Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 10th, '07

[JackSpratts]

"It's ridiculous to just arrest a chap for using computers." – Russian President Vladimir Putin


"Thanks to the internet we are seeing an unprecedented shift of power from the centre to the people, a shift that we observe in the media, in politics and in the way large companies respond to their customers. We need to ensure that the freedoms we currently enjoy online are preserved as the network evolves, or this shift could easily end up as minor historical footnote." – Bill Thompson


"P2P remains an unacceptable problem. The folks engaged in the practice are doing more of it." – Mitch Bainwol


"Peer-to-peer traffic is by far the largest form of traffic on the Internet today. It doesn't show any signs of dissipating." – Michael Piatek


"The West has packed the whole world on a runaway train. We are on the road to extincting ourselves as a species. That’s what I meant when I said that we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden." – Joni Mitchell


"We're reaching the same point we did years ago when kids no longer wanted to pay for overpriced CDs. As a result, they found alternative ways of getting music. That’s what’s happening with summer touring in this country, it’s out-pricing itself. We started this and we want to keep it and we want to make it bigger and bigger each year by getting bigger sponsors to be involved with the festival and underwriting the festival. That’s what it’s about." – Sharon Osbourne


"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either." – Arthur Sulzberger





































February 10th, 2007








Happy campers

P2P Systems Rack up a Billion Tracks a Month – Analyst

Despite success in suing people who download music illegally and in reaching deals with personal networking sites like YouTube, the music industry is still bleeding millions of dollars in sales to online piracy.

It is a major issue for an industry that is desperately trying to boost revenue from legal downloads to make up for falling sales of compact discs, which declined 23 per cent globally between 2000 to 2006.

To get an idea of the size of the problem, Eric Garland of Web consultants Big Champagne estimates that more than 1 billion digital tracks are illegally traded for free each month.

By comparison, Apple's iTunes Music Store, which has more than 70 per cent of legal digital music sales in the United States, has sold only a bit more than 2 billion songs since its launch in 2003.

The problem is so-called peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as Gnutella and BitTorrent that link millions of personal computers and allow anonymous users to exchange digital music files for free over the Internet.

Since the music industry started winning lawsuits against individuals in the last few years, the growth in the number of people using illegal file-sharing software has slowed significantly, but nonetheless it is still growing.

Russ Crupnick, an analyst at consumer research group NPD, said the number of U.S. households engaged in P2P over the last year rose 7 per cent, while the number of illegal downloads were up by 24 per cent

'P2P remains an unacceptable problem,' said Mitch Bainwol, president of the Recording Industry Association of America. 'The folks engaged in the practice are doing more of it.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) succeeded in closing some companies behind file-swapping, such as Grokster and KaZaA starting in 2005.

But shutting down the companies that marketed the applications does not always kill the network.

'If you've got the software you can still file-share. The rulings just means you can't distribute (the software) anymore,' said Wayne Rosso, a former chief executive of Grokster.

In the last year, the music industry's focus has been on more high profile Web sites like News Corp.'s social networking site MySpace and YouTube, Google's online video sharing site.

French media group Vivendi's Universal Music Group, along with fellow record companies Warner Music Group and Sony BMG, have signed revenue-sharing agreements with YouTube to let its users legally distribute their music on the site.

Universal Music Group also sued MySpace last year for letting users distribute its artists' works, a case that Universal has it expects to end in a settlement.

The record companies are now partners with 'what they used to call pirates,' Rosso said. The reason is that a company like YouTube has tens of millions of young music fans that music companies want to sell to.

'The record labels are saying on the one hand it's piracy so we've got to provide protection,' said Jon Diamond, chief executive of ArtistDirect. 'But on the other hand, it's their audience and they want to figure out ways to monetize that audience.'

ArtistDirect's MediaDefender targets users of P2P networks and redirects them to video commercials when they search for files to swap illegally.

Even if record companies could eradicate all illegal downloading, there is no guarantee that people who swap songs for free would actually switch to buying music legally.

But the industry's strategy is to slow down P2P sharing and hope that legal digital music sales will eventually make up the shortfall.

'Obviously it's been a huge impediment to the growth of the legal market,' said Larry Kenswil, Universal Music's top digital executive.

'But the growth of the legal market has been spectacular, he said. 'P2P is not going to go away but the relative problem will drop for us.'
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/103975/p...h-analyst.html





Hollywood Takes Its Concerns About Piracy and Taxes to Washington


Access Washington: Barry M. Meyer, chairman of Warner Brothers, left, and Brad Grey, chairman of Paramount,
standing, talked with Senator Patrick J. Leahy on Tuesday at a luncheon where Hollywood and Washington mingled.


David M. Halbfinger

Hollywood has often been a whipping boy here, but with a new Congress in session, the heads of the major movie studios converged on the capital Tuesday to pitch their industry in the unaccustomed role of good guy: boon to the trade balance, engine of economic growth, polisher of the nation’s image and employer of a big, uncelebrated, middle-class work force.

Cheered by the Democratic takeover, the industry’s leadership hopes to press its agenda of fighting piracy, obtaining new tax advantages and reining in movie and television production from going abroad.

So the Motion Picture Association of America put on a daylong show for lawmakers, lobbyists and Capitol Hill aides, armed with some A-list talent — the actor Will Smith gave a morning speech, and Clint Eastwood received an award at dinner — and a new study showing that film and TV production accounts for $30 billion in wages, $10 billion in taxes, more than 400,000 jobs and a trade surplus of $9.5 billion.

“When people read about us, they read about celebrity and glitz,” said Dan Glickman, the trade association’s chairman, who said he learned much about other industries from such programs while he was a congressman. “That’s an asset we have, but that’s not enough.”

Judging from a few panel discussions, the M.P.A.A. had calculated that it would be hard to drum up sympathy for an industry symbolized by its highly paid stars and largely made up of giant conglomerates. So, atop the talking points, apparently, was the idea that the movie business is really made up of middle-class guild and union members who often live hand to mouth.

