing because domain names tend not to have a predictable form – compare barackobama.com with joinRudy2008.com – making it difficult to pick the official site. Such attacks could deter people from donating online, a move that would disproportionately affect Democrats and young people, who are more likely than other groups to donate via the web.

The low probability of getting caught online, combined with the fact that anti-spam laws and "no-call" lists exempt political messages, makes the threat real. "The fact is that all of the technology for all of these things to happen is already in place," Soghoian says. "I'm not sure this will happen in 2008, but it will happen."
http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn12754





Voting Machines Giving Florida New Headache
Abby Goodnough

It used to be that everyone wanted a Florida voting machine.

After the history-making presidential recount of 2000, Palm Beach County sold hundreds of its infamous Votomatic machines to memorabilia seekers, including a group of chiropractors in Arizona, the cable-news host Greta Van Susteren and the hotelier André Balazs. One machine ended up in the Smithsonian Institution. Dozens were transformed into pieces of contemporary art for an exhibition in New York.

But now that Florida is purging its precincts of 25,000 touch-screen voting machines — bought after the recount for up to $5,000 each, hailed as the way of the future but deemed failures after five or six years — no one is biting.

“I think we are going to have them on hand for a while,” said Arthur Anderson, the elections supervisor in Palm Beach County, which must jettison 4,900 touch-screen machines for which it paid $14.5 million in 2001 and still owes $4.8 million. “They are probably, for the most part, headed to the scrap pile.”

Across the nation, jurisdictions that experimented with touch-screen voting after 2000 are starting to scale back or abandon it based on a growing perception that the machines are unreliable and concern that they do not provide a paper trail in case questions arise. California will sharply scale back touch-screen voting next year after a review by the secretary of state found it was vulnerable to hackers.

Florida is the biggest state to reject touch screens so sweepingly, and its deadline for removing them, July 1, 2008, is the most imminent. For the 15 counties that must dump their expensive systems, buy new optical-scan machines and retrain thousands of poll workers, hurdles abound.

Six counties still owe a combined $33 million on their touch-screen machines, which most bought hurriedly to comply with a new federal law banning punch-card and lever voting systems after the recount. Miami-Dade County alone must cast aside 7,200 touch-screen machines, for which it paid $24.5 million and still owes $15 million.

Secretary of State Kurt S. Browning is seeking buyers for the touch screens, but he will not even begin to recoup the counties’ losses. Inquiries have come from a Veterans Affairs hospital in Miami, which hoped to convert some of the machines into “learning kiosks” for disabled patients, and the Century Village retirement community in Palm Beach County, which wanted them for condo association elections.

Sequoia Voting Systems, which manufactured some of Florida’s machines, offered to buy them back for a bleak $1 apiece.

“We’re not accepting that offer,” said Sterling Ivey, a spokesman for the Florida Division of Elections. “We can get more for our money.”

So far, Mr. Ivey said, the most likely options are selling the machines to recycling companies that would strip them for parts — from the wheels on the voting booths to the circuit boards — or reselling them to other states or countries through one of the original vendors, Election Systems and Software of Omaha.

“We would expect a number of jurisdictions to be interested in adding to their existing voting terminals as they prepare for the 2008 general election,” said Ken Fields, a spokesman for the company.

Most of the money for the touch screens came from the federal government, and so will most for the replacement machines, which cost about $6,000 each. But with Florida county budgets tightening due to a state mandate to cut property taxes, election officials are griping.

“I think it’s a real waste of money,” said Kay Clem, the elections supervisor in Indian River County. “I don’t have my heart in it, because I think we’re going 30 years backwards.”

Under the state’s new election law, disabled voters can keep voting by touch screen — akin to using an A.T.M. — until 2012. But everyone else will use them only twice more, for the presidential primaries on Jan. 29 and municipal elections next spring. With optical scanning, voters use pens to mark paper ballots that are then read by scanning machines, leaving a paper record for recounts.

The only county that has already switched is Sarasota, where voters last year approved a charter amendment requiring a paper-ballot system. More than 18,000 votes cast on touch-screen machines were not recorded in a close Congressional race in the county last year, raising an outcry that hastened the statewide switch to optical scanning.

Sarasota County’s touch-screen machines are sequestered under court order while an investigation into last year’s election continues. Most of the other counties getting new equipment will ask the state to cart their touch screens away after the presidential primaries.

“I will get them off my hands, one way or the other,” Mr. Browning said.

Like many other county election officials, he said he still believed in touch-screen voting, calling it “a very accurate, secure, reliable system.” He supports the switch to optical scanners, Mr. Browning said, only because the public no longer trusts touch screens.

“If you were to do a very thorough study of problems with touch screens,” he said, “you would probably find that 99.9 percent of them would be traced back to human error.”

Public interest groups almost universally supported the move to optical scanning, which is now thought more reliable than touch-screen voting, if only because it leaves a paper trail.

One problem that could persist is poor ballot design, which was responsible for widespread voter confusion in Palm Beach County in 2000 and possibly for the not-recorded votes in Sarasota County last year. Mr. Browning said the state would revise its ballot design rule in time for the presidential election in 2008.

As for the displeasure of election supervisors, Mr. Browning said it was understandable given that for many this would be the third voting system in eight years.

“After a while, you get a little change-weary,” he said. “Nothing seems to be stable or constant anymore. But I am very, very hopeful that this is the last major change to voting systems in Florida for some time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/us...voting.html?hp





Googlestalking For Covert NSA Research Funding
James Hardine

Wikileaks is reporting that the CIA has funded covert research on torture techniques, and that the NSA has pushed tens or hundreds of millions into academia through research grants using one particular grant code. Some researchers try to conceal the source of funding, yet commonality in the NSA grant code prefix makes all these attempts transparent. The primary NSA grant-code prefix is "MDA904". Googling for this grant code yields 39,000 references although some refer to non-academic contracts (scolar.google.com 2,300). The grants issue from light NSA cover, the "Maryland Procurement Office" or other fronts. From this one can see the broad sweep of academic research interests being driven by the NSA.
http://science.slashdot.org/article..../10/07/2011251





Businesses Spend 20% of IT Budgets on Security, Survey Shows
K.C. Jones

Security accounted for 20 percent of technology spending last year and it's expected to rise, according to a report released Tuesday.

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) surveyed 1,070 organisations and found that on average, they spent one-fifth of their technology budgets on security-related spending in 2006. That's up from the 15 percent of IT budgets spent on security in 2005, and the 12 percent spent in 2004.

The survey results also revealed that for each dollar spent on security, about 42 cents goes toward technology product purchases. In general, 17 cents goes toward security-related processes; 15 cents covers training; 12 cents for assessments; and 9 cents pays for certification. The balance goes to other items.

TNS, a global market insight and information group, conducted the study for CompTIA, in an attempt to identify current IT security practices and highlight security challenges confronting organisations of varying sizes, in various industries.

Organisations expect to increase spending across all areas related to security in the next 12 months, CompTIA said. Almost half of the respondents said they plan to increase spending on security-related technologies. One-third of those surveyed said they expect to increase spending on security training. Those who expect to increase spending would do so by an average increase to 23 percent.

According to CompTIA, antivirus software, firewalls, and proxy servers hold the top slots for security enforcement technologies, and nearly all organisations use them. Over the past two years, organizations have increasingly relied on a layered approach, or combinations of firewalls, proxy servers, intrusion detection systems, physical access control, and multi-factor authentication, among other methods.

CompTIA has more than 22,000 member companies in over 100 countries. The association aims to advance the long-term success and growth of the IT industry. It helps individuals to obtain skills and credentials for IT careers
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/62760,...vey-shows.aspx





The 8 Most Dangerous Consumer Technologies
Mary Brandel

High-tech consumer products and services of all kinds are making their way into the workplace. They include everything from smart phones, voice-over-IP systems and flash memory sticks to virtual online worlds. And as people grow more accustomed to having their own personal technology at their beck and call -- and in fact can't imagine functioning without it -- the line between what they use for work and what they use for recreation is blurring.

In a recent survey of corporate users by Yankee Group Research Inc., 86% of the 500 respondents said they had used at least one consumer technology in the workplace, for purposes related to both innovation and productivity.

Unfortunately, this trend poses problems for IT organizations. For one thing, the use of these technologies increases the risk of security breaches. Moreover, users expect IT to support these devices and services, especially once they interact with applications in the corporate environment.

But in many companies, it would be against corporate culture to simply ban the devices or to block employees from accessing consumer services. At the same time, companies can't depend wholly on policy to maintain the level of security they need.

"I don't know of any business where employees have the time to read and comprehend every single policy related to a computer in their environment -- they're busy doing their jobs," says Sharon Finney, information security administrator at DeKalb Medical Center in DeKalb County, Ga. "I consider it my responsibility to implement things that make security seamless, easy and completely in the background."

Others, like Michael Miller, vice president of security at telecommunications services provider Global Crossing Ltd., wait until the devices or services affect productivity or otherwise cause a business problem, such as the security department battling worms or dealing with bandwidth issues. But no matter what companies decide to do, the response always involves a balance of enabling employee productivity, abiding by the corporate culture, not eating up too much of IT's own resources and ensuring a level of security that's right for the company.

"Consumerization will be a nightmare for IT departments, creating maintenance and support problems that will swiftly overwhelm IT resources, unless they embrace new approaches to managing the rogue employees," says Josh Holbrook, an analyst at Yankee Group. Holbrook equates banning the use of consumer technologies in the workplace with "an endless game of whack-a-mole." At the same time, ignoring the adoption of such technologies would lead to a potentially hazardous mix of secured and unsecured applications within a corporate enterprise, he says. He proposes ceding control to end users via an internal customer care cooperative model. (See "Zen and the art of ceding control of consumer tech to end users.")

To help you decide how to respond, below we look at eight popular consumer technologies and services that have crept into the workplace and provide some insight into how companies are achieving the balance of security, productivity and sanity.

1. Instant messaging

People use instant messaging for everything from making sure their kids have a ride home from practice to communicating with co-workers and business partners. In the Yankee study, 40% of respondents said they use consumer IM technology at work. Instant messaging present numerous security challenges. Among other things, malware can enter a corporate network through external IM clients and IM users can send sensitive company data across insecure networks.

One way to combat threats is to phase out consumer IM services and use an internal IM server. In late 2005, Global Crossing did just that when it deployed Microsoft Corp.'s Live Communications Server (LCS). Then in August 2006 it blocked employees from directly using external IM services from providers such as AOL, MSN and Yahoo. Now, all internal IM exchanges are encrypted, and external IM exchanges are protected, as they're funneled through the LCS server and Microsoft's public IM cloud.

Adopting an internal IM server also gave Global Crossing's security team more control. "Through the public IM cloud, we're able to make certain choices as to how restrictive or open we are. We can block file transfers, limit the information leaving our network or restrict URLs coming in," which was a common method for propagating worms, Miller says. "That takes away a huge component of malicious activity."

You can also take a harder line. DeKalb's security policy, for instance, bans IM use altogether. "It's mainly chat-type traffic, not personal health information, but it's still a concern," Finney says. As backup to the restrictive policy, she blocks most sites where IM clients can be downloaded, although she can't block MSN, AOL or Yahoo because many physicians use those sites for e-mail accounts. Her team also uses a network inventory tool that can detect IM clients on employee PCs. If one is found, the employee is reminded of DeKalb's no-IM policy and notified that the IM client will be removed. Finney is also considering various methods of blocking outbound IM traffic, but for now, she also uses a data loss prevention tool from Vericept Corp. to monitor IM traffic and alert the security team about any serious breaches. To do that, Finney's team needs to shut down most of its Internet ports, which forces IM traffic to scroll to Port 80 for monitoring.

DeKalb is looking into the idea of implementing the IM add-on of IBM's Lotus Notes or even an internal freeware IM service like Jabber for business users who want to communicate across campus. "Nothing is 100%," Finney says. "IM is always a huge concern from a security as well as a productivity perspective."

2. Web mail

Of the respondents to the Yankee Group survey, 50% said they use consumer e-mail applications for business purposes. The problem with consumer e-mail services such as those from Google, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo is that the users themselves don't realize how insecure their e-mail exchanges are because messages are transported over the Web and stored on the ISP's server as well as the e-mail provider's server. Without that awareness, many use no discretion about sending sensitive information such as Social Security numbers, passwords, confidential business data or trade secrets.

One approach to tightening security around Web mail is to use a tool that monitors e-mail content using keyword filters and other detection techniques and the either generates alerts regarding potential breaches or simply blocks the e-mail from being sent. For instance, WebEx Communications is considering expanding its use of a data loss prevention tool from Reconnex Inc. to include e-mail monitoring, according to Michael Machado, director of IT infrastructure.

For its part, DeKalb addresses this problem with Vericept's tool, which captures a screenshot of every Web-based e-mail that employees send, including file attachments, and scans these for company-defined sensitive data, such as Social Security numbers. Alerts are sent to Finney's team so that they can follow up with users to educate them on the dangers of sending sensitive data over the Web.

3. Portable storage devices

One of an IT manager's biggest fears, according to Holbrook, is the steady proliferation in types of portable storage, ranging from Apple iPhones and iPods to flash memory devices. "People can use these to download any number of corporate secrets or sensitive information and move it off-site, which is not where IT wants that information to be," he says.

"In the past three weeks alone, I've heard six different conversations about the risks of flash drives and portable storage devices," says Mark Rhodes-Ousley, an information security architect and author of Network Security: The Complete Reference (McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, 2003).

While it would be easy enough to lock down the USB ports on employee PCs, many security managers say this is not a recommended approach. "If people want to subvert the process, they're going to find a way to get around any barriers you put in place," Miller says. "And where do you draw the line? If you restrict USB ports and [cell] phones coming into the office that may have data storage ports, then you have to look at restricting infrared ports on devices and CD burners, and the list goes on and on."

It's better, he says, to handle the matter by educating people on how to treat the storage of sensitive information. "Most of the incidents that occur are unintentional [rather than] malicious, so that's where education comes in, as to proper handling and why it's important," Miller says.

Machado says he isn't a fan of blocking USB ports at WebEx, mainly because such a strategy would quickly devolve into users asking IT for exceptions to the rule and IT having to manage those exceptions. "Everyone has an exception that they think is important, which takes up more of IT's time than is necessary," he says.

What would be optimal, he adds, is to have a tool that sends an to people who are trying to copy files to USB drives or other unencrypted storage media, advising them that they're going against corporate policy. "Then they know they're empowered to make the decision but that it's going to be tracked and monitored," he says.

On the other hand, DeKalb's Finney says she is interested in blocking technologies and is looking into the Vericept tool's ability to either block certain types of data from being transferred to an external storage device or alert her when someone tries to plug anything into a PC that's not native to that computer. Ideally, she'd like a tool that would also remind employees that corporate policy forbids sensitive data to be stored on external devices.

Meanwhile, Michigan's Grand Valley State University and other colleges and universities where professors and students have lost flash drives with sensitive data are looking into standardizing on password- and encryption-protected USB drives to protect them in the future.

4. PDAs and smart phones

More and more employees are showing up at work with some form of smart phone or personal digital assistant, be it a BlackBerry, a Treo or an iPhone. But when they try to synch up their device's calendar or e-mail application with their own PC, it can cause problems ranging from application glitches to the blue screen of death. "Those types of problems are not uncommon -- it's the mundane things like that that can drive IT nuts," Holbrook says. "It's not how they want to be spending their time."

Moreover, should the employee quit or be fired, he can walk out the door with any information he wants, as long as the PDA or smart phone belongs to him.

Like some other companies, WebEx minimizes those possibilities by standardizing on a single brand and model of PDA and letting employees know the IT organization will only support that one device. WebEx does the same thing with laptops, which Machado notes, represent an even greater threat than PDAs because they can hold even more data. Any unapproved devices are not allowed on the WebEx network.

5. Camera phones

A hospital worker stands at a nursing station, casually chatting with the nurses. No one notices she's got a small device in her hand, on which, from time to time, she's pressing a small button. A scene from the latest spy thriller? No, a security test conducted by DeKalb's Finney.

"One of the tests I did was to go to take my cell phone to the nursing station and start clicking off photos, unbeknownst to them," she says. "I wanted to download the photos, enhance the images and see what I got -- patient information displayed on computer screens or on papers lying on the desk."

As it turns out, she didn't obtain any personally identifiable information, but she did glean the computer name (not the IP address) from the top of the photographed computer screen.

"That kind of information can add up to clues that can be compiled or combined with other information someone could get from other sources in the facility to build a plan of attack," she says.

As a follow-up, Finney added information regarding this potential security breach to DeKalb's employee orientation and security awareness programs, so people are at least aware of how risky it is to expose sensitive data for others to see -- and possibly photograph.

6. Skype and other consumer VoIP services

Another fast-growing consumer technology is Skype, a downloadable software-based service that allows users to make free Internet phone calls. In fact, 20% of the respondents to the Yankee Group study said they use Skype for business purposes.

In a business setting, the threat presented by Skype and similar services is the same as that of any consumer software downloaded to a corporate PC, Holbrook says. "Enterprise applications are highly scalable and highly secure, while consumer applications are less scalable and less secure," he says. "So anytime you download Skype or anything else, you're introducing a security risk that IT is uncomfortable with." For instance, the software can interact with every other application on the PC or network, potentially affecting the performance of every application.

Skype itself has issued at least four bulletins announcing security holes that users can patch when they download the latest version of the software. But because IT often has no idea how many users have installed Skype, let alone who has done it, there's no way for them to police these efforts.

The most secure option, and one that research firm Gartner Inc. recommends, is to block Skype traffic altogether. If a business chooses not to do that, it should actively engage in version control of Skype clients using configuration management tools and ensure that it is distributed only to authorized users, Gartner says.

7. Downloadable widgets

According to Yankee Group, consumers are using devices such as the Q and the Nokia E62 to download widgets that give them quick access to Web applications. These widgets can be easily moved to PCs, which, according to Holbrook, represent another entry point into the technology ecosystem that IT struggles to control.

The risk here is that these tiny programs use processing power on the PC and the network. And beyond that, any software that gets downloaded without being vetted represents a potential threat. "It's not more likely to be infected with a virus, but you're downloading something you might not have a lot of trust in," Holbrook says.

WebEx mitigates this risk using a threefold approach. It educates users on the risks of software downloads; it uses Reconnex to monitor what's installed on user PCs; and it disables some of the users' default access rights, restricting their download capabilities.

8. Virtual worlds

Business users are beginning to experiment with virtual worlds such as Second Life, and as they do, IT needs to become more aware of the accompanying security concerns. It would be short-sighted, Holbrook says, to simply block the use of these virtual worlds. "It's an application that people are just now figuring out how it can be useful in a business setting," he says.

At the same time, using Second Life involves downloading a large amount of executable code and putting it inside the corporate firewall, Gartner points out in a recent report. In addition, there's really no way to know the actual identities of the avatars who populate the virtual world.

One option that Gartner suggests is enabling employees to access their virtual worlds over the company's public wireless network or encourage them to do it from home. A third option is for companies to evaluate tools to create their own virtual environments that would be hosted internally within the enterprise firewall.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9034278





Data Centers Get Religion
Barbara Darrow

Are you looking for a new data center? One that promises an abundant supply of energy and offers the latest in cooling technology?

You might want to take a gander at what Boston College (BC) is doing with its new data center. Not only does it provide the latest amenities, but it boasts its very own patron saint watching over the racks of blades, storage devices and power gear.

The center, which moved to the empty St. Clement's chapel last year, features 16 stained-glass windows, one of which depicts St. Isidore (a.k.a. San Ysidro). Isidore of Seville was credited with creating the first encyclopedia, and the Vatican recently gave him purview over the World Wide Web. Now Isidore looks down at BC's glass-enclosed control center from his stained-glass perch.

BC had to make the move after outgrowing its old digs at the O'Neill Library.

The chapel, on BC's Brighton campus, has a space advantage over the library. The library's fifth-floor data center was a nonexpandable 3,000 square feet. In comparison, St. Clement's Hall is about 4,500 square feet -- enough space to add a backup generator.

In densely populated areas, IT pros must often make a hard choice between retrofitting existing sites or building a new one where land is at a premium and construction costs are high. In this case, BC's CIO found in the chapel exactly what she needed: A big chunk of space, unused and available.

"The space was so monumental, we had to take advantage of it," says Marian Moore, BC's vice president of information technology and CIO.

The challenge then was to retrofit the space for IT needs while respecting its aesthetics. To take best advantage of the chapel while preserving the windows, the architects designed a glass room -- a box within the box of the chapel -- for the operator control room.

BC removed some mainframes and started using blade servers instead, about 300 now. The old building's infrastructure couldn't have handled the blade servers' load, or the heat it would generate, Moore said. "Blades may be smaller, but they put out a lot more heat. The other major problem with the old space was there was no backup power." The latter issue was huge a couple of times when construction work cut the main utility power line, Moore says.

St. Clement's is not the only religious-themed working data center. Barcelona's MareNostrum supercomputer center, created by the Spanish government and IBM, is in a 1920s-era chapel at the Technical University of Catalonia. The chapel, secularized years ago, was available and viable -- with some work -- says Juan Jose Porta, chief architect for high-performance computing at IBM's Boeblingen Labs in Germany, who led this effort.

Back in 2003, the idea was to prove how quickly a blade-and-Linux-based supercomputer center could come together, Porta says. "We had a very tight schedule; we had to go from original design to up and running in nine months," he said.

The church had been closed for more than 50 years and during that time had served as a private estate and a school for nuns, and was then donated to the town, he explains.

There were dual challenges. First, the designers had to figure out how to control humidity, temperature and even dust. Second, the architects had to "integrate the new technology into an old building," he says.

As at BC, they put a glass cage inside the building for the operations console. While there are some big hurdles in converting older buildings to IT centers, chapels and churches offer the advantage of big open spaces and high ceilings, which actually offer an air-flow advantage over even some of the newer buildings.

MareNostrum uses air flow, front to back, as the primary means of cooling, with the air entering at 15 degrees Celsius and exiting at 32 degrees to 35 degrees Celsius. That air then enters a secondary cycle, flowing into heat exchangers that use water to suck out the accumulated heat. That warmer water is then cycled out of the system and is allowed to cool for reuse.

From sanctuary to war room

For its part, Advanced Data Centers (ADC) is using part of the old McClellan Air Force Base outside Sacramento. ADC has bought an on-base facility and is working with the local utility to make sure it has plentiful -- and economic -- power. ADC is a San Francisco-based start-up that hopes to build a business around providing energy-efficient data centers for Fortune 1,000 companies, including banks, insurance providers and retailers.

The 3,700-acre base was closed as a military site six years ago but remains an industrial and business park.

When it goes online in a bit more than a year, it will be just shy of a quarter of a million square feet, says ADC President Michael Cohen.

There are other amenities that go part and parcel with the site, including police and fire presences nearby in case of emergencies, two local power substations and room for expansion on the rest of the 3,700-acre base.

In addition, Sacramento is "not on a flood plain and is basically seismically inactive" -- important considerations in California, says Cohen.

ADC is working with Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) on the power supply aspect. SMUD is "a forward-thinking utility with a mix of renewable energy in their portfolio," Cohen says.

To make the best use of the power available, ADC is building what Cohen calls state-of-the-art HVAC systems that can cool in excess of 225 watts of power. Thus, ADC can offer air cooling as well as water-cooled cabinets to companies that need them. He thinks water cooling will be a big seller.

As microprocessors need more and more power, eventually he will need liquid cooling, Cohen believes. "We're building hot aisles and cold aisles to increase the efficiency and lower the TCO for the customer," he says.

A real bunker mentality

If you want an even more hardened environment for your data, you might look at the aptly named InfoBunker in Boone, Iowa, about an hour outside Des Moines.

It's about as hard-core as you get -- a 1960s era "purpose-built" underground site that once housed communications equipment used by the North American Aerospace Defense Command and the U.S. Air Force.

Conversion started three years ago, with the site opening for business last October, says Jason McGinnis, president of InfoBunker.

"We have two major sale pitches: One is a lot of open space. We provide standard racks and also private rooms, which have special cooling for equipment," McGinnis says.

The other is sheer security. The 65,000-square-foot, five-story site is dug deep into the ground. No one gets in without passing though the 4.5-ton steel door and then a three-step process. A scanner uses radio frequency to read the would-be entrant's skin as a biometric identifier. He then needs to use a keycard and enter a code on the keypad. This three-tier security is standard for high-level military installations, McGinnis explains.

The site itself offers the speedy network, the power and the cooling -- "everything a modern computing site needs except the computers," McGinnis says.

InfoBunker's Cold War roots show in its three-foot-thick reinforced concrete construction built to survive a "maximum probable event." That would be a 20-megaton nuclear blast at 2.5 miles away. The facility was constructed to keep operating in complete isolation mode -- cut off from the rest of the world and all its amenities -- for three months, according to InfoBunker's Web site.

Other perks: Electro Magnetic Pulse protection up to military standards, multistage air filtering to screen out particles larger than three microns. Dust and particles are not a computer's friends and can really gum up the works. Also on-site are a 16,000-gallon water supply for fire suppression, a six-day fuel reserve and a backup 750 kW generator.

The site is equipped with the Nortel communications systems and American Power Conversion power gear, including line conditioners.

Going green with renewable energy

In contrast to the data centers described above, which force-fit technology gear into existing structures, AISO.net started from scratch to build a "green" data center relying on alternative energy, says Phil Nail, chief technology officer at Affordable Internet Services Online Inc., a Web hoster and design firm in Romoland, Calif.

Aiso.net, which hosted the Live Earth Web effort, uses solar panels to run its IBM X Series servers, NetApps clustered SAN servers and a whole lot of VMware. It also relies on solar tubes to pipe in natural light and recycles its "gray" water for landscaping. Special air conditioning units monitor outside temperature so when it drops to below 60 degrees outside, the building brings that air inside.

Nail estimates the energy investment paid for itself within a few years.

The 2,000-square foot data center is steel-framed and uses no wood except for its interior door frames. Walls are 12 inches thick and are insulated with recycled material. Not to rest on its laurels, Aiso.net is now working on a green roof -- basically a rooftop garden that will be stocked with drought-resistant plants. That addition should reduce its cooling costs by more than 50%, the company says.

Aiso.net is redundant to a fare-thee-well, Nail says. "We use remote management, we have redundant monitoring servers. I even carry two cell phones on two different providers in case there's a problem with [cell] coverage," he explains.

In the mines

DeBeers Canada put the data center for its newly opened Snap Lake diamond mine into two cargo ship containers retrofitted with doors, windows and insulation for IT use. The environment is punishing. The data center is in Canada's Northwest Territories in the Arctic Circle, some 190 miles north of DeBeers' regional office in Yellowknife. Temperatures at the mine site can hit the 90s in the summer and plummet to negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter.

"We built out walls, windows and have two racks of servers and put in giant truck air conditioners on both ends," says Ben Lacasse, IT superintendent. Shipping containers don't have windows and have cargo doors instead of the usual type, so windows had to be put in after the fact.

While the mine just opened for business, the data center itself has been in operation for a year, and has handled the load and temps just fine, Lacasse said.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9041000





Securing Very Important Data: Your Own
Denise Caruso

AS long as we are willing to relinquish some personal data, Web applications have long allowed us to create virtual identities that can conduct most of the social and financial transactions that typify life in the real world.

But the newest generation of these services is starting to collect and store far more than just the standard suite of identity data — name and address, phone, Social Security or credit-card numbers — that populates the databases of banks and credit-card processors. They increasingly store information, generated by us, that is directly linked to those virtual identities.

And users are loving them.

For example, the start-up Mint.com won this year’s TechCrunch award for its Swiss Army knife approach to personal financial management. In exchange for customers uploading their account information and allowing sponsors to offer them specialized services, Mint will connect nightly to their credit-card providers, banks and credit unions. Then it automatically updates transactions and accounts, balances their checkbooks, categorizes their transactions, compares cash with debt and, based on their personal spending habits, shops for better rates on new accounts and credit cards.

A powerful project management and collaboration tool called Basecamp allows teams to store online entire project management plans, including performance targets, to-do lists, files, collaborative documents and messages. Provided by 37Signals L.L.C., based in Chicago, Basecamp has more than a million users around the world, including me.

Another site, Dopplr, from a company of the same name based in Finland, is still in its beta-test phase. It lets users upload and share their travel itineraries with a group of “trusted fellow travelers.” The site can connect with Facebook friend lists, and in September it announced that it had opened an invitation-only social network to business travelers from 100 leading companies and international organizations, including Google, I.B.M. and Nokia.

This type of sensitive, sometimes proprietary information was once locked up on hard drives or in file cabinets far away from anything resembling a global or even a local distribution network. Yet none of the users flocking to these services seem perturbed that they have relinquished personal control over this data to companies that, even with the best of intentions, may not be able to keep it safe.

The incidence of data theft — from wallets to data breaches, computer viruses or Dumpster diving — is soaring. This year alone, the security of nearly 77 million Americans’ records has been breached, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego, nearly a fourfold increase over 2006.

Governments around the world are passing and enforcing laws that increasingly hold businesses financially accountable for avoidable data losses. Just last month, the TJX Companies, which owns T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and other retail stores, made a settlement offer, subject to court approval, to victims of a huge data breach, in which 45.7 million customers’ credit- and debit-card data was exposed to identity thieves.

As a result, some security experts are starting to ask whether the “identity data-for-services” business model, which is the engine for virtually all e-commerce companies, is a fair trade — not just for consumers, but for business as well.

In response, they are coming up with new protocols and frameworks for collecting, using and governing identity data. Given that virtually all businesses today collect and use these kinds of data, they aim to shift the status quo in ways that could help companies both improve their reputations with customers and avoid the mounting legal liabilities that now face companies that lose control of customer data.

“The myth is that companies have to know all this information about you in order to do business with you,” said Drummond Reed, vice president for infrastructure at Parity Communications, an identity technology company in Needham, Mass. “But from a liability perspective, the less I know about my customers the better.”

Parity is sponsoring a number of open software projects to shift more control to the users whose identity data is at risk. One of the most intriguing is called the CloudTripper Project, which is developing a way for individuals to “take their data with them” as they traverse the Web, just as they keep their wallets and checkbooks with them as they move around in the real world.

Another project, the Identity Governance Framework, aims to help organizations comply with national and international regulations, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It establishes a new approach for securely sharing and auditing sensitive personal information, and has been widely embraced by major enterprise software vendors as well as providers of identity technology. While such projects are helping to close security gaps that should have been addressed long ago, at least one security expert says that such efforts are trying in vain to solve a social problem with technology.

“We’re in a situation where business holds all the cards,” said Mike Neuenschwander, vice president and research director of identity and privacy strategies at the Burton Group, a technology research and advisory service based in Midvale, Utah. “Businesses put the deal in front of the consumer, they control the playing field and the consumer doesn’t have any say in how the deal plays out.”

ONE way to change this, he said, is to make people more like organizations.

To this end, Mr. Neuenschwander and his colleagues have floated the intriguing concept of the L.L.P.: the Limited Liability Persona. This persona would be a legally recognized virtual person in which users could “invest” the financial or identity resources of their choosing.

Once their individual personas are created, consumers would be able to use them as their legal “alter ego,” even in financial transactions. “My L.L.P. would have its own mailing address, its own tax ID number, and that’s the information I’d give when I’m online,” Mr. Neuenschwander said. Other benefits include the ability for “personas” to limit their financial exposure in ways that individuals cannot.

“When you enter into a relationship with a company and give them your personal information, you’re at tremendous risk — and they aren’t,” he said.

“In the U.S., certain kinds of personal information aren’t treated like property at all. It’s very difficult to sue someone for misuse of personal information. And even if you do, they can never give you back your mailing address, your Social Security number or your DNA, for that matter.”

But if a company loses or tampers with an L.L.P’s data, “the law allows me to sue them because it’s corporate information,” Mr. Neuenschwander said. “It’s digital-rights management,” he added, referring to the access control technologies used by publishers and other copyright holders to limit use of digital media, “only you’re acting on behalf of your own organization.”

Mr. Reed of Parity agreed. “Companies use digital-rights management technology to protect their data from us,” he said. “But they’d be better off if we used it to protect our data from them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/te...y/07frame.html





CT Gov. Orders Confidential Data on State Laptops Encrypted or Purged; AG Calls Response to Stolen Computer Inadequate
Don Michak

Gov. M. Jodi Rell, saying that last month's theft of a state computer containing personal information on 106,000 Connecticut taxpayers was "an accident that never should have happened," has ordered tighter controls on the use of restricted or confidential data on state laptops, Blackberries, and other mobile computing devices.
Under a policy the governor announced Monday, all state agencies are to be required to encrypt any data on a mobile device and require additional protections from unauthorized access and disclosure.

Rell said the policy would be implemented by the Department of Information Technology, which she directed to speed up approval of the new encryption tools and selection of a vendor or vendors.

A DOIT spokeswoman, Nuala M. Forde Whelton said Tuesday that the agency had been working on that task before the Department of Revenue Services' computer was stolen and that it was considering "a variety of encryption products out in the marketplace."

"DOIT's challenge is to select a methodology that is usable across the state agencies," she said, noting that the 14 largest agencies now own a total of between 2,500 and 3,000 laptops and some 600 Blackberries. "It's critical that the correct combination of methods and products be selected."

Whelton added that DOIT's task is complicated by the relatively rapid proliferation of laptops and portable devices among state agencies as they prepare "for some type of interruption in the event of a disaster or pandemic flu and their facilities become unavailable."

The spokeswoman also suggested that the purchase of the new encryption technology would be expensive, but said she could make no ballpark estimate of the cost.

Rell on Monday also directed agencies to assess and purge "sensitive data" on state laptop computers and portable storage devices "if there is no compelling business need for the information to be stored on those devices."

"Personal information should not leave the security of state facilities except under certain carefully controlled circumstances - and then it should be safeguarded in every way," the governor said.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal criticized the Department of Revenue Services for its "inadequate" response to the Aug. 17 theft, which he characterized as a "massive security breach" in a letter sent Monday to DRS Commissioner Pam Law.

Blumenthal said the tax agency needed to take "stronger measures" to safeguard the taxpayers at risk of identity theft, urging it to provide them with free "credit freezes" in addition to the "credit alerts" already offered, which he said amounted to a "pittance" of protection.