“It’s not just me and Tom,” said Mr. Smith, referring to Tom Cruise, one of his peers who can command $20 million a picture. He said his latest film, “I Am Legend,” was employing 1,000 local crew members and actors on location in New York.

The director Paris Barclay told of trying to hire one of his favorite technicians recently, and learning that the man had moved his wife and three children to Vancouver, because that is where the work is.

And Taylor Hackford, the director of “Ray,” in establishing his credentials, added: “I’m working class.”

The conversation often turned to piracy, the existential issue that dominates the association’s agenda. Mr. Hackford, who spent more than a decade developing “Ray,” told of finding a bootleg DVD of the movie on the day of its theatrical release, and said 42 million illicit copies were sold within five months.

That meant millions of dollars in lost revenue — “and DVDs is how people get their money back,” he said of movie financiers. “If they don’t, will I be able to sell a hard-to-sell picture like ‘Ray’? No.”

In a rare moment of newsmaking, Barry M. Meyer, the chairman of Warner Brothers, issued a sharp rebuke to the president of the Consumer Electronics Association, Gary Shapiro, who warned in January that antipiracy efforts could “smother” technological progress and said that “private conduct may be unauthorized, but that does not mean it is piracy.”

Mr. Meyer took issue with calling the theft of intellectual property merely unauthorized rather than illegal, and said that Hollywood’s promotion of so-called digital rights management technology had made it possible for consumers to rent or buy movies and TV programs at a variety of prices.

“It’s easy to demonize it, but without some level of control and order, things don’t work,” he said. “The only choice we’re not offering is free.”

He added: “Unlike the technology industry, which can outrun pirates by upgrading their product, there is no ‘Gone With the Wind 2.0.’ ”

Mr. Glickman took Mr. Meyer and some of his peers — Brad Grey of Paramount and Michael Lynton of Sony Pictures — to the capital for meetings with the new Senate leader, Harry Reid of Nevada; Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader; and Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi; Mr. Hoyer; Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut; and Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York attended an evening reception.

Almost no mention was made of the M.P.A.A.’s movie rating system, which Mr. Glickman recently tweaked. And it was not a Republican, but Senator Dianne Feinstein of California who, departing from a paean to everything else the movie industry stands for, called for the studio chiefs in the room to cut down on gratuitous sex and violence.

More typical of the day, however, was Representative Charles Rangel, the new Ways and Means chairman, promising to press the Bush administration to take a tougher line in trade talks with Russia, China and other countries concerning rampant piracy or barriers to Hollywood movies.

And then there was Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, vowing to press the Justice Department to do more about piracy — moments before rushing over to the actor James Cromwell and complimenting his performance as Prince Philip in “The Queen.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/bu...a/07movie.html





Movie Piracy Claims More Fiction Than Fact
Michael Geist

My weekly Law Bytes column examines recent claims that Canada has become the world's leading source of movie piracy. The column finds that a closer examination of the industry's own data reveals that the claims are based primarily on fiction rather than fact, featuring unsubstantiated and inconsistent claims about camcording, exaggerations about its economic harm, and misleading critiques of Canadian law.

First, the camcorder claims have themselves involved wildly different figures. Over the past two weeks, reports have pegged the Canadian percentage of global camcording at either forty or fifty percent. Yet the International Intellectual Property Alliance, a U.S. lobby group that includes the MPAA, advised the U.S. government in late September that Canadians were the source for 23 percent of camcorded copies of DVDs.

Not surprisingly, none of these figures have been subject to independent audit or review. In fact, AT&T Labs, which conducted the last major public study on movie piracy in 2003, concluded that 77 percent of pirated movies actually originate from industry insiders and advance screener copies provided to movie reviewers.

Moreover, the industry's numbers indicate that camcorded versions of DVDs strike only a fraction of the movies that are released each year. As of August 2006, the MPAA documented 179 camcorded movies as the source for infringing DVDs since 2004. During that time, its members released approximately 1400 movies, suggesting that approximately one in every ten movies is camcorded and sold as infringing DVDs. According to this data, Canadian sources are therefore responsible for camcorded DVD versions of about three percent of all MPAA member movies.

Second, the claims of economic harm associated with camcorded movies have been grossly exaggerated.
The industry has suggested that of recently released movies on DVD, ninety percent can be sourced to camcording. This data is misleading not only because a small fraction of recently released movies are actually available on DVD, but also because the window of availability of the camcorded versions is very short. Counterfeiters invariably seek to improve the quality of their DVDs by dropping the camcorder versions as soon as the studios begin production of authentic DVDs (which provide the source for perfect copies).

In fact, as the movie industry has grown - global revenues have nearly tripled over the past 25 years - the importance of theatre revenues has shrunk. In 1980, theatre box office revenues represented 55 percent of movie revenue. Today, DVDs and television licensing capture the lion share of revenue, with the box office only responsible for approximately 15 percent of movie revenue. In other words, the economic impact of camcorded DVDs - which involve only one in ten releases and impact a small part of the revenue cycle - is little more than a rounding error in a US$45 billion industry.

Third, claims that Canadian copyright law is ill-equipped to deal with camcorder piracy are similarly misleading. Canadian law already renders it illegal to make for sale or rental an infringing copy of a copyrighted work such as movie. The Copyright Act includes severe penalties for violating this provision with the potential for million dollar fines and up to five years in jail.

Indeed, the MPAA's own website specifically points to Canada as an example of how many countries have legislation that prohibit illegal camcording. The movie lobby group states that "in Canada camcording is an infringement under the Copyright Act, regardless of whether it is for the public or personal use of the person making the copy."

Moreover, the CMPDA's website trumpets dozens of arrests for DVD and movie piracy in Canada. Over the past year, the RCMP and local police forces laid charges for DVD piracy on numerous occasions, while a Canadian court upheld a U.S. decision to fine a Canadian operator nearly $500,000 for copyright infringement related to movie piracy.

As for claims that tough U.S. laws are pushing camcording into Canada, the president of the U.S. National Association of Theatre Owners told his members in November that illegal camcording in the U.S. has expanded over the past two years from New York and Los Angeles to at least 15 states across the country.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1657/135/





Canadian Government Rejects Net Neutrality Rules
ScuttleMonkey

An anonymous reader writes
"The Canadian Press reports that the Canadian government appears ready to reject net neutrality legislation, instead heeding the arguments of large telecommunications companies . Michael Geist has posted transcripts of the documents which can be summarized as the government thinks that blocking or prioritizing content is acceptable, it knows that this runs counter to recommended policy, and it doesn't care because it plans to the leave the issue to the dominant telecommunications providers."
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/02/07/1810240.shtml





Ozzy And Sharon Shock Fans With Free Ozzfest
FMQB

With many music fans griping about the cost of concert tickets these days, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne have decided to try something completely new for this summer's Ozzfest: free tickets. That's right - FREE. The Osbournes and tour producer Live Nation announced today at the Concert Industry Consortium in Los Angeles that their 12th annual Metal festival - a 25-date trek launching July 7 in Los Angeles - is pulling the plug on ticket prices and calling this summer’s Ozzfest "FreeFest." To gain entry to the shows, fans will be directed to Ozzfest.com or LiveNation.com to find links that will direct them to special sponsor sites where tickets can be secured. More details regarding the process are forthcoming.

In addition to Los Angeles, other cities on the schedule will be San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Dallas, San Antonio, Kansas City, St Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis, Columbus, Pittsburgh, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Hartford, Charlotte, Atlanta, West Palm Beach and Nashville.

As for the lineup, Ozzy will headline the festival, but the other bands are still under wraps. "We have bands committed, but we’re hoping that after today's announcement we’ll have a whole influx of artists who want to be a part of something this ground breaking," said Sharon Osbourne. "We know there aren't any major headlining acts that would tour all summer for nothing, but we're confident we can turn some of the genre's biggest bands on to what we're doing and have them come out to play a date or two... They can sell their t-shirts, CDs and whatever else they've got. They're also welcome to book their own shows in local venues on the day of Ozzfest. I’m not stopping them. People have to be creative and think of alternatives."

Sharon also commented about why the tickets will be free this year, saying that the touring model in the U.S. needs to be re-evaluated. "For the last few years, ticket prices have steadily climbed as artists demand more and more money for summer tours. We certainly want everybody to make money, however we also want the kids to be able to afford to come out and have an incredible experience. If we continued with the traditional touring festival model, we would have no choice but to raise ticket prices again this year."

She continued, "We're reaching the same point we did years ago when kids no longer wanted to pay for overpriced CDs. As a result, they found alternative ways of getting music. That’s what’s happening with summer touring in this country, it’s out-pricing itself. We started this and we want to keep it and we want to make it bigger and bigger each year by getting bigger sponsors to be involved with the festival and underwriting the festival. That’s what it’s about."
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=346542





Big Win for Innocent RIAA Defendant

Good news today from the great state of Oklahoma. Debbie Foster, a single mom who was improperly sued by the RIAA back in 2004 for file sharing, has won back her attorneys' fees. The decision today is one of the first in the country to award attorneys fees to a defendant in an RIAA case over music sharing on the Internet.

Last year, Judge Lee R. West dismissed the case against her with prejudice after it became clear that Ms. Foster was simply the Internet access account holder in her home and had no knowledge or experience with file sharing software. EFF, Public Citizen, the ACLU, and the American Association of Law Libraries filed an amicus brief in the case, supporting Ms. Foster's motion for fees.

In his ruling, Judge West found that the RIAA had asserted an untested and marginal theory that veered toward "frivolous and unreasonable" by suing Foster for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement when the only evidence against her was her name on the household Internet account. Much like the judge in Elektra v. Santangelo, West expressed skepticism that "an Internet-illiterate parent, who does not know Kazaa from a kazoo" could be held liable for children in her home downloading music illegally unless the parent had knowledge of the conduct or had giver her permission to do so. West also hinted that the RIAA might have pursued the secondary liability claims "to press Ms. Foster into settlement after they ceased to believe she was a direct or 'primary' infringer."

Finding that in the face of these claims, "her only alternative to litigating ... was to capitulate to a settlement for a violation she insists she did not commit" and that "[s]uch capitulation would not advance the aims of the Copyright Act," the Court awarded Ms. Foster her attorneys fees and costs.

We applaud Judge West for standing up to the RIAA and recognizing the importance of helping people like Debbie Foster push back against their overzealous litigation campaign.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005114.php





Is Apple the New Evil Empire?
Charles Coxe

AppleThe signs are all there: The technological superiority. The ruthless march to galactic domination. The musical devices that from a fashion standpoint would be the perfect accessory for any Stormtrooper uniform. Once but the student (see their classic 1984 ad, their PC vs. Mac ads and oh, everything else that’s ever come out of their mouth), it seems that little ol’ Apple finally could be turning into the Master.

It sounds ridiculous, we know. Apple? Really? Don’t only a couple of loser bloggers and the hopelessly out-of-touch publishing industry (ahem) use those things? Well, consider the recent evidence that goes well beyond the limited world of desktop computers:

· The announcement of the impending iPhone at last month’s MacWorld conference set off shockwaves that rippled beyond the assembled geek alliance. It won’t even be out until this summer, and it’s already the most buzzed-about tech innovation since, well, the iPod, stealing the thunder of every gadget unveiled at Las Vegas’ Consumer Electronics Show. Verizon recently revealed it turned down the chance to be the exclusive carrier of the iPhone because Apple wanted to maintain tight-fisted control of the service. So now Cingular (which was just bought out by original Evil Empire AT&T) gets to be the exclusive provider, forcing everybody to figure out how to dump their current wireless plan and switch over.