He also asked DRS to cover the cost of credit protection for two years instead of one, and to hike the amount of identity theft insurance provided from $5,000 to $25,000.

Moreover, the attorney general asked for changes in several provisions of the agency's contract with Debix, an identity theft warning service hired to protect taxpayers whose personal information is at peril.

He recommended, for example, that DRS add a provision to that pact that would prohibit Debix from retaining and selling information on any Connecticut taxpayer.

Similarly, he said DRS needed to eliminate a contract provision providing for automatic renewal unless the consumer tells Debix he or she wishes to cancel.

"Debix must assure that consumer information is kept confidential and taxpayers are not tricked into expensive contract extensions," he said. "Consumers should not surrender ownership of personal finance information for protection against identity theft."
Rell's directive and Blumenthal's letter came after the Journal Inquirer reported last week that the DRS computer was just one of 29 laptops that state employees had reported lost or stolen since July 2006.

One taxpayer whose information was included on the stolen DRS computer, House Majority Leader Christopher G. Donovan of Meriden, told the JI last week that when he called the company recommended to him by DRS he was frustrated when a representative tried to sell him "extra" protection for "something like $199."
http://www.journalinquirer.com/site/...161556&rfi= 6





Ohio Official Loses a Week's Vacation for Theft of Tape

Drive stolen from car holds data on thousands of state workers and taxpayers
Brian Fonseca

An Ohio state official must surrender about a week of future vacation time as punishment for not ensuring the security of personal data stored on a stolen backup tape holding Social Security and other personal data. The tape was pilfered in June from the car of an intern responsible for carrying data used by the Ohio state government's computer systems.

Jerry Miller, payroll team leader for the Ohio Department of Administrative Services' Administrative Knowledge System (OAKS) ERP project, was informed of the decision by department officials on Sep. 26, said Ron Sylvester, a spokesman for DAS. Miller accepted the penalty, Sylvester said.

Sylvester described Miller as a "stellar longtime DAS employee" and said he has been forthright in acknowledging his role in the "management glitch" pertaining to the stolen backup tape.

Last month, the state announced that an investigation by computer forensics experts at Interhack Corp. in Columbus, Ohio, had determined that the missing tape contained data on all 64,467 state employees, 19,388 former employees and 47,245 Ohio taxpayers.
The data breach is expected to cost the state upwards of $3 million.

Though the administrative services unit was responsible for the data, Sylvester said the tape was handled by a number of people from other state agencies.

"Part of the problem is [the data] was outside of any one single person's hands. There were people who were not full-time tasked to OAKS who were coming in from agencies doing data migration and testing and introducing data on the drive," said Sylvester. "We believe we had some contractors who continued to introduce data on the drive.

"One lesson that the state learned is that we need to throw more resources at security and privacy when we have an issue like that," he added

A third party brought in from Ohio's Office of Collective Bargaining investigated the incident and recommended the penalty, Sylvester said.

"The next time the state takes on a project of this scope, we're going to have people on the job whose major responsibility is just data security," he added.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...&intsrc=kc_top





Student Who Disclosed Security Breach to Campus Paper Barely Escapes Expulsion
Jaikumar Vijayan

A student at Western Oregon University who accidentally discovered a file containing personal data on a publicly accessible university server and then handed that data over to the student newspaper has narrowly escaped being expelled for his actions.

But a contracted adviser to the newspaper has been dismissed for allegedly mishandling the data and for failing to properly advise the students on the university's policies relating to handling of personally identifiable data.

Brian Loving, a student at WOU, stumbled upon a file containing the names, Social Security numbers and grade point averages of between 50 to 100 students on a publicly accessible university server in June. Loving downloaded a copy of what he discovered and handed it over to the Western Oregon Journal, the campus newspaper.

After making a copy of the file, the newspaper's editor and Loving then informed the university about the security breach. Though the paper's final publication date for the academic year had already passed, it decided to publish a four-page special report with an article describing Loving's discovery. No names of any of the students were published in the article.

The episode triggered an internal investigation at WOU. It also prompted campus officials to send IT staffers into the paper's closed newsroom and search newsroom computers for copies of the file that may have been stored in those systems.

Two months into the investigation, Loving -- who is now a staffer with the newspaper -- was found to have broken a university computer use policy that prohibits unauthorized people from accessing confidential files that may have been inadvertently placed in a publicly accessible location. On Sept. 28 he faced a disciplinary hearing over the incident.

Mark Weiss, the university executive vice president of finance and administration, on Wednesday cited student confidentiality and refused to describe the outcome of the hearing. But he denied that Loving had ever been expelled as a consequence for his action, as some local media outlets suggested.

Adviser adieu

Weiss also confirmed that Susan Wickstrom, who had been an adviser to students working at the newspaper, is no longer in that position since the university chose not to renew her contract. He did not say if the reason for the non-renewal had anything to do with Loving's security breach incident report.

A source at the university who wished to remain anonymous said that Wickstrom's contract was not renewed because of her failure to advice students against making copies of the exposed file and for her failure to advise them about the school relevant computer use policies.

"This was not a freedom of the press issue at all," Weiss said. The school newspaper should be able to write on any topic it wants to, he said. Similarly, "the issue is not that the student discovered a file that contained confidential information. For that we are grateful," said Weiss who also expressed gratitude to Loving for discovering a vulnerability the university had not been aware of up to that time.

Rather, the problem had to do with the manner in which the information was handled after it had been discovered, Weiss said.

"Once confidential information is discovered, we don't expect people to be downloading copies of that information and giving it to other people," he said. "He mishandled copies of the file," Weiss said of Loving. "People who know this shouldn't be done should be advising students on what the right thing to do is," he said in an apparent reference to Wickstrom.

Weiss also defended the university's decision to send IT staffers to search for copies of the file on newsroom computers at a time when the newsroom was locked. "The last issue of the student newspaper had already been printed. We asked [newspaper staffers] for the files that were copied to be returned," Weiss said. When the newspaper did not respond, IT staffers went in to retrieve any files that might have been copied and stored on newsroom computers, he said. At the time when the IT staff went in the newspaper offices had been shut down for the summer, he explained.

He also maintained that the university had a right to look for the files on newsroom computers because the systems were owned by the university. "We considered whether or not it was appropriate to enter, look for and take those files that were taken from our systems and we concluded that it was appropriate," Weiss said.

Weird times for whistleblowers

The incident is similar to others in which individuals who discover or publicly disclose data braches at their places of work end up being in trouble themselves. Just last month, a former IT employee again working in Oregon but with Providence Health System, filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the organization claiming he was fired in Feb 2006 simply because he reported a data theft to local law enforcement.

Even more recently, a St. Louis-based IT worker for The Boeing Co. claimed he was fired by the company for speaking with a Seattle newspaper about ongoing information security challenges at the company. A report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer quoted a Boeing spokesman as saying that company had clear guidelines regarding the release of information outside the company and every employee was expected to follow those guidelines.

In yet another similar incident, a New Mexico jury awarded $4.3 million in damages to Shawn Carpenter a former network security analyst at Sandia National Laboratories. Carpenter had filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against Sandia after he was fired from the lab for disclosing details of an internal security breach with the FBI and others.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9042098





WWII Veteran Nazi Interrogators Denounced Bush’s Torture Techniques
John Amato

Will Limbaugh call these men “phony soldiers?”

For six decades, they held their silence.

The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.

“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess.

”During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone,” said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. “We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”…read on

BushCo. and the Republican Congress will always be known as the “Party of Torture.” Their pundits as well are a disgrace to the American flag that they wrap themselves around in everyday…
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/1...re-techniques/





Boy in Court on Terror Charges
BBC

A British teenager who is accused of possessing material for terrorist purposes has appeared in court.

The 17-year-old, who was arrested in the Dewsbury area of West Yorkshire on Monday, was given bail after a hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court.

It is alleged he had a copy of the "Anarchists' Cookbook", containing instructions on how to make home-made explosives.

His next court hearing has been set for 25 October.

The teenager faces two charges under the Terrorism Act 2000.

The first charge relates to the possession of material for terrorist purposes in October last year.

The second relates to the collection or possession of information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism.

He stood in the dock wearing a baggy, blue hooded top and only spoke to confirm his name and date of birth.

After the 40-minute hearing, the teenager was released on bail under several conditions.

A second 17-year-old who is facing similar charges has already been remanded in custody and will also appear at the Crown Court on 25 October.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk/7030096.stm





Report Says War on Terror is Fuelling al Qaeda
Kate Kelland

Six years after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the "war on terror" is failing and instead fuelling an increase in support for extremist Islamist movements, a British think-tank said on Monday.

A report by the Oxford Research Group (ORG) said a "fundamental re-think is required" if the global terrorist network is to be rendered ineffective.

"If the al Qaeda movement is to be countered, then the roots of its support must be understood and systematically undercut," said Paul Rogers, the report's author and professor of global peace studies at Bradford University in northern England.

"Combined with conventional policing and security measures, al Qaeda can be contained and minimized but this will require a change in policy at every level."

He described the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as a "disastrous mistake" which had helped establish a "most valued jihadist combat training zone" for al Qaeda supporters.

The report -- Alternatives to the War on Terror -- recommended the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq coupled with intensive diplomatic engagement in the region, including with Iran and Syria.

In Afghanistan, Rogers also called for an immediate scaling down of military activities, an injection of more civil aid and negotiations with militia groups aimed at bringing them into the political process.

If such measures were adopted it would still take "at least 10 years to make up for the mistakes made since 9/11."

"Failure to make the necessary changes could result in the war on terror lasting decades," the report added.

Rogers also warned of a drift toward conflict with Iran.

"Going to war with Iran", he said, "will make matters far worse, playing directly into the hands of extreme elements and adding greatly to the violence across the region. Whatever the problems with Iran, war should be avoided at all costs."
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...37906320071007





Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda's Secrets

Firm Says Administration's Handling of Video Ruined Its Spying Efforts
Joby Warrick

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.

While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

But privately, some intelligence officials called the incident regrettable, and one official said SITE had been "tremendously helpful" in ferreting out al-Qaeda secrets over time.

The al-Qaeda video aired on Sept. 7 attracted international attention as the first new video message from the group's leader in three years. In it, a dark-bearded bin Laden urges Americans to convert to Islam and predicts failure for the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan. The video was aired on hundreds of Western news Web sites nearly a full day before its release by a distribution company linked to al-Qaeda.

Computer logs and records reviewed by The Washington Post support SITE's claim that it snatched the video from al-Qaeda days beforehand. Katz requested that the precise date and details of the acquisition not be made public, saying such disclosures could reveal sensitive details about the company's methods.

SITE -- an acronym for the Search for International Terrorist Entities -- was established in 2002 with the stated goal of tracking and exposing terrorist groups, according to the company's Web site. Katz, an Iraqi-born Israeli citizen whose father was executed by Saddam Hussein in the 1960s, has made the investigation of terrorist groups a passionate quest.

"We were able to establish sources that provided us with unique and important information into al-Qaeda's hidden world," Katz said. Her company's income is drawn from subscriber fees and contracts.

Katz said she decided to offer an advance copy of the bin Laden video to the White House without charge so officials there could prepare for its eventual release.

She spoke first with White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, whom she had previously met, and then with Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the president for homeland security. Both expressed interest in obtaining a copy, and Bagnal suggested that she send a copy to Michael Leiter, who holds the No. 2 job at the National Counterterrorism Center.

Administration and intelligence officials would not comment on whether they had obtained the video separately. Katz said Fielding and Bagnal made it clear to her that the White House did not possess a copy at the time she offered hers.

Around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, Katz sent both Leiter and Fielding an e-mail with a link to a private SITE Web page containing the video and an English transcript. "Please understand the necessity for secrecy," Katz wrote in her e-mail. "We ask you not to distribute . . . [as] it could harm our investigations."

Fielding replied with an e-mail expressing gratitude to Katz. "It is you who deserves the thanks," he wrote, according to a copy of the message. There was no record of a response from Leiter or the national intelligence director's office.

Exactly what happened next is unclear. But within minutes of Katz's e-mail to the White House, government-registered computers began downloading the video from SITE's server, according to a log of file transfers. The records show dozens of downloads over the next three hours from computers with addresses registered to defense and intelligence agencies.

By midafternoon, several television news networks reported obtaining copies of the transcript. A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News's Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. "This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document," Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m.

Al-Qaeda supporters, now alerted to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past, according to Katz.

A small number of private intelligence companies compete with SITE in scouring terrorists' networks for information and messages, and some have questioned the company's motives and methods, including the claim that its access to al-Qaeda's network was unique. One competitor, Ben Venzke, founder of IntelCenter, said he questions SITE's decision -- as described by Katz -- to offer the video to White House policymakers rather than quietly share it with intelligence analysts.

"It is not just about getting the video first," Venzke said. "It is about having the proper methods and procedures in place to make sure that the appropriate intelligence gets to where it needs to go in the intelligence community and elsewhere in order to support ongoing counterterrorism operations."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...src=newsletter





Democratic Concessions Are Expected on Wiretapping
Eric Lichtblau and Carl Hulse

Two months after vowing to roll back broad new wiretapping powers won by the Bush administration, Congressional Democrats appear ready to make concessions that could extend some of the key powers granted to the National Security Agency.

Bush administration officials say they are confident they will win approval of the broadened wiretapping authority that they secured temporarily in August as Congress rushed toward recess, and some Democratic officials admit that they may not come up with the votes to rein in the administration.

As the debate over the N.S.A.’s wiretapping powers begins anew this week, the emerging legislation reflects the political reality confronting the Democrats. While they are willing to oppose the White House on the conduct of the war in Iraq, they remain nervous that they will be labeled as soft on terrorism if they insist on strict curbs on intelligence gathering.

A Democratic bill to be proposed Tuesday in the House would maintain for several years the type of broad, blanket authority for N.S.A. wiretapping that the administration secured in August for just six months. But in an acknowledgment of civil liberties concerns, the measure would also require a more active role by the special foreign intelligence court that oversees the N.S.A.’s interception of foreign-based communications.

A competing proposal in the Senate, still being drafted, may be even closer in line with the administration’s demands, with the possibility of including retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that took part in the N.S.A.’s once-secret program to wiretap without court warrants.

No one is willing to predict with certainty how the issue will play out. But some Congressional officials and others monitoring the debate over the legislation said the final result may not be much different than it was two months ago, despite Democrats’ insistence that they would not let stand the August extension of the N.S.A.’s powers.

“Many members continue to fear that if they don’t support whatever the president asks for, they’ll be perceived as soft on terrorism,” said William Banks, a professor specializing in terrorism and national security law at Syracuse University who has written extensively on federal wiretapping law.

The August bill, known as the Protect America Act, was approved by Congress in the final hours before its summer recess after heated warnings from the Bush administration that legal loopholes in wiretapping coverage had left the country vulnerable to another terrorist attack. The legislation significantly reduced the role of the foreign intelligence court and broadened the N.S.A.’s ability to listen in on foreign-based communications without a court warrant.

“We want the statute made permanent,” Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said today. “We view this as a healthy debate. We also view it as an opportunity to inform Congress and the public that we can use these authorities responsibly. We’re going to go forward and look at any proposals that come forth, but we’ll look at them very carefully to make sure they don’t have any consequences that hamper our abilities to protect the country.”

House Democrats overwhelmingly opposed the interim legislation in August and believed at the time they had been forced into a corner by the Bush administration.

As Congress takes up the new legislation, a senior Democratic aide said House leaders are working hard to make sure the administration does not succeed in pushing through a bill that would make permanent all the powers it secured in August for the N.S.A. “That’s what we’re trying to avoid,” the aide said. “We have that concern too.”

The bill to be proposed Tuesday by the Democratic leaders of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees would impose more controls over the N.S.A.’s powers, including quarterly audits by the Justice Department’s inspector general. It would also give the foreign intelligence court a role in approving, in advance, “basket” or “umbrella” warrants for bundles of overseas communications, according to a Congressional official.

“We are giving the N.S.A. what it legitimately needs for national security but with far more limitations and protections than are in the Protect America Act,” said Brendan Daly, a spokesman for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California.

Perhaps most important in the eyes of Democratic supporters, the House bill would not give retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies that took part in the N.S.A.’s domestic eavesdropping program — a proposal that had been a top priority of the Bush administration. The August legislation granted the companies immunity for future acts, but not past deeds.

A number of private groups are trying to prove in federal court that the telecommunications companies violated the law by taking part in the program. A former senior Justice Department lawyer, Jack Goldsmith, seemed to bolster their case last week when he told Congress that the program was a “legal mess” and strongly suggested it was illegal.

In the Senate, the Democratic chairman of the Intelligence Committee, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, is working with his Republican counterpart, Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, who was one of the main proponents of the August plan, to come up with a compromise wiretapping proposal. Wendy Morigi, a spokeswoman for Mr. Rockefeller, said that retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies is “under discussion,” but that no final proposal had been developed.

The immunity issue may prove to be the key sticking point between whatever proposals are ultimately passed by the House and the Senate. Representative Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat who was among the harshest critics of the legislation passed in August, said he would vigorously oppose any effort to grant retroactive legal protection to telecommunications companies. “There is heavy pressure on the immunity and we should not cave an inch on that,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Nadler said he was worried that the Senate would give too much ground to the administration in its proposal, but he said he was satisfied with the legislation to be proposed Tuesday in the House.

“It is not perfect, but it is a good bill,” he said. “It makes huge improvements in the current law. In some respects it is better than the old FISA law,” referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Civil liberties advocates and others who met with House officials today about the proposed bill agreed that it was an improvement over the August plan, but they were not quite as charitable in their overall assessment.

‘This still authorizes the interception of Americans’ international communications without a warrant in far too many instances and without adequate civil liberties protections,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, who was among the group that met with House officials.

Caroline Frederickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, said she was troubled by the Democrats’ acceptance of broad, blanket warrants for the N.S.A., rather than the individualized warrants traditionally required by the intelligence court.

“The Democratic leadership, philosophically, is with us, but we need to help them realize the political case, which is that Democrats will not be in danger if they don’t reauthorize this Protect America Act,” Ms. Frederickson said. “They’re nervous. There’s a ‘keep the majority’ mentality, which is understandable. But we think they’re putting themselves in more danger by not standing on principle.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/wa...09cnd-nsa.html





Proposed FISA Update Would Not Give Telecom Companies Legal Protection
Nick Juliano

House introduces delayed proposal to amend foreign spying law

House Democrats have refused to submit to Bush administration requests to save telecommunications companies that assisted in a warrantless wiretapping scheme from lawsuits or prosecution, and they want to require judicial approval for future efforts to spy on Americans.

The latest demands were aired Tuesday in a proposed update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, although it remains to be seen whether House leaders -- and their counterparts in the Senate -- will be able to stand firm in sticking to their demands.

“Earlier this year, President Bush signed a short-term surveillance law that exposed innocent Americans’ phone calls and emails to warrantless intrusion," House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers said in a statement announcing the Democrats' proposal. "This bill shows that it is possible to protect civil liberties and fight terrorism at the same time.”

The proposed House bill offers some concession to the administration, and it includes fixes in surveillance that Democrats and Republicans agreed were needed, such as a clarification that no warrant is required to spy on strictly foreign-to-foreign phone calls and e-mails.

Under the new law, the Attorney General or Director of National Intelligence would be authorized to receive blanket warrants to eavesdrop on several foreign intelligence targets who could call into the United States, but the bill would restore FISA court reviews of targeting procedures and steps taken to "minimize" Americans' exposure to surveillance. If an American is to become the "target" of surveillance, intelligence agencies would be required to seek an individualized warrant from the FISA court.

The American Civil Liberties Union said that concession would allow "blanket warrants" to authorize the National Security Agency and other US intelligence services to gather information on untold numbers of Americans who may not be suspected of doing anything wrong.

"The program can collect any communication as long as one leg of it is overseas," the ACLU said in a critique of the new proposal. "If Americans’ communications are swept up by this new, general program warrant, there is no requirement that a court actually review whether those communications are seized in compliance with the Fourth Amendment."

A Democratic summary of the new bill says Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell did not object to judicial oversight of targeting and minimization procedures. A DNI spokeswoman told RAW STORY that McConnell would not comment on pending legislation.

When he testified before Congress last month, McConnell laid out three primary requests for the FISA update. His foreign-to-foreign clarification and basket warrant provisions were included, but Democrats did not bow to his requests that telecommunications be let off the hook for assisting in the warrantless wiretapping program since 2001. McConnell told congressional committees that basket warrants were needed because intelligence analysts can't know in advance whether a foreign target would be calling someone in the US.

The ACLU was largely positive about bill, but it was dire in its warnings about the basket warrants' potential to violate Americans civil rights.

"There has not been a surveillance program since FISA was created that allows massive, untargeted collection of communications that will knowingly pick up US communications on US soil without any suspicion of wrongdoing," the group said. "This creates novel and fundamental Fourth Amendment problems that Congress should seek to avoid instead of sanctioning. Going back to the court may be inconvenient, but doing so is just a matter or resources and protecting our Fourth Amendment rights is worth the cost."

Since passing what many saw as a hastily crafted temporary FISA revision just before recessing in August, Democrats in the House vowed to assuage critics who saw that bill, the Protect America Act, as not doing enough to protect Americans' privacy rights.
The House Intelligence and Judiciary committees on Tuesday released a summary of their latest effort to amend FISA, which would require repair shortcomings in intelligence-gathering efforts while ensuring that intelligence agencies do not target Americans without first getting individualized warrants.

The proposal is known as the Responsible Surveillance That is Overseen, Reviewed and Effective (Restore) Act, and it is timed to expire Dec. 31, 2009, when Congress also would revisit the Patriot Act.

Before the announcement Tuesday, the New York Times published a bleak assessment of the chances for success of a bill like the one Democrats have proposed.

Although the act would include several provisions requested last week by progressive lawmakers, it does not include must-have items demanded by President Bush, such as telecom immunity, and Democrats are unlikely to be able to corral enough votes to override a presidential veto.

Civil liberties and privacy-rights activists have been lobbying intensely for Democrats to stand firm against immunity for telephone and Internet providers who are alleged to have granted National Security Agency spies access to domestic communications switches, and they appear to have scored a small victory with Tuesday's announcement.

House leaders were expected to announce their proposal last week but held off after the House Progressive Caucus released its list of needed reforms in a FISA update, such as a sunset provision and refusal to grant immunity to telecom companies, which were included Tuesday.

The Protect America Act expires in February, and Democrats are facing pressure from the White House to pass a permanent measure soon. Congress is expected to send its FISA revision to the president before the end of the year.
#

The House Intelligence and Judiciary committees released the following summary of their proposal:

RESTORE Act of 2007 (Responsible Surveillance That is Overseen, Reviewed and Effective) Bill Summary

Security and Liberty: The bill provides the Intelligence Community with effective tools to conduct surveillance of foreign targets outside the United States but restores Constitutional checks and balances that were not contained in the Protect America Act (PAA--the Administration’s FISA bill.)

The RESTORE ACT:

Clarifies that No Court Warrant is Required to Intercept Communications of Non-United States Persons When Both Ends of the Communications are Outside the United States.

Requires an Individualized Court Warrant from the FISA Court When Targeting Persons in the United States. (Same as current law.)

Creates a Program of Court Authorized Targeting of Non-U.S. Persons Outside the United States. Grants the Attorney General (AG) and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) authority to apply to the FISA Court for an order to conduct surveillance of foreign targets, or groups of targets, for up to one year – but RESTORES the following checks and balances that were absent under the PAA:

a. Court Review of Targeting Procedures. The FISA Court must review targeting procedures to ensure that they are reasonably designed to target only people outside the United States. In emergencies, the FISA Court review may take place after the surveillance has begun – for up to 45 days. DNI McConnell told Congress in September that he did not oppose FISA Court review of these targeting procedures.

b. Court Review of Minimization Procedures. The FISA Court must review minimization procedures. DNI McConnell told Congress in September that he did not oppose FISA Court review of these minimization procedures.

c. Court Review of Guidelines to ensure that, when the government seeks to conduct electronic surveillance of a person in the United States, the government obtains a traditional individualized warrant from the FISA Court.
Clarifies Ambiguous Language on Warrantless Domestic Searches. The bill clarifies and eliminates ambiguous language in the PAA that appeared to authorize warrantless searches inside the United States, including physical searches of American homes, offices, computers, and medical records.

In a letter to Congress in September, Administration officials indicated that they did not intend their legislation to authorize such warrantless domestic searches and expressed a willingness to consider alternative language.
A RESTORE ACT Authorization May Not Be Used to Target Any Known U.S. Person. If the government learns that the target of surveillance is a U.S. person (say, an American traveling abroad), it cannot use this new authority.

Assistant Attorney General Ken Wainstein acknowledged to Congress in September that the PAA could be used by the Administration to target Americans abroad without a warrant, even U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Limits Authority to Terrorism, Espionage, Sabotage, and Threats to National Security. The Administration’s bill allowed for surveillance for all foreign intelligence, including a broad category of information related to “foreign affairs.” This bill allows the Intelligence Community to deal with the threats facing the United States from terrorism, espionage, sabotage, clandestine intelligence activities, and to collect information related to the national defense or security of the U.S., without authorizing the collection on the broad category of “foreign affairs.”

Requires Quarterly Audits and Reports. Requires quarterly audits by the Justice Department Inspector General (DOJ IG) on communications collected under this authority and the number of U.S. persons identified in intelligence reports disseminated pursuant to this collection. These audits would be provided to the FISA Court and to Congress (Intelligence and Judiciary Committees.)

The Administration’s bill contained very limited reporting to Congress. During testimony, DNI McConnell said he did not oppose an Inspector General audit of the program to determine the scope of American communications swept up by this authority.

Requires an Audit of the President’s Surveillance Program and Other Warrantless Surveillance Programs. This audit mandates a report and documents related to these programs be provided to Congress in unclassified form with a classified annex.

Requires Record-keeping of the Use of United States Persons Information. Mandates that the Executive Branch record every instance in which the identity of a United States person whose communication was acquired by the Intelligence Community is disseminated to an element or person within the Executive Branch and that it submit an annual report to Congress on the dissemination.

Adds Resources for FISA. Adds funding for personnel and technology resources at DOJ and NSA to speed the FISA process and to ensure that audits can be conducted expeditiously.

Reiterates the Exclusivity of FISA. Includes House-passed bipartisan Schiff-Flake language stating that FISA is the exclusive means to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans for the purpose of foreign intelligence collection.

No Retroactive Immunity. The bill is silent on retroactive immunity because the Administration has refused to provide Congress with documents on the specifics of the President’s warrantless surveillance program. However, the bill does provide prospective immunity for those complying with court orders issued pursuant to this authority.

Establishes En Banc Review. Allows the FISA Court to sit en banc. The FISA Court requested this, and the Administration does not oppose it.

Provides Sunset, Transition Procedures and Report on PAA. Sunsets this new authority on December 31, 2009, when certain PATRIOT Act provisions sunset. However, the legislation will allow for a transition from the existing warrants to the new ones to ensure that the Intelligence Community does not go “dark” on any surveillance. The Administration will be required to submit a report on U.S.-person information collected and disseminated under the PAA authorities.
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Propos...give_1009.html





Documents: Qwest was Targeted

'Classified info' was not allowed at ex-CEO's trial
Sara Burnett And Jeff Smith

The National Security Agency and other government agencies retaliated against Qwest because the Denver telco refused to go along with a phone spying program, documents released Wednesday suggest.

The documents indicate that likely would have been at the heart of former CEO Joe Nacchio's so-called "classified information" defense at his insider trading trial, had he been allowed to present it.

The secret contracts - worth hundreds of millions of dollars - made Nacchio optimistic about Qwest's future, even as his staff was warning him the company might not make its numbers, Nacchio's defense attorneys have maintained. But Nacchio didn't present that argument at trial.

The documents suggest U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham refused to allow Nacchio to present the argument about retaliation. Nottingham also said Nacchio would have to take the stand to raise the classified defense.

Prosecutors have said they were prepared to poke holes in Nacchio's classified defense.

Nacchio was convicted last spring on 19 counts of insider trading for $52 million of stock sales in April and May 2001, and sentenced to six years in prison. He's free pending appeal.

The partially redacted documents were filed under seal before, during and after Nacchio's trial. They were released Wednesday.

Nacchio planned to demonstrate at trial that he had a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., to discuss a $100 million project. According to the documents, another topic also was discussed at that meeting, one with which Nacchio refused to comply.

The topic itself is redacted each time it appears in the hundreds of pages of documents, but there is mention of Nacchio believing the request was both inappropriate and illegal, and repeatedly refusing to go along with it.

The NSA contract was awarded in July 2001 to companies other than Qwest.

USA Today reported in May 2006 that Qwest, unlike AT&T and Verizon, balked at helping the NSA track phone calling patterns that may have indicated terrorist organizational activities. Nacchio's attorney, Herbert Stern, confirmed that Nacchio refused to turn over customer telephone records because he didn't think the NSA program had legal standing.

In the documents, Nacchio also asserts Qwest was in line to build a $2 billion private government network called GovNet and do other government business, including a network between the U.S. and South America.

The documents maintain that Nacchio met with top government officials, including President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice in 2000 and early 2001 to discuss how to protect the government's communications network.

They portray U.S. government officials, even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, worried about a "Pearl Harbor" type of attack on the Internet. As early as 1997, a three-star general talked to Nacchio about using Qwest's new fiber-optic network for government purposes, according to the defense.

One key meeting with a government official was held at Qwest founder Phil Anschutz's ranch near Greeley, with former Chief Financial Officer Robin Szeliga prevented from attending presumably because she lacked security clearance.

Nacchio was on a Bush-appointed national security telecommunications advisory panel. In March 2001, then-counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke asked the panel if it would be possible to build a private network for the government to protect it from cyberwarfare.

Nacchio piped up: "I already built this network twice" for other government agencies. The defense asserts Nacchio believed Qwest would be asked to build the network and that it could do so in six months.

But the contract didn't materialize.



Looking ahead

DATES SET

Government's response to Nacchio's appeal brief is due Nov. 9. Nacchio could choose to file a reply to the government's brief by Nov. 20. Oral arguments at the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals are scheduled for Dec. 18 in Denver. In the meantime, Nacchio is free pending appeal.

APPELLATE COURT OPTIONS

• Uphold conviction (Nacchio could appeal to Supreme Court)

• Uphold conviction, reduce six-year sentence. (Nacchio could appeal to Supreme Court).

• Overturn conviction because evidence was insufficient to convict

• Order new trial based on errors made by U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham.

EXCERPTS FROM NACCHIO'S APPELLATE BRIEF

• "The indictment, trial and conviction of Joseph P. Nacchio took place in an atmosphere of prejudgment and vitriol."

• "Many shareholders lost paper fortunes, employees lost jobs as the company downsized, and all demanded someone to blame."

• "After years of investigation, prosecutors apparently concluded that they could not prove any crime based on the accounting restatement, and settled on insider trading."

• "This is an unprecedented prosecution. The extraordinary charges here are based on the claim that Nacchio knew, eight months or more in advance, that Qwest might not make its year-end 2001 financial projections."

• "The prosecution yoked an unprecedented theory to plainly insufficient facts, and hoped, in a bitter and vindictive atmosphere, that it would be enough to win a conviction from a Denver jury. It was."
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drm...719566,00.html





House Panels Reject Appeal on Eavesdropping
Stephen LaBaton

Two Congressional panels today rejected President Bush’s request to renew without added restrictions his administration’s broad eavesdropping authority, and instead adopted a measure that gives federal judges greater oversight authority over foreign electronic surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency.

The bill approved by the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees was along straight party lines, just as they split to defeat the administration’s proposal. The legislation, sponsored by Representative John Conyers of Michigan and Representative Silvestre Reyes of Texas, the chairmen of the Judiciary and Intelligence committees, respectively, conspicuously did not contain two provisions demanded by the White House. One would have provided retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that had helped the N.SA. to conduct eavesdropping without warrants. A second would have made the surveillance program permanent — instead, the legislation expires in two years.

As the administration has sought, the legislation provides authority for the government to obtain “basket” or “umbrella” warrants for bundles of overseas communications. But White House and Justice Department officials nonetheless criticized the legislation because of the greater authority it gives to a special foreign intelligence surveillance court.

Shortly before the first votes were cast in Congress this morning, President Bush appeared on the South Lawn of the White House to attack the House legislation, saying that it “would take us backward.” He asked instead for an extension of a law adopted last August, the Protect America Act, which expires in February. That measure significantly reduced the role of the foreign intelligence court and broadened the security agency’s ability to listen to foreign-based communications without court warrants.

“While the House bill is not final, my administration has serious concerns about some of its provisions, and I am hopeful that the deficiencies in the bill can be fixed,” Mr. Bush said.

“Terrorists in faraway lands are plotting and planning new ways to kill Americans,” he said. “The security of our country and the safety of our citizens depend on learning about their plans. The Protect America Act is a vital tool in stopping the terrorists, and it would be a grave mistake for Congress to weaken this tool.”

The legislation now heads to the floor of the House, where it is expected to be approved. The Senate has not considered a companion bill yet, although administration officials, as well as some civil liberties and intelligence experts say the White House may have more allies in that chamber. Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who heads the Senate intelligence committee, has for instance previously expressed support for providing immunity to the telephone companies.

Civil liberties groups praised the House version for not providing immunity to the companies and for providing for additional judicial oversight of the surveillance program. But they also expressed concern about the proposal to continue to permit the National Security Agency to monitor large groups of people without obtaining individual warrants.

“What’s good is they’ve put some more protections in place,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s a step in the right direction. What’s bad is it still contains provisions that let the administration get surveillance for up to a year without individual warrants.”

Ms. Fredrickson said that the legislative fight was still in its early stages and noted that senior Democrats had not committed to denying immunity to the phone companies, saying only said that they will not approve immunity until they get more details about the role played by the companies in warrantless surveillance in recent years.

The House legislation sets up various categories of court intervention and oversight of electronic surveillance. It continues the policy of not requiring a warrant for intercepting communications between foreigners outside of the United States. It also continues the policy of requiring a warrant from a special foreign intelligence surveillance court when the officials are targeting people in the United States.