· To this date, Apple has sold 90 million iPods and more than 2 billion individual songs through the iTunes store — that’s almost one song for every three people on the planet (many of them not huge fans of “Fergalicious”).

· Steve Jobs announced Tuesday that he has asked the record labels to scrap their proprietary DRM software that prevents music from being shared, as he feels it’s ineffective and merely hampers consumers from being able to listen to music how they please. Sounds good, right? Well, it’s propaganda. Lost in his release is that that the largest source of proprietary DRM software is Apple, which prevents songs purchased from iTunes to be played on any competing player (and prevents the iPod from playing songs purchased from competing online music stores).

· When problems cropped up between iPods and the new Microsoft Vista operating system — songs purchased through iTunes wouldn’t play, and some users found their iPods corrupted after connecting to their PC — Microsoft engineers hurriedly worked to try to solve the problem and make their system compatible. Apple, on the other hand, officially warned PC users to avoid installing Microsoft Vista — at least until Apple gets around to updating the iTunes software in the next couple weeks or so.

· Apple has reached a deal with Apple Corps Ltd. which will allow the entire Beatles’ catalogue to be purchased from iTunes (alluded to when Jobs played tracks from Sgt. Pepper at the iPhone announcement). Will it put the Fab Four back in the Top 40? Some experts think it’s a certainty. With the size of the Baby Boomer generation combined with the power of iTunes, it’s not hard to imagine a world where it’s all golden oldies, all the time.

Don’t get us wrong — we definitely don’t feel sorry for the Bill Gateses of the world. But the fact that Apple now seems to be calling all the shots is more than a little bit unnerving. First they dominate publishing, Web design, and music, then TV and movies, mobile phones…when Steve Jobs flips the switch, the all-seeing “i” will be everywhere. When you wake up tomorrow to find a folder with a question mark where the sun used to be, don’t come crying to us.
http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdail...w-evil-empire/





Jobs Calls for End to Music Copy Protection
John Markoff

Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple, jolted the record industry by calling on its largest companies to allow online music sales unfettered by anti-piracy software.

The call Tuesday is a gamble for Apple. Its iPod players and iTunes Store have defined the online music market, but they have much at stake in the current copy-protection system.

Under terms reached with the major record labels, online music stores embed software code into the digital songs they sell to restrict the ability to copy them. Because Apple uses its own system, the songs it sells can be played only on the iPod. That limitation has drawn increasing scrutiny from European governments, pressure that Apple has recently begun to acknowledge.

Jobs's appeal, posted on the Apple Web site Tuesday, came in the form of an essay "Thoughts on Music," but in essence it was a letter to the "big four" music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI.

While he said that "customers are being well served" by the current approach to digital rights management — with online music retailers using incompatible anti-piracy systems, but nonetheless offering "a wide variety of choices" — the subtext clearly pointed to the prospect of change.

He dismissed one possible alternative, in which Apple would license its own system, FairPlay, allowing competing digital music players to play iTunes songs and other stores to sell copy-protected music for the iPod. Jobs said that approach would only complicate anti-piracy enforcement, as myriad companies would have to coordinate software and hardware updates.

Instead, he proposed that labels could shed digital rights management altogether. Jobs pointed out that only 10 percent of all music sold last year was through an online store, and that songs on CDs are already easy to convert into digital files with no anti-piracy features. Attaching digital rights management to music bought online has only limited the number of online music stores, he wrote.

Eliminating digital rights management "is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat," he wrote.

Jobs's move comes as the music industry appears to be facing a crisis. Sales of its mainstay product — the album — continue to sink, and sales of digital music, including individual songs, have not increased fast enough to offset the decline.

With a paucity of hit releases to start the year, industrywide CD sales are already down more than 15 percent from last year, marking the worst January since computerized sales tracking began in 1991.

At a forum in France last month, Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks, which operates the Rhapsody digital music service, predicted widespread availability of unrestricted digital music within a few years. He said it was "an idea in ascendance and whose time has come."

But Jobs is clearly the most powerful voice raised so far in support of a change. With the clout built on his company's market share for both players and music, he has already prevailed against the labels in disputes over pricing.

Facing pressure to bolster digital sales, the four major music companies have only toyed with the idea of selling unprotected files — most notably with a personalized version of a Jessica Simpson song and the first single from Norah Jones's new album. MySpace, the social-networking giant that hosts pages for countless independent and major-label acts, has embraced the unrestricted MP3 format for artists who choose to sell music there.

More recently, the industry has been abuzz with rumors that one or more of the major companies was preparing to lift restrictions on some portions of their digital catalogue.

Jeanne Meyer, an EMI spokeswoman, said, "The lack of interoperability between a proliferating range of digital platforms and devices is increasingly becoming a real issue for music consumers."

Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment declined to comment. But several industry executives said they viewed Jobs's comments as an effort to deflect blame from Apple and onto the record companies for the incompatibility of various digital music devices and services.

There is a general sense that the industry is still unwilling to do away completely with copy protection, and no contracts have been signed yet to change the systems of distribution by any of the players.

A senior executive at one of the companies, who requested anonymity to avoid inflaming relations with Apple, said that while labels may experiment with other forms of copy protection software, "we're not going to broadly license our content for unprotected digital distribution."

Several consumer electronics and music industry executives said that if the music industry moves away from copy protection, it could potentially make it easier for competing music players. Jobs seems to be betting that anything that stimulates the sale of digital music can only help his company.

Jobs's statement drew criticism from some competitors, who argued that he was simply trying to get in front of a shift in industry strategy and claim credit for it.