For a third category of intercepts—bundles of communications by groups of people—the legislation permits the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to authorize surveillance for up to a year but only with tight supervision by the foreign intelligence court. The court is required to review procedures to assure that they are reasonably designed to monitor only people outside the United States. The legislation also requires quarterly audits of the program by the Justice Department’s inspector general that would be shared with the foreign intelligence court and Congress.

Administration and law enforcement officials said that the legislation would set up a cumbersome process that would rob them of the ability to obtain timely intelligence. In a telephone briefing with reporters this afternoon, Kenneth L. Wainstein, assistant attorney general for national security, said that while the legislation tries to set up categories for court intervention, the reality is that many times intelligence officials have no idea who a foreign terrorist suspect is calling or where the recipient of the call is located. He said that the legislation would now require court of approval of some types of surveillance that previously could be accomplished without court approval.

“We need flexibility, we need to be nimble,” Mr. Wainstein said.

Mr. Conyers and other House Democrats described the legislation as a fair and vital balance between competing interests.

“The legislation before us today seeks to once again strike an appropriate balance between needed government authority and our precious rights and liberties,” he said. “To those who would claim that this bill is weak on terrorism, I would say that protecting the civil rights and liberties of Americans does not show our weakness, but our strength.”

“To those who say that the bill is too weak on civil liberties, I say that if you trust an independent court and have faith in Congressional oversight, those liberties will not be jeopardized.”

But Republicans attacked the legislation, saying it gave too much authority to judges who are not competent to be reviewing intelligence programs. And they said that the failure to provide immunity to telecommunications companies would deter companies from cooperating with intelligence agencies in the future.

“These companies deserve our thanks,” said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “They do not deserve a flurry of lawsuits seeking access to documents the disclosure of which would harm our country.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/wa...nd-nsa.html?hp





NSA's Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became Switchboard to the World
Ryan Singel

A lucky coincidence of economics is responsible for routing much of the world's internet and telephone traffic through switching points in the United States, where, under legislation introduced this week, the U.S. National Security Agency will be free to continue tapping it.

Leading House Democrats introduced the so-called RESTORE Act Tuesday that allows the nation's spies to maintain permanent eavesdropping stations inside United States switching centers. Telecom and internet experts interviewed by Wired News say the bill will give the NSA legal access to a torrent of foreign phone calls and internet traffic that travels through American soil on its way someplace else.

But contrary to recent assertions by Bush administration officials, the proportion of international traffic entering the United States is dropping, not increasing, experts say.

International phone and internet traffic flows through the United States largely because of pricing models established more than 100 years ago in the International Telecommunication Union to handle international phone calls. Under those ITU tariffs, smaller and developing countries charge higher fees to accept calls than the U.S.-based carriers do, which can make it cheaper to route phone calls through the United States than directly to a neighboring country.

"Carriers shop around for the best price for termination," says Stephan Beckert, the research director at Telegeography, a communications-traffic research firm.

The United States, where the internet was invented, was also home to the first internet backbone. Combine that architectural advantage with the pricing disparity inherited from the phone networks, and the United States quickly became the center of cyberspace as the internet gained international penetration in the 1990s.

In those early days, internet traffic from one Asian country often bounced through the first West Coast internet-exchange point, the San Jose-based MAE West, says Bill Woodcock, the research director for Packet Clearing House, which helps create packet-exchange points around the world.

While nobody outside the intelligence community knows the exact volume of international telephone and internet traffic that crosses U.S. borders, experts agree that it bounces off a handful of key telephone switches and perhaps a dozen IXPs in coastal cities near undersea fiber-optic cable landings, particularly Miami, Los Angeles, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Miami sees most of the internet traffic between South America and the rest of the world, including traffic passing from one South American country to another, says Bill Manning, the managing partner of ep.net. "Basically they backhaul to the United States, do the switch and haul it back down since (it's) cheaper than crossing their international borders."



And some internet traffic traveling from Asia to Europe still crosses the entire breadth of the United States, entering in Los Angeles and exiting in New York, says Woodcock.

For voice traffic, the NSA could scoop up an astounding amount of telephone calls by simply choosing the right facilities, according to Beckert, though he says NSA officials "make a big deal out of naming them."

"There are about three or four buildings you need to tap," Beckert says. "In L.A. there is 1 Wilshire; in New York, 60 Hudson, and in Miami, the NAP of the Americas."

The United States' role as an international communications hub came at a convenient time for the National Security Agency, which in the 1990s began confronting a world moving away from easily-intercepted microwave and satellite communications, and toward fiber optics, which are difficult and expensive to tap.

Press leaks in recent months have revealed that the NSA began tapping the U.S. communications hubs for purely international traffic shortly after 9/11, at the same time that it began monitoring communications between U.S. citizens and foreigners as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

After the Democrats took over Congress in 2007, the administration put the NSA surveillance programs under the supervision of a secretive spying court, which ruled shortly thereafter that wiretapping U.S.-based facilities without a warrant was illegal, even for the purpose of harvesting foreign communications.

In August, Congress granted the NSA "emergency" temporary powers to continue the surveillance, which are set to expire in February. The RESTORE Act (the Responsible Electronic Surveillance That is Overseen Reviewed and Effective Act of 2007) is the Democrat's effort to extend that power indefinitely, while including some safeguards against abuse. It would legalize both the foreign-to-foreign intercepts, and the domestic-to-foreign surveillance associated with the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

The bill enjoys wide support in the House, but on Wednesday President Bush vowed to veto any surveillance legislation that doesn't extend retroactive legal immunity to telephone companies who cooperated in the NSA's domestic surveillance before it was legalized -- a provision absent from the RESTORE Act. AT&T, which is facing a class-action lawsuit for allegedly wiretapping the internet on behalf of the NSA, is reportedly among the companies lobbying hard for immunity.

Experts say that, even with a stamp of approval from Congress, the growth of international communications networks will eventually rob the NSA of its home-field advantage in inspecting foreign communications. "The creation of alternative paths are starting to challenge the dominant position the U.S. has," Manning says, adding that the changes will not be welcomed by U.S. intelligence services.

Exchanges in Hong Kong and London are emerging as local hubs for Asian and European traffic, while new fiber cables running north and south from Japan around to Europe will divert traffic from the trans-America route. Meanwhile, more countries are building their own internal internet exchanges.

"Because the decisions are made by the private sector, you're always going to go the direction where you have the cheapest fiber," Woodcock says. "That's likely to be through the U.S. for a while yet, (but) that's changing as more and more fiber gets installed around South Asia."

Manning points to South Africa as an example of how countries are creating their own internet exchanges.

"In South Africa for a long time, ISPs didn't talk to each other and would backhaul traffic to the U.S. or Europe," Manning said. "What they have done in last 10 years, they have built local exchange points and fixed regulatory conditions to allow cross exchange of traffic."

The trend may leave U.S. spooks longing for a simpler time; like 1992, when the first -- and at the time, only -- internet exchange point, called MAE-East, was erected in Washington D.C.

"All the traffic in the world went through Washington," Woodcock says. "But it was coincidence that it was Washington, more or less, and it was private-sector. And it probably wasn't tapped for at least a couple of years."
http://www.wired.com/politics/securi.../domestic_taps





US Demands Air Passengers Ask its Permission to Fly
Wendy M. Grossman

Under new rules proposed by the Transport Security Administration (TSA) (http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspubli...ontentType=pdf) (pdf), all airline passengers would need advance permission before flying into, through, or over the United States regardless of citizenship or the airline's national origin.

Currently, the Advanced Passenger Information System, operated by the Customs and Border Patrol, requires airlines to forward a list of passenger information no later than 15 minutes before flights from the US take off (international flights bound for the US have until 15 minutes after take-off). Planes are diverted if a passenger on board is on the no-fly list.

The new rules mean this information must be submitted 72 hours before departure. Only those given clearance will get a boarding pass. The TSA estimates that 90 to 93 per cent of all travel reservations are final by then.

The proposed rules require the following information for each passenger: full name, sex, date of birth, and redress number (assigned to passengers who use the Travel Redress Inquiry Program because they have been mistakenly placed on the no-fly list), and known traveller number (once there is a programme in place for registering known travellers whose backgrounds have been checked). Non-travellers entering secure areas, such as parents escorting children, will also need clearance.

The TSA held a public hearing in Washington DC on 20 September, which heard comments from both privacy advocates and airline industry representatives from Qantas, the Regional Airline Association (http://www.raa.org), IATA (http://www.iata.org), and the American Society of Travel Agents (http://www.asta.org). The privacy advocates came from the American Civil Liberties Union (http://www.aclu.org) and the Identity Project (http://www.papersplease.org). All were negative.

The proposals should be withdrawn entirely, argued Edward Hasbrouck (http://www.hasbrouck.org), author of The Practical Nomad and the leading expert on travel data privacy. "Obscured by the euphemistic language of 'screening' is the fact that travellers would be required to get permission before they can travel."

Hasbrouck submitted that requiring clearance in order to travel violates the US First Amendment right of assembly, the central claim in John Gilmore's (http://www.toad.com/gnu/) case against the US government over the requirement to show photo ID for domestic travel.

In addition, the TSA is required to study the impact of the proposals on small economic entities (such as sole traders). Finally, the TSA provides no way for individuals to tell whether their government-issued ID is actually required by law, opening the way for rampant identity theft.

ACLU's Barry Steinhardt quoted press reports of 500,000 to 750,000 people on the watch list (of which the no-fly list is a subset). "If there are that many terrorists in the US, we'd all be dead."

TSA representative Kip Hawley noted that the list has been carefully investigated and halved over the last year. "Half of grossly bloated is still bloated," Steinhardt replied.

The airline industry representatives' objections were largely logistical. They argued that the 60-day timeframe the TSA proposes to allow for implementation from the publication date of the final rules is much too short. They want a year to revamp many IT systems, especially, as the Qantas representative said, as no one will start until they're sure there will be no further changes.

In addition, many were concerned about the impact on new, convenient and cash-saving technologies, such as checking in at home, or storing a boarding pass in a PDA.

One additional point, also raised by Hasbrouck: the data the TSA requires will be collected by the airlines who presumably will keep it for their own purposes – a "government-coerced informational windfall", he called it.

The third parties who actually do much of the airline industry's data processing, the Global Distribution Systems and Computer Reservations Systems, were missing from the hearing.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10...nto_data_hell/





Polish Pirate Party Files for Registration
Ben Jones

The existence of a Polish Pirate Party (or Partia Piratów) may seem to the uneducated as something of a joke. However, it is soon to join only Sweden, Germany, Austria, and Spain in having a full Pirate Party.

Poland is a former communist country where at least three of the political parties have the word ‘peasant’ in their name, so hardly seems the likely place for a party centered around technological policies. Now, with at least 11 of its 38 Million populace using the Internet, the Polish Pirate Party seems poised to explode across the nation. I managed to get a few minutes to talk to Błażej Kaczorowski, the founder of the party.

TorrentFreak: The polish party was founded when exactly?

Kaczorowski: The idea of creating PP in Poland appeared 27 July 2006

TorrentFreak: And you registered this week, in court, for official political party status?

Kaczorowski: Yes, on Monday we went to court to submit all papers needed for registration. Now will will have to wait for registration but from the moment of giving papers to court we will have pre-registration status.

TorrentFreak: how long until that status is confirmed?

Kaczorowski: Depends - if everything will be ok with papers - 2 weeks

TorrentFreak: The next (European) election is going to be held in September 2009, will you be putting up candidates?

Kaczorowski: Here in Poland we have elections on 27 October but it is way to soon for us too start. The elections for Europarlament in 2009 will be probably our first elections - if our parliament will not fall apart before that date.

TorrentFreak: How many members do you currently have?

Kaczorowski: 2,000 registered on web page, 30 people actually active - numbers are small becouse we weren’t advertising ourselves a lot - we are waiting for gathering people - we needed to register first, create a new web page and then we can look for more people

TorrentFreak: What has been your biggest activity, as a party, to date?

Kaczorowski: probably the appearing on Woodstock Stop music festival in Kostrzyn. Lots of fun, great music and talking to people about our issues.

TorrentFreak: What big events do you have planned for the near future?

Kaczorowski: The registration, first inside party elections and Pirate Party internationals upcoming meeting in Berlin

TorrentFreak: Recently, you expressed your distaste with Commissioner Franco Frattini’s proposal regarding anti-terrorism and the Internet, by comparing it to how Poland was run in the 1980s. How much has the country changed since then, and what does the Pirate Party aim to do to help accelerate the change from the soviet era?

Kaczorowski: Like 180 degrees. In 80s we has socialism here with all its worst totalitarian ambitions and a grate Solidarność movement underground. Media control was normal but it didn’t worked out. You could listen to Free Europe radio beside communist trying to jam transmissions, You could read all underground printed newspapers even if for having one you could get in jail quickly - the same would be with internet now – if someone would try to control information people will go underground. Even if from first sight trying to not give terrorist info is good - controlling internet is much worse - it is a step back in creating free informational society.

TorrentFreak: Dziękuję bardzo za wasz czas

Kaczorowski: No problem

For more information about the Polish Party, you can visit their website here.
http://torrentfreak.com/polish-pirat...ration-071011/





Sailing To A New Island With The Pirate Bay
enigmax

Being in The Pirate Bay team means you have a very busy life. Running the world’s largest tracker and dealing with raids and court cases leaves little time for anything else. But as usual, the Pirate Bay guys still make the time to update their fans on their plans to buy an island.

Back in January when The Pirate Bay announced they wanted to buy the micronation of Sealand, they caused quite a stir. Sealand and its native hosting company HavenCo have no copyright regulations making it an attractive target location for the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.

A site set up to take donations for the cause (buysealand.com, currently moving servers) announced: “With the help of all the kopimists on Internets, we want to buy Sealand. Donate money and you will become a citizen and nobleman. It should be a great place for everybody, with high-speed Internets access, no copyright laws and vip accounts to The Pirate Bay”

Sadly, His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Sealand said in a ‘CBC The Hour’ interview that he would not be allowing The Pirate Bay to buy Sealand.

During a Computer Sweden ‘Hot Seat’ interview, Anton put it to brokep: You will probably not be able to buy the “country” Sealand. What will you do with all the money you have received in donations? Will you keep them now?” brokep replied: “No. We will buy an island with them if we can’t buy Sealand.” So, it turns out that The Pirate Bay has to find an other “micronation” to set up their headquarters.

But what happened to all the donations so far? We spoke to The Pirate Bay’s brokep to find out, and he told us: “Well, we’re going to do something, lately has just been so stressed out and we have had no time. The Sealand project took all of our time and we couldn’t do anything else basically.” However, brokep assured us: “The money will be spent on an island, but first of all we need to focus on the upcoming court cases we have.”

Indeed, The Pirate Bay guys still have an on-going dispute with the Swedish police who despite over 1 year of investigations, still can’t find anything against them, however the great LAN parties the police could be having with the servers could encourage them to hold them for years to come. In the meantime TPB will be pursuing legal action of their own as they take on 10 major media companies, holding them to account for their part in the attempted sabotage of Pirate Bay’s trackers.

brokep adds: “We still love the idea and so on, but being this small team has a price in what we have to prioritise, which right now is the court cases. But be assured, the project WILL reappear as soon as we’re on top of things time-wise.”

Stay Tuned!
http://torrentfreak.com/sailing-to-a...atebay-071011/





Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs.
Rick Weiss

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' "

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Others think they are, well, dragonflies -- an ancient order of insects that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature can look.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.

The technical challenges of creating robotic insects are daunting, and most experts doubt that fully working models exist yet.

"If you find something, let me know," said Gary Anderson of the Defense Department's Rapid Reaction Technology Office.

But the CIA secretly developed a simple dragonfly snooper as long ago as the 1970s. And given recent advances, even skeptics say there is always a chance that some agency has quietly managed to make something operational.

"America can be pretty sneaky," said Tom Ehrhard, a retired Air Force colonel and expert in unmanned aerial vehicles who is now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonprofit Washington-based research institute.

Robotic fliers have been used by the military since World War II, but in the past decade their numbers and level of sophistication have increased enormously. Defense Department documents describe nearly 100 different models in use today, some as tiny as birds, and some the size of small planes.

All told, the nation's fleet of flying robots logged more than 160,000 flight hours last year -- a more than fourfold increase since 2003. A recent report by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College warned that if traffic rules are not clarified soon, the glut of unmanned vehicles "could render military airspace chaotic and potentially dangerous."

But getting from bird size to bug size is not a simple matter of making everything smaller.

"You can't make a conventional robot of metal and ball bearings and just shrink the design down," said Ronald Fearing, a roboticist at the University of California at Berkeley. For one thing, the rules of aerodynamics change at very tiny scales and require wings that flap in precise ways -- a huge engineering challenge.

Only recently have scientists come to understand how insects fly -- a biomechanical feat that, despite the evidence before scientists' eyes, was for decades deemed "theoretically impossible." Just last month, researchers at Cornell University published a physics paper clarifying how dragonflies adjust the relative motions of their front and rear wings to save energy while hovering.

That kind of finding is important to roboticists because flapping fliers tend to be energy hogs, and batteries are heavy.

The CIA was among the earliest to tackle the problem. The "insectothopter," developed by the agency's Office of Research and Development 30 years ago, looked just like a dragonfly and contained a tiny gasoline engine to make the four wings flap. It flew but was ultimately declared a failure because it could not handle crosswinds.

Agency spokesman George Little said he could not talk about what the CIA may have done since then. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service also declined to discuss the topic.

Only the FBI offered a declarative denial. "We don't have anything like that," a spokesman said.

The Defense Department is trying, though.

In one approach, researchers funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are inserting computer chips into moth pupae -- the intermediate stage between a caterpillar and a flying adult -- and hatching them into healthy "cyborg moths."

The Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems project aims to create literal shutterbugs -- camera-toting insects whose nerves have grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities. DARPA researchers are also raising cyborg beetles with power for various instruments to be generated by their muscles.

"You might recall that Gandalf the friendly wizard in the recent classic 'Lord of the Rings' used a moth to call in air support," DARPA program manager Amit Lal said at a symposium in August. Today, he said, "this science fiction vision is within the realm of reality."

A DARPA spokeswoman denied a reporter's request to interview Lal or others on the project.

The cyborg insect project has its share of doubters.

"I'll be seriously dead before that program deploys," said vice admiral Joe Dyer, former commander of the Naval Air Systems Command, now at iRobot in Burlington, Mass., which makes household and military robots.

By contrast, fully mechanical micro-fliers are advancing quickly.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have made a "microbat ornithopter" that flies freely and fits in the palm of one's hand. A Vanderbilt University team has made a similar device.

With their sail-like wings, neither of those would be mistaken for insects. In July, however, a Harvard University team got a truly fly-like robot airborne, its synthetic wings buzzing at 120 beats per second.

"It showed that we can manufacture the articulated, high-speed structures that you need to re-create the complex wing motions that insects produce," said team leader Robert Wood.

The fly's vanishingly thin materials were machined with lasers, then folded into three-dimensional form "like a micro-origami," he said. Alternating electric fields make the wings flap. The whole thing weighs just 65 milligrams, or a little more than the plastic head of a push pin.

Still, it can fly only while attached to a threadlike tether that supplies power, evidence that significant hurdles remain.

In August, at the International Symposium on Flying Insects and Robots, held in Switzerland, Japanese researchers introduced radio-controlled fliers with four-inch wingspans that resemble hawk moths. Those who watch them fly, its creator wrote in the program, "feel something of 'living souls.' "

Others, taking a tip from the CIA, are making fliers that run on chemical fuels instead of batteries. The "entomopter," in early stages of development at the Georgia Institute of Technology and resembling a toy plane more than a bug, converts liquid fuel into a hot gas, which powers four flapping wings and ancillary equipment.

"You can get more energy out of a drop of gasoline than out of a battery the size of a drop of gasoline," said team leader Robert Michelson.

Even if the technical hurdles are overcome, insect-size fliers will always be risky investments.

"They can get eaten by a bird, they can get caught in a spider web," said Fearing of Berkeley. "No matter how smart you are -- you can put a Pentium in there -- if a bird comes at you at 30 miles per hour there's nothing you can do about it."

Protesters might even nab one with a net -- one of many reasons why Ehrhard, the former Air Force colonel, and other experts said they doubted that the hovering bugs spotted in Washington were spies.

So what was seen by Crane, Alarcon and a handful of others at the D.C. march -- and as far back as 2004, during the Republican National Convention in New York, when one observant but perhaps paranoid peace-march participant described on the Web "a jet-black dragonfly hovering about 10 feet off the ground, precisely in the middle of 7th avenue . . . watching us"?

They probably saw dragonflies, said Jerry Louton, an entomologist at the National Museum of Natural History. Washington is home to some large, spectacularly adorned dragonflies that "can knock your socks off," he said.

At the same time, he added, some details do not make sense. Three people at the D.C. event independently described a row of spheres, the size of small berries, attached along the tails of the big dragonflies -- an accoutrement that Louton could not explain. And all reported seeing at least three maneuvering in unison.

"Dragonflies never fly in a pack," he said.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice said her group is investigating witness reports and has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with several federal agencies. If such devices are being used to spy on political activists, she said, "it would be a significant violation of people's civil rights."

For many roboticists still struggling to get off the ground, however, that concern -- and their technology's potential role -- seems superfluous.

"I don't want people to get paranoid, but what can I say?" Fearing said. "Cellphone cameras are already everywhere. It's not that much different."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...100801434.html





Selective enforcement

Time Up on Siegelman Political Prosecution

TIME Reports on the Political Prosecutions in Alabama
Scott Horton

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” remarked a nationally known print journalist in a conversation three weeks ago.

“Everything I’ve been told by the convicted defendants checks out as the gospel truth. And everything I’m told by federal prosecutors who pushed the case turns out either to be an outrageous lie or at least a very serious distortion. And the local journalists who wrote the most about the case all behave like they’re accessories after the fact in a criminal investigation.”

Welcome to the Siegelman case.

And this week the cover will be pulled back further on the fraudulent criminal prosecution launched by U.S. Attorney Leura Canary, wife of the state’s G.O.P. campaign kingpin, and attorneys working for her. On Thursday of next week, the House Judiciary Committee will conduct its first hearings ever dealing with politically motivated prosecutions. And center stage will be occupied by the corrupt trial and conviction of Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman.

Today, Time Magazine delivers us a tiny appetizer for the feast which is approaching. It publishes as its cover story for the next issue the first pieces of its research project looking at the Siegelman case. Time poses the question: Was this a politically motivated prosecution? And it answers the question: Yes. And indeed, at this point those who say otherwise simply reveal that they don’t know much about the case.

On May 8, 2002, Clayton Lamar (Lanny) Young Jr., a lobbyist and landfill developer described by acquaintances as a hard-drinking “good ole boy,” was in an expansive mood. In the downtown offices of the U.S. Attorney in Montgomery, Ala., Young settled into his chair, personal lawyer at his side, and proceeded to tell a group of seasoned prosecutors and investigators that he had paid tens of thousands of dollars in apparently illegal campaign contributions to some of the biggest names in Alabama Republican politics.

According to Young, among the recipients of his largesse were the state’s former attorney general Jeff Sessions, now a U.S. Senator, and William Pryor Jr., Sessions’ successor as attorney general and now a federal judge. Young, whose detailed statements are described in documents obtained by TIME, became a key witness in a major case in Alabama that brought down a high-profile politician and landed him in federal prison with an 88-month sentence. As it happened, however, that official was the top Democrat named by Young in a series of interviews, and none of the Republicans whose campaigns he fingered were investigated in the case, let alone prosecuted.

The case of Don Siegelman, the Democratic former Governor of Alabama who was convicted last year on corruption charges, has become a flash point in the debate over the politicization of the Bush Administration’s Justice Department. Forty-four former state attorneys general — Republicans and Democrats — have cited “irregularities” in the investigation and prosecution, saying they “call into question the basic fairness that is the linchpin of our system of justice.”

The Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s office strongly deny that politics played any part in Siegelman’s prosecution. They say the former Governor, who recently began serving the first months of his more than seven-year sentence, got exactly what he deserved. But Justice officials have refused to turn over documentation on the case requested by the House Judiciary Committee, which scheduled a hearing on Siegelman’s prosecution for Oct. 11.

Now TIME has obtained sensitive portions of the requested materials, including FBI and state investigative records that lay out some of Young’s testimony. The information provided by the landfill developer was central to roughly half the 32 counts that Siegelman faced for allegedly accepting campaign contributions, money and gifts in exchange for official favors. (Siegelman was acquitted on 25 of those counts and convicted on seven. Young pleaded guilty to bribery-related charges and, in recognition of his cooperation with the government, received a short two-year sentence and fine.) But what Young had to say about Sessions, Pryor and other high-profile Alabama Republicans was even more remarkable for the simple fact that much of it had never before come to light.

Of course, readers of No Comment are familiar with much of the Lanny Young accusations. And indeed, some of them were put on the record in the Siegelman trial itself, causing Federal Judge Mark Fuller and the Justice Department prosecutors the equivalent of a minor coronary episode as they quickly scrambled to hush it all up.

Montgomery U.S. Attorney Leura Canary. The wife of G.O.P. kingpin William Canary, TIME discovers that her office put accusations targeting her husband’s clients in the deep freeze. Moreover, the Lanny Young accusations are only one of three separate cases I have already collected which reflect a consistent pattern.

Those raising complaints of criminal conduct on the part of senior Alabama Republicans with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Montgomery are told in plain terms that the Justice Department is not interested in the accusations. And if they persist, they quickly become the targets of threats. In one case, it was asserted, a threat was leveled that a grand jury would be empaneled and an indictment sought: against the person raising the corruption charges.

One of the more intriguing of the accusations involves the federal judge who presided over the Siegelman trial, Mark Fuller. Earlier the Court of Appeals remanded to Fuller the motion that Governor Siegelman filed for release pending appeal and on which Fuller never ruled. Such motions are granted as a matter of routine, and Fuller’s conduct was cited by a number of independent observers, including several former attorneys general, as a reason to be very suspicious of his conduct of the case. And now more information is surfacing concerning Fuller and the case.

Allegations were raised that Fuller had business dealings with Alabama Republican Senator Richard Shelby and that he benefited from Shelby’s access to highly classified and sensitive information for purposes of advancing the interests of his business, which is a contractor that thrives off of Defense Department contracts. Shelby, as the Washington Post reported, was investigated by the FBI for mishandling classified information.

The investigation included concerns that he passed classified information to a contractor. It is now being suggested that the contractor in question was one of Fuller’s companies. During the Siegelman case, Fuller acted very aggressively to cover-up the evidence of selective prosecution in the Siegelman case. Was Fuller motivated by concerns about disclosures that could prove compromising to him directly? Is so, that would provide still more reason to question Fuller’s impartiality.

In addition, a prominent member of the Alabama bar recently detailed to me his efforts to present concerns about corruption involving Alabama’s G.O.P. governor, Bob Riley, to a senior career prosecutor who works for Mrs. Canary. “He didn’t want to hear a word about it. He looked extremely uncomfortable,” the lawyer stated. And of course: Mrs. Canary is the wife of William Canary, close personal friend of Karl Rove, and campaign manager to Governor Riley. Moreover, also campaign manager to William Pryor, for whom Mrs. Canary formerly worked. The reasons why the Montgomery U.S. Attorney’s office failed to pursue this matter is completely obvious. It’s called political corruption.

In any event, as Time notes, conduct which is aggressively prosecuted if it involves Democrats is simply dismissed as unimportant if it involves Republicans. And that’s the definition of politically selective prosecution.

Time also catches Leura Canary in another fairly obvious deceit. Here’s the key passage:

Canary was in charge when Young spoke about his payments to the Sessions and Pryor campaigns and to other Alabama Republicans. At the same time, her husband’s consulting firm, Capitol Group LLC, was being paid close to $40,000 to advise Pryor. A source who held a senior post in Canary’s office during the long-running investigation into Siegelman says it’s almost inconceivable that Canary would not have been informed of Young’s charges against prominent Republican officeholders and candidates. Canary denied that to TIME. The fact that those charges were never looked at will only heighten suspicions that the Siegelman prosecution was a case of selective justice and that in the Bush Administration, enforcing the law has been a partisan pursuit.

Time offers up a small part of the documents which Leura Canary is vigorously seeking to suppress. Even just this little peek makes clear why the prosecutors in Montgomery are desperately trying to slither under a rock. When all their dealings are exposed to the light of the sun, the Siegelman prosecution will make its way into the history books. After the Scottsboro Boys, posterity will know the Siegelman case as the other prosecution that stained forever the state’s reputation for justice.
http://www.pacificfreepress.com/content/view/1730/81/





Terminal enforcement

Cop Kills Six in Rampage

A sheriff's deputy shot and killed six people in Crandon, Wisconsin, early Sunday before dying himself under circumstances that remain under wraps, the town's police chief said.

The assailant, Tyler Peterson, also worked part-time as a Crandon police officer.

Forest County Sheriff Keith Van Cleve said Peterson was "about 20" and was not on duty at the time of the shootings.

Schools superintendent Richard Peters told The Associated Press that three Crandon High students were killed and another three who died had graduated within the past year.

The victims were at a house party together. Residents say one of those killed is or was the shooter's girlfriend.

A survivor of the shooting was in critical condition Sunday night, and a Crandon police officer was treated for minor injuries, according to AP.

"I'm waiting for somebody to wake me up right now. This is a bad, bad dream," Jenny Stahl, mother of 14-year-old victim Lindsey Stahl told AP. "He took them all out."

Karly Johnson, 16, told AP she knew the shooter.

"He was nice. He was an average guy. Normal. You wouldn't think he could do that," Johnson said.

She said he had helped her in a class and had graduated with her brother. Peters, however, said he could not confirm whether the shooter graduated from Crandon High.

Police Chief John Dennee would not say Sunday evening how Peterson died.

Crandon Mayor Gary Bradley said the assailant had been brought down by a sniper, AP reported.

The shootings took place about 2:45 a.m. at a home in Crandon, a town of about 2,000 people 220 miles north of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Neither Dennee nor Van Cleve would discuss details of the shootings or identify the victims. They said officials would address questions Monday. Dennee told AP the victims were having "a pizza and movie party."

Marci Franz lives two houses south of the duplex where the shootings occurred.

"Initially, it sounded almost like a hammer on tin," Franz told CNN affiliate WJFW. "It was loud enough to wake me, but I wasn't sure it was gunshots."

The state attorney general's office will investigate the case, Van Cleve said.

Kevin St. John, a spokesman for the state Department of Justice, said the agency's criminal investigation unit routinely investigates cases of a "statewide or significant nature."

Van Cleve called the situation "very difficult" for his officers and the community. Watch how the small town is handling the shock of the shooting »

Bud Evans, an elder at Praise Chapel Community Church, said relatives of some of the victims of the shooting were gathering at his church.

Evans said watching members of the community suffer left him with "a helpless feeling."

The Crandon School District canceled classes for Monday.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/10/07/wis...ing/index.html





Victims of Cop Were Young
AP

The victims of an off-duty deputy's shooting spree were students or graduates of Crandon High School, and had gathered for pizza and movies on homecoming weekend.

One was an animal rights activist who had just started high school. Another dreamed of entering law enforcement himself.

Here is a look at their lives:

BRADLEY SCHULTZ

Bradley Schultz, 20, was a third-year criminal justice major at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He wanted to be a homicide detective, said his aunt, Rose Gerow.

Another aunt, Sharon Pisarek, said Schultz had been home from college visiting his friends and died trying to protect one.

''We still don't have many details, but from what they've told us, there was a girl next to him and he was covering her, protecting her,'' she said, sobbing. ''He was loved by everybody. He was everybody's son.''

Schultz's mother, Diane Schultz, is blind and a single parent who raised three sons, Gerow said. Bradley was the middle child with 15- and 22-year-old brothers.

Gerow said the family was devastated by his death.

''He was just a good boy,'' she said.

LINDSEY STAHL

Lindsey Stahl's mother let her daughter sleep over at a friend's house Saturday night -- it was homecoming weekend.

The 14-year-old, a freshman and the youngest of the victims, was a vegetarian, said her mother, Jenny Stahl, 39.

''She didn't eat meat,'' Stahl said. ''That is what a lot of people know her for. She was an animal rights activist.''

She also was interested in global warming, said her half brother, Ryan Coulter, 12. ''She probably would have changed the world, you know,'' he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

The family moved to northern Wisconsin about 10 years ago from Kenosha, in the southeastern part of the state.

Ashley Sheldon, 14, had been friends with Lindsey since preschool. She described her as a good friend who often helped her out.

''I will just remember her smile all the time,'' Ashley said.

JORDANNE MURRAY

Jordanne Murray loved children and hoped to be a daycare provider, said Sally Maxon, whose daughter had been best friends with her since kindergarten.

''She's a very, very wonderful person, the nicest girl you'd ever want to meet,'' Maxon said.

Murray, 18, was a good writer who had played sports in high school. Next August, she was supposed to stand up in Maxon's daughter's wedding, along with Bradley Schultz.

AARON SMITH

Aaron Smith was a happy-go-lucky guy, who embraced his nickname ''Chunk,'' said Derek Dehart, who went to high school with him.

''You almost never saw him without a smile,'' he said.

Smith, 20, and Bradley Schultz played on the football team with Dehart and helped the team to its first-ever playoff win their senior year, he said.

''He always joked around and had a good time, and even when he got mad, you knew he would never hurt a fly,'' Dehart said.

Smith certainly was ''a big guy with big muscles,'' said Sjana Farr, whose husband is the pastor at Praise Chapel Community Church. But she and her husband called him ''Spanky,'' because he reminded them of the character from ''The Little Rascals'' movies.

His parents wanted him to work at their insurance company, but he didn't want to, Farr said. Instead, Smith usually worked construction jobs because he was so muscular.

Smith was at their house every day and like a son, Farr said. He even stood up in their son's wedding.

''It's extremely hard to know that Aaron's gone,'' she said, crying.

LEANNA THOMAS

Leanna Thomas, 18, sang with her identical twin Lindsey in the church choir, their voices merging beautifully, Sjana Farr said.

''You could feel the buzz of their tone because their voices were so much connected to each other,'' Farr said. ''It was beautiful to hear them sing.''

The twins were in band and theater and played volleyball, baseball and basketball together. They were lively and artistic and made people around them feel good, Farr said.

''When they walked into a room, they made every kid and every adult feel like they were worth something,'' she said.

Farr said she became close with Leanna because she too is an identical twin. She would try to talk to the girls about what it meant to be a twin.

''Now I'm really concerned about her being left alone,'' she said of Lindsey. ''Those two were inseparable. I could hardly tell them apart.''

KATRINA McCORKLE

Katrina McCorkle, 18, was a senior. A former boyfriend said she and Murray were longtime friends. McCorkle loved playing softball and had been thinking about what college she might attend, he said, adding that ''her family meant everything to her.''

CHARLIE NEITZEL

Charlie Neitzel, 21, who was injured in the shooting, was a goofy guy and a good friend of Aaron Smith's, said Dehart, who went to high school with him. The two always went to parties together, he said.

''He was always able to make somebody laugh,'' he said.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i...0XXiAD8S5AFI80





Post Editor Says Bush, Gonzales Should be Tortured
Nick Juliano

An associate editor and columnist for the Washington Post says that until George W. Bush and others in his administration endure the "harsh" treatment to which terrorism suspects are subjected, then Bush "will be remembered as the president who tried to justify torture."

Saying his proposal is a "serious" alternative to Jonathan Swift's "modest proposal," the Post's Eugene Robinson says Bush should endure the same detainee treatment he authorized, which "international conventions deem torture."

"My proposal on torture is serious," Robinson wrote on a washingtonpost.com discussion board Sunday. "Let me know if you agree: Bush administration officials who claim the "harsh" interrogation techniques being used on terrorism suspects are not torture should have to undergo those same techniques. Personally. Repeatedly."

The New York Times revealed last week that secret Justice Department documents explicitly authorized "a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures." Bush repeated denials that the US does not torture prisoners, although he has not discussed what specific tactics are used.

"Clearly, he is using a narrow definition of torture: If we haven't actually put anybody on the rack or pulled out his fingernails, we haven't committed torture," Robinson writes. "Until George W. Bush can say, 'Hey, I've been waterboarded, and it wasn't so bad,' or Alberto Gonzales can say, 'To tell the truth, spending those three days naked in a freezing-cold cell wasn't painful or anything,' then I'll continue to believe that history will condemn this administration for a shocking lapse of moral judgment. Bush will be remembered as the president who tried to justify torture."
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Post_e...ould_1008.html





GOP Congressmen Quit Because of Five-Day Work Week

Nine Republican congressmen have so far announced that they will not be running for re-election. One of those lawmakers, Rep. Ray LaHood (R-IL), complained “that the Democrats’ new five-day workweek” is part of the reason they’re all retiring:

“I do think the schedule and the flying is a huge pain for people, particularly those who are from the Midwest or even further West,” he said, adding that it’s “probably the worst part of the job.”

“I think that has played into these retirement announcements,” said the seven-term congressman from Peoria.

In Dec. 2006, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) also griped about having to work five days each week, stating, “Marriages suffer. The Democrats could care less about families — that’s what this says.”
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/10/09/...day-work-week/

[JackSpratts]

Marilyn Monroe's Millions at Stake
Philip Sherwell

Her sultry pout and peroxide blonde hair helped make Marilyn Monroe one of the most famous faces in showbusiness. Now her instantly recognisable looks are at the centre of a bitter legal row over the control of dead celebrities' images, one that is pitting some of the biggest names in entertainment and sport against each other.

Yoko Ono, Al Pacino and the estates of the tennis champion Arthur Ashe and the baseball legend Babe Ruth are among those backing new legislation that would give the heirs of dead celebrities full control over commercial use of their names and images.

Opponents, who include the children of Ray Charles and Marlon Brando as well as the photographers who captured iconic images of Monroe, contend that new laws proposed in California and New York would restrict public access throughout the world to the pictures and work of hundreds of actors and artists.

The intensity of the confrontation reflects the highly lucrative business of marketing the famous names that keep filling the coffers even in death. According to the latest dead rich list compiled by Forbes magazine, the top 13 dead celebrities raked in $247 million (£125 million) for their estates last year from deals for their works, or rights to use their names and images for marketing and memorabilia.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor-turned-politician, now has a pivotal role in the process. As the governor of California, he must decide whether to sign a bill passed last month by the state legislature that expands the control of heirs over how deceased celebrities are marketed. The immediate controversy is over who has the right to control images such as the world famous pose of Monroe, with dress billowing over a subway grate, in a photo shoot taken by Sam Shaw for the film The Seven Year Itch.

The star's sole heir, Anna Strasberg, the Venezuelan-born widow of Monroe's acting coach Lee Strasberg, to whom she left her estate, is pitted against the children of four photographers who worked closely with the international sex symbol. It has turned into an ugly and unpleasant fight.

The enduring allure of Monroe, who died of a sleeping pill overdose aged 36 in 1962, earned $8 million for her estate for 2005-06 from perfumes, handbags and advertising campaigns for the likes of Dom Perignon and General Motors.

Those were all authorised by the Marilyn Monroe Limited Liability Company, established by Mrs Strasberg. But in 2005, she sued the picture archives that had been independently selling photographs for merchandising.

Although there was no dispute that the archives owned the copyrights, and indeed in some cases Monroe had also signed release forms, Mrs Strasberg argued that she should control marketing rights — and of course licensing fees.

The court hearings on the East and West coasts went against her in May, prompting Mrs Strasberg to launch her legislative push in June. The proposals stalled in New York but were fast-tracked in California, where lawmakers are historically more supportive of the entertainment industry.

Her battle has angered the descendants of the photographers who helped make Marilyn Monroe famous. "Sam Shaw owned the copyright to the photos and the billowing skirt concept was his. Now we are facing an attempt to enact retroactive legislation," said his grandson David Marcus.

Joshua Greene, whose photographer father Milton was a former business partner of Monroe and shot some 5,000 pictures of her, is equally indignant. "My father and Marilyn were partners, she happily signed away the rights to the photos, she lived in our house and she babysat for me, but now Marilyn Monroe LLC wants the right to control those images," he said.

The Monroe estate counters that it is pursuing its duty to protect the star's reputation from exploitation on inappropriate items such as condoms and knickers — items that have been found bearing her image.

Currently, a British T-shirt manufacturer who wants to feature a Milton Greene picture of Monroe must seek permission and pay a fee to the photographer's archive. If the new legislation is passed, he would also need authority from Mrs Strasberg and pay her charges too.

Anna Strasberg enlisted big-name allies for the legislative push. Yoko Ono gave support on behalf of her murdered husband John Lennon, the former Beatle, while Al Pacino said: "I feel one's likeness and image should be protected in some way and not abused or denigrated for the sake of profit."

Mrs Strasberg's son David said his family was determined to protect Monroe's legacy and had rejected proposals such as Marilyn cigarettes and condoms.

"The only people who are opposed to this legislation are those who want to make a quick buck out of Marilyn," he said. "You can still use photos of Marilyn in artworks and newspapers and books. But we are determined to prevent her exploitation."

However, the children of Ray Charles joined a campaign urging Mr Schwarzenegger not to sign the legislation, including a petition which suggests that Anna Strasberg only wants to change the law to make "millions of dollars from those wishing to use the name or likeness of Marilyn Monroe".

And Surjit Soni, a lawyer for two California-based picture archives, contended the law would cause "pandemonium" in the courts and reduce the availability worldwide of Monroe memorabilia.

"If this legislation is passed, the public throughout the world would be at the mercy of Anna Strasberg's taste and sensibilities," he said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...wmonroe107.xml





New Blu-Ray Features Freeze Older Players; Updates Coming
Scott M. Fulton, III

With the next wave of interactive features having been added to 20th Century-Fox's latest Blu-Ray Disc releases, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and The Day After Tomorrow, there was always a certain level of anticipation that some existing Blu-ray consoles would have trouble, especially the first-generation editions. Surprisingly, it's the second generation which is seeing some early problems, with reports from owners of Samsung's BD-P1200 that they can't play either of these titles.

"You know, this really sucks...how much did we pay for the freaking things?" asked one AVS Forum member on Tuesday. "It's bad enough you have to choose sides to play certain movies, but now some don't even work."

Reports from other AVS Forum users show many BD-P1200s don't play the F4 sequel at all, while earlier first-generation BD-P1000 models valiantly make the attempt - taking forever to load and sputtering generally through the first half-hour of playback, before freezing. Owners of LG's original dual-format BH-100 console also report no playback, but its interactivity support was always known to be lacking anyway, especially for HD DVD.

While some Sony PlayStation 3 owners have also reported problems, expert owners point the latest system firmware already available should correct them.

In a statement yesterday to Video Business, Fox' senior VP of communications, Steve Feldstein, acknowledged the issue but said the solution rests with the hardware manufacturers. Feldstein urged that console owners lobby those companies, implying some kind of mass movement.

In anticipation of such movement, apparently, both affected manufacturers are acting. Spokespersons for both LG and Samsung told Hi-Def Digest they would have firmware fixes within the next few weeks, while some Samsung owners report being told by its customer support personnel a fix may be available next week, though at least one other Samsung owner was told the company had no absolute timetable.

Users of Cyberlink's PowerDVD player for Windows have also reported problems with these titles, and have been advised to upgrade their software. However as of today, many of those users remain perplexed.

What exactly is the problem, and could it become widespread? The initial lack of reports from any other Blu-ray brand appear hopeful, though there may yet be implementation problems which manufacturers may need to take into account.

While some expert owners at first suspected Blu-ray's BDMV authoring mode, which has advanced features such as overlaid menus and alternate audio tracks, suspicion now centers on Fox's implementation of Blu-ray's BD-J interactivity layer and its BD+ copy protection - specifically, on how both may be used together.

Although both categories have always been part of the Blu-ray specification, they have actually been evolving while the first generation of high-def discs were already being sold, and the first-generation consoles being distributed.

Supposedly, if a later generation disc with BD+ protection was to be inserted in a console with earlier-generation support or no support, or that needed to have a firmware upgrade to support it, the older firmware would recognize that fact and warn the owner in plain English on screen. That's not what's happening in any of the cases reported to user forums.

While that would appear to cast the spotlight on BD-J as the likely culprit, some PowerDVD users who have updated their software as advised and who still have problems are suspecting their BD-ROM drives. Meanwhile, many users of the very first Blu-ray players made available early last year report no problems whatsoever with these or any other titles.

As one member of the Hi-Def Forum put it, "I have no idea how these AACS/BD+ thingies work...Why should I? As a customer, I just want a working product!"
http://www.betanews.com/article/prin...ing/1191609316





Is The Net Good For Writers?
RU Sirius

"Writing as a special talent became obsolete in the 19th century. The bottleneck was publishing."

That bold statement came from Clay Shirky when I interviewed him for the NeoFiles webzine back in 2002. I never got around to asking him if that was an aesthetic judgment or a statement about economics and social relations.

But here's a contrasting viewpoint. Novelist William Burroughs met playwright Samuel Beckett, and after some small talk, Beckett looked directly at Burroughs and said, propitiously, "You're a writer." Burroughs instantly understood that Beckett was welcoming him into a very tiny and exclusive club — that there are only a few writers alive at any one time in human history. Beckett was saying that Burroughs was one of them. Everybody writes. Not everybody is a writer. Or at least, that's what some of us think...

Now the web — and its democratizing impact — has spread for over a decade. Over a billion people can deliver their text to a very broad public. It's a fantastic thing which gives a global voice to dissidents in various regions, makes people less lonely by connecting other people with similar interests and problems, ad infinitum.

But what does it mean for writers and writing? What does it mean for those who specialize in writing well?

I've asked ten professional writers, including Mr. Shirky, to assess the net's impact on writers. Here are their answers to the question...

Q: Is the internet good for writers and writing?


Mark Amerika

The short answer is yes, but as I suggest in my new book, META/DATA, we probably need to expand the concept of writing to take into account new forms of online communication as well as emerging styles of digital rhetoric. This means that the educational approach to writing is also becoming more complex, because it's not just one (alphabetically oriented) literacy that informs successful written communication but a few others as well, most notably visual design literacy and computer/networking literacy.

As always, RU, you were ahead of the game — think how easy it is to text your name!

It helps to know how to write across all media platforms. Not only that, but to become various role-playing personas whose writerly performance plays out in various multi-media languages across these same platforms. The most successful writer-personas now and into the future — at least those interested in "making a living" as you put it — will be those who can take on varying flux personas via the act of writing. (And who isn't into making a living... What's the opposite? Conducting a death ritual for the consumer zombies lost in the greenwash imaginary?)

Think of this gem from Italo Calvino.
Writing always presupposes the selection of a psychological attitude, a rapport with the world, a tone of voice, a homogeneous set of linguistic tools, the data of experience and the phantoms of the imagination — in a word, a style. The author is an author insofar as he enters into a role the way an actor does and identifies himself with that projection of himself at the moment of writing.

The key is to keep writing, imaginatively. As Ron Sukenick once said: "Use your imagination or else someone else will use it for you." What better way to use it than via writing, and the internet is the space where writing is teleported to your distributed audience in waiting, no?

Mark Amerika has been the Publisher of Alt-X since it first went online in 1993. He is the producer of the Net-Art Trilogy, Grammatron. His books include META/DATA: A Digital Poetics and In Memoriam to Postmodernism: Essays on the Avant-Pop (coedited with Lance Olsen). He teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


Erik Davis

In the face of this complex, hydra-headed query I'll simply offer the evidence and narrow perspective of one writer in a moderately grumpy mood: me.

I began my career as a freelance writer in 1989, and by the mid-90s was a modestly successful and up-and-coming character who wrote about a wide number of topics for a variety of print publications, both esoteric (Gnosis, Fringeware Review) and slick (Details, Spin). I got paid pretty good for a youngster—generally much better than I get paid now, when my career sometimes looks more and more like a hobby, but also less driven by external measures of what a “successful” writing career looks like.

I cannot blame my shrinking income entirely on the internet. My own career choices have been largely to write about what I want to write about, and my interests are not exactly mainstream. The early to mid-1990s was a very special time in American culture, a strange and giddy Renaissance where esoteric topics freely mixed and matched in a highly sampledelic culture. So I was able to write about outsider matters in a reasonably mainstream context.

My first book, Techgnosis, which was about mystic and countercultural currents within media and technological culture, fetched a pretty nice advance. But once the internet bubble really started to swell, leading to the pop and then 9/11, that era passed into a more conservative, celebrity-driven, and niche-oriented culture, a development that relates to the rise of the internet but cannot be laid at its feet.

Many of the changes in the book industry and print publications are more obviously related to the rise of the internet. One of the worst developments for me has been the increasing brevity of print pieces, something I do blame largely on the fast-moving, novelty-driven blip culture of the internet and the blogosphere. When I started writing for music magazines, I wrote 2000-plus-word articles about (then) relatively obscure bands like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. Now I write 125-word reviews for Blender. I don't even try to play the game of penning celebrity-driven profiles in mainstream music mags anymore, where feature lengths have shrunk all around and the topics seem more driven by the publicists.

Shrinking space has definitely worked against my job satisfaction. I'm basically an essayist, though I often disguise myself as a critic or a journalist. Either way, it means that I am a long writer guy. I like to develop topics, approach them from different, often contradictory angles, and most of all, I like to polish the shit out of them so that the flow and the prose shine and bedazzle. On and offline, I find the internet-driven pressure to make pieces short, data-dense, and crisply opinionated — as opposed to thoughtful, multi-perspectival, and lyrical — rather oppressive, leading to a certain kind of superficial smugness as well as general submission to the forces of reference over reflection. I do enjoy writing 125-word record reviews though!

I also like to read and try to produce really good prose — prose that infuses nonfiction, whether criticism or journalism or essay, with an almost poetic and emotional sensibility that ideally reflects in style and form the content that one is expressing. But nonfiction discourse online is almost entirely driven by Content — which includes not only news and information, but also opinion, that dread and terrible habit that is kinda like canned thought. People have reactions, and yet feel a need to justify them, and so reach for a can of opinion, pop the lid, and spread it all over the bulletin board or the blog.

I'm really sick of opinions and of most of what passes for online debate. Even the more artful rhetorical elements of argument and debate are rarely seen amidst the food fights, the generic argumentative “moves,” the poor syntax, and the often lame attempts to bring a “fresh take” to a topic. This is not an encouraging environment from which to speak from the heart or the soul or whatever it is that makes living, breathing prose an actual source of sustenance and spiritual strength.

But it's all about adaptation, right? Though I'm still committed to books, I now write more online than off. I've been enjoying myself, although my definition of “making a living” has continued to sink ever farther from anything halfway reasonable. I've enjoyed writing for online pay publications like Slate and Salon, but the rates are depressing. As for my own writing at my Techgnosis.com, I'm still struggling to develop traffic in an environment that rewards precisely the kind of writing I don't really do. Some people really love the stuff I write there, but I take a lot of time on my posts and generally don't offer the sort of sharp opinions and super-fresh news and unseen links that tend to draw eyeballs.

At the same time, it's been enormously satisfying to find my own way into this vast and open form, and to elude the generic grooves of the blog form and really shape it into a medium for the kind of writing I want to do. (Don't get me wrong—some of my favorite writing and thinking anywhere appears online; BLDGBLOG is just the first that springs to mind.) It's been delicious to explore possibilities in nonfiction writing that all but the most obscure and arty print publications would reject, and to do so in a medium that is bursting with possible readers. I'm not into “private” writing; I write for and with readers in mind, and I think its great how the web allows linkages and alliances with like minds and crews (like 10 Zen Monkeys, or Reality Sandwich, or Boing Boing). And I know that readers who resonate with my stuff now stumble across it along myriad paths.

At the same time, I find it tough to keep at bay the online inclinations that in many ways I find corrosive to the type of writing I do — the desire to increase traffic, to post relentlessly, to write shorter and snappier, to obsessively check stats, to plug into the often tedious and ill-thought “debates” that will increase traffic but that too often fall far short of actually thinking about anything. I've met amazing like minds online, and participated in some stellar debates, but frankly that was years ago. Today things seem to be growing rather claustrophobic and increasingly cybernetic.

For example, I chose to not have a comments section on Techgnosis.com, because I didn't want to deal with spam. Plus I find most comments sections boring and/or tendentious and/or tough to read for one still invested in proper grammar. I figure that folks who wanted to respond can just send me emails, which they do, and which I have long made it a rule to answer. I'm pleased with my choice, though I also feel the absence of the sort of quick feedback loops of attention that satisfy the desire to make an impact on readers, and that, in an attention economy, have increasingly become the coin of the realm. But that coin—which is certainly not the same thing as actually being read—is a little thin.

Especially without some of the old coin in your pocket to back it up.
Erik Davis is author of The Visionary State: A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape and Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information.

He writes for Wired, Bookforum, Village Voice and many other publications. He posts frequently at his website at techgnosis.com


Mark Dery

Who, exactly, is making a living shoveling prose online? Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds? Jason Kottke? Josh Marshall? To the best of my knowledge, only a vanishingly tiny number of bloggers are able to eke out an existence through their blogging, much less turn a healthy profit.

For now, visions of getting rich through self-publishing look a lot like envelope-stuffing for the cognitive elite — or at least for insomniacs with enough time and bandwidth to run their legs to stumps in their electronic hamster wheels, posting and answering comments 24/7. As a venerable hack toiling in the fields of academe, I love the idea of being King of All Media without even wearing pants, which is why I hope that some new-media wonk like Jason Calacanis or Jeff Jarvis finds the Holy Grail of self-winding journalism — i.e., figuring out how to make online writing self-supporting.

Meanwhile, the sour smell of fear is in the air. Reporting — especially investigative reporting, the lifeblood of a truly adversarial press — is labor-intensive, money-sucking stuff, yet even The New York Times can't figure out how to charge for its content in the Age of Rip, Burn, and Remix. To be sure, newspapers are hemorrhaging readers to the Web, and fewer and fewer Americans care about current events and the world outside their own skulls. But the other part of the problem is that Generation Download thinks information wants to be free, everywhere and always, even if some ink-stained wretch wept tears of blood to create it.

Lawrence Lessig talks a good game, but I still don't understand how people who live and die by their intellectual property survive the obsolescence of copyright and the transition to the gift economy of our dreams. I mean, even John Perry Barlow, bearded evangelist of the coming netopia, seems to have taken shelter in the academy. Yes, we live in the golden age of achingly hip little 'zines like Cabinet and The Believer and Meatpaper, and I rejoice in that fact, but most of them pay hen corn, if they pay at all.

As someone who once survived (albeit barely) as a freelancer, I can say with some authority that the freelance writer is going the way of the Quagga. Well, at least one species of freelance writer: the public intellectual who writes for a well-educated, culturally literate reader whose historical memory doesn't begin with Dawson's Landing. A professor friend of mine, well-known for his/her incisive cultural criticism, just landed a column for PopMatters.com. Now, a column is yeoman's work and it doesn't pay squat. But s/he was happy to get the gig because she wanted to burnish her brand, presumably, and besides, as she noted, "Who does, these days?" (Pay, that is.) The Village Voice's Voice Literary Supplement used to offer the Smartest Kids in the World a forum for long, shaggy screeds; now, newspapers across the country are shuttering their book review sections and the Voice is about the length (and depth) of your average Jack Chick tract and shedding pages by the minute.

So those are the grim, pecuniary effects of the net on writers and writing. As for its literary fallout, print editors are being stampeded, goggle-eyed, toward a form of writing that presumes what used to be called, cornily enough, a "screenage" paradigm: short bursts of prose — the shorter the better, to accommodate as much eye candy as possible. Rupert Murdoch just took over The Wall Street Journal, and is already remaking that august journal for blip culture: article lengths are shrinking. Shrewdly, magazines like The New Yorker understand that print fetishists want their print printy — McLuhan would have said Gutenbergian — so they're erring on the side of length, and Dave Eggers and the Cabinet people are emphasizing what print does best: exquisite paper stocks, images so luxuriously reproduced you could lower yourself into them, like a hot bath.

Also, information overload and time famine encourage a sort of flat, depthless style, indebted to online blurblets, that's spreading like kudzu across the landscape of American prose. (The English, by contrast, preserve a smarter, more literary voice online, rich in character; not for nothing are Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens two of the web's best stylists.) I can't read people like Malcolm Gladwell, whose bajillion-selling success is no surprise when you consider that he aspires to a sort of in-flight magazine weightlessness, just the sort of thing for anxious middle managers who want it all explained for them in the space of a New York-to-Chicago flight. The English language dies screaming on the pages of Gladwell's books, and between the covers of every other bestseller whose subtitle begins, "How..."

Another fit of spleen: This ghastly notion, popularized by Masters of Their Own Domain like Jeff Jarvis, that every piece of writing is a "conversation." It's a no-brainer that writing is a communicative act, and always has been. And I'll eagerly grant the point that composing in a dialogic medium like the net is like typing onstage, in Madison Square Garden, with Metallica laying down a speed metal beat behind you. You're writing on the fly, which is halfway between prose and speech. But the Jarvises of the world forget that not all writing published online is written online. I dearly loathe Jarvis's implication that all writing, online or off, should sound like water-cooler conversation; that content is all that matters; that foppish literati should stop sylphing around and submit to the tyranny of the pyramid lead; and that any mind that can't squeeze its thoughts into bullet points should just die. This is the beige, soul-crushing logic of the PowerPoint mind. What will happen, I wonder, when we have to write for the postage-stamp screen of the iPod? The age of IM prose is waiting in the wings...

Parting thoughts: The net has also open-sourced the cultural criticism business, a signal development that on one hand destratifies cultural hierarchies and makes space for astonishing voices like the people behind bOING bOING and BLDGBLOG and Ballardian. Skimming reader comments on Amazon, I never cease to be amazed by the arcane expertise lurking in the crowd; somebody, somewhere, knows everything about something, no matter how mind-twistingly obscure. But this sea change — and it's an extraordinary one — is counterbalanced by the unhappy fact that off-the-shelf blogware and the comment thread make everyone a critic or, more accurately, make everyone think they're a critic, to a minus effect. We're drowning in yak, and it's getting harder and harder to hear the insightful voices through all the media cacophony. Oscar Wilde would be just another forlorn blogger out on the media asteroid belt in our day, constantly checking his SiteMeter's Average Hits Per Day and Average Visit Length.

Also, the Digital Age puts the middlebrow masses on the bleeding edge. Again, a good thing, and a symmetry break with postwar history, when the bobos were the "antennae of the race," as Pound put it, light years ahead of the leadfooted bourgeoisie when it came to emergent trends. Now even obscure subcultures and microtrends tucked into the nooks and crannies of our culture are just a Google search away. Back in the day, a subcultural spelunker could make a living writing about the cultural fringes because it took a kind of pop ethnographer or anthropologist to sleuth them out and make sense of them; it still takes critical wisdom to make sense of them, but sleuthing them out takes only a few clicks.

Do I sound bitter? Not at all. But we live in times of chaos and complexity, and the future of writing and reading is deeply uncertain. Reading and writing are solitary activities. The web enables us to write in public and, maybe one day, strike off the shackles of cubicle hell and get rich living by our wits. Sometimes I think we're just about to turn that cultural corner. Then I step onto the New York subway, where most of the car is talking nonstop on cellphones. Time was when people would have occupied their idle hours between the covers of a book. No more. We've turned the psyche inside out, exteriorizing our egos, extruding our selves into public space and filling our inner vacuums with white noise.

Mark Dery is the author of The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. His 1993 essay "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs" popularized the term "culture jamming" and helped launch the movement.

He teaches media criticism and literary journalism in the Department of Journalism at NYU and blogs at markdery.com


Jay Kinney

It's a mixed blessing.

If the hardest part of writing is just making yourself sit there and write, and what used to be a typewriter and a blank sheet of paper has been transformed into a magical portal to a zillion fascinating destinations, then the internet can be a giant and addictive distraction.

On the other hand, it's a quick and simple way to do research without ever leaving your chair, and that can be a real time-saver.

So, on those counts at least — color me ambivalent.

Jay Kinney is the author of Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (with Richard Smoley), and The Inner West: An Introduction to the Hidden Wisdom of the West. He was the editor of CoEvolution Quarterly and Gnosis magazine.


Paul Krassner

For me as a writer, the internet has become indispensable; if only in terms of researching it saves so much time and energy. Google et al are miraculous.

Word processing has changed the nature of editing, and without the dread of typing a whole page again; I can change things as I go along, surrendering to delusions of perfection.

I have become as much in awe of Technology as I am of Nature. And although I blog for free, occasional paid assignments have fallen into my lap as a result.

Better than lapdancing.

Paul Krassner was Publisher/Editor of the legendary satire magazine, The Realist.

He started the classic satirical publication The Realist, founded the Yippies with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and has written billions and billions of books including his most recent: One Hand Jerking: Reports from an Investigative Satirist. Krassner posts regularly at paulkrassner.com


Adam Parfrey

The internet has made research much easier, which is both good and bad. It's good not to be forced to go libraries to fact check and throw together bibliographic references. But it's bad not to be forced to do this, since it diminishes the possibility of accidental discovery. Physically browsing on library stacks and at used bookstores can lead to extraordinary discoveries. One can also discover extraordinary things online, too, but the physical process of doing so is somehow more personally gratifying.

The internet has both broadened and limited audiences for books at the same time. People outside urban centers can now find offbeat books that personally intrigue them. But the interest in physical books overall seems diminished by the satiation of curiosity by a simple search on the internet, and the distraction of limitless data smog.

The internet has influenced my decision as a publisher to move away from text-only books to ones with a more multimedia quality, with photos, illustrations and sometimes CDs or DVDs.

I like the internet and computers for their ability to make writers of nearly everyone. I don't like the internet and computers for their ability to make sloppy and thoughtless writers of nearly everyone.

Overall, it's an exciting world. I'm glad to be alive at this time.

Adam Parfrey is Publisher with Feral House and Process Media, and author of the classic Apocalypse Culture, among many other books.


Douglas Rushkoff

I'd say that it's great for writing as a cultural behavior, but maybe not for people who made their livings creating text. There's a whole lot more text out there, and only so much time to read all this stuff. People spend a lot of their time reading text on screens, and don't necessarily want to come home and read text on a page after that. Reading a hundred emails is really enough daily reading for anyone.

The book industry isn't what it used to be, but I don't blame that on the internet. It's really the fault of media conglomeration. Authors are no longer respected in the same way, books are treated more like magazines with firm expiration dates, and writers who simply write really well don't get deals as quickly as disgraced celebrities or get-rich-quick gurus.

This makes it harder for writers to make a living writing. To write professionally means being able to craft sentences and paragraphs and articles and books that communicate as literature. Those who care about such things should rise to the top.

But I think many writers — even good ones — will have to accept the fact that books can be loss-leaders or break-even propositions in a highly mediated world where showing up in person generates the most income.

Douglas Rushkoff is a noted media critic who has written and hosted two award-winning Frontline documentaries that looked at the influence of corporations on youth culture — The Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders.

Recent books include Get Back in the Box: How Being Great at What You Do Is Great for Business and Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism. He is currently writing a monthly comic book, Testament for Vertigo. He blogs frequently at Rushkoff.com/blog.php


Clay Shirky

Dear Mr. Sirius, I read with some interest your request to comment on whether Herr Gutenberg's new movable type is good for books and for scribes. I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about the newly capable printing press, and though the invention is just 40 years old, I think we can already see some of the outlines of the coming changes.

First, your question "is it good for books and for scribes?" seems to assume that what is good for one must be good for the other. Granted, this has been true for the last several centuries, but the printing press has a curious property — it reduces the very scarcity of writing that made scribal effort worthwhile, so I would answer that it is great for books and terrible for scribes. Thanks to the printing press, we are going to see more writing, and more kinds of writing, which is wonderful for the reading public, and even creates new incentives for literacy. Because of these improvements, however, the people who made their living from the previous scarcity of books will be sorely discomfited.

In the same way that water is more vital than diamonds but diamonds are more expensive than water, the new abundance caused by the printing press will destroy many of the old professions tied to writing, even as it puts in place new opportunities as yet only dimly with us. Aldus Manutius, in Venice, seems to be creating a market for new kinds of writing that the scribes never dreamt of, and which were impossible given the high cost of paying someone to copy a book by hand.

There is one thing the printing press does not change, of course, which is the scarcity of publishing. Taking a fantastical turn, one could imagine a world in which everyone had not only the ability to read and write but to publish as well. In such a world, of course, we would see the same sort of transformation we are seeing now with the printing press, which is to say an explosion in novel forms of writing. Such a change would also create enormous economic hardship for anyone whose living was tied to earlier scarcities. Such a world, as remarkable as it might be, must remain merely imaginative, as the cost of publishing will always be out of reach of even literate citizens.

Yours,

Clay Shirky, Esq.

Clay Shirky consults on the rise of decentralized technologies for Nokia, the Library of Congress, and the BBC. He's an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches a course in "Social Weather," examining ways of understanding group dynamics in online spaces.

His writing has appeared in Business 2.0, New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications.


John Shirley

The internet has some advantages for writers, which I gladly exploit; it offers some access to new audiences, it offers new venues... But it has even more disadvantages.

A recent study suggested that young people read approximately half as much as young people did before the advent of the internet and videogames. While there are enormous bookstores, teeming with books, chain stores and online book dealing now dominate the book trade and it may be that there are fewer booksellers overall. A lot of fine books are published but, on the whole, publishers push for the predictable profit far more than they used to, which means they prefer predictable books. Editors are no longer permitted to make decisions on their own. They must consult marketing departments before buying a book. Book production has become ever more like television production: subordinate to trendiness, and the anxiety of executives.

And in my opinion this is partly because a generation intellectually concussed by the impact of the internet and other hyperactive, attention-deficit media, is assumed, probably rightly, to want superficial reading.

I know people earnestly involved in producing dramas for iPod download and transmission to iPhones. Obviously, productions of that sort are oriented to small images in easy-to-absorb bites. Episodes are often only a few minutes long. Or even shorter. Broadband drama, produced to be seen on the internet, is also attention-deficit-oriented. I've written for episodic television and have known the frustration of writers told to cut their "one hour" episodes down to 42 minutes, so that more commercials can be crammed in. Losing ten minutes of drama takes a toll on the writing of a one hour show — just imagine the toll taken by being restricted to three-minute episodes. Story development becomes staccato, pointlessly violent (because that translates well to the form), childishly melodramatic, simple minded to the extreme.

All this may be an extension of the basic communication format forged by the internet: email, chatrooms, instant messages, board postings, blogs. Email is usually telegraphic in form, compact, and without the literary feel that letters once had; communication in chatrooms is reduced to soundbites that will fit into the little message window and people are impatient in chatrooms, unwilling to wait as a long sentence is formulated; instant messages are even more compressed, superficial, and not even in real English; board postings may be lengthier but if they are, no one reads them.

Same goes for blogs. They'd better be short thoughts or — for the most part — few will trouble to read them. The internet is always tugging at you to move on, surf on, check this and that, talk to three people at once. How do you maintain long thoughts, how do you stretch out intellectually, in those conditions? Sometimes at places like The Well, perhaps, people are more thoughtful. But in general, online readers are prone to be attention challenged.

Reading at one's computer is, also, not as comfortable as reading a book in an armchair — so besides the distractions, it's simply a drag to spend a lot of time reading a single document online. But people spend a great deal of time and energy online, time and energy which is then not available for that armchair book. Occasionally someone breaks the rules and puts long stories online, as Rudy Rucker has done, admirably well, posting new stories by various writers at flurb.net. But for the most part, the internet is inimical to stretching out, literarily.

The genie is out of the bottle, and we cannot go back. But it would be well if people did not misrepresent the literary value of writing for the internet.

John Shirley was the original cyberpunk SF writer, but he also writes in other genres including horror. He wrote the original script for The Crow and has written for television including Deep Space Nine, Max Headroom, and Poltergeist: The Legacy.

His books include the Eclipse Trilogy, Wetbones, The Other End and his latest — a short story collection Living Shadows: Stories: New & Preowned. He writes lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult. Shirley's own online indulgence is his site Signs of Witness.