Jason Reindorp, marketing director for Zune at Microsoft, said Jobs's call for unrestricted music sales was "irresponsible, or at the very least naïve," adding, "It's like he's on top of the mountain making pronouncements, while we're here on the ground working with the industry to make it happen.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...ness/apple.php





EMI May Sell Recordings Online With No Anti-Copying Software
Jeff Leeds

The EMI Group, the British music giant, has been considering a plan to offer a broad swath of its recordings for sale online without anti-copying software, executives involved in discussions with the company said.

EMI, which releases music by artists including Coldplay and the Beatles, has discussed various proposals to sell unprotected files through an array of digital retailers, including Apple, Microsoft, Real Networks and Yahoo, said the executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

EMI declined to comment.

It is far from clear that the company, which has tested the concept recently by selling a song from Norah Jones in unprotected form, will reach a deal.

But if it does, it would be the first of the four major music companies to distribute its catalog without software designed to limit copying. Because various online retailers use different forms of security software, known as digital-rights management, their services are not always compatible with all music-playing devices on the market.

The debate over the industry’s handling of the issue heated up this week when Steven P. Jobs, chief executive of Apple, which leads the market with its iPod and iTunes service, suggested that the music companies offer their music without anti-copying software.

Mr. Jobs’s stance drew catcalls from executives at several major labels — though some have experimented by selling a handful of songs in unprotected form, as EMI did with a single from Ms. Jones’s new album.

Reports of the EMI plan surfaced in Europe this week when music executive speculated that EMI was close to a deal with several online music services that went beyond the relatively limited experiments with non-copy-protected music that it had conducted so far.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/bu.../09online.html





The Slow Death of DRM
Steve Gordon

The DRM walls are crumbling. Earlier this week, Steve Jobs called on the major record labels to allow online music sales unfettered by digital rights management restrictions.

Today, the Wall Street Journal disclosed that EMI is in negotiations with several digital music services to sell unprotected MP3s of its catalogue. Jobs was motivated at least in part by legal actions against Apple in Europe and the US as discussed below. But whatever his motivation, Jobs is right: DRM has been a disaster for the recording business. This article will outline the brief but sad history of DRM, the current legal attacks on it, and the reasons why the recording business would be far better off without it.

A disaster of historical proportions

When I was still a lawyer at Sony Music, before the BMG merger, we had a business affairs summit. The year was 1999.

This was the first year our annual discussion covered digital music. It was led by an attorney specialising in litigation. The attorney used a projector to show us the original Napster. She asked for someone to name a song. She typed in the title and it immediately came up. She clicked the keyboard again, and boom, the song downloaded to her computer. And it was completely DRM-free.

That is, the song could be copied, ripped, mixed, and burned freely. Then she showed us Sony's digital offering. A consumer could "download" Mariah Carey tracks for $3 each, but because of the DRM, you could only listen to it on your desktop. I seriously doubt that more than a few poor souls took advantage of Sony's offer, and this feeble initiative was quickly withdrawn.

You could argue that the price was the big difference. But if Sony had offered the same product as Napster at a reasonable price, then the music business might now be leading the digital revolution and raking in money.

But instead of truly competing with "free," Sony chose to sue Napster. That strategy lead to the emergence of other P2P services which simply took its place.

Three years later the major labels finally took their first serious stab at competing with P2P by launching MusicNet and Pressplay. But both services were mired by, and ultimately destroyed by, DRM. Neither Pressplay, from Sony and Universal, nor MusicNet, a service from EMI, BMG and Warner, allowed downloads or portability, thanks to DRM. They were stillborn and died quickly.

More recently, Sony BMG tried applying DRM to CDs and that led to public scandal, dozens of lawsuits, losses of millions of dollars and, in large part, Andy Lack's exit as head of Sony BMG. The DRM used in that case not only attempted to deter copying, it installed a hidden spyware on consumers' computers called rootkit that created security holes that allowed viruses to break in. Attempts to remove the spyware by some customers damaged their PC.

Sony BMG had to recall millions of CDs, and was forced to pay $4.25m to 39 states and the District of Columbia - and much more (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/31/ftc_settlement/) to consumers - to resolve various lawsuits. The good news is the extreme stink of this debacle will deter Sony BMG and any other majors to implement CD-based protections in the future.

Consumer litigation against DRM

Steve Jobs was the first industry figure to convince the labels to offer downloads without many restrictions on copying and burning. However, the parties agreed to deploy Apple's FairPlay DRM, which prevents songs purchased at the iTunes store from playing in any other player than the iPod because of Apple's refusal to license FairPlay to other music services, or in turn, license competitors' DRM technology. European legislators have been giving considerable attention to this "interoperability" failure. But Norway recently actually declared Apple was engaging in anti-competitive behaviour, giving the company until October to repair the situation or shut down. In addition the campaign has been joined by consumer lobbies in four other countries: Sweden, Denmark, France and Germany. If these initiatives are successful, they could be enough to break FairPlay and make Apple either license FairPlay or shutdown iTunes in Europe.

In the United States, Apple's Fairplay also faces a legal onslaught. In Tucker vs. Apple Computer led in July in the US District Court, Northern District of California, the plaintiff alleges that Apple unfairly restricts consumer choice because it does not load onto the iPod the software needed to play music that uses Microsoft's protected standards (PlaysForSure and the new Zune DRM) in addition to Apple's own. The suit is seeking damages for anyone who purchased an iPod or content from iTunes after April 2003. A motion filed by Apple to dismiss the charges was denied.

Whatever the outcome of these legal initiates, DRM may be discarded because as the rest of this article will discuss, DRM is bad for business and even worse for the major labels who insist on using it.

Digital growth is flagging

There can be no hard proof that DRM has interfered with the growth of digital sales, because the majors have never released the catalogues online without it. But it is absolutely clear that digital sales with DRM are not helping get the labels out of the crisis resulting from declining CD sales. The global decrease in CD sales since 1999 has been approximately 25 per cent. But digital sales only accounted for 10 per cent of all sales last year, and therefore do not come close to compensating for declining CD sales.