Michael Simmons

Concerning the internet, yes, many thoughts. None of them good.

The advent of personal computers has been ruinous. Empowering, my ass. Suddenly everyone's a writer. As someone who's been a professional writer my entire life, I now sit for hours every day and answer e-mails. I don't mind if the subject has substance, like this, but the onslaught of e-media, e-spam, e-requests for money, stupid e-jokes, e-advertisements, etc., is painful. I'm chained to a machine. Editors say they simply can't respond to all the e-mails they receive. Telephonic communication was quicker and easier.

Used to be I sat at an alphabet keyboard (called typewriters in my day) when I had an assignment or inspiration. Now it's all I do. Go to a library? Why? You can get what you need on the internet. Which means I've been suffering from Acute Cabin Fever since 1999 (when I tragically signed up for internet access). Sure, I could get off my ass and go to a library, but the internet is like heroin. Why take a walk in the park when you can boot up and find beauty behind your eyelids or truth from the MacBook? (Interesting that the term 'boot-up' is junkie-speak.)

I only got a word processor in 1990. I used a typewriter until then. My writing was no different before I could instantly re-write. I had to think about what I was going to write before applying fingertip to key. Now I'm terribly careless. I make mistakes that I never made pre-processing. Certainly literature hasn't improved (nor has art, music, film or anything else). Instead of reading Charles Olson or Rimbaud or Melville or Voltaire or Terry Southern, now people spend all day playing with their computers and endless varieties of applications.

I hear my friends — all smart — kvelling about some new piece of software. You'd think they'd cured cancer. We're a planet of marks getting our bank accounts skimmed by Bill Gates and Steven Jobs. Gates and Jobs (and yer pal Woz) ought to be disemboweled — yes, on the internet — and their carcasses left to rot on www.disemboweledcyberthieves.com.

Furthermore, I get nauseous thinking of the days, weeks, months I've spent on the phone with tech support. All these robber baron geeks are loaded, yet they can't even perfect the goddamn things.

The world of LOL and iirc and this hideous perpetual junior high language has not encouraged quality-lit. Have you looked at my former employer the L.A. Weekly lately? It's created by illiterates promoting bad and overpriced music, art, film, etc. There's a glut of so-called writers and if they're 22 and have big tits, many editors will give them work before I get any. It's no coincidence that my payments and assignments for freelancing have diminished in the last 8 years.

I was a happy nappy-takin' pappy 'fore the advent of these glorified television sets. Now my eyes hurt at the end of every day from the glow of the monitor. RU, I'm not happy that you — a brilliant man who has kept Yippie spirit alive — promote these contraptions. I didn't even have a phone answering machine until 1988 when I was 33. Everything was better before this glut of machinery entered my life. It's quadrupled my monthly bills and swamps me with useless information.

No, it hasn't fired my imagination but, yes, I can't get no satisfaction.

Michael Simmons edited the National Lampoon in the ‘80s. He has written for LA Weekly, LA Times, Rolling Stone, High Times, and The Progressive. Currently, he blogs for Huffington Post and he and Tyler Hubby are shooting a documentary on the Yippies


Edward Champion

The Internet is good for writers for several reasons: What was once a rather clunky process of querying by fax, phone, and snail-mail has been replaced by the mad, near-instantaneous medium of e-mail, where the indolent are more easily sequestered from the industrious. The process is, as it always was, one of long hours, haphazard diets, and rather bizarre forms of self-promotion. But clips are easily linkable. Work can be more readily distributed. And if a writer maintains a blog, there is now a more regular indicator of a writer's thought process.

The stakes have risen. Everyone who wishes to survive in this game must operate at some peak and preternatural efficiency. Since the internet is a ragtag, lightning-fast glockenspiel where thoughts, both divine and clumsy, are banged out swifter with mad mallets more than any medium that has preceded it, an editor can get a very good sense of what a writer is good for and how he makes mistakes. While it is true that this great speed has come at the expense of long-form pieces and even months-long reporting, I believe the very limitations of this current system are capable of creating ambition rather than stifling it.

If the internet was committing some kind of cultural genocide for any piece of writing that was over twenty pages, why then has the number of books published increased over the past fifteen years? Some of the old-school types, like John Updike, have decried the ancillary and annotated aspects of the Internet, insisting that there is nothing more to talk about than the book. But if a book is a unit transmitting information from one person to another, then why ignore those on the receiving end? For are they not part of this process? Writing has been talked about ever since Johann Gutenberg's great innovation caused many classical works to be disseminated into the public consciousness, and thus spawned the Renaissance.

What we are now experiencing may have an altogether different scale, but it is not different in effect. The profusion of written thoughts and emotions is certainly overwhelming, but the true writer is likely to be a skillful and highly selective reader, and thus has many jewels to select from, to be inspired by, to be wowed by, and to otherwise cause the truly ambitious to carry forth with passion and a whip-smart disposition.
Edward Champion's work has appeared in The LA Times, Chicago Sun-Times, and Newsday, as well as more disreputable publications.

His Bat Segundo podcast — which you can find at his website at edrants.com — has featured interviews with the likes of T.C. Boyle, Brett Easton Elllis, Octavio Butler, John Updike, Richard Dawkins, Amy Sedaris, David Lynch, Martin Amis, and William Gibson.
http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/10/...d-for-writers/





AP Sues US News Aggregator for Copyright Infringement and Trademark Abuse
Thomas Wilburn

The Associated Press stated today that it has filed suit against Moreover Technologies, a news aggregation service owned by Verisign. AP says that the suit comes in the wake of a cease-and-desist letter sent to the service on September 11 and insists that Moreover is infringing on the news giant's "proprietary news reports," as well as "falsely associating themselves with AP."

For a fee, Moreover provides individuals and businesses with a wide variety of news coverage, scraped from online sources, editorially ranked, and placed in a database, which can then be filtered and distributed in a variety of ways. For example, the BBC uses Moreover's services for its Newstracker service, which adds related links to other news sites to any BBC article. As of the time of this writing, Moreover still listed AP as a major news coverage source on its product web site. Ironically, according to CNN Money, AP discovered the infringement while it was negotiating to have Moreover provide content management for its own members.

At first glance, this may appear similar to legal troubles experienced by Google on multiple occasions, as well as by other aggregation services. The services in question have usually lost those battles, and been forced to settle with news providers. Google has long maintained that its news excerpts and images are legal and fall under US "fair use" provisions, but has also reportedly worked out a contract with the AP for its content.

There are a few differences between past suits and the AP's complaint, however. For one thing, both parties are based in the US, which means that the case will fall under the jurisdiction of US courts. For another, while Moreover displays AP headlines and excerpts for free on a page with ads (similar to Google News, except for the ads), the stories are reproduced in their entirety on Moreover's fee-based service, and full reproduction for commercial gain falls outside of the boundaries of fair use.

It's tempting to see this lawsuit as just another content provider that doesn't understand the Internet, or an attempt to stifle the open exchange of information. But it's telling that the plaintiffs in these cases are wire services, which make their income by selling reporting to other outlets, such as newspapers and broadcast media, instead of to the public. Indeed, AP stories are the backbone of many major news sources. But as mere content providers, AP and other wire services don't see any benefit from ad revenue and incoming link traffic to their clients. If they don't jealously guard their content, the organizations reason, many clients will simply acquire it secondhand from ultrafast aggregation services, instead of directly from the newswire. If that happens, the licensing revenue stream could dry up, taking AP with it.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...g-failure.html





Don't Post This Cease-and-Desist Letter, Or Else
Greg Beck

DirectBuy is a company that claims to offer a deal on furniture and home supplies by letting consumers buy directly from the manufacturer. Apparently, the company doesn't want you to hear from customers who don't think the deal is such a good one. The company's law firm, Dozier Internet Law (which specializes, among other things, in using copyright law to "get websites pulled down without notice") sent a strongly worded demand letter to the owner of InfomercialScams.com, claiming that consumer complaints on the website are defamatory because they refer to the company's direct-buy plan as a "scam" and a "nightmare."

Of course, words like "scam" and "nightmare" are subjective statements of opinion. If consumers think a product is a scam, who can prove them wrong? Because the statements identified by DirectBuy are pure opinion, they are protected by the First Amendment and can't give rise to liability for defamation. Even if the complaints were not opinion, however, the Communications Decency Act would protect the website from liability for its users' posts. The demand letter is therefore completely without merit.

Nevertheless, DirectBuy's lawyer, Donald Morris, relies on an extraordinarily broad reading of the Ninth Circuit's decision in Fair Housing Council v. Roommates.com to claim that InfomercialRatings.com is liable for "encourag[ing] and solicit[ing] defamatory statements." Even worse, Morris threatens to file suit in Canada, because DirectBuy does business there in addition to the United States. And, to top it off, he claims that his threat letter is copyrighted, and that to post it online would give rise to copyright liability.

Companies trying to quash complaints by consumers on the Internet often send bullying letters like this, demanding that criticism be taken offline. These threats are often effective against small website operators who can't afford the cost of a legal battle, especially one filed in a distant forum or another country. Before the Web, there was little disincentive to sending such a letter. Now, however, companies realize that their demand letters may end up online, resulting in further embarrassment for them (a phenomenon for which Mike Masnick coined the term "Streisand Effect"). Copyright claims like the one in this letter are becoming a common method to counter that problem by scaring recipients into keeping quiet. It has so far been a successful strategy -- DirectBuy's lawyer claims that none of his similar demand letters, until now, have ever been posted online.

Public Citizen decided to post the letter on its website because it is only possible to understand our letter in response by seeing the letter we are responding to, and because we think Morris's letter is a good example of the many meritless threats that companies hurl at their online critics in an effort to silence dissent. We also don't think the copyright laws prevent us from posting the letter. First, the letter is not registered with the copyright office, and until it is, DirectBuy's law firm can't sue to enforce it. Second, posting the letter is a clear example of fair use. Companies should not be able to make threats and then hide from criticism behind the Copyright Act.

Paul Levy wrote Public Citizen's response, titled "How not to write a cease and desist letter."
http://pubcit.typepad.com/clpblog/20...ublish-th.html





Court Clears Way for Mobile-Phone-Unlocking Lawsuit Against T-Mobile
David Kravets

Wireless-carrier T-Mobile USA lost a California Supreme Court bid Wednesday to kill a lawsuit challenging the company's early-termination fees and its practice of locking down phones to work only on T-Mobile's network.

Without comment, the high court's seven justices declined to review two lower-court decisions that allowed the lawsuit. The case could ultimately revamp the relationship between mobile-phone carriers and their customers.

Neither T-Mobile nor lawyers for aggrieved phone customers immediately returned messages to comment.

The Supreme Court's refusal to hear the challenge clears the way for a class-action lawsuit seeking a court injunction barring T-Mobile from collecting a termination-of-service fee of about $200. The company usually charges the fee when a contract is terminated early, no matter how close or far away from the contract's expiration date.

The plaintiffs also seek an order requiring T-Mobile to disclose the existence and effect of the software locks it places on the phones it sells, and to offer to unlock the handsets so consumers can switch to a different carrier without buying a new phone.

The practice of locking cell phones to a particular carrier is widespread. This week a California man sued Apple under the state's antitrust laws for locking the popular iPhone to AT&T's network.

If the T-Mobile lawsuit is successful, the outcome could require cell phone carriers, at least in California, to unlock cell phones upon a customer's request.

T-Mobile originally asked the lower courts to throw out the lawsuit, arguing its terms-of-service agreement requires aggrieved customers to submit to binding arbitration before a neutral mediator. T-Mobile said the service agreement also bars them from filing class-action lawsuits. But the plaintiffs argued it is in the public interest to use the courts, not mediators, because public-policy issues are at stake.

A state trial judge and a state appeals court rejected T-Mobile's position. The carrier appealed to California's highest court, which on Wednesday let those decisions stand.

In its August appeal to the Supreme Court, T-Mobile said its customers should honor the agreements they signed:"When the plaintiffs signed up for service with T-Mobile, they signed a written customer-service agreement that contained an arbitration clause."

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Ronald Sabraw had ruled at the trial-court level that the case could go ahead, and a San Francisco-based appellate court affirmed that decision in June.

The appeals court also held that the prohibition on class-action lawsuits in T-Mobile's service agreement was unconscionable, and therefore "rendered the arbitration provision unenforceable."

The case is Gatton v. T-Mobile, S154947.
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/10/tmobile





iPhone and iPod Touch v1.1.1 Full Jailbreak Tested, Confirmed!
Ryan Block

We were invited by iPhone / iPod touch file system hacker Niacin (who you might also know for his PSP and MSN TV Linux cluster hacks, etc.) and Dre to test out their new v1.1.1 file system hack. We know the whole v1.1.1 hacking thing has been massively confusing even to folks like us, so here's a quick n' dirty timeline to bring you up to date.

Apple releases iPhone, which was obviously cracked six ways from Sunday.
Through firmwares 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 Apple does not block these hacks in any way.
Firmware v1.1.1 is released for iPhone and iPod touch, which completely locks out file system access (and thus 3rd party software).
Awkward silence from Apple fans and the dev community as everyone ponders how to crack the new file system protections.
Hackers dinopio, edgan discover the symlink hack, which takes v1.0.2 iPhones up to v1.1.1 with read / write file system access. In other words, the hack only works on v1.0.2 iPhones (not the iPod touch) when being upgraded to v1.1.1, and still doesn't grant the ability to execute loaded programs.
The next version of dinopio & co.'s symlink hack (which hasn't yet been released to the public) grants the coveted execute privilege (so you can run those 3rd party apps), and enables another hack (by pumpkin) to make the new SpringBoard (the application launcher) recognize the freshly recompiled iPhone apps.
Hacker Niacin (aka toc2rta) and Dre claim they've managed to combine the symlink hack with a TIFF vulnerability found in the v1.1.1 firmware's mobile Safari, which grants access to the file system. This is the hack we're testing here.
Note: Due to the nature of this hack, it's to be considered ephemeral. Apple needs only to patch the TIFF vulnerability and file system access on v1.1.1 is out, with the touch and iPhone back to their previously not-too-hackable state.
And the result thus far? We've tested the solution, and we can confirm file system read+write access via the TIFF exploit on an iPod touch, meaning loading a simple image file on your v1.1.1 device gives full root file system access!

Caveats:
The release has not at this time been released to the public. Niacin claims that will happen in the near future, possibly later this morning.
Thus far the hack isn't entirely without issues. We're still trying to determine exactly what's what, but we've lost read and write access unexpectedly. This may or may not be a problem with our machine or device, though, and not necessarily the hack.
We did not test this method on an iPhone, but technically there should be no difference in the effect. Side note: your v1.1.1 iPhone would, at this time, need to be activated to load the TIFF. (How else are you gonna load it?) This is supposedly being worked on.
Quick terminal log using iPHUC on the iPod touch confirming write ability to root FS after the break.

==Terminal==
iphuc 0.6.1 with tab completion.
>> By The iPhoneDev Team: nightwatch geohot ixtli warren nall mjc operator
CFRunLoop: Waiting for iPhone.
notification: iPhone attached.
AMDeviceStartService 'com.apple.afc': 0
(iPHUC) /: ls
.
..
Applications
Library
System
bin
cores
dev
etc
mach
private
sbin
tmp
usr
var
(iPHUC) /: putfile ./fstab /etc/fstab [That's the money line! No errors.]
(iPHUC) /: exit
==/Terminal==

Can confirm by way of getfile that the uploaded version sticks.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/10/i...ted-confirmed/





L'iPhone Debloqué: Seulement en Français?

Welcome to Europe, land of the unlocked phone, Apple. According to several stories in the French press, Apple's deal with Orange to sell iPhones in France has run up against a little legal problem: Orange is required to sell iPhones both with and without contract. Paraphrasing the French paper Les Echos, this is a big problem for Apple, because their business model is based on getting kickbacks from monthly subscriptions. No subscriptions, no monthly vig going to La Casa Cupertinostra.

Things get even thornier for Apple depending on how you interpret France's mobile phone law. There's a bit at the end of Chapter 2.3 of the law that supposedly says that carriers must unlock phones for free after six months of use. That means in about six months, France could flood the world with unlocked iPhones.

If you've wondered why there are no iPhones in Belgium, Italy or Spain, this is why: Apple hasn't released phones in any countries with strong unlocking laws. (If you've wondered why there are no iPhones in Canada, there's no good reason.)

I was talking to my fellow analyst Joel Santo Domingo about this, and he came up with a great theory of what Apple is going to do. They're going to let users unlock phones in accordance with French law - but the phones sold in France will only have French language resources on board. Each firmware update, meanwhile, will wipe any non-French languages added.

This will send people in Quebec into a thrill of gloating hilarity, but it will safely keep the unlocked phones out of les mains of Apple's core English-and-Spanish-speaking clientele. And the French government will love it - if people want to buy unlocked iPhones, they'll have to learn French.

Heck, I see the same thing happening in Belgium and the Netherlands with Flemish-only and Dutch-only phones. Spain is probably still shafted, though - Spanish-only iPhones would be too tempting to both all of Latin America and to Spanish-speakers here in the US.
http://www.gearlog.com/2007/10/lipho...ulement_en.php





Don’t Invent, Evolve
The inventor’s trial-and-error approach can be automated by software that mimics natural selection

“I HAVE not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” So said Thomas Edison, the prolific inventor, speaking of his laborious attempts to perfect the incandescent light bulb. Although 10,000 trial-and-error attempts might sound a little over the top, an emerging technique for developing inventions knocks even Edison’s exhaustive approach into a cocked hat. Evolutionary design, as it is known, allows a computer to run through tens of millions of variations on an invention until it hits on the best solution to a problem.

As its name suggests, evolutionary design borrows its ideas from biology. It takes a basic blueprint and mutates it in a bid to improve it without human input. As in biology, most mutations are worse than the original. But a few are better, and these are used to create the next generation. Evolutionary design uses a computer program called an evolutionary algorithm, which takes the initial parameters of the design (things such as lengths, areas, volumes, currents and voltages) and treats each like one gene in an organism. Collectively, these genes comprise the product’s genome. By randomly mutating these genes and then breeding them with other, similarly mutated genomes, new offspring designs are created. These are subjected to simulated use by a second program. If a particular offspring is shown not to be up to the task, it is discarded. If it is promising, it is selectively bred with other fit offspring to see if the results, when subject to further mutation, can do even better.

The idea of evolutionary algorithms is not new. Until recently, however, their use has been confined to projects such as refining the aerodynamic profiles of car bodies, aircraft fuselages and wings. That is because only large firms have been able to afford the supercomputers needed to mutate and crossbreed large virtual genomes—and then simulate the behaviour of their offspring—for perhaps 20m generations before the perfect design emerges.

What has changed, in this as in so much else, is the availability and cheapness of computing power. According to John Koza of Stanford University, who is one of the pioneers of the field, evolutionary designs that would have taken many months to run on PCs are now feasible in days.

The result is that the range of applications to which the principles of evolutionary design are being applied is growing fast. Among those revealed at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference held in London this summer were long-life USB memory sticks, superfast racing-yacht keels, ultra-high-bandwidth optical fibres, high performance Wi-Fi antennae (evolved to avoid patent fees), cochlear implants that can optimise themselves to individual patients and a cancer-biopsy analyser that was evolved to match a human pathologist’s tumour-spotting skills.

How can evolution help improve a USB stick? It turns out that the storage transistors in these flash-memory devices are prone to being gummed up with electrostatic charge that they cannot dissipate. That prevents them being erased, limiting the stick’s useful life. A team at the University of Limerick in Ireland therefore evolved new signal-timing patterns that minimise the build-up of the disabling charge. The result: USB sticks that last up to 30 times longer than their predecessors. At the University of Sydney, in Australia, Steve Manos let an evolutionary algorithm come up with novel patterns in a type of optical fibre that has air holes shot through its length. Normally, these holes are arranged in a hexagonal pattern, but the algorithm generated a bizarre flower-like pattern of holes that no human would have thought of trying. It doubled the fibre’s bandwidth.

Meanwhile, Pierrick Legrand of the University of Bordeaux has used the method to optimise individual devices to the user. The devices in question are cochlear implants, which help those hard of hearing to hear better. One of the hardest tasks facing those who fit these devices is working out the precise choreography of the voltages and timings that need to be applied to the 20 or so electrodes embedded in the auditory nerve, in order to make them work properly. The signals required vary from patient to patient and some people go many years before an audiologist gets it right. Dr Legrand, however, has developed an evolution-based system that works on the fly. It co-evolves several channels at a time, allowing a patient to tell his doctor how each pattern of electrode stimulation is faring. Dr Legrand says that one patient, who had experienced a decade of trouble with his implant, had it fixed in a couple of days by the evolutionary method.

Perhaps the most cunning use of an evolutionary algorithm, though, is by Dr Koza himself. His team at Stanford developed a Wi-Fi antenna for a client who did not want to pay a patent-licence fee to Cisco Systems. The team fed the algorithm as much data as they could from the Cisco patent and told the software to design around it. It succeeded in doing so. The result is a design that does not infringe Cisco’s patent—and is more efficient to boot. A century and a half after Darwin suggested natural selection as the mechanism of evolution, engineers have proved him right once again.
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/...ory_id=9896323





Physics of Hard Drives Wins Nobel
Matt Moore and Karl Ritter

Two European scientists won the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for a discovery that lets computers, iPods and other digital devices store reams of data on ever-shrinking hard disks.

France's Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg independently discovered a physical effect in 1988 has led to sensitive tools for reading the information stored on hard disks. That sensitivity lets the electronics industry use smaller and smaller disks.

''The MP3 and iPod industry would not have existed without this discovery,'' Borje Johansson, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences told The Associated Press. ''You would not have an iPod without this effect.''

The two scientists discovered a phenomenon called giant magnetoresistance. In this effect, very weak changes in magnetism generate larger changes in electrical resistance. This is how information stored magnetically on a hard disk can be converted to electrical signals that the computer reads.

Smaller disks mean fainter magnetic signals, so the ability to detect them is key to shrinking hard disks.

The first disk-reading device based on the effect was launched in 1997 ''and this soon became the standard technology,'' the Nobel committee said.

Phil Schewe, a physicist and spokesman for the American Institute of Physics, said the prize honored ''a terrific combination of great physics and huge practical application.

''I can hardly think of an application that has a bigger bang than the magnetic hard drive industry. Every one of us probably owns three or four or five devices, probably more, that depend on billions of bits of information stored on something the size of a dime.''

Fert, 69, is the scientific director of the Mixed Unit for Physics at CNRS/Thales in Orsay, France, while Gruenberg, 68, is a professor at the Institute of Solid State Research in western Germany.

In a telephone conference with the award committee, Fert said he was very happy to win, and to share the $1.5 million prize with Gruenberg.

''This is a surprise for me but I knew that it was possible,'' he said. ''I knew I was among the many candidates.''

A former rugby player and now avid sailboarder, Fert told France's Inter Radio that he planned to share some of the spoils of his winnings with colleagues.

''As usual when I get prizes, I share a little with my associates and then I will see,'' he said. ''I don't know. I think I need new sails for my windsurfers.''

Last year, Americans John C. Mather and George F. Smoot won the physics prize for their work examining the infancy of the universe, studies that have aided the understanding of galaxies and stars and increasing support for the Big Bang theory of the beginning of the universe.

On Monday, two American scientists, Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Briton Sir Martin J. Evans, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes.

Prizes for chemistry, literature, peace and economics will be announced through Oct. 15.

The peace award is announced in Oslo, while the other prizes are announced in Stockholm. The prizes, each of which carries a cash prize of $1.5 million, were established in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel.

The Nobel prizes are always presented to the winners on the Dec. 10 anniversary of the death of its creator.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j...RPEcQD8S5MO6G0





Hard Times for Hard Drives: US May Ban Popular Imports
Jacqui Cheng

The International Trade Commission (ITC) has announced that it plans to begin an investigation into several companies that either make or use certain hard drives. In a statement issued yesterday, the ITC said that the hard drives in question are alleged to infringe on patents owned by California residents Steven and Mary Reiber. The two filed a complaint with the ITC in September, saying that the importation of the hard drives violates section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930.

There are currently five companies being investigated by the ITC, including Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell. All five companies either manufacture drives that use "dissipative ceramic bonding tips," or sell products that use such hard drives. These parts are used to bond electrical wires within the hard drive—while the ITC doesn't specify exactly which patents the technology allegedly infringes on, two patents that are owned by the Reibers, titled "Dissipative ceramic bonding tool tip," appear to fit the description.

Section 337 of the Tariff Act bars the importation of products into the US that infringe on patents owned by others in the US. This is the same stipulation that bit Qualcomm in the butt last June, when the ITC barred the importation of its EVDO chips, circuit board modules, and handsets that infringed on the patents owned by its competitor, Broadcom. At that time, the ITC said that handsets that were already being imported prior to the ruling could continue to be imported, but that no new chips or handsets could be brought into the country.

The Qualcomm ban sparked outrage among the mobile industry, with all of the major carriers—AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint—speaking out against the ITC's decision. Trade group CTIA also criticized the ITC over the decision, saying that it "unnecessarily decreases competition" and would "cause enormous undue harm to tens of millions of American wireless consumers." The same would almost definitely happen if such a ban was placed on products made by some of the most popular hard drive makers in the world.

Even if the ITC ends up ruling against them, Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, HP, and Dell might still get lucky if the US Court of Appeals remains on their side, as it did with Qualcomm when the court stayed the ban in September. No target date has been set for completing the investigation, but the ITC has 45 days to settle on one.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...r-imports.html





Alienware Supercharges Desktop with 64GB Solid-State Drives
Brian Fonseca

Alienware Tuesday introduced a 64GB solid-state storage option for its Alienware Area-51 ALX and Aurora ALX desktop computers.

Marc Diana, product marketing manager at Miami-based Alienware said the company plans to add solid-state functionality to its other desktop offerings by mid-2008.

Diana would not say whether Alienware's parent firm, Dell Inc., also plans to use the solid-state storage options in its personal computers. Dell officials could not be reached for comment.

Earlier this year, Dell announced a 32GB solid-state option for its Latitude D420 and D629 ATG notebook computers. The PC vendor has been relatively silent on the solid-state front ever since.

Unlike traditional hard drives, solid-state drives contain no moving parts that can be damaged or worn over time. While the reliability, improved power consumption and speed of solid-state drives leapfrogs hard drive technology, the flash-based technology's steep price point continues to hamper adoption, analysts say.

"Using solid-state drives completely as a primary solution right now is a significant price premium to traditional hard drives," said Jeff Janukowicz, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC.

Still, IDC foresees growing interest in the emerging storage technology. A report released by the IT research firm in July predicted that sales of solid-state drives will skyrocket from $373 million in 2006 to $5.4 billion in 2011.

Despite admitting solid-state technology is "very expensive" and isn't yet "mature enough" for the mainstream market, Diana downplayed swirling interest in hybrid flash memory/disk drives, such as the new Seagate Technology LLC offering announced on Monday.

"Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state," said Diana. "Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...tsrc =hm_list





Essay: The Myth of Infinite Bandwidth
Allan Leinwand

Back in the late 1990s I was often asked what I thought would happen if Internet bandwidth was infinite — what would that change about the Internet itself? Level 3’s (LVLT) recent decision to slash prices on its content distribution network and rumors of new multi-terabit cables across the Pacific have me wondering if we are actually getting closer to having infinite bandwidth.

But when replying to the infinite bandwidth question I was prone to posing a return question — what does infinite bandwidth actually mean? As an example, I would often say that infinite bandwidth meant that I could personally consume terabits of bandwidth at any location on the planet at any time without loss or jitter. And, since bandwidth would be infinite, it would be the ultimate commodity and free.

I have often found that people who talk about infinite bandwidth lack a basic understanding of what bandwidth is — many think that if you have infinite bandwidth you can have instantaneous access to every computer around the globe. People often forget that the speed of light is very fast (around 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum) but nevertheless a constant. As an example, if you have infinite bandwidth between two points it’s like having a freeway with infinite lanes but your car can only go a finite speed. There is no congestion or traffic jam, but it still takes time to travel from source to destination.

On the Internet, a bit of data does travel quickly over fiber optics, but there are many different mediums and pieces of equipment between any given source and destination to slow things down. For example, from here in San Francisco it takes a bit of data around 320 milliseconds to travel to Bangalore and back, and about half that for a bit to make a round trip between here and London. Of course, on today’s finite Internet, these travel times vary with the time of day, the exact path taken and a thousand other networking variables, but I believe that these latency times are in the ballpark for most networks. Infinite bandwidth would not have this variability but would still be hampered by the pesky issue of speed of light between any two points on the planet.

Other than the speed of light issue, when people talk about infinite bandwidth they contend that accomplishing this on the backbone of the Internet (across network providers and between exchange points) is definitely feasible, but true end-to-end infinite bandwidth is hard to imagine given the constraints of the last mile in many locations. While I agree that the last mile is clearly a current constraint to infinite bandwidth, I have some hope that some high-speed variant of Ethernet or a wireless technology will solve this problem in the not-too-distant future — just look at what’s happening in Tokyo and Seoul.

So, in my mind infinite bandwidth is possible. Some thoughts about what we could do with it include: unlimited High Definition two-way video streaming (not like little YouTube screens, but to video walls), immersive and lifelike collaboration environments (think Second Life on steroids), limitless file transfer and backup (no more burning data to DVDs), real-time photo sharing (grandmothers will love this), and complete data mobility for both personal and work information (regardless of what type of data you have, you can access it from anywhere).

As the saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” So we need to know that bandwidth will be infinite and we need ways to necessitate this technology soon. How do you think infinite bandwidth would change your behavior on the Internet, either personally or for your company?
http://newteevee.com/2007/10/10/essa...ite-bandwidth/





Dutch Consumers’ Union Asks for Free Copies of XP for Vista Victims
Ruben Francia

In a recent meeting between the Dutch Consumers’ Union (Consumentenbond) and Microsoft Netherlands, the consumer organization asked for free copies of Windows XP for members who were having problems with Vista. Microsoft, of course, refused.

The refusal has led Consumentenbond to call on consumers to explicitly ask for Windows XP when purchasing a new computer and for shops to provide free Windows XP packages to those dissatisfied with Vista.

The meeting was initiated by the union after it did a five weeks investigation, where it received some 5,000 consumer complaints about Windows Vista. Most of the complaints revolved around application and peripheral hardware compatibility issues.

“The product has many teething problems, it is just not ready,” a spokesperson for the consumer organization told Expatica. “Printers and other hardware reportedly failed in combination with Vista, computers crash regularly and the peripherals are very slow.”

Earlier, Microsoft offered a “downgrade” option to consumers that get machines with Windows Vista but want to switch to XP. But the offering applies only to Windows Vista Business and Ultimate versions, so it doesn’t do much for most consumers.

It seems that by giving selective and limited downgrade options to XP, Microsoft is not giving equal treatment to its consumers. Maybe, it’s time for Microsoft to start being more sympathetic.
http://vista.blorge.com/2007/10/12/d...vista-victims/





Stalling Cars Via OnStar: A Hacker's Dream Come True?
Lauren Weinstein

Greetings. Ready to turn over the keys of your vehicle to the cops, or that clever hacker in the next lane? How about that creepy guy following you on a lonely country road?

GM apparently plans to perhaps make this all possible. It's been announced that they'll be equipping nearly two million of their 2009 model vehicles (that have OnStar installed), with the capability to be remotely shut down to idle via OnStar commands at the request of law enforcement.

The claim is that owners will have to give permission first for this capability to be enabled. Bull. I don't care what OnStar's privacy policy says, if the technical capability for this function is present, OnStar will have no practical choice but to comply when faced with a law enforcement demand or court order, whether or not owner "permission" was ever granted.

This new capability will also create an irresistible challenge to the hacker community -- and perhaps criminal organizations -- to try find ways into the OnStar system for triggering this fun -- one way or another. It's impossible to hack OnStar? Would you bet your life on that?

Unfortunately, this is yet another laudable idea that's being "driven" into the marketplace before all of the negative ramifications have been thought through or fully understood. And how long will it be before such systems are mandated, one might wonder?

OnStar has long been the subject of various privacy concerns. This new capability appears to be the most serious privacy-related issue for OnStar to date.
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000313.html





10 miles to the penny

China "e" Bikes Silently Drive Lead Demand



Lucy Hornby

As the red light changes, Han Zhang turns the handlebar of his battery-driven bike, pushes off with his foot, and whirrs silently along a Beijing boulevard.

His yellow bike looks like something between a bicycle and a scooter, but to the lead industry, he's driving a car.

Every year, millions of Chinese are hitting the streets on "e" bikes - battery-powered contraptions that are increasingly popular as soaring fuel prices make traditional motorbikes and scooters expensive to drive.

The bikes are getting bigger, faster and more glamorous - and the growing size of their batteries is soaking up increasing amounts of lead.

"Everyone looks at the "e" bike as a replacement for a motorbike. But for the lead industry it's an astonishing change. In terms of lead demand, one "e" bike is one car," said Mark Stevenson, technical manager for lead at Nyrstar in Australia.

"If someone says there is growth of a million bikes a year, the lead industry thinks 'who cares'. But if you say a growth of a million cars per year, that changes the whole picture."

Yet a 48-volt bike battery uses just under 10 kilograms of lead, similar to that used by a medium-sized car like a Toyota Camry. They last for about a year, compared with over three years for a typical car battery.

"There's a huge amount of lead being carried around on bikes in China," said Huw Roberts of CHR Metals Ltd. He estimates the bikes produced through the end of last year have absorbed about 400,000 tons of lead.

That new source of demand could help drive up lead prices, which hit a record high of $3,835 a ton on October 9.

Lead has been the star performer on the London Metal Exchange and is up by 130 percent this year.

Silent Force

China produced 19 million battery driven bikes in 2006, and that figure could rise by 30 percent this year, said Zhang Changhai, lead analyst with metals consultancy Antaike in Beijing.

"The explosive growth is already over, and we expect new standards being developed for the larger bikes to slow growth in 2008," Zhang said.

The standards for newer, 48-volt bikes could be along the lines of those for the more common 36-volt bikes, limiting speed and size and setting guidelines for which companies can produce them to weed out cut throat competition.

Estimates for how many companies produce "e" bikes vary from 100 to 300 firms, but all agree that their low design and start-up costs have driven margins to the bare minimum, eroding profits for more established firms like Shanghai Forever Co.

Meanwhile, 72-volt bikes that are as big and powerful as motorcycles are alarming city governments. They have been banned in the southern boom cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai.

"When you have these things whizzing along in the bike lanes at 60 kilometers an hour it's getting a little dangerous," Roberts said.

"They are known as the 'silent killer' because you can't hear them coming."

Other cities are trying to limit the bikes' speed and size, and may soon require licenses to use them.

Other innovations include bikes that use lithium-ion batteries which generally last longer and give more power for their weight.

With prices above 3,000 yuan ($400), they have found an export niche. But in the domestic market, they are unlikely to replace bikes using lead-acid batteries which cost between 1,000 yuan and 2,000 yuan.

At a bicycle shop in central Beijing, salesman Zhang Guangyi pointed to his best selling model, a long black bike with flames painted along its body. It only costs about 1 yuan to charge the bike enough for 240 kilometers of use, he noted.

"Who drives motorbikes anymore? Fuel is too expensive and these have no emissions so they are better for the environment – it’s popular to think about that these days."

($1=7.516 Yuan)
http://www.reuters.com/article/inDep...10974620071010





Film Drop-Off Sites Fade Against Digital Cameras
Katie Hafner

Fresh from a family vacation in California, Rick Wallerstein went to the Stop & Shop supermarket in Berkeley Heights, N.J., last month to drop off a roll of film, as he has done for about two decades.

But a sign on the familiar drop-box next to the juice aisle informed him that because of the advent of digital photography, film would no longer be accepted at the store. “The sign said something like, ‘Thanks for your past patronage and good luck,’” Mr. Wallerstein said.

When he returned to the store 10 days later, both the box and the sign were gone. “It’s like it never even existed,” he said. “As if it had all been a dream.”

Mr. Wallerstein had stumbled upon a trend that materialized not gradually, as many trends do, but instantly — like, well, an image on a digital camera.

“With the prevalence of digital cameras, to continue to do film processing where demand has continued to decline just wasn’t feasible,” said Robert Keane, a spokesman for Stop & Shop, which discontinued film processing services at all 300 of its stores throughout the Northeast on Sept. 15.

Stop & Shop, operated by Royal Ahold, is hardly the first and it will definitely not be the last to abandon film processing.

“Over the past few years it’s gotten increasingly difficult to find next-day service for film,” said Gary Pageau, publisher of PMA Magazine, a photo industry trade publication.

Some 35,000 locations in the United States still develop film, mostly drugstores, supermarkets and discount retail stores, as well as photo specialty stores. “But you’re not going to get the same level of service, where you’d drop off a roll of film at 2 p.m. and have it back the next day,” he said.

Mr. Pageau said he was not surprised to hear that Stop & Shop had stopped offering its film processing service. “They probably weren’t even doing enough business to warrant the five square feet of space the drop-off box was occupying,” he said.

The rate of decline is apparent from film sales — since only people who buy film need to have it developed. Over the last four years, the sale of film has been dropping at a rate of 25 to 30 percent each year. In 2006, 204 million rolls were sold, a quarter of the 800 million sold at the peak in 1999. “It’s pretty alarming,” said Bing Liem, senior vice president of sales for the imaging division of Fujifilm USA.

Sales of single-use cameras are declining, too, but more slowly than film, said Mr. Pageau. “You’ll still get people using one-time-use cameras in places like amusement parks where people don’t want to damage their digital camera,” he said. Mr. Pageau said that about 6 percent of households in the United States used single-use cameras exclusively.

Still, Mr. Pageau said, film developing is becoming a niche service, thanks to digital cameras. “It’s all about the replacement cycles of the technology,” he said. “Most reloadable films are 35 millimeter, and there hasn’t been a significant new 35-millimeter camera introduced in two or more years.”

“The photo finishing ecosystem has fragmented,” said Mr. Liem. It used to be a matter of dropping off a roll and choosing between one-hour and overnight processing, matte and glossy, 4x6 and 5x7. “Now you can bring your media card in and go to a kiosk and have it printed in a second. Or you can have it printed at a one-hour photo lab. Or you can upload the image to a wholesale facility on the Internet and have it delivered to a retail store.”

Mr. Liem said he, too, was not surprised to hear of Stop & Shop’s decision to stop processing film. “We knew retailers were most likely going to do that, because they can no longer do just two things. They have to do 10 things now.”

And although retail stores with large film processing departments, like Wal-Mart and Walgreens, still do the traditional film processing, the new emphasis on digital processing is pronounced.

Walgreens said its digital photofinishing sales increased 58 percent in 2006, although the company would not disclose actual sales figures. “Digital is absolutely the fastest growing part of our photo finishing department,” said Carol Hively, a Walgreens spokeswoman. In addition to film developing, Walgreens has self-service kiosks for printing from digital camera memory cards in all of its nearly 6,000 stores.

The Eastman Kodak Company’s film business has plummeted, and the company has spent the last few years making a transition to digital technology.

There is no dearth of images. In the heyday of film, said Mr. Liem, some 25 billion images were not just captured but printed as well. By 2009, as the use of digital cameras continues to grow, some 135 billion images will be captured, but far fewer printed. Instead, those images tend to stay on people’s computers in electronic shoeboxes. The challenge, say companies like Kodak and Fujifilm, is getting people to print those images out.

Kodak is aiming at third world economies where home computers are less common, to extend the life of film. It is selling low-cost film cameras throughout Asia, said Christopher Veronda, a spokesman for Kodak. “We’re seeding places with large populations and limited incomes, trying to take picture taking to those markets,” he said. In India last month, Kodak had a record sales month.

In the United States, when digital camera owners do print out their digital images, they are increasingly doing so in stores rather than on home printers, according to the Photo Marketing Association. Instead of silver halide photo processing equipment, stores are now installing kiosks made by companies like Kodak, Fujifilm and Hewlett-Packard. Among them, those companies have sold more than 100,000 photo kiosks.

As Fujifilm has seen a decline in sales of its analog-based minilabs, it has seen a corresponding rise in sales of kiosks. Some of those kiosks are free-standing, and others are connected to an in-store minilab.

As for Mr. Wallerstein and his roll of film, he let it languish at home for a couple of weeks, and finally took it to Wal-Mart. He had to go there anyway.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/bu...09film.html?hp





Startup Looks to Sell All Things Digital
Tomio Geron

A startup coming out of stealth mode is hoping to upend the market for digital products in the same way eBay did for all types of physical products.

Expected to launch in the next week or so, San Francisco-based Zipidee will let companies sell videos, music tracks, ebooks, mobile ringtones, software, games, and podcasts through its online marketplace.

The idea is to allow small to medium sized companies—and individuals—to set up "stores" much like they can already do on eBay, but merchandise on Zipidee will be limited to digital goods.

But unlike eBay's auction system for physical goods, digital download prices on Zipidee will be fixed by the seller, much in the way that Apple's iTunes store set prices for digital music tracks.

Zipidee's sellers will be able to control the price of their goods and the method by which they will be distributed. Zipidee, founded this February, is backed by Individuals' Venture Fund, which invested in Salesforce.com and Netlogic, as well as Novus Ventures, and Khalda Development.

Zipidee's marketplace is initially focused on selling "prosumer" content—especially instructional or educational videos—that are professionally produced and often sold offline as DVDs. Zipidee has signed up gurus such as Marcia Wieder of Dream University and Christine Comaford-Lynch of Mighty Ventures, who bring legions of devoted fans.

But the challenge for Zipidee will be to attract a large enough audience, when few online content companies have been successful charging customers for content, said Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. People have often come to expect digital content and goods to be free, unlike the physical products for sale on eBay.

"The theory of (Zipidee's model) is right in the sense of the so-called long tail and all the niche segments would seem to support a subscription model," Mr. Sterling said. "In practice it's hard to get large numbers of subscribers. There are people out there who will pay. The question is how big is the market."

Zipidee will have to offer a high quality product and unique content that isn't available elsewhere, he added.

Zipidee is also targeting offline DVD and educational content distributors, offering to digitize their content. Finally, the company is in talks with some large media companies about finding ways to monetize their content. Zipidee said it is purposely avoiding most entertainment content because heavyweights such as Apple and Amazon already dominate that market.

Sellers can decide whether they want to use Zipidee's proprietary DRM protection, and whether they want to allow users to rent content for 30 days, purchase individual units or an entire collection at one time. Buyers can also opt to download content or receive it as a stream.

The service allows more information for sellers about how their products are selling—for example real time information—than iTunes does with its monthly reports.

These various services will allow small to medium sized sellers to easily get their products to market in a self-serve format, says Zipidee CEO Henry Wong, rather than spending money to distribute it through DVDs or other channels.

Zipidee is seeking to offer an alternative to both existing pay models for content and free ad-supported models. On the pay side, content creators—not to mention media companies—are often unhappy with iTunes, which takes a large cut of revenues. And free video sites such as Revver and Veoh generate substantial ad revenues only if their videos are massive global hits.

"The online ad model is great for entertainment but that requires massive viewing," Mr. Wong said. "For the content we're going after, the smaller niche audience, the price point is much higher."

Zipidee will charge a $1 listing fee and collect roughly 20 percent of the purchase price. Zipidee also has a number of consumer-friendly features like an eBay-style ratings system.

Mr. Wong has a background in digital marketplaces, having invested in AdECN, the online advertising marketplace that was recently acquired by Microsoft.

As Mr. Wong knows from his work with AdECN, he needs to pull in a large amount of inventory from sellers to ramp up his site into an active functioning marketplace. If he can do that then, as with his Microsoft exit, his marketplace could take off.
http://www.redherring.com/Home/22928





Virtual World’s Like Second Life Brewing Lawsuits and Disputes

With virtual world’s forming into the next big thing on the horizon, the real world is starting to play catch up. Traffic stats are increasing and the money pouring into virtual worlds is starting to translate into real world money that cannot be ignored. Just recently a report was released by Screencast.com, a business research and intelligence gathering company, that listed subscription sales for online virtual worlds rising to $526,000,000 in the US market in 2006 alone.

With all this money pouring into the virtual worlds and attention being given to these markets, entrepreneurs and business minds come alive. Just as if it were in the 1800’s and dreamers were running into the California gold rush, people are now running to virtual worlds for entertainment and business.

With business savvy and genius creations comes the bad side of the virtual world progression of litigation, scams and regulations. Lawsuits and discussions are rising in the area of virtual worlds and if real world laws and government regulations apply to these new worlds.

Probably just due to the fact of the mention of sex, the lawsuit coming out of the virtual world Second Life is setting boundaries. Second Life is one of the leading virtual worlds in self ownership. Second Life allows users to own land, collect rent, invent and sell and products and basically participate in a replica of real life, hence the name, Second Life.

The opportunity at Second Life has inspired entrepreneurs like Kevin Alderman to create virtual products for the virtual world. Alderman has created many products but one of his most successful products involved in a lawsuit is called SexGen Platinum. The SexGen program allows virtual world participants in Second Life to add a little bit of sexual flair to their Avatars (or characters they use in the game).

Business was going great for Alderman and his company Eros. However, just like in the real world there are thieves and copycats and people that try to sell products as their own. An online persona naming himself, “Volkov Catteneo” started copying the program Alderman wrote for Second Life and selling to others at discounted prices. This issue is not about pennies here, the full program goes for a retail price of $45 US dollars. When Alderman contacted the person illegally selling his program the guy just mocked him and said, “What are you going to do? Sue me?” With that attitude, Alderman filed a civil lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Tampa, Florida.

This specific lawsuit is very important to the virtual world industry as it will set standards in defining how much freedom people do have in virtual worlds and whether they have to obey every real world law. It isn’t often when avatars from the games start throwing around lawsuits but other litigation in the virtual world industry is not new.

Lawsuits are happening frequently that target the companies actually running the virtual worlds. In regards to Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life they run into lawsuits when they punish users for making bad deals or making the virtual world less fun for others. One recent case that was brought against Second Life was from a man named Marc Bragg, an attorney that used Second Life. The story is well covered in this Wired Magazine story here. Basically Marc Bragg was able to aquire cheap virtual land through underhanded methods and Second Life shut down his account. Since virtual land and products have a real world value, Mr. Bragg’s decided he would sue for the real world value of these products.

Some people question whether these virtual items really have any value at all. The real answer is they do in fact have a value when converted to real world dollars. For instance, in Second Life you can exchange your Linden dollars for U.S. dollars. The exchange rate has ranged anywhere from 200 - 350 Lindens to each U.S. dollar. This exchange rate almost rivals some of the world’s currencies in exchange value. Since people spend the virtual dollars on everything from real estate to avatar enhancements, they are spending money on items that do have a real value. The money making prospects has sent people into full time careers making money off of these virtual worlds.

What now remains to be seen is what standards and laws get passed on over to the virtual world from the real world. As lawsuits get settled people will learn the limits their avatars have and can quit making silly statements like, “What are you going to do, sue me?” Until these disputes are taken to the courts most people fight over who is right and wrong through companies that facilitate the transactions. PayPal has had a growing number of disputes due to virtual world disagreements. Until the values reach epic proportions most financial virtual world disputes will probably be settled by companies like PayPal and Second Life internally.
http://businessshrink.biz/psychology...-and-disputes/





Stretching the Search for Signs of Life



Dennis Overbye

Call it a small step for E.T., a leap for radio astronomy.

Astronomers in Hat Creek, Calif., are planning today to switch on the first elements of a giant new array of radio telescopes that they say will greatly extend the investigation of natural and unnatural phenomena in the universe.

When the Allen Telescope Array, as it is known, is complete, it will consist of 350 antennas, each 20 feet in diameter. Using the separate antennas as if they were one giant dish, radio astronomers will be able to map vast swaths of the sky cheaply and efficiently.

The array will help search for new phenomena like black holes eating each other and so-called dark galaxies without stars, as well as extend the search for extraterrestrial radio signals a thousandfold, to include a million nearby stars over the next two decades.

Today, 42 of the antennas, mass-produced from molds and employing inexpensive telecommunications technology, will go into operation. “It’s like cutting the ribbon on the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria,” said Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the Seti Institute, in Mountain View, Calif., who pointed out that this was the first radio telescope ever designed specifically for the extraterrestrial quest.

The telescope, named for Paul G. Allen, who provided $25 million in seed money, is a joint project of the Radio Astronomy Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Seti Institute. “If they do find something, they’re going to call me up first and say we have a signal,” Mr. Allen said in an interview, adding, “So far the phone hasn’t rung.”

Describing himself as “a child of the 50s, the golden age of space exploration and science fiction,” Mr. Allen, a founder of Microsoft, said he first got interested in supporting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence after a conversation 12 years ago with Carl Sagan, the Cornell astronomer and exuberant proponent of cosmic wonder.

When the idea later arose to build a telescope array on the cheap, using off-the-shelf satellite dish technology and advanced digital signal processing, Mr. Allen was intrigued. “If you know anything about me,” he said, “you know I’m a real enthusiast for new unconventional approaches to things.”

Telescopes, including radio telescopes, have traditionally been custom-built one-of-a-kind items. The antennas for the Allen array are stamped from a mold. Mr. Allen’s family foundation put up the money to get the first part of the array built, with other contributions from Nathan Myhrvold, formerly of Microsoft and the chief executive of Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Wash., among others.

Leo Blitz, director of the Radio Astronomy Laboratory, estimated that it would take three years and $41 million more, depending on the price of aluminum, to complete the array. The full array, astronomers say, will be useful not just for science, but also as practice for a truly giant telescope known as the Square Kilometer Array, which would have a combined receiving area of a square kilometer and which astronomers hope to build in Australia or South Africa in 10 or 20 years.

Dr. Blitz said the main advantage of the Allen array for regular radio astronomy was the ability to obtain images of large swaths of the sky, several times the size of the full moon, in a single pointing. At low frequencies, he said, the full array could map the entire sky in a day and night and do it again the next night.

“This has not been possible before,” he said.

In its partial form, Dr. Blitz said, the array is already almost as fast, and much cheaper to run, than larger telescopes.

The speed should make it possible to catch transient events, like radio bursts from colliding black holes, that might last only a few hours, while the mapping ability should enable astronomers to search for lumps of gas without stars, the so-called dark galaxies predicted by the prevailing models of cosmology.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has lived on the kindness of strangers since Congress canceled a NASA-sponsored search using existing radio telescopes in 1993, only a year after it had begun. The Seti Institute, which was to have conducted a search of nearby stars under contract to NASA, raised money from Silicon Valley and revived the search as Project Phoenix, using existing radio telescopes.

Project Phoenix was finished three years ago, having checked some 750 stars for signals, Dr. Shostak said. While that might sound like a lot, he said, “it doesn’t impress anybody who knows how many stars there are in the galaxy.”

There are some 200 billion stars in the galaxy, and a significant fraction of them have planets. Estimates of the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy have ranged from one (or none, if you are particularly discouraged about human affairs) into the millions.

Dr. Shostak calculated that the full Allen array would be able to detect a signal from as far as 500 light years that is only a few times more powerful than what can now be sent by the Arecibo radio telescope, a 1,000-foot-diameter dish in Puerto Rico that is the world’s largest (although it is in danger of being shut down to save money). That translates to about a million stars, which he said was getting into a promising number. Dr. Shostak described the expanded search as looking for the needle in the proverbial haystack with a shovel instead of a spoon.

Anyone out there and broadcasting, for whatever wacky alien reason, would also have to be broadcasting right at Earth. But advanced civilizations, Dr. Shostak said, would be able to tell there was life on Earth because of the oxygen in our atmosphere.

“We’ve been broadcasting that for 2.5 billion years,” he said.

The first thing Dr. Shostak and his colleagues plan to do with the newly operational 42-antenna array is to survey a strip across the center of the galaxy. There will be several billion stars in the field of view, but they will be very far away, 10,000 to 50,000 light years, so any signal would have to be huge to be detected. But who is to say that among galactic civilizations there are not a rare few with tremendous capabilities?

“I’ve never begrudged aliens any power in their transmitter,” Dr. Shostak said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/science/11seti.html





Slashdot's CmdrTaco Looks Back at 10 Years of 'News for Nerds'
Miyoko Ohtake

The Sputnik launch isn't the only big anniversary this month; Slashdot is celebrating, too.

The influential "news for nerds" site famous for swamping unsuspecting websites with boatloads of traffic turns 10 in October, and parties are popping up all around the country.

It all started in 1997, in a time before there was Gmail. Slashdot founder and editor Rob Malda, aka CmdrTaco, wanted a non-college-affiliated e-mail address, so he simply registered his own domain name. And while he was at it, he decided to add a little humor and make the url as unpronounceable as possible: "H, T, T, P, colon, slash, slash, slashdot, dot, org."

What Malda didn't expect was that Slashdot would become one of the most popular geek news sites on the web, overloading so many websites' servers that the phrase "Slashdot effect" would be coined.

Wired News spoke with Malda by phone Wednesday as he got ready for the Slashdot 10th anniversary celebrations at his home base in Michigan. (Want to join the fun? Find a Slashdot party in your neck of the woods.)

Wired News: Did you ever think Slashdot would make it to 10 years?

Rob Malda: No. When I registered the domain name it was supposed to be a joke, and I wanted an e-mail address that wasn't my college's e-mail. The website was built out of my blog -- though they didn't call them blogs back then -- because I wanted to have a web server I could Perl and hack around on. There was no premeditation, and it was three or four months before I realized Slashdot meant anything.

WN: So when did you know that Slashdot was turning into something?

Malda: There was a log file that would slowly scroll across your screen. It used to be that I'd look at the log every few days and see we had X number of hits. But one night we were just hanging out in our living room and watching the log scroll by and it was just hit, hit, hit. And they were coming from MIT and Carnegie Mellon and Stanford and Microsoft and Red Hat and big companies and big institutions of higher learning. Before that, my only real comprehension of the size of Slashdot was that I was getting a lot of e-mail, hundreds of e-mails, but that never mentally translated into, "OMG! People in Germany are reading this thing!"

WN: So you had hundreds of articles in your inbox and people all over the world following Slashdot. Why did you decide to keep Slashdot a user-submitted, editor-evaluated site instead of crowdsourcing the job of posting articles?

Malda: When you're building a system like this you're balancing the wisdom of the crowds versus the tyranny of the mob. Sometimes a crowd is really smart, but some things don't work so well by committee. Crowds work when you have a tightly knit group of people with similar interests, but when you have a loosely knit community you get "Man Gets Hit in Crotch With Football" and Everybody Loves Raymond, where it's just good enough to not suck. At the end of the day I want to be able to say, "These are good stories."

WN: And the users can tell you whether they think the stories are good in the comments. When you started this, what made you think comments were going to be as important as they've become?

Malda: I never thought of not having comments. I started with BBSes in the 1980s and was using Usenet. I don't understand why you would build a site without comments. That's what the internet is for: people communicating. I think we got lucky that the people reading Slashdot were techies who also grew up with BBSes and Usenet and they also wouldn't have imagined not having user comments.

WN: What do you think has helped Slashdot reach its 10th anniversary?

Malda: Over the years the site has developed something of a personality. There are certain subject matters that we're going to discuss and there are certain subjects we're not going to discuss. We're going to cover what's happening with Linux, who's building new technology and what companies are taking your right away to play with that technology. There aren't a lot of websites that are focuses. Everybody tries to be everything and no one does one thing that they're really good at.

WN: So it's all about having your niche?

Malda: That'd be the much more concise way to say it.

WN: Looking back at the last decade, what are your top Slashdot moments?

Malda: I have to mention that I proposed to my wife on Slashdot. That was pretty cool. And then there have been a number of stories where we went out of our normal bubble and stuck our noses in something else. Those somethings were (the) Columbine (school shootings) and Sept. 11.

Sept. 11 was interesting because a lot of the mainstream websites that were online were getting so overburdened with traffic that they were getting shut down. My team worked really, really, really hard to keep the site up and there was a lot of traffic on the site that day. We'll never know the numbers, because we had to turn off the clock to save processor cycles. But we managed to stay up and that was a real shining day because of what we had to get done. It was a pretty shitty day, but I was very proud of everybody at Slashdot that day.

And then there was Columbine. Columbine was weird because the mainstream media really took on a specific view of what happened and the Slashdot audience took a very different view of that event. The discussions on Slashdot were very heartfelt and meaningful. Instead of reading the mainstream media stories about videogames causing kids to be evil, you were reading stories about what happens to kids being beaten up for four years. When the bully jocks kick a helpless kid, it's not surprising that every now and then someone's going to snap.

So there's a happy and two less-happy moments in Slashdot history.

WN: And what's next for Slashdot?

Malda: People always ask me that, and if in 10 years from now Slashdot is the same as it was 10 years ago, I'll think we're doing something right. If we continue to maintain the level of article selection and user discussion then I'm a happy camper.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/t...slashdot10year





Acquisitive Craigslist Post Reddens Faces All Around
Andrew Adam Newman

Last month on Craigslist.com, someone who described herself as a “spectacularly beautiful” 25-year-old placed a personal ad seeking a husband who made at least $500,000 a year, because “$250,000 won’t get me to Central Park West.”

As her post hit the blogs, it received a scathing response from a man who said he fit her description and told her that her proposition was a bad business deal. “In economic terms, you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset,” he wrote, because “your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity.”

Last week, this exchange spilled over into the e-mail world, where the it turned into a popular item to send to friends as a joke. The difference between this and other outrageous share-mail messages, however, was that instead of remaining anonymous, its ostensible author signed his name and the company where he worked, which happened to be the investment banking division of JPMorgan Chase.

This detail, which may have provoked nearly as much mirth as the contents of the exchange, made the correspondence either more or less credible. Would someone with a big job at a prestigious company really have linked his name to a message that read in part: “You’re 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!”

The man who is widely credited with writing the response did not respond to a voice message, but the media relations department at JPMorgan Chase confirmed that he worked there and said that he was not the author. Rather, a company spokesman said, he had forwarded the e-mail message to friends, and the signature setting on his e-mail accompanied the response when it wound up on blogs.

By this account, the employee was just an accidental sexist, the latest object lesson in the dangers of e-mail getting into the wrong hands — the Wall Street equivalent of a Pittsburgh Steelers coach who passed along an e-mail message with a sex video to the National Football League commissioner, among others.

“Your workplace computer does not exist as a tool for forwarding jokey things,” said Will Schwalbe, an author of “Send: The Essential Guide to E-Mail for Office and Home.”

As for the legitimacy of the original posting by the husband seeker, a spokeswoman for Craigslist wrote in an e-mail message that “it does look as if the post was made sincerely.” A message sent to the Craigslist mailbox seeking comment yielded no response.

Craigslist declined to say how many people responded to the personal ad (which asked, among other things, for names of bars, restaurants and gyms where rich single men hung out). And so far, the identity of the responder remains a mystery too.

“I wish we wrote it because I think it’s great,” said John Carney, editor of DealBreaker, a Wall Street gossip site that posted the exchange on Wednesday.

Mr. Carney said that he had received the zinger in an e-mail message from someone other than the author, and his source did not know who wrote it. (The response never appeared on Craigslist itself.)

On Thursday, Howard Lindzon posted it to his blog. After a commenter asked who wrote it, Mr. Lindzon responded “me,” but then said in a telephone interview that he had been kidding. The traffic the posting drew was serious, though. Mr. Lindzon usually gets about 3,000 daily visitors, but popularity-rating sites digg.com and reddit.com linked to the item, drawing more than 100,000 visitors and crashing his server.

Brett Michael Dykes, a blogger notorious for fake listings on Craigslist, said he had received about 40 e-mail messages accusing him of posting the husband-seeking personal ad. But he said he had not written it and was stumped about its provenance.

“I’ve probably read it five or six times, and I go back and forth,” Mr. Dykes said. “Sadly I think it may be real. I have met in New York City that type of girl.”

By now, Mr. Dykes said, a blogger would have taken credit for the listing if it were a hoax, but “who would want to step from the shadows and say, ‘I’m the gold digger’?”

And Mr. Carney said he was not holding his breath that the Wall Street type would step forward. “In the age of ultrasensitivity to sexual harassment, people might think that this guy’s response about women being depreciating assets is not exactly how they want their firm to be perceived by the public,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/bu...olddigger.html





Do Prostitutes Use the Social Web Better Than Corporate America?
Kevin

The social web has rapidly evolved into a powerful marketing tool whose reach has forced business to adjust their core philosophies and strategies in order to more effectively reach their target consumers. The social web, though relatively young, was already considered a popular media by 2004, though mainstream media and Corporate America have only recently taken notice. When a Bausch and Lomb Executive was recently asked about his attendance at a conference on blogging, his reply indicated that his company lacked a presence in new media. Businesses and governments are beginning to understand the power of the social web and have begun to embrace it, including British Foreign Secretary David Milibland who launched a blog to help people understand the diplomatic policy of England. One business though has beaten all these titans to the bunch; the world’s oldest profession has been quick to embrace these new and exciting technologies. People in this profession have been quick to grasp the strength of creating a community on the social web.

We have been able to witness the growth of this trend, which mirrors the growth of the technology and shares traits with any other sub-group on the web. Web 2.0 concepts such as the creation of social networking websites are being used by people within this industry as well as other technologies such as bulletin boards, Craigslist.com, and instant messenger have benefited both provider and seeker. These combined technologies have helped create and foster a community. This has had multiple effects on illegal activity: it has moved a lot of people off of the streets, emboldened them to work for themselves, created a screening process for both client and provider, and has created a path for law enforcement to track it.

In examining the growth of prostitution online, it mirrors the type of growth and activity of a typical subgroup. We can take fans of the Super Bowl Champions, the Indianapolis Colts for example. They have their own social networking site designed by the team http://www.mycolts.net/. On that site users can create their own profile and participate on message boards created to specifically discuss the Colts. Beyond the message board, featured users can share their thoughts via chatrooms, messaging services, and blogs. They are also able to follow the news about the team as well as being able to read blogs created by members of the team and coaching staff. By using social networking the Colts have found a way to unite their fan base and create a community. With these connections, you see a history emerge of the interaction between the users. The users refer to other conversations or make references to information about other users, which is a display of familiarity. This is something that you see in a community; not only is there interaction, but you have people with established relationships referencing those relationships within their interactions with each other.

When you examine prostitution online you can see the exact same type of sites, albeit with different subject area and interests. Users still have the creation of relationships and an ongoing discussion between clients, just as the fans in the previous example. On top of their ongoing professional conversations, providers also participate and interact with their client base in a more casual context, beyond their immediate professional concerns. This one on one interaction was a surprising component of this sub-group. Unlike the Colts, where there is a wall between fans and players, in this context there was no formal distinction or distance. This isn’t the case as providers are part of the conversations on these sites in a way that demonstrates that they are members of the community, not just the providers of a service. Unlike the Colts site where the blogs are a one sided interaction (fans can comment on the posts but there isn’t going to be an ongoing dialogue created like on most blogs), on these message boards there is an involvement with the desired subject. These communities are built just like any other web communities, in a collaboration of multiple sites or sites with multiple features that cover multiple types of technology such as in house messaging, profiles, message boards, photography, and other hallmarks of social networking sites.

For example escorts.com- a site which is a way for users to find providers in their area- has a lot of the same aspects you would find onmost social networking websites, but with a niche community like on mycolts.net. Users can set up their own profile with their date of birth, gender, sexual orientation, race, height, weight, smoking preference, drinking preference, and other typical background profile information that social networking websites ask for. Users can also modify their profile by adding pictures (with a full photo gallery feature), configuring a headline or greeting, and designing their profile layout in a manner reminiscent of most social networking sites. The communication features of this site also mirror large social networking sites in that you can instant message, send long form messages, chat, and interact on message boards.

Besides the traditional social networking features of this site, there are things that are specific to this niche such as reviews of providers and clients. Also there is a paid membership feature that allows you extended access that includes reviews with intimate details. This, in addition to referral links to other adult services, is how the site is monetized.

There are multiple benefits of deploying this technology for this industry. From a political perspective it reduces the street aspect of the industry. This has a kind of a “out of site out of mind” type reaction within the political and law enforcement world. (Although in reality it is currently thriving online.) Safety wise this provides multiple levels of protection for all involved: a rating system allows clients to know what to expect with a provider and providers can be tainted if they have a history of participating in unethical practices within this community. Activities such as not expressing their rates properly, upselling their services, or even a reputation of stealing from their clients can follow them in this virtual world. For providers they are able to get recommendations from other providers about specific clients, which helps protect them against law enforcement stings as well as protecting themselves against potentially dangerous clients. While there is obviously still a risk on many levels for both clients and providers ranging from STDs, robbery, or even worse, this screening process created by these sites has considerably lowered risks on a lot of fronts. When compared head to head against street prostitution the risks are considerably lower.

Beyond the social networking type of website, there are a few other sites that people use that are current web 2.0 technologies. Craigslist.com has been in the news recently for their erotic services section on their website. It has drawn the ire of law enforcement personal as well as religious advocates. The erotic services section is filled with multiple ads for adult services that include phone sex operators, web cam girls, massage parlors, and escorts. An interesting angle to the use of cragslist.com is that Craigslist is actually looked down upon by many of the people that are involved in these community websites. It is widely proclaimed by message boards such as aspd.net that Craigslist is a haven for scam artists.

People that are active on message boards centered around prostitution have created a hierarchy of the adult industry. This community has created a social ladder, just like you would see in any other community. “There is a perceived hierarchy in the industry,” Jennifer said. “Topless dancers think they’re better than nude dancers. Nude dancers think they’re better than the prostitutes. The people on Craigslist tend to be women on the lower end of the spectrum.”

Forums such as aspd.net offer up a source for providers as well as clients. There are established users that have created a handbook of how to get involved in- as they refer to it- “the hobby”. The forum is also a place that ties multiple websites together, where people can post reviews from multiple different providers websites, as well as interacting with other users via private message and instant messenger, all while keeping their true identity hidden. Here they evaluate the information that is posted on these sites, as well as tell each other about potential scam warnings and law enforcement lookout. Another topic that the users actually approach is the idea of safe sex and protecting oneself from potential STDS.

In examining multiple dating and sex forums the topic of STDs are never brought up. On this website there were multiple threads dedicated to this topic including multiple links to websites with extremely valuable information regarding safe sex. When compared to other forums that have frank talk about sex, like different dating forums, the topic of STDs and save sex is barely every broached. Here they have formed a community that looks out for each other, from a law enforcement all the way to health perspective. While the activities they are doing are illegal in most areas of the United States and arguably immoral, the amount of participation and care displayed for their fellow “hobbyist” was remarkable.

Detailed information flows pretty freely on these sites. All of this information is available for people that want to take part in the “hobby”. There is a free transfer of information ranging from who to acquire services from and how to get them, to how to protect yourself, avoid scams, and participate within this community. Most providers are perceived to be very open and honest, and while most clients hide themselves behind online identities they were still open with details about a very intimate part of their life creating a sort of comfort level amongst the users.

This openness and transparency of all this comes with a problem from a pragmatic sense, in that law enforcement now has access to information about the business that these people are in. According to a recent article in the New York Times, law enforcement agencies are supported by the digital footprints that sites like Craigslist provide.

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.’ While the idea of enforcement is nice, the actual implementation of enforcement policies has been rare. Over the last year there have been large arrests, but they are only highlighted by three cities versus the hundreds of cities that have specific sites on Craigslist. “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.” These arrests aside, most law enforcement agencies explain that they simply don’t have the manpower to respond to this or they don’t consider it a priority. The impact of technology is apparent here. While it leaves the risk of a digital footprint, it is still more cumbersome and challenging to track providers and clients down than it is to arrest someone on the street or raid a massage parlor.