As an indication of how insignificant authorised digital downloads are to the music business, Apple's four year slog with its iTunes store has grossed it less than $2bn, whereas gross sales from ringtones were over $6bn worldwide last year alone. And the growth of digital sales is definitely flagging. Although digital sales grew last year, the rate of increase was less than in 2005, and according to Billboard Magazine, in the year to come the US "revenue from digital downloads and mobile content is expected to be flat or, in some cases, decline next year".

Is DRM to blame? Common sense suggests that DRM is a huge factor in the lack of growth in digital sales. As Steve Jobs correctly points out in his "Thoughts on Music (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/)", the absurdity of DRM is that anyone can now buy a CD, and rip, mix, burn, and upload to their heart's content.

"So if the music companies are selling over 90 per cent of their music DRM-free," wrote Jobs, "what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none."

Making consumers pay a comparable price for a digital download, which at 99 cents per single roughly equals what you would pay for a CD, encourages them to steal. People don't want limits on what they can do with the music, so consumers take the slight risk of an RIAA lawsuit and retaliate by downloading for free. Illegal downloads still outnumber legal by 40 to 1 according to the big label representatives, although insiders put the figure as high as 100 to 1. DRM is not serving these consumers, and that's how DRM is hurting rather than serving the copyright owners it is meant to protect.

Pressure to dump DRM

Although spokesmen for the major labels, including RIAA chairman Mitch Bainwol, continue to be unwilling to position their tracks without protections, at least one of the majors, EMI, is actively considering moving ahead without DRM, the Wall Street Journal reports today.

Moreover, there is mounting pressure by industry players, especially legit distributors, to get rid of it. The main pressure from the distributors is coming from Steve Jobs. In addition, Amazon.com is reportedly itching to get into digital downloads, but is holding out for a DRM-free service. Amazon is an important outlet for both music and MP3 players including the iPod, and it already has a relationships with both consumers of music and the major labels. Amazon may in itself have the power to force a DRM strategy shift. Calls for discarding DRM are also coming from Rhapsody and Yahoo!.

Even if the legal attacks against DRM do not prevail, the majors should take note: get rid of DRM, because it's bad for business.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02...ve_gordon_drm/





Microsoft: We Like DRM
Dan Frommer

SteveJobsSteve Jobs wants the music business to drop restrictions for digital tunes. But Microsoft, which began competing head to head with Apple in the digital music business last fall, is happy with the way things are, says media exec Robbie Bach.

On Tuesday, Apple chief Jobs suggested that the music industry stop forcing online music services like his iTunes to use software that restricts what people can do with the music they purchase, such as sharing it with friends.

Some observers applauded Jobs' memo, insisting that letting people freely share legally purchased digital music--like they've been doing for decades with CDs--is good for the business. Others say Jobs is just playing nice to European critics, who question the legality of "digital rights management" (DRM) software on digital media (see: "Is Jobs Making Nice With Europe?").

In his letter, Jobs said Apple wouldn't license its DRM software, called FairPlay, to competitors, the way rival Microsoft has done with its DRM software, called PlaysForSure. While songs purchased from Apple's iTunes store only play on Apple software or hardware, PlaysForSure songs work on many devices like Creative music players and some Samsung cellphones, and can be purchased from several stores like Napster and RealNetworks' Rhapsody.

But Microsoft's own strategy points out how complicated things can be in a DRM world--its own Zune portable music player doesn't play PlaysForSure songs, and songs purchased from its Zune store won't work on PlaysForSure devices.

RobbieBachRobbie Bach, president of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division, spoke with Forbes.com Thursday about Jobs' music manifesto, the Zune and some of Microsoft's other entertainment products.

Forbes.com: What do you make of Jobs' pitch?

Bach: You kind of have to put that in a certain context. They're under a lot of pressure in Europe. They have to figure out how to deal with that. They really don't want to license FairPlay, for whatever reason. We don't completely understand that, but OK. We've been very focused on producing a DRM system. We're willing to license it across the board.

We think that's important. Certainly the content providers are the people who determine what the rights are. Our view is it's our job to provide the technology and the content providers can tell us what kind of restrictions and policies they want to apply to that.

We think DRM is important, and you can decide if you want to do it in the clear, that would be fine with us. You can decide you want to do it with a certain set of restrictions. Our job is to provide the technology you need for that. It's not just for music players--it's for phones, it's for other devices, because all that kind of media is going to flow through the ecosystem. It was an interesting letter, but I don't think it's anything that's particularly surprising.

Speaking of music phones, last month, Jobs unveiled the iPhone, which will compete with both your Zune, PlaysForSure partners and Windows Mobile devices. Does it change your mobile strategy?

It doesn't really change things for us in any fundamental way. Apple comes from a music and entertainment perspective and is adding phones to that functionality. Our view is that our strategy is more the correct one. People think, 'Gosh, I need a device that works in my work style and my lifestyle,' and the fact that we're strong on the business side and have all the lifestyle capabilities like music, like video, like text messaging--all those kinds of things, we think give us a big competitive leg up.

It's $500 and a two-year contract. Basically there's a group of enthusiasts who are going to buy that phone because they buy every new phone and want to experiment with every new thing. But at that price point, the size of the market you're going to reach is going to be relatively limited.

That's not a knock on Apple--they're going to drive the price point down just like everybody else does. But most people would have said, 'Hey, we're not ready to have a $500 phone.' When you look at something like a Motorola Q or a Samsung BlackJack or a T-Mobile Dash, you say 'for a lot, lot less money, I can get that functionality today,' and maybe that's the direction more people will go. So we'll see how that plays out.

Can we expect a Zune phone next?

Right now, I can tell you that the Zune team is really focused on producing great innovation in the music device space. When you have a guy who has 80% market share and has sold as many devices as Apple has, you gotta be focused on home cooking, so to speak. I wouldn't expect there to be much focus beyond what we're trying to do in the core music space.

So what will the next Zune do differently?

That's actually something I just can't talk about. We're obviously doing a lot of things. There's things we're doing for today's Zune, because today's Zune continues to sell well, and we're continued to focus on things we can provide to those customers. Obviously the team is working on things for the future. Because the device changes with regularity and the market turns over relatively fast, you can't start marketing the next thing because you're selling the current thing.

Some say the Zune project undermines your PlaysForSure partnerships.

What you have to recognize is all the work we're doing around that sort of technology continues and we're going to continue advancements. We know that there is absolutely a market there for people who want to have choice of devices. We know there is certainly a market relative to the [cellphone] handset people and the operators who are interested in that technology. We've been very clear with our music and video partners as well as with the [device manufacturers] and operators that we're going to continue to support that.

What we did do is add to our arsenal, and we probably didn't do a very good job communicating the distinction between that, but we have the broad focus with our Windows Media technology as well as a very focused effort with Zune to compete with the vertical approach that Apple has taken. It turns out the market needs both of those. We're going to provide the technology on one hand and the product on the other.

Nintendo's Wii did well over the holidays, while Sony's behemoth PlayStation3 didn't get as much attention. Do people want a simpler videogame machine?

If you actually look at the numbers we outsold the Wii and the PS3 combined. Certainly Nintendo had a fine launch and they did well relative to PS3, but when you compare the broader marketplace and what we're doing with Xbox 360, we think it's evidence that the gaming market is a very broad and vibrant place, and 360 continues to do very, very well.

Is there a market for casual games? Yes, and there always has been. And Nintendo has always done pretty well in that marketplace, about 15% to 20% of the market that they’ve always done well in, and because the way they run their business model, that turns out to be a good business for them. They'll have their place, PS3 will have their place. Right now we feel like we have the right platform with the right games and we're in the right position there. We'll see how that develops.
http://www.forbes.com/digitalenterta..._0208bach.html





Wal-Mart and Studios in Film Deal
Michael Barbaro

Wal-Mart Stores may have lost the online DVD rental battle, but it has no plans to lose the higher-stakes video downloading war.

On Tuesday the company is to introduce a partnership with all of the six major Hollywood studios — Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox and Universal — to sell digital movies and television shows on its Web site (www.walmart.com/ videodownloads), becoming the first traditional retailer to do so.

The move plunges Wal-Mart into competition with several established sites, like Amazon.com, CinemaNow and iTunes, and given the chain's penchant for price cutting, this could drive down the cost of a digital download.

But supremacy in the digital movie business could prove elusive for Wal- Mart, a company that is used to being the No. 1 seller of everything from DVDs to diamonds.

Apple already dominates the online music and movie industry, leaving a sliver for everyone else to fight over.

And Wal-Mart has already stumbled once before with online video rentals, shutting down its DVD rental business two years ago and referring users to its rival Netflix instead.

"As much of an 800-pound gorilla as they are in retail sales, they are an 80- pound weakling when it comes to digital distribution," said Michael Goodman, digital entertainment program manager at the Yankee Group, a consulting firm.

This time, however, Wal-Mart says it has used its clout to pull together all the right Hollywood players, create an easy- to-use Web site with Hewlett-Packard and develop a broad library of videos.

One big draw, it says, is that all the top movie studios have signed on. Even in a business crowded with new companies, "we will be the only one at this point in time to have the support of all six of the majors," said Kevin Swint, Wal-Mart's divisional merchandise manager for digital media.

On the television side, Wal-Mart will cull titles from networks big and small, like Comedy Central, CW, FX, Logo, MTV and Nickelodeon.

It will have access to 3,000 productions, including films like "The Devil Wears Prada" and "Little Miss Sunshine" and TV series like "24" and "Veronica Mars."

Film download prices will range from $12.88 to $19.88 on the day of the DVD release; older movies will start at $7.50, while TV shows start at $1.96 an episode.

Wal-Mart said its prices would be competitive, and a quick scan of a major rival, CinemaNow, suggested the prices would be relatively close. A download of "Superman Returns" cost $14.88 on WalMart.com on Monday versus $14.95 on CinemaNow.

To avoid running afoul of studios that want to protect their DVD business, Wal-Mart said prices for a digital movie would be comparable to those of the same movie on DVD at its stores.

To be considered a success, Wal- Mart's download service will not only have to compete with strong rivals. It will have to pass the same test all services do at WalMart.com: to lure customers into Wal-Mart's 4,000 stores, to buy groceries, electronics and clothing.

Wal-Mart's online video-rental service failed to do just that, and analysts said the digital download system could encounter the same problem.

"If you are doing digital distribution, you are doing it because you do not want to be in the store," said Goodman of the Yankee Group.

Swint of Wal-Mart said the company would create discounts that encouraged shoppers to purchase both DVDs and digital videos.

"There will be customers who download and be done with it," he said, "but we will have offers that begin online and end in the store."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...ss/studios.php





Amazon and TiVo in Venture to Put Downloaded Videos on TV
Brad Stone

Amazon.com, the online retail giant, and TiVo, pioneer of the digital video recorder, are teaming up to help downloaded movies and TV shows make the leap to television screens.

In a deal to be announced Wednesday, Amazon and TiVo will allow TiVo owners who shop on Amazon’s digital download store, called Amazon Unbox, to send films and TV shows to their broadband-connected TiVo machines, and pause and fast-forward through them as they do a regular TV program.

The partnership gives Amazon an advantage over other download services like the iTunes Store, CinemaNow and a new service from Wal-Mart. Moving video files purchased on those sites from the PC to the television is tricky, generally requiring the setup of a home network.