When looking at prostitution and the people that are involved in it online, you can compare it directly with other communities. The use of various web 2.0 tools and techniques have helped multiple communities grow and have fostered an atmosphere of upfront information sharing. With information being shared so openly due to this use of technology it has caused this illegal activity to expand in the digital age. It has also helped reform a business that by all accounts has had been unsafe for the people involved and the society around it. While the online component of this activity doesn’t cure a lot of the social ills associated with prostitution such as drug use, the exploitation of women, and other problems, it has created a safer environment for those that are involved by creating a screening process, an information sharing network, and a system where people can interact with those around them all by creating and growing a virtual community around it. It is sad to say that corporate America is lagging behind the online sex trade for fully using web 2.0 applications to their fullest.
http://www.buzznetworker.com/do-pros...orate-america/





Interpol Launches Global Hunt for Internet Paedophile
AFP

Interpol on Monday launched an unprecedented worldwide hunt for a man who it said had posted pictures on the Internet of himself raping young boys in Vietnam or Cambodia.

The International Criminal Police Organisation, based in Lyon, France, issued a global request for assistance on its website along with a picture of the wanted suspect recovered from one of his own images.

"For years, images of this man sexually abusing children have been circulating on the Internet," Interpol chief Ronald Noble said in a statement.

"We have tried all other means to identify and to bring him to justice, but we are now convinced that without the public's help this sexual predator could continue to rape and sexually abuse young children whose ages appear to range from six to early teens."

This was "the first time the organisation has made such an appeal," Interpol stressed.

A special crimes unit in Germany managed to produce the picture of the man from one of his photos that had been altered on the web. The original had been digitally 'swirled' to disguise his face.

The recovered picture shows a white man in his 30s or early 40s, shaven, with receding dark hair.

His identity and nationality remain unknown despite efforts by 186 Interpol offices and specialist units.

According to the police organisation, some 200 photos have been circulating of the man assaulting 12 different young boys. They appeared to have been taken in Vietnam and Cambodia, two countries that have gained reputations as destinations for sex tourism.

Noble said "we have very good reason to believe that he travels the world in order to sexually abuse and exploit vulnerable children."

Kristin Kvigne, the assistant director of Interpol's Trafficking in Human Beings Unit, said: "We are certainly not encouraging members of the public to take any direct action themselves, particularly since any positive identification would need to be confirmed by law enforcement authorities."

But she urged anyone who recognised the man to contact police or Interpol representatives in their country.

The appeal and photographs of the man were on www.interpol.int
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5...e0oiKMSl-ZtEzg





Gallery Vandals Destroy Photos
Carol Vogel

A grainy video of four masked vandals running through an art gallery in Sweden, smashing sexually explicit photographs with crowbars and axes to the strain of thundering death-metal music, was posted on YouTube Friday night.

This was no joke or acting stunt. It was what actually happened on a quiet Friday afternoon in Lund, a small university town in southern Sweden where “The History of Sex,” an exhibition of photographs by the New York artist Andres Serrano, had opened two weeks earlier.

Around 3:30, half an hour before closing, four vandals wearing black masks stormed into a space known as the Kulturen Gallery while shouting in Swedish, “We don’t support this,” plus an expletive. They pushed visitors aside, entered a darkened room where some of the photographs were displayed and began smashing the glass protecting the photographs and then hacking away at the prints.

The bumpy video, evidently shot with a hand-held camera by someone who ran into the gallery with the attackers, intersperses images of the Serrano photographs with lettered commentary in Swedish like “This is art?” before showing the vandals at work.

No guards were on duty in the gallery, said Viveca Ohlsson, the show’s curator, although security videos captured much of the incident.

“There was one woman who works at the gallery who tried to stop them until she saw the axes and crowbars,” Ms. Ohlsson said. “These men are dangerous.”

By the time the masked men had finished, half the show — seven 50-by-60-inch photographs, worth some $200,000 over all — had been destroyed. The men left behind leaflets reading, “Against decadence and for a healthier culture.” The fliers listed no name or organization.

“I was shocked and horrified,” Mr. Serrano said in a telephone interview yesterday from New York. “I never expected something like this, especially in this magical town, which is so sweet I joked about it being like something out of Harry Potter.”

Mr. Serrano said he had flown to Sweden for the opening and was met with great enthusiasm by gallery visitors. “The reaction was so positive,” he said. “I could never imagine anything like this happening.”

Officials at the local police station said yesterday that the vandals had not been caught but that they were believed to be part of a neo-Nazi group.

Ms. Ohlsson said the attack was clearly well planned. “We think that they had been at the gallery a few days before,” she said. “They knew where to go.”

The show consists of photographs, made in 1995 and 1996, of various sex acts, including a depiction of a naked woman fondling a stallion. It was divided into two rooms. One had white walls, the other black. The vandals went to the black room, where Ms. Ohlsson said the photographs were a bit racier.

This is not the first time Mr. Serrano’s work has been attacked, physically or in words. In 1989 the National Endowment for the Arts came under fire from conservative politicians and religious groups for helping to finance a $15,000 grant to Mr. Serrano related to past work that included a photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine. A print of that work was attacked and destroyed in 1997 when it was on view at the National Gallery of Art in Melbourne, Australia.

It is not the first time the Kulturen Gallery has seen violence, either. About 10 years ago vandals raced into the gallery and put paint on images by a Swedish photographer.

“The History of Sex” remains on view, but with bolstered security, Ms. Ohlsson said, explaining that the group had threatened on the Internet to attack the show again.

Paula Cooper, Mr. Serrano’s New York dealer, whose gallery in Chelsea exhibited his “History of Sex” photographs in 1997, said she was horrified by the attack in Sweden. “Art inflames people,” she said.

Ms. Cooper said that her gallery was working to replace the destroyed photographs as soon as possible so they could go back on view in Lund. (Mr. Serrano produced each in editions of three.)

After “The History of Sex” closes in Lund in December, it is to travel to the Alingsas Art Museum in Alingsas, Sweden.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/ar...gn/09serr.html





Toned-Down Version of 'Manhunt 2,' Approved in U.S., is Still Banned in U.K.
AP

British regulators on Monday banned a toned-down version of the violent video game "Manhunt 2," saying the changes didn't go far enough to alter the game's "bleakness and callousness of tone."

The game's maker called the decision "a setback for video games."

In June, Take Two Interactive Inc. suspended plans to distribute the game - because it was rejected by the Entertainment Software Rating Board in the United States and by regulators in Europe - but finally agreed, two months later, to release the revised version.

The game, made by Take-Two's studio Rockstar Games, allows players to assume the role of an escapee from a mental institution who can go on a killing rampage.

In the U.S., the less-violent version eventually was accepted by the rating board, an industry group, and received a Mature rating, meaning it is appropriate for consumers age 17 or older. It will ship on Halloween for the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable and Nintendo Wii game systems.

But the British Board of Film Classification said it was unsatisfied with the changes, which included blurring out some of the game's execution-style kills.

"The impact of the revisions on the bleakness and callousness of tone, or the essential nature of the game play, is clearly insufficient," BBFC director David Cooke said in a statement.

Cooke said it was up to Take-Two and Rockstar Games to resubmit a further edited version. Rockstar Games said it would appeal.

"The changes necessary in order to publish the game in Britain are unacceptable to us and represent a setback for video games," Rockstar Games said in a statement. "The BBFC allows adults the freedom to decide for themselves when it comes to horror in movies and we think adults should be similarly allowed to decide for themselves when it comes to horror in video games, such as Manhunt 2."

Rockstar Games did not explain in detail what it was about the BBFC's current demands that were unacceptable compared to the earlier alterations made for the U.S. market.

Take-Two shares rose a penny to $18.06 in midday trading.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_7119316





Report: Imus To Return December 1
FMQB

Last week, it was reported that Don Imus was close to finalizing a deal with Citadel to return to the radio. Now sources tell the Washington Post that Imus' comeback has a start date of December 1. The Post reports that a new contract between Imus and Citadel Broadcasting will likely be finalized by the end of the week. Sources also told the paper that, as predicted, Imus would be taking over mornings at WABC/New York, with his show back in syndication once again.

There are also suggestions that Imus would bring his show back to TV as well, and he has floated the idea that the show could be a fit on the new Fox Business Network, though no official negotiations have begun.

While nothing has been said on the record yet, Citadel CEO Farid Suleman did tell the New York Times over the weekend that "[Imus] did something wrong. He didn’t break the law. He’s more than paid the price for what he did. I think he should be evaluated by what he does going forward." Suleman did not, however, confirm or deny that Citadel was in negotiations with Imus.

Advertising Age has asked some top advertisers if they would return to running spots during Imus' show, if he comes back. While General Motors had suspended its advertising on his show when the controversy began in the spring, a spokeswoman for GM told Ad Age the company wouldn't buy ad time until it knew what his new program would be about. Natalie Swed Stone, OMD's head of radio buying, added that she "couldn't see why" advertisers wouldn't want to return to running ads with Imus once again.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=490075





Biography of ‘Peanuts’ Creator Stirs Family
Patricia Cohen

David Michaelis first contacted the family of Charles M. Schulz seven years ago about writing a biography of Schulz, the creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip. It turned out that Schulz had read Mr. Michaelis’s biography of N. C. Wyeth, and that Schulz’s son Monte also liked the writer’s work. He ended up helping persuade the rest of the Schulz clan to cooperate with Mr. Michaelis, granted full access to his father’s papers and put aside his own novel writing to help him.

But Monte Schulz said that when he read Mr. Michaelis’s manuscript in December, members of the family were shocked by the portrayal of a depressed, cold and bitter man who was constantly going after different women.

“It’s not true,” Monte said. “It’s preposterous.”

His sister Amy Schulz Johnson felt the same. “The whole thing is completely wrong,” she said from her home in Utah. “I think he wanted to write a book a certain way, and so he used our family.”

“We were all really excited thinking we were going to get to say things about our Dad,” she said, complaining that the children play a very small role in the book.

Mr. Michaelis said that he was surprised to hear how upset some members of the family were, but that “to their children fathers are always heroes, and very few families can see beyond that paterfamilias.” After interviewing hundreds of people, going through every one of the 17,897 comic strips Schulz drew and doing extensive research, Mr. Michaelis said, “this was the man I found.”

“Did I get the story right?” he asked. “Absolutely. No question.”

Mr. Michaelis referred to numerous interviews throughout Charles Schulz’s life in which he talked about his own “melancholy” and anxieties. “I have this awful feeling of impending doom,” he said on “60 Minutes” in 1999. “I wake up to a funeral-like atmosphere.” Many portraits of Schulz pick up the same theme. Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s 1989 biography, “Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz,” similarly describes him as depressed and plagued by panic attacks, despite a large family and mammoth financial and critical success. Nor does it seem that Mr. Michaelis made a secret of his perspective. He wrote an appreciation of Schulz in Time magazine in December 2000 after his death at 77 in which he clearly laid out the thesis he expands on in his 655-page book, sometimes word for word.

Mr. Michaelis’s biography, “Schulz and Peanuts,” which HarperCollins is releasing next week, is one of the most anticipated books of the fall publishing season. Schulz’s cartoon panels are interspersed with the text, and Mr. Michaelis uses them as revelations of the artist’s emotions.

“He was a complicated artist who had an inner life and embedded that inner life on the page,” Mr. Michaelis said in an interview. “His anxieties and fears brought him Lucy and the characters in ‘Peanuts.’”

“A normal person couldn’t have done it,” he said.

Biographers often find themselves at odds with the friends and families of their subjects. Clearly a loved one is not necessarily objective, a family may want to protect a reputation or may be unaware of hidden events or aspects of someone’s character. Janet Malcolm, in a well-known provocative essay, offered another analysis, describing the relationship between a journalist and a subject as innately deceptive and the journalist as “kind of a confidence man.” Elements of all these explanations have been invoked.

Jean Schulz, Charles’ second wife, said she read about three-quarters of Mr. Michaelis’s third draft. She didn’t disagree that her husband, whom friends called Sparky, was “melancholy,” but she said that was only part of the story: “It’s not a full portrait. Sparky was so much more. Most of the time he loved to laugh.

“Part of what puzzles people about Sparky was that he talked about the actual physical sensation that he had from being anxious, the ‘sense of dread’ when he got up in the morning. But he had a Buddhist acceptance of life and its ups and downs. He functioned perfectly well.

“David couldn’t put everything in,” she said, but added, “I think Sparky’s melancholy and his dysfunctional first marriage are more interesting to talk about than 25 years of happiness.” She quoted her husband’s frequent response to why Charlie Brown never got to kick the football: “Happiness is not funny.”

What particularly disturbed her, she said, were Mr. Michaelis’s judgments. “Every artist has to take a point of view,” she said, “but if David is going to say that Sparky is a consistently mean man, then you need to back it up.”

“The attribution is very vague,” she said, mentioning anonymous quotations.

Mr. Michaelis’s source notes for each chapter are organized by subject, so it can be difficult to attach a particular quote to a particular source.

Jean Schulz said that she had found factual errors, many of them trivial, like whether a Redwood tree was dug up, but that “it just makes me wonder about other things in the book.” Mr. Michaelis “obviously took notes,” she said, but some things were clearly “mistranscribed or misinterpreted.”

Monte Schulz cited a number of small inaccuracies, including a mention of a housekeeper serving dinner after she no longer worked for the family; an incorrect reference to his father hearing him lecture at a writer’s workshop; and what Monte said was a ridiculously low estimate for building an ice-skating rink, which made it seem as if there were a more than a 1,000 percent cost overrun.

He said his mother, Joyce Doty, was very upset at being portrayed as an overbearing and shrewish. Reached at her home in Hawaii, she said, “I am not talking to anybody about anything.” Meredith Hodges, who grew up as one of Schulz’s five children, only discovered as an adult that he was not her biological father. She describes him in the book as “cold,” “distant” and “afraid to love,” and she wrote in an e-mail message, “No comment.”

Mr. Michaelis in his biography describes Schulz as extremely generous, devoted to his children, modest and funny, and Joyce as energetic, capable and vibrant, but those traits do not get nearly as much space. Amy Schulz Johnson, who described Schulz as “the most amazing Christ-like father,” complained that Mr. Michaelis played up the negative and left out the positive. “We all got deceived,” she said.

Still, Jean Schulz is sympathetic to the notion of a writer’s or artist’s creative vision, pointing to her own husband. “David is writing this for himself,” she said. “He’s got to be satisfied.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/books/08schu.html





Connecticut Man Sues, Saying Demon Murder Claim was a Hoax
John Christoffersen

Carl Glatzel Jr. says he's a happily married building contractor. The last thing he wanted was a book reviving a claim that he and his brother were under the spell of demons that led to a killing decades ago by a family acquaintance.

Glatzel is suing famed psychic Lorraine Warren and author Gerald Brittle, who last year reprinted his book "The Devil in Connecticut." The lawsuit, filed in Danbury Superior Court, was announced Monday and seeks unspecified damages.

"He thought this whole thing was behind him," said Gregory Nolan, Glatzel's attorney. "He doesn't want everyone to think of him as the guy who was possessed by Satan."

The book focuses on Arne Cheyenne Johnson, a Glatzel family acquaintance who was convicted of manslaughter in the fatal stabbing of his landlord, Alan Bono, 40, in 1981. Johnson claimed he killed Bono under the devil's spell after challenging the devil to leave 12-year-old David Glatzel.

A judge refused to allow Johnson's defense of innocent by demonic possession. But the case attracted widespread attention and led to a 1983 NBC television movie, "The Demon Murder Case," that starred Andy Griffith, Cloris Leachman and Kevin Bacon.

Lorraine Warren and her late husband, Ed, worked on the case as demonologists. The couple was challenged in the 1970s over the "Amityville Horror" case, in which Ed Warren said a supposedly haunted house in New York proved the existence of demons.

Carl Glatzel Jr., a 42-year-old Brookfield resident, says the demon claim was a hoax designed to bring the Warrens money and fame. He says his brother David suffered a mental illness as a boy that led to hallucinations and delusions, but has since recovered and now has his own construction business.

"They saw a gold mine," Glatzel said. "We're not going to be ridiculed again."

Glatzel said he and his brother were shunned by friends and classmates and had troubled getting work later because of the notoriety of the case. He said his brother did not want to comment.

"It was living hell when we were kids," Glatzel said Tuesday. "It was just a nightmare. I'm not going to go through that again. Neither is my brother."

Warren, an 80-year-old Monroe resident, called the lawsuit "ridiculous," saying it came 25 years after the book was first published. She said six Catholic priests attended the exorcisms and she and her husband witnessed some of the behavior.

"You can't even believe the things we witnessed in that home and to that boy who was 11 at the time," Warren said. "He came under hideous attacks."

David Glatzel levitated, Warren claimed.

"He'd go right up off the bed," Warren said. "He had marks all over his body. He could tell things that were going to happen in the future such as the murder."

Warren declined to name the priests, except one who has since died. She said David's parents shared in the book's profits.

Brittle said he stands by the book, saying it was based on statements from David's family, including his parents, that he recorded.

"The child was being beaten by unseen hands," Brittle said. "The child was being levitated."

Carl Glatzel said his parents received $2,000 from the book publisher. His father, Carl Glatzel Sr., denied telling the author that his son was possessed.

Johnson, who was released from prison in 1986, married Glatzel's sister, Deborah. They still contend the account of demons was true and say Carl Glatzel is suing to make money.

Carl Glatzel said he wants to set the record straight. The Warrens manipulated dysfunctional families, he said.

"We couldn't do half the stuff we wanted to do in life," Glatzel said. "They made me sound like a freak from outer space."
http://www.newstimes.com/region/ci_7128094





Co-Founder of Skype Defends Its Value
Victoria Shannon

In his first public remarks since quitting last week as chief executive of the Internet phone company Skype, Niklas Zennstrom said Tuesday that he had no regrets about his handling of the company but conceded that he might have tried to squeeze money out of it too quickly.

EBay, the online auction company that paid $2.6 billion for Skype in 2005, said last week that it would take a $1.43 billion charge for the service.

EBay has retained Mr. Zennstrom as Skype’s nonexecutive chairman. Michael van Swaaij, eBay’s chief strategy officer, will fill in as chief executive until a permanent successor is hired.

The write-down was widely seen as a concession that eBay had overpaid for Skype, but Mr. Zennstrom, a Swede who was a co-founder of the company in 2003, defended its value.

In the second quarter, revenue grew 100 percent from a year earlier, to $90 million, and the company recorded a profit in the first quarter, he said.

About 220 million people, most of them outside the United States, are registered with Skype, which uses the Internet to carry phone conversations between personal computers.

“It’s not like it’s been overtaken by Microsoft or Google or Yahoo,” Mr. Zennstrom said at a technology conference here. “Over the longer term, I think it’s going to turn out to be a good business.”

Revenue and earnings projections made by Skype executives before the sale to eBay turned out to be “a bit front-loaded,” he said.

“Sometimes I feel like we tried to monetize too rapidly,” Mr. Zennstrom said.

While he and his co-founder, Janus Friis, could have made more money if they had stayed on and hit undisclosed financial goals over the next two years, Mr. Zennstrom said it was his choice to leave now.

“I made a decision to phase myself out,” he added. “For me, that was always the intention. That was a very natural process. The question is, when do you do that? In this case, it was when the company is in a good position in the market and you feel confidence in your team.”

Mr. Zennstrom is focusing on his newest business, Joost, a broadband Internet television service. Joost opened its Web site to the public this week after an invitation-only trial period, although the software is still being tested.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/te...y/10skype.html





Happy 1st Anniversary YouTube and Google; Now Move Over a Bit
Mark Hendrickson

Time for another roundup, and this one coincides with a notable first-year anniversary: that of Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, confirmed on October 9th, 2006.

Since then, the name “YouTube” has become virtually synonymous with “online video sharing”. According to Comscore, the website maintains a sizable lead over competitors with 205,593,000 unique visitors per month. Second-place Yahoo Video trails with 48,026,000 visitors. But must YouTube remain the clear winner in the online video space? While they have certainly captured the largest audience - which may in the end be all they had needed to do to secure their position - we shouldn’t underestimate the many other companies vying for mindshare.

Even if YouTube remains the destination of choice for the vast majority of consumers, producers ought to take a serious look at the alternative services. They often support more file types, bigger uploads, and higher resolutions. They also place fewer restrictions and provide an array of features simply overlooked by YouTube. That said, a few of these services are mere YouTube clones and hope to follow in YouTube’s footsteps by providing very basic features.

These are the services we looked at: blip.tv, Brightcove.tv, ClipShack, Crackle, DailyMotion, Sony eyeVio, Google Video, Megavideo, Metacafe, Motionbox, Revver, Spike (ifilm), Stage6, Veoh, Viddler, Vimeo, Yahoo Video, and YouTube.

Since they are all about 80% the same, I’m not going to go through each of them one-by-one at length. However, there are some overall trends that ought to be pointed out, as well as some key differentiators. To get into the details as to how all of these websites differ, check out the comparison chart we’ve provided above. You’ll notice that there are some gaps, so please email me if you can help us fill in the holes.

First of all, only YouTube, DailyMotion, and Metacafe appear to place any hard restrictions on video length. With the rest, video lengths are determined indirectly by file size restrictions. While YouTube and several of these sites place the file size cap at 100mb per upload, others place it higher at 250mb, 500mb, or 2000mb. Veoh places no limitations on file size, but they recommend you use their desktop player for files over 100mb. If you’re willing to fork over some cash for a premium membership, Brightcove.tv and Motionbox will also let you upload files of any size.

While YouTube allows users to upload files only formatted as .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, or .MPG, other services accept a much greater range of file types. If you want to make your life easier, however, get into the habit of encoding in .MOV (Quicktime) and you’ll be welcome at almost all of these sites.

When it comes to video quality/resolution, it’s not perfectly clear how these services compare, because most of them don’t state their video bit rates or explain their transcoding processes. However, several of them clearly blow YouTube out of the water. Stage6, a DivX-based service, and Sony’s eyeVio, a Japanese-only service, support the most stunning video quality. Videos hosted by Veoh and Crackle also look very sharp.

Out of all these alternative services, blip.tv stands out as the most professional video sharing solution. The website and player are cleanly designed, they accept perhaps the widest range of file formats, they will automatically syndicate your videos to many other websites, and you can choose to place midroll, postroll, adjacent, and overlay advertisements in your uploads. Additionally, you can track your shows’ statistics quite closely and allow users to download your videos. I could go on and on about blip.tv’s useful features. The only major bummer with blip.tv is that you can’t seek ahead to points in a video using their Flash player.

It’s no surprise that shows like Rocketboom have decided to migrate over to blip.tv. We even decided to use them for our TechCrunch40 conference. And PC World agrees with us that blip.tv tops them all.

While we have a strong preference for blip.tv, the others have their own peculiarities that may make them more attractive to you. ClipShack, while mostly a YouTube clone, has an area where you can use a webcam to add movie, book, video game, and TV show reviews directly to the site. Crackle serves as a talent discovery system through which amateur producers can win a chance to pitch ideas to Sony and other media executives.

Dailymotion, Metacafe, and Megavideo support a wide range of languages. Sony eyeVio, which unfortunately doesn’t plan to roll out an English version, enables users to download videos straight to their PSPs, Walkmans, iPods, and mobile phones. Metacafe and Megavideo both have programs with which they pay content creators according to how many people view their videos. Motionbox, the most private of the services, has a video player with a unique filmstrip that can be used to visually locate segments in a video (they also provide a simple online video editor).

Revver provides a WordPress plugin so that video bloggers can upload and manage their content more efficiently. Veoh lets you both upload videos to other sharing sites and watch videos from all over the Web in its download client. Vimeo sports the best-designed website and a strong community feel. And Viddler’s player packs in a bunch of features, including the ability to leave comments in videos at particular points.

Since embeddable video players are the faces of these services, we have placed screenshots of them below (click to enlarge). We are also in the process of uploading a sample video to each of these websites so you can compare their video qualities. Links to these videos can be found in the comparison chart.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/10...ve-over-a-bit/





Internet Company to Let Consumers Profit From Posted Videos
Victoria Shannon

Blinkx, an Internet video search company based in London, will allow consumers to make money from the videos they show on their own blogs, social network sites or home pages if they agree to embed advertising in the videos.

By combining two Internet trends — social networking and online video — with a moneymaking opportunity, Blinkx hopes to better compete with YouTube, the market-leading video-sharing service owned by Google, said the founder and chief executive of Blinkx, Suranga Chandratillake.

Google said yesterday that it would allow Web sites in its advertising network to use some YouTube content and share advertising revenue. In a similar vein, Revver.com, which shares 50 percent of its ad revenue with people who post videos on its site, includes its ads before and after the videos.

Blinkx, however, has until now concentrated on its role as a video search engine. The company, which was spun off from the British software firm Autonomy in May, uses speech-to-text transcription and visual recognition technology to sift through Internet videos.

On Monday, Blinkx started offering search capabilities in French, German and Spanish. It is indexing content from 200 European sources and sites with more than one million hours of non-English video content, including Eurosport, Euronews, TF1, Elmundo, Le Monde and Spiegel TV.

Under Blinkx’s new program, to be formally introduced in London today, Internet video fans can post film clips to their sites and then submit them to Blinkx to be indexed and categorized.

Each time the video is watched, the Blinkx system will choose a relevant ad from its inventory and place it in one of two places — either in a small transparent window at the bottom of the video screen or in a box outside the top of the frame.

Every time an ad is clicked, the host Web site for the video will receive a portion of the payment for the ad placement. The rate varies, based on the ad, but it is generally a few pennies for each click.

“This way, the people who are powering the video revolution are the ones who get the rewards,” Mr. Chandratillake said.

He said the choice of ad display was up to the host, adding that the ads were no more distracting than the banner ads now common on Internet pages.

Many Web sites — especially social networks like MySpace and Facebook — allow users to borrow and embed video on their personalized pages. Others, usually professional media companies like the BBC, do not.

Mr. Chandratillake cautioned that any income derived by bloggers and others agreeing to take the ads would not be much. “Maybe enough to pay your Internet bill at best,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/bu...a/10video.html





Sticking it to l'Homme: Canadian Co-op Forms Own ISP

Nate Anderson
Not your father's ISP

Some ISPs simply discourage end users from offering WiFi connections to neighbors; most explicitly rule it out in their terms of service. But a small Canadian ISP called Wireless Nomad actually requires it.

Nomad does things a little differently. The company is subscriber-owned, volunteer-run, and open-source friendly. It offers a neutral Internet connection with no bandwidth caps or throttling, and it makes a point of creating wireless access points at the end of each DSL connection that can be used, for free, by the public. Bell Canada this is not.

"People like to share," says Nomad co-founder Damien Fox when we talk about the company's history. And if WiMAX radios run cheap enough, the members of Wireless Nomad could eventually blanket much of Toronto with high-speed ‘Net access. The operation has been tough to keep running, and Fox admits that "if we knew then what we knew now... we probably wouldn't have done it because it was too crazy."

But Fox and cofounder Steve Wilton have kept Wireless Nomad up for two years already, and they hope to see the subscriber-owned model take off in more communities in Canada and the US. Here's how they did it (and keep on doing it) at a lower price than Bell Canada's own DSL offerings.

What has mandatory line-sharing done for you lately?

We recently profiled Copowi, a startup ISP in the US that claims to guarantee network neutrality to subscribers. While Copowi has visions of offering service across the US, Wireless Nomad's ambitions have been more modest. The company has been operating since 2005 in Toronto, where Damien and some friends started the service in a Toronto condo.

It's fitting that a former EFF summer intern would help launch a service without bandwidth caps or traffic shaping, but it's all made possible by government regulation. Canada has mandatory access requirements for telephone lines that require a line owner to lease out access at wholesale rates for competitors who want to resell service. In the US, such requirements initially led to competition in the DSL space, but the line-sharing rules were eventually scrapped. In 2005, a California ISP called Brand X lost an important court case in which it argued that cable companies ought to share their lines, and later that year the FCC reclassified DSL in order to exempt it too from the line-sharing requirements altogether.

Once that happened, telecoms were free to resell services if they liked, but it was no longer required, and rates could be prohibitively expensive for any ISP that hoped to compete on cost (an issue that Copowi currently faces). In Canada, despite opposition from line owners, mandatory access provisions persist and make it simpler for resellers to enter the market. According to Fox, Toronto alone has more than 100 DSL resellers, making Wireless Nomad only one among many small ISPs.

And it is small, with only 100 or so subscribers, but it can still offer DSL at a competitive price. More importantly, it can offer DSL on its own terms.

Toronto downtown coverage map

Here's how it works: every new subscriber gets a DSL connection that Wireless Nomad purchases through a wholesaler (which in turn purchases service from Bell Canada and others). All subscribers are asked to stick a wireless router on the DSL line, but these routers have been tricked out with OpenWRT, and subscribers use Chillispot to control access. The idea is to make free Internet hotspots available to WiFi users all over the city, but not to do so in such a way that a subscriber's home Internet connection is degraded.

Anyone wanting to access the wireless link needs to set up a free account and can then surf the ‘Net at a throttled speed of 64Kbps (obviously, this does not apply to wireless accounts created by the subscriber, who has access to the full speed of the connection). Sure, this is pretty slow, but when total strangers offer you free connections over their own home connection, it's hard to complain too much.

In the last two years, more than 5,000 accounts have been created, a good indication that the free service really is being used.

Small ISP, big problems

For the subscribers, it's a chance to control their own connections in a way that's not possible with most major ISPs. Fox says that the goal of Wireless Nomad is not to offer the cheapest possible service, but to create a reasonably priced system that does what people want it to do. Unfortunately for the company, most people don't have a problem with the major providers, and they like the security of big brand names. Since opening its doors in 2005, Wireless Nomad has signed up only 100 customers, but it has managed to stay afloat for two years, and the founders have learned some hard lessons along the way.

Back when Wireless Nomad began, the founders thought it sounded like a great idea. So great that it would bring in hundreds of subscribers, maybe 1,000, and would provide enough income to fund a couple of full-time jobs. They started spending money, thousands of dollars on setup fees and equipment. They signed on with a wholesaler who resold Bell Canada DSL lines and charged (on top of the fixed fees) $2 per gigabyte of data transferred. Now, all they needed was customers.

After signing on their first subscribers, everything seemed hunky-dory. The connections were live, everyone had broadband, and the WiFi was working. Viva la revolución!

Then came the first bills. Damien and Wilton found themselves immediately in debt to the wholesaler. The DSL subscribers had an unexpected thirst for data; the Wireless Nomad administrators had not set up their pricing scheme with these kind of numbers on mind. An American Express card kept the venture afloat, but the backers were now on the hook for some serious cash.

Clearly, radical changes were required if Wireless Nomad wanted to ramble on. The company immediately switched wholesalers. They found a company that offered 10GB of data per line for a fixed fee (and this was spread across all the lines Wireless Nomad purchased, so that those who used less made it possible for those who used more). This worked better, and the situation stabilized. Costs were containable, and in fact, Wireless Nomad was offering service for less than Bell Canada.

But usage continues to creep up. As YouTube, in particular, exploded in popularity, the company neared its bandwidth caps. Fox was able to work out a new arrangement with the wholesaler under which Wireless Nomad would use a different backhaul link from the wholesaler to the actual line owner, and it could then purchase truly unlimited data access for a fixed price. (Currently, subscribers average about 15GB of data transfer per line, per month.)

The situation was now sustainable, but Wireless Nomad wasn't making any sort of money to speak of. The setup and administration work were done by volunteers, and Fox and the others had to hang on to day jobs.

A lesson in wholesale economics

For anyone considering a similar undertaking in their own community, here's how the numbers break down. According to Fox, Bell Canada charges end users about CAN$45 a month for DSL. It offers that same link at wholesale rates for around CAN$22, but it can be especially difficult for a small startup to work directly with a company like Bell. That's why Wireless Nomad buys from another wholesaler which aggregates all of its orders and deals directly with Bell to get the lines switched on and off. The wholesaler charges CAN$26 for a line, and Wireless Nomad pays another CAN$1 each month per line to have the company handle some tech support issues.

Many of Wireless Nomad's subscribers want to pay with credit card, which means a cost of CAN$1.50 each month to pay the card processor. That makes a grand total of CAN$28.50 in fixed costs.

Wireless Nomad currently charges customers CAN$37 a month for a DSL line, making a profit of CAN$8.50 per line. Well, not quite a profit, since the company also has to cover the cost of bad accounts, the cost of hardware, and its past debts (note: credit card debt can turn out to be really, really expensive). The upshot: no one makes any money.

In fact, things are so tight that Wireless Nomad uses a "Linux café" in Toronto (complete with inflatable penguin) as a mail and equipment drop to save money.

Not owning one's own lines can also be a constant source of frustration, since the company is dependent on line owners to activate new accounts. This requires the submission of the exact information from a phone bill, and then a wait of five days for the line to activate. It "should not take this long," says Fox, but what can he do?

Future plans

Despite its small size, Wireless Nomad has tried some innovative ideas. The free WiFi running on open-source firmware is certainly one of the most obvious, but the company has also experimented with running a mesh network that could theoretically allow even those at a great distance from the DSL-linked hotspot to get access without a DSL connection of their own. The idea is that a wireless router a few houses down from the main DSL link could relay the signal to another router even further down the block, and so on. If this worked properly, it could reduce the needed number of DSL circuits and could lower prices for all the co-op owners.

Unfortunately, this was one of those not-quite-ready-for-primetime ideas, and it failed to live up to expectations. The idea was shelved soon after it was tried, but in retrospect, Fox wonders if the problem was simply the fragility of WiFi signals. They don't propagate well and are notoriously susceptible to interference. This made the mesh perpetually unstable and gave poor performance. But what if each WiFi radio could cover miles instead of meters?

That's the promise of WiMAX, and Fox clings to the dream of hitching WiMAX radios up to the end of his subscribers' DSL lines to blanket Toronto with signals. Obviously, throwing open a DSL link to hundreds of simultaneous users invites total meltdown, but Fox suggests keeping the distance down and charging users a few bucks a months for access. Since the company has purchased truly unlimited access, there's no danger of being booted for slurping up too much bandwidth in a month, and even a few subscribers could offer service over a good portion of the city.

But WiMAX is a ways off. For now, Fox recommends that those interested in starting their own co-op ISP realize a few practical things.

First, it's tough. People like brand names, even for ISPs, and they don't trust small providers to stay in business or to solve their tech support problems. That means that attracting users will be difficult. Keep expectations low and expansion plans realistic.

Second, prepare for the costs. Understand exactly what service level you're buying from a wholesaler, and do worry about setup fees, which can run into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Third, recognize that this stuff is complicated. Fox points out that WiFi is easy compared to the complexity of getting a DSL connection to that spot. The heavy lifting (and trench-digging, and DSLAM-owning, and line maintenance) might be invisible to end users and even to some ISPs, but broadband is a real technical challenge. There will be problems; find good technical people to help.

With all the challenges, why bother? Fox bothers because he's helping to give a few people real control over their ‘Net connection at a reasonable price, and he's providing a small but useful public service. He knew just how useful it could be when he looked out of his window one day and saw Bell Canada employees in the park across the street surfing on their laptops.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/cult...ms-own-ISP.ars





PCs to Be Seen, Not Heard
Peter Wayner

JOSH SHENKLE knew that he couldn’t hook up any old PC to the 106-inch Panasonic projection television in his home theater. Most computers come with buzzing fans, whirring disk drives and whining capacitors that compete with the sound system.

“After a while, the noise gets to you during quiet scenes,” he said. “It overwhelms you and takes you away from the movie.”

Computer users who want silent offices and living rooms are starting to ask for quiet computers. Manufacturers are taking notice. Some new computers like the Apple iMac or the Alienware Area-51 7500 are marketed for their silence. A number of other manufacturers are responding by starting to work on quieting their machines.

An aftermarket of parts that people can use to tweak their machines with quieter fans and silent drives is emerging. Some small companies like Zalman are charging more than $5,000 for ultraquiet machines aimed at sound recording studios and home theaters.
Mr. Shenkle, a technical analyst in Minneapolis, ended up building his own PC inside the Antec Sonata 2 (www.antec.com), a computer case engineered to be extraordinarily quiet.

“What’s nice about the Antec 2 is that it has a temperature-sensing power supply with attachments specifically for the fan,” he said. “When the temperature does rise, it will speed up the fans.”

Heat is a product of computation, and every decision a computer makes about a spreadsheet, the color of a Web site’s background or the trajectory of a race car in a game produces a tiny bit of heat. When modern chips make billions of decisions in a second, the heat adds up.

“Most of the noise is related to cooling,” says Mike Chin, the editor of silentpcreview.com. “What you want to do is have the most effective cooling flow with the slowest fans.”

Mr. Chin started his Web site more than five years ago when he became annoyed with the loud machines on the market. Today, he makes his living writing on the topic, reviewing products and designing machines for manufacturers like Cool Tech PC (www.endpcnoise.com).

Mr. Chin says that the simplest way to cut noise is to use larger variable-speed fans that run no faster than necessary to keep the computer cool. If the components inside the case are arranged to make it easier for the air to flow smoothly without negotiating tight corners, the work is that much easier.

He also recommends using quieter disk drives and mounting them with special rubber gaskets that keep any vibrations from radiating through the case. These two steps may make the biggest difference.

But Mr. Chin said it was impossible to completely eliminate the noise that comes from the circuitry itself. “In lots of cases, the noise in a power supply or a motherboard is covered up by fans. You make things quiet enough, the buried noises are plainly audible.”

Mr. Chin’s Web site reviews different components by measuring the sound with a decibel meter and trying to characterize the nature of the sound. Both manufacturers and people who want quiet computers read it regularly to compare the sound emitted by various components.

A number of manufacturers are using these tricks when selling complete systems. “Our typical customer is spending upwards of $2,000 to $5,000 on a PC,” said Jon Schoenborn of Cool Tech PC. “They’re not looking for cheap stuff. They want top-end parts. They’re looking for an immaculate computer.”

His company tests parts carefully for noise, checks with experts like Mr. Chin, chooses the quietest parts and then experiments with putting them together in the best way. “Assembly here is not a low-skill job,” Mr. Schoenborn said. “Our assembly people are highly trained. You can’t mass-produce these things.”

Other companies are experimenting with more exotic solutions that use heat pipes and large blocks of highly conductive metals, known as heat sinks, to carry the heat from the components to the walls of the case. Glenn Lirhus, the owner and main designer for A-Tech Fabrication (www.atechfabrication.com) in Burbank, Calif., said that some of his computers came with a big block of aluminum for mounting the disk drive, a solution he thinks is better than using shock-absorbing mounts because the block conducts the heat away from the drive without air flow.

“The main problem with the rubber washers is you get no heat transfer from the drive, so you need some air flow,” Mr. Lirhus said.

Indeed, Mr. Lirhus’s machines are a good example of the school of design that believes that large blocks of metal can cool without fans. His company’s cases come with large fins running vertically along the sides. The air heats up around the case, producing a natural breeze to cool the devices without a fan.

Heat pipes are also becoming more and more common. These sealed tubes contain a liquid that will boil near the hot spots and then condense near the cool end, effectively moving the heat.

The Zalman 300 system from the Korean company Zalman (www.zalmanusa.com) uses a network of heat pipes that connect the central processing unit and the graphics card with the case itself, which is lined with big aluminum fins. The case alone is available for $600 from www.quietpcusa.com.

Still, others question that approach, pointing out that moving air is much lighter and more effective than aluminum fins. One fan moving 10 cubic feet of air a minute “can mean the difference of 20 degrees for something like a hard drive,” Mr. Chin said. “Take away that fan, you’ll increase that temperature by 15 degrees.”

Mr. Chin said that on the noise front, the typical ambient noise level in an office was 40 decibels, and that it was not hard to get a computer to be quieter than that. But he said the noise level in his home office was usually about 20 decibels. Getting below that level is “a much tougher challenge, but it can be done with fan-cooled,” he said.

The sound from typical computers is about 35 to 45 decibels, roughly the noise of a refrigerator humming, and it is not unusual to find noisier models breaking 50 decibels or maybe even 60, the level of an office conversation.

The designers are not content to just optimize the level of sound. There are aesthetics to consider, too, so the thin metal of the heat sink is being displayed in much the same way that sports cars come with open wheels that flaunt the size of their brake calipers and the cross-drilled rotors.

Some customers are paying attention. When Carlos Rodriguez, a community manager for a Web start-up, built out the PC for his home theater, he turned to a Zalman CNPS9500, a $49 cooler for the C.P.U. that comes with hundreds of thin copper fins and weighs almost a quarter of a pound.

“It’s got huge heat-sink fins,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “It’s got a 92-millimeter fan. I just can’t hear it at all. It’s big, but it’s also kind of beautiful.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/te...sics.html?8dpc





Judge Rules Gore Climate Film Requires Guidance Notes
AFP

A judge on Wednesday ruled that Al Gore's award winning climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" should only be shown in schools with guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination.

High Court judge Michael Burton's decision follows legal action brought by a father of two last month claiming the former US vice-president's film contained "serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda and sentimental mush".

Stewart Dimmock wanted to block the government's pledge to send more than 3,500 secondary schools in England and Wales a DVD of the documentary to demonstrate the need to fight global warming.

Judge Burton said the Oscar-winning film should be accompanied by government guidance notes and to distribute it without them would breach education laws prohibiting the promotion of unbalanced political viewpoints.

But the victory was only partial, as Dimmock failed to get the film totally banned from schools.

The lorry driver said after the case that he was "elated", but disappointed he had not secured an outright ban.

"If it was not for the case brought by myself, our young people would still be being indoctrinated with this political spin," he told reporters.

Dimmock is a member of the New Party, a fringe political organisation which describes itself as "a party of economic liberalism, political reform and internationalism."

Its supporters include industrialists and small- and medium-sized businesses. The party accepts climate change is a major issue but says the argument that it is man-made is not unequivocal.

Instead, it argues for developing new technologies, building new nuclear power stations and providing "positive incentives" for developing countries to support cleaner technologies.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1





Big Screen Embraces Hot Muse: Rock Stars
David Carr

In the second half of “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” a documentary about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers by the director Peter Bogdanovich, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam sits in on a duet of “The Waiting.” Standing before a tumultuous crowd roaring its approval, Mr. Petty turns to Mr. Vedder and suggests that he enjoy the moment. “Look at that, Eddie — rock and roll heaven.”

Moviegoers might be saying the same thing for months to come. There seems to be enough projects in theaters and in development built on the intersection between celluloid and what used to be called vinyl to fill a jukebox.

“Runnin’ Down a Dream” is one of three musically themed movies scheduled for the closing weekend of the New York Film Festival, along with “The Other Side of the Mirror,” a Bob Dylan documentary, and “Fados,” a look at the Portuguese musical tradition.

The music of the Beatles is currently reimagined in Julie Taymor’s “Across the Universe.” Today “Control,” a dramatic feature about the Manchester sad-core band Joy Division, will have its theatrical release, to be followed next month by Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There,” featuring six performers all taking turns as avatars of Bob Dylan.

Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese, whose Rolling Stones documentary will come out next year, just signed on for a documentary about George Harrison.

And after a summer that saw musicals and biopics like “Hairspray,” “El Cantante” and “La Vie en Rose,” a modest movie called “Once,” starring the Frames front man Glen Hansard, continues to play in theaters, powered by ardent word of mouth.

Mr. Bogdanovich, who was invited to make a film about the 30-year career of a master of the three-minute pop song and responded with a nearly four-hour documentary, said that music in general and that of Mr. Petty is often a gateway to bigger themes.

“Tom Petty is a particularly American story,” he said. “And I think that pop music has always been a very good indicator of where we are in the narrative of contemporary history.”

The Petty documentary will probably not have a big theatrical run — Best Buy will sell the DVD exclusively — but the film’s backer, Warner Brothers Records, hopes that all sorts of Petty fans will snap up a documentary about a man with 50 million in all-time sales. (It’s also releasing a concert DVD of a 30th-anniversary show in Gainesville, Fla., Mr. Petty’s hometown.)

The movie looks back in cultural history to a time before “rock stars were invented on game shows,” as Mr. Petty wryly observes. It also serves as a vivid reminder that Mr. Petty remains one of the coolest guys out of the South since William Faulkner, a straight-ahead rocker who got the likes of Mr. Dylan, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Mr. Harrison to play with him.

In the midst of movie clutter, familiar musical figures offer one way to catch audience attention. The music biopic stretches back decades to movies like “Night and Day” (about Cole Porter) and “The Gene Krupa Story,” and the link between musical and visual forms was cemented by MTV back when the network actually used to show music videos. Following a path taken by singers like Frank Sinatra, there is a host of musical stars today who have found traction as film actors, including Jennifer Hudson, Ice-T, Ludacris and Queen Latifah.

The music and film industries might be forming a more steadfast alliance partly to ward off disruptive technologies that allow people to partake without paying, but those same technologies are part of what makes music-oriented projects more likely to be undertaken and potentially more lucrative. Even beyond taking advantage of vastly improved theatrical sound systems, both in theaters and in the home, such films have become a rich source of DVDs, downloads and accompanying compilation and inspired-by albums, like Jay-Z’s take on Ridley Scott’s forthcoming “American Gangster.” (Sometimes a musical companion can outlive and surpass the film itself, as arguably happened with “Garden State,” a record that is still passed around as mood music for an alternative universe.)

“In a digital age, there is a crossover in delivery systems — iTunes and the Web, DVDs — that allows for both musical and film experience,” said Richard Peña, program director of the New York Film Festival. “The technological changes have had an effect on the films themselves as well. You have more and more complex soundtracks, to the point where soundtracks become almost as important as the image tracks from the filmmakers. In the truest sense, you get a kind of audio-visual spectacle.”

Beyond providing narrative assists and serving as a platform for huge crowd-pleasers like “Dreamgirls,” pop music is built on a vast series of rabid, self-defined tribes, who will scoop up any and all products about a given artist or group. That may explain why Joy Division, a group that put out just two records and was never a huge arena band, merits not just a feature, but also a documentary, simply called “Joy Division.”

Demographics may also be playing a role. Many baby boomers whose seminal experiences were accompanied by a certain band or song are now in their prime moviemaking years. But hybrid celebrity culture is in there as well.

“The actors today are absolutely musically obsessed,” said the director James Toback, who is currently in the studio with RZA of Wu-Tang Clan, laying down tracks for his coming documentary on Mike Tyson. “When pop culture became the culture, stars of the two forms interacted and blended, inspiring desire for all sorts of crossover projects.”

Of course music won’t redeem every project. “Ray” and “Walk the Line” notwithstanding, bald attempts to capitalize on embedded awareness can head into the tank faster than you can say “From Justin to Kelly.”

And then there’s “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” the faux biopic starring John C. Reilly, coming in December from the comedy workshop of Judd Apatow. One of the surest signs that a trend is under way is that it has become worthy of parody, and “Walk Hard” riffs through many of the genre’s tendencies. After playing a few songs from the movie and showing a clip from the film last week in Los Angeles, Mr. Apatow said later by phone that he and Jake Kasdan, the film’s director, watched many of the classics and decided that the stories were all pretty much the same.

“A small-town person grows up amidst a tragedy in his family, becomes a star, cheats on his first wife, goes into rehab, falls in love, cheats on his second wife, then sobers up again, experiences a final triumph and passes away peacefully or dies horribly,” he said.

“We all know these stories from VH1’s ‘Behind the Music,’ and even though we know what to expect, we still love watching them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/movies/10pett.html





Haunting Songs of Heartbreak, Done by a Man With Experience
A. O. Scott

In 1973, when we first encounter him, Ian Curtis (Sam Riley) is a lanky schoolboy in Macclesfield, a red-brick English town outside of Manchester, with intense but not unusual interests. Apart from cigarettes and his best friend’s girlfriend (whom he will shortly marry), these are mainly musical and literary. In his debut film, “Control,” about the last seven years of Mr. Curtis’s life, Anton Corbijn notes some of the figures in the young man’s personal canon — the expected proto-punk culture heroes (David Bowie, Lou Reed, J. G. Ballard), yes, but also William Wordsworth, whose “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” Mr. Curtis quotes from memory.

Of course, from its very first frame, “Control” is shadowed by intimations of its main character’s imminent mortality. Mr. Curtis, the lead singer in Joy Division, the great post-punk Manchester quartet, committed suicide in 1980, just before the band was to embark on its first American tour. He was 23, and in the years since his death he has become a canonical figure in his own right. Even as Joy Division’s austere, brooding songs — “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” “Isolation,” “She’s Lost Control” — have continued to influence musicians from all corners of the musical cosmos, they have lost very little of their glum, haunting power.

The challenge facing Matt Greenhalgh, the screenwriter, and Mr. Corbijn, a celebrity photographer who took pictures of the real Joy Division a few months before Mr. Curtis died, is how to tell this story of great promise and early death without turning it into yet another exercise in pop martyrology. How, in other words, to take account of Mr. Curtis’s artistic life and its premature end without treating them as simple cause and effect. The worst and most common failing in movies of this kind — biographies of artists, musicians in particular — is that they turn creativity into a symptom and fate into pathology. One of the great virtues of “Control” is that it does not fall into this trap. Where it might have been literal-minded and sentimental, it is instead enigmatic and moving, much in the manner of Joy Division’s best songs.

You hear a lot of these on the soundtrack, flawlessly performed by Mr. Riley and the other members of the cast (Joe Anderson on bass, James Anthony Pearson on guitar and Harry Treadaway as the wisecracking drummer) who turned themselves into an uncannily persuasive tribute band. (Just how good they are may not become fully apparent until you hear the real Joy Division’s version of “Atmosphere” over the end credits.)

Joy Division’s two albums were artifacts of their time that became permanent fixtures in the pop universe, available to any listener with a good reason to want a few minutes of voluptuous bad feeling. In tracing them back to their origins, Mr. Corbijn resists the temptation to pile on the evocative period details or to wallow in nostalgia for the early days of the Manchester scene. Shot in a pale, Nouvelle Vague black-and-white palette, “Control” manages to be both stylized and straightforward, avoiding overstatement even as it generates considerable intensity.

Mr. Riley, hollow-eyed and gentle-looking, is crucial to the film’s effectiveness. Since Mr. Curtis is known more by his deep, plangent voice than by his face or his physical presence, Mr. Riley does not labor under the burden of mimicry, like the recent portrayers of more famous singers like Ray Charles or Johnny Cash. His performance is quiet, charismatic and a little opaque, in keeping with the movie’s careful, detached approach to its subject.

Samantha Morton, playing Mr. Curtis’s wife, Deborah (on whose 1995 memoir, “Touching From a Distance,” the film is based), provides a necessary measure of hurt and warmth, reminding the audience that Ian Curtis’s great subject as a writer was heartbreak.

But Mr. Corbijn and Mr. Greenhalgh, to their credit, do not presume to probe the depths of Mr. Curtis’s psychology, or to find the hidden emotional sources of his songs. Instead their film shows, plainly and sufficiently, how those songs were made. They were written down in a notebook, practiced with the rest of the band and then performed in front of ever larger and more ecstatic audiences.

But the group’s progress — it wins the favor of the Manchester music guru Tony Wilson (Craig Parkinson) and acquires an aggressive manager in the person of Rob Gretton (Toby Kebbell) — is accompanied by increasing complication and strain in Mr. Curtis’s personal life. While still a teenager, he marries Deborah and becomes a father just as Joy Division is recording its first album. He begins to suffer from epileptic seizures and to worry that the medicine he takes to treat the condition will affect his moods and his mind. He also falls for a Belgian journalist named Annik Honoré (Alexandra Maria Lara), and love tears him apart, again.

“Control” tells a sad story that is also a chronicle of success, and it declines to find an easy moral either in Joy Division’s rapid rise or in its lead singer’s early death. These are things that happened, both on the intimate stage of individual life and in the larger arena of popular culture. Mr. Corbijn, no doubt aware of what this movie will mean to devotees of post-punk melancholy, sticks to the human dimensions of the narrative rather than turning out yet another show business fable. You don’t have to know anything about Joy Division to grasp the mysterious sorrow at its heart.

“Control” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes obscenities and drug use.


CONTROL

Opens today in Manhattan.

Directed by Anton Corbijn; written by Matt Greenhalgh, based on the book “Touching From a Distance” by Deborah Curtis; director of photography, Martin Ruhe; edited by Andrew Hulme; production designer, Chris Roope; produced by Mr. Corbijn, Orian Williams and Todd Eckert; released by the Weinstein Company. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 121 minutes.

WITH: Sam Riley (Ian Curtis), Samantha Morton (Deborah Curtis), Alexandra Maria Lara (Annik Honoré), Joe Anderson (Hooky), James Anthony Pearson (Bernard Sumner), Harry Treadaway (Steve Morris), Craig Parkinson (Tony Wilson) and Toby Kebbell (Rob Gretton).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/movies/10cont.html





Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context, a Presentation for Some Music Industry Friends
Ian Rogers

Yesterday was a crazy day.

In the morning I found myself car-less and skateboarding to Santa Monica High School in a suitcoat and wool Vans with my computer in a leather satchel over my shoulder (a byproduct of sharing my car with my seventeen year-old daughter — or more accurately her sharing the car with me). In the afternoon I sat on a panel at Digital Media Forum West with the Usual Suspects (TM), and for dinner I had the pleasure of hearing David Pakman’s “drum story” (which was amazing, btw) and sushi at Ike on Hollyweird Blvd.

But in the middle I gave a brief, twenty minute presentation to some friends in the music industry about why it’s time we pay closer attention to consumer needs when it comes to digital music. I thought I’d share my presentation in case others were interested.

Enjoy,
Ian


Hello. My name is Ian Rogers. I’ve been building digital media applications since 1992, dropped out of a Computer Science PhD program to tour with Beastie Boys in 1995, and have been purchased by both AOL and Yahoo! in the ten years since then, with a stint running the new media department for a record label in the middle. Currently I work at Yahoo! Entertainment on Yahoo! Music.

First, a question: How many of you have tried Amazon’s MP3 download service?

Back in 1999 I ran Winamp.com for Rob and Justin. Napster came on the scene and we thought, “Wow! There’s a market for MP3s!” We had millions of people using Winamp, visiting Winamp.com for skins and plugins — it was by far the largest community of MP3-lovers. We naively and enthusiastically suggested to labels that we’d be a great place to sell MP3s. The response from the labels at the time was universally, “What’s MP3?” or “Um, no.”

Instead they commenced suing Napster. We were naive to be sure, but we were genuinely surprised by the approach. Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.

Nullsoft subsequently built and prematurely released a program called Gnutella which became the basis for true P2P of the coming years. When Tom Pepper told Time Magazine that Gnutella was for “sharing recipes” he really said it all: This is so much bigger than just sharing music. This is physics. It’s trivial for one person to transfer bits from one person to another. Trivial. Unstoppable. PUT YOUR ENERGY ELSEWHERE, we thought out loud.

I caught a lot of heat from my music industry friends for Nullsoft’s Gnutella leak. In a long and impassioned email in 1999 I wrote to everyone I knew in a band, at a label, or music journalism (whatup, Jay!) and urged them to sell their content to their users in the format they were asking for: MP3. Make it easy, I wrote, and convenience will beat free.

Well, we (you included) did lots of other things instead. While running “New Media” at Grand Royal I released the first day/date digital/physical release with At The Drive-In’s “Relationship of Command”. Thanks to EMI requirements (hi Ted! hi Melissa!) it was DRM’d WMA and we sold about 12 copies in the first month, probably all to journalists. Years later I helped Yahoo! build Yahoo! Music Unlimited, a Windows Media Janus DRM-based subscription service. Record labels for their part participated in no end of control experiments: SDMI, Liquid Audio, Pressplay, Coral, etc, and they continue to this day.

But now, eight years later, Amazon’s finally done what was clearly the right solution in 1999. Music in the format that people actually want it in, with a Web-based experience that’s simple and works with any device. I bought tracks from Amazon (Kevin Drew and No Age), downloaded them, sync’d them to my new iPod Nano, and had them playing in my home audio system (Control 4) in less than five minutes. PRAISE JESUS. It only took 8 years.

8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years? How much naivety and hubris did we have when we said, “if we build it they will come”? What did we spend? And what did we gain? We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet.

Inconvenient experiences don’t have Web-scale potential, and platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web is the only way to compete with the control you’ve lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music industry. If your consultants are telling you anything else, they are wrong.

Yahoo! Music demonstrates this scale discrepancy perfectly. Yahoo! is the world’s #1 Internet destination. Hundreds of millions of people visit Yahoo! each month. Yahoo! Music is the #1 Music site on the Web, with tens of millions of monthly visitors. Between 10 and 20 million people watch music videos on Yahoo! Music every month. Between 5 and 10 million people listen to radio on Yahoo! Music every month. But the ENTIRE subscription music market (including Rhapsody, Napster, and Yahoo!) is in the low millions (sorry, we don’t release subscriber numbers, but the aggregate number proves the point), even after years of marketing by all three companies. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. When you compare the experiences on Yahoo! Music, the order of magnitude difference in opportunity shouldn’t be a surprise: Want radio? No problem. Click play, get radio. Want video? Awesome. Click play, get video. Want a track on-demand? Oh have we got a deal for you! If you’re on Windows XP or Vista, and you’re in North America, just download this 20MB application, go through these seven install screens, reboot your computer, go through these five setup screens, these six credit card screens, give us $160 dollars and POW! Now you can hear that song you wanted to hear…if you’re still with us. Yahoo! didn’t want to go through all these steps. The licensing dictated it. It’s a slippery slope from “a little control” to consumer unfriendliness and non-Web-scale products and services.

But this isn’t news, nor is it particular to the digital age. History tells us: convenience wins, hubris loses. “Who is going to want a shitty quality LP when these 78s sound so good? Who wants a hissy cassette when they have an awesome quadrophonic system? Who wants digitized music on discs now that we have Dolby on our cassettes? Who wants to listen to compressed audio on their computers?” ANSWER: EVERYONE. Convenience wins, hubris loses.

I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

If, on the other hand, you’ve seen the light too, there’s a very fun road ahead for us all. Lets get beyond talking about how you get the music and into building context: reasons and ways to experience the music. The opportunity is in the chasm between the way we experience the content and the incredible user-created context of the Web.

By way of illustration (and via exaggeration), in a manner of speaking iTunes is a spreadsheet that plays music. It’s context-free. You just paid $10 for that album — who plays drums? I dunno, WHY DON’T YOU GO TO THE WEB TO FIND OUT, BECAUSE THAT’S WHERE THE CONTEXT IS.

But the content experience on the Web is crap. Go to Aquarium Drunkard, click an MP3. If you don’t get a 404, you’ll get a Save As… dialog or the SAME GOD DAMN QUICKTIME BAR FROM 1995. OMFG. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THIS IS ALL WE’VE ACCOMPLISHED IN 15 YEARS ON THE WEB? It makes me insane.

So we have media consumption experiences with no context (desktop media players) and an incredible, endless, emergent contextual experience where media consumption is a pain in the ass, illegal, or non-existent (the Web). FIX IT. Your fans are pouring their music-loving hearts into blogs, Wikipedia, etc and what tools have you given them to work with? Not much, unfortunately.

This is what I’m vowing to devote my energy, and Yahoo!’s energy to.

Lets envision the end state and drive there as quickly as possible. Lets not waste another eight years on what is obvious today. Lets build the tools of a healthy media Web and reward music-lovers for being a part of it.

In the end you get what you pay for. I won’t spend another dime paying engineers to build false control, making listening to music harder for music-lovers. I will put all of my energy into making it easier and making the experience better. I suggest you do the same.

Thanks for listening.



EPILOGUE:

I wrote this on Thursday but didn’t have time to pull the images together and post. Last night (Friday) I took my mom to the Getty to see Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Mom and I saw Jimmie about fifteen years ago in Bloomington, Indiana. Lots changed for both mom and me in those fifteen years in-between, but Jimmie has only gotten better. His voice is hauntingly beautiful and he nailed every song, even a couple which he said he hadn’t done in a while but would “try”. Mom was cute, she’s in love with Jimmie and was so excited when he walked out on stage she leaned forward in her second-row seat a little and said, “Oh my God!” like she couldn’t believe he was really standing there in front of her. She would turn to me throughout the show to call out a Townes Van Zandt song from the opening riff or ask if it was ok if she sang along with “Dallas”. Anyone who wonders where I get my music nerd-ness from need look no further.

By his own admission, Jimmie’s never met a digression he didn’t like. He tells stories on stage which are things you might expect him to say in the mirror. “What I’ve learned is that when I’m on stage I find out what it is I’m thinking,” he half-joked. But in his very first monologue as he was talking about playing the Getty Museum he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about content and context lately. As it turns out, there is only context.” Given that I had just made my mom read a draft of the above post before we left, it was a little eerie.

Afterward Jimmie was in the lobby signing autographs. I didn’t want an autograph but I did want to know why the hell he’s been thinking so much about content vs. context. I waited until the autographing was mostly over, introduced mom and myself, and asked. “Don’t get him started,” said his manager. But start he did, and he told us it was the Buddhist concept he’d been considering, and that the notion that anything was without context wasn’t really plausible. I told him I’d been thinking a lot about content vs. context, too, but from a different perspective (in a different context, I suppose you could say).

But they’re related. Music is never without context. Digital music context isn’t nearly as good as it could be. Context is where the opportunity is and therefore where the innovation will be. The next five years is gonna be fun. I think we’re finally going to see some innovation in digital media.

Ian

http://www.fistfulayen.com/blog/?p=127





Sting Tops List of Worst Lyricists

Maybe Sting should start writing more instrumentals. The school teacher-turned-rock star topped Blender's list of the worst lyricists, thanks to lines that betray "mountainous pomposity (and) cloying spirituality," the music magazine said.

The survey, contained in the November issue that hits newsstands next week, placed Rush drummer Neil Peart at No. 2, Creed frontman Scott Stapp at No. 3, Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher at No. 4, and soft-rocker Dan Fogelberg at No. 5.

Blender assailed Sting for such alleged sins as name-dropping Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov in the Police tune "Don't Stand So Close to Me," quoting a Volvo bumper sticker ("If You Love Someone Set Them Free"), and co-opting the works of Chaucer, St. Augustine and Shakespeare.

A spokeswoman for the English rocker, who is currently in Belgium on the Police's reunion world tour, did not respond to a request for comment.

Blender described Canadian rocker Peart's lyrics as "richly awful tapestries of fantasy and science," and said Gallagher "seemed incapable of following a metaphor through a single line, let alone a whole verse."

Further down the ranks, Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant (No. 23) was derided for his Tolkienesque musings on Gollum and Mordor in "Ramble On."

Carly Simon (No. 31) was mocked for rhyming "yacht," "apricot" and "gavotte" in "You're So Vain."

Paul McCartney made No. 38, thanks in part to "Ebony and Ivory," his socially conscious duet with Stevie Wonder.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...45096420071009





Jordan Jails Royal Critic Over e-Mails

A critic of Jordan's royal family was sentenced to two years in jail on Tuesday for sending e-mails abroad that the court ruled to be carrying "false news" and harmful to the dignity of the state.

The verdict against Ahmad Oweidi al-Abbadi, after a two-month trial, comes at a time that human rights groups are voicing concern about what they call an official clampdown on the media.

Judicial sources said Abbadi, a right-wing former deputy, was found guilty on three charges of undermining state dignity, publishing "false news" on e-mails sent to foreign figures and illegally distributing leaflets.

Abbadi had pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Before his arrest, Abbadi had stepped up criticism of Jordan's royal family and accused top officials of corruption on a Web site he ran. Supporters said he had sent an e-mail to U.S. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid decrying what he called a steep rise in official corruption.

Authorities announced this month that Web sites would be subject to a tough press law that is widely seen as censorship. The law bans articles seen as being in contempt of religion, damaging to national unity or offensive to public morals.

Jordan has tough laws against slandering King Abdullah or Jordan's royal family.

International human rights groups have denounced Abbadi's arrest as politically motivated and called for his release.

Abbadi is from a prominent tribe that wields big influence in Jordan's security services and government.

The 62-year old former police colonel and author of dozens of books on Jordan's tribal roots has long held strong views against the presence of Palestinians who settled in the kingdom after successive Arab-Israeli wars.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...95910320071009





Argentine Priest Receives Life Sentence in ‘Dirty War’ Killings
Alexei Barrionuevo

An Argentine tribunal sentenced a Roman Catholic priest to life in prison on Tuesday for conspiring with the military in murders and kidnapping during the country’s “dirty war” against leftist opponents, in a case that has become for many a powerful symbol of the church’s complicity with the former regime.

The Rev. Christian von Wernich, who worked as a police chaplain during the military dictatorship, was found guilty of involvement in seven murders, 31 cases of torture and 42 kidnappings. He is the first Catholic priest prosecuted in connection with human rights violations in Argentina, where at least 12,000 people were killed during the military regime from 1976 to 1983.

Seconds after the sentence was read, hundreds of protesters cheered and fireworks were shot off outside the courthouse in La Plata, about 50 miles from Buenos Aires. Father von Wernich, who wore a bulletproof vest in court, clasped his hands and frowned.
Nearly a quarter of a century after the junta was toppled in 1983 and democracy was restored, the trial of Father von Wernich has forced Argentina to confront the church’s dark past during the dirty war. It illustrated how closely some Argentine priests, who had strongly aligned themselves with the power of the military, worked with the regime’s leaders.

Over several months of often chilling testimony during the trial, witnesses spoke about how Father von Wernich was present at torture sessions in clandestine detention centers. They said he extracted confessions to help the military root out perceived enemies, while at the same time offering comforting words and hope to family members searching for loved ones who had been kidnapped by the government.

His lawyer, Juan Martín Cerolini, maintained that Father von Wernich had been made a “Catholic scapegoat” for those who wanted to prosecute the church. Father von Wernich fled Argentina for Chile but was found in 2003 in the seaside town of El Quisco by a group of journalists and human rights advocates. He was working as a priest under the name Christian González.

Argentina’s past stands in stark contrast to the role the church played during the dictatorships in Chile and Brazil, where priests and bishops publicly condemned the governments and worked to save those being persecuted from torture and death.

Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/wo...argentina.html





Going dark

Burma Shuts Down Last Communication Links
Ian MacKinnon

Burma's regime is targeting the last remaining communications links that brought images of the bloody crackdown on the recent pro-democracy protests to the outside world.

Exiled dissident groups in neighbouring Thailand say up to 10 satellite telephones and countless computers earlier smuggled into Burma have been seized, the last lines of contact after the government shut down the internet and blocked mobile and fixed-line telephones.

Officials from Burma's foreign affairs ministry and home department security officers also visited a UN office in the Traders Hotel in downtown Rangoon late last week and demanded to see the organisation's permits for its satellite phones.

Article continues

The officials also inspected the Japan International Co-operation Agency at the Sakura Tower and offices at the Sedona Hotel, which has a vantage point overlooking the Shwedagon Pagoda, one of the flashpoints for the demonstrations.

"I think they came to the Traders Hotel and Sakura Tower in an effort to identify the systems that allowed information about the demonstrations to get out," said a UN official.

The junta's determination to snuff out the last trickles of information signals its paranoia over the damage images of the military's suppression of the demonstrations had inflicted. The pictures, coupled with accounts from bloggers, fuelled the international community's anger over the beatings and arrests of monks, and the killing of at least 13 that heightened demands for tougher sanctions.

Among the most shocking were images of a monk floating face down in a pool and others of the Japanese video journalist, Kenji Nagai, being shot at close range, giving the lie to the regime's claim that he died accidentally from a stray bullet.

Yesterday Burmese exiles, family members and fellow journalists in Tokyo paid their last respects at the funeral of the 50-year-old, who died from massive blood loss after a bullet pierced his liver.

The ceremony came as the 15-member UN Security Council met in New York to debate a resolution condemning Burma's "violent repression of peaceful demonstrations" while calling for a halt to the regime's heavy-handed measures.

Burma's military leaders last night named deputy labour minister Aung Kyi as the "manager for relations" to build bridges with opposition groups. His chief concern will be the junta's dealings with the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, in line with a suggestion by UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari to Burma's leader, General Than Shwe.

Despite the apparently conciliatory gestures, the arrests of those suspected of taking part in the 100,000 pro-democracy marches were reportedly still continuing in Rangoon. Among those taken were the owners of computers suspected of being used to transmit images and testimony to the outside world.

Yesterday the British and US embassies in Rangoon, reachable by phone until late last week, were impossible to get through to from outside the country. British ambassador Mark Canning and US charge d'affaires Shari Villarosa were outspoken critics of the regime's actions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/burma/stor...186651,00.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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