Apple plans to start selling a device this month that will attach to a TV and pull in videos from a computer over a wireless network.

TiVo and Amazon will begin testing the new service on Wednesday and plan to make it available more broadly in the coming weeks to the 1.5 million owners of broadband-connected TiVos.

To activate the service, TiVo owners must register their machines on Amazon’s site. With each purchase or rental, they will have the option to send a digital copy of the movie or show to their TiVos, in addition to downloading it to their PC.

There is no additional charge for the service, which is called Amazon Unbox on TiVo. The service will not work for satellite or cable TV subscribers whose set-top boxes run TiVo software.

Executives at Amazon and TiVo said bypassing the PC would open the digital download market to a more mainstream audience.

“Certainly there is a phenomenon of people watching short video clips on sites like YouTube,” said TiVo’s chief executive, Thomas S. Rogers. “But our research clearly shows that when it comes to full-length movies and television shows, for the real experience, it needs to be on the TV set.”

Bill Carr, vice president for digital media at Amazon, said that the service would also provide a better experience than the video-on-demand stores offered by cable companies, mostly because its selection is greater and the Internet allows for easier browsing.

“As we know, a lot of people spend their time shopping and browsing for content they love on their PC, and the cable services don’t allow you to do that,” Mr. Carr said.

Amazon Unbox, which was introduced last September, received poor early reviews for its clunky software and slow downloads. Amazon says the average movie should take about an hour to download on a fast broadband connection, but users have reported longer waits.

Videos rented from the site must be watched within 30 days, and once a video starts playing it must be watched within 24 hours.

Most of the media companies that sell or rent TV shows and movies through Amazon Unbox, including CBS, Fox, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios and Warner Brothers, will make them available to TiVo users. Others, including Sony, are not yet signed up but Mr. Rogers said he expected them to come aboard shortly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/te...y/07video.html





User-Generated Videos Coming to Comcast. Where's My Remote?
Eric Bangeman

A new series called Facebook Diaries will combine the resources of social-networking site Facebook, user-generated-video site Ziddio (launched last year by Comcast Interactive Media and generally lumped into the category of video sites called "Not YouTube"), and Comcast. Beginning in March, the companies will launch a series of contests designed to solicit short video segments about the lives of users of the two web sties. The best videos will find themselves prominently featured on both Facebook and Ziddio along with Comcast's On Demand programming service.

The best of the best will find themselves in Facebook Diaries. The ten-episode series will be produced by RJ Cutler, who is best known for TV shows 30 Days and American High. Cutler will have the responsibility of separating the video wheat from the chaff to compile 30-minute episodes of Facebook Diaries to air on TV and online.

"Video sharing is extremely popular among Facebook's 16 million users," according Owen Van Natta, Facebook's COO. "Through our partnership with Comcast, we are making it even easier for the Facebook community to share video content in a trusted online environment and giving them the opportunity to tell their stories on TV."

The networks are hungry for inexpensive programming—hence the exponential increase in the number of reality shows over the past several years. What better source than the vast ocean of videos uploaded every day to sites like YouTube, Revver, and Ziddio? But finding stuff that's actually worth watching is going to be challening. Sure, the next lonelygirl15 is probably out there waiting to be discovered, but if the user-generated video segments about users' lives end up looking like this, then you can color me uninterested.

That said, one noteworthy aspect of the joint venture between Facebook, Ziddio, and Comcast is that it marks one of the first attempts to fuse Internet video with television. A report released last fall by Accenture shows that some people want a YouTube-like experience on TV, and Facebook Diaries should meet that need to some extent. Will it be must-see TV, though? Probably not.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070207-8788.html





Video on Demand From the Public Library
ScuttleMonkey

ye oulde library lover writes
"In light of the recent story about Wal-Mart and movies on demand, readers should know there is a free service available from some public libraries that lets you download movies and tv shows. The service is just beginning, so selection is pretty mediocre, but the sponsors, Recorded Books and PermissionTV, make some big promises. If your library ponies up the dough for the top service, you will be able to download movies on the same day as their dvd release. All you need is a library card. You can see one of the early adopters — Half Hollow Hills Community Library in the library's blog. Look for MyLibraryDV."
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/02/07/1942243.shtml





Forgive Me, Viewer, for I Have Confessed in a Banner Ad
Louise Story

Courtney Stecker is obsessed with the idea of surviving a car crash over a bridge, he confided to the camera. And every time he drives over a bridge, he said, he shuts everyone else out and imagines his car sailing over the rail.

No, it is not a consumer-generated YouTube clip. Instead, Mr. Stecker’s chilling confession was taped last night from a bar near Washington, and streamed into banner ads to promote “The Number 23,” a horror movie in which Jim Carrey becomes obsessed with the number 23.

New Line Cinema, the film’s producer, sponsored the ads, which were supposed to be beamed live from the Rhino Bar and Pumphouse in the Georgetown area. The streaming process, however, encountered delays and it took 45 minutes or more for the ads to appear online at first. An hour later, the videos seemed to be running more quickly.

“We were a bit late off the game,” said Chris Young, executive vice president for rich media at DoubleClick, the company that created and served the New Line ads. “Obviously, as we start doing this more and more it will be much more regulated.”

New Line is one of many advertisers shifting money toward online video rather than simple banner or display ads. Aside from one-time events like AOL’s Live 8 concerts in 2005, there has been little live footage on the Internet, and live advertising is a novel concept. Last year, Sun Microsystems broadcast a technology conference in real time onto ads on business sites, but New Line’s almost live ads are aimed at young consumers on sites like MySpace and Fox Sports.

“There’s a unique creative approach that online needs to take because it’s a different medium,” said Gordon Paddison, executive vice president for new media marketing at New Line, which is owned by Time Warner.

At less than 5 percent of online ad spending, Internet commercials are still a small piece of that pie, but advertising executives say they expect them to become far more prominent this year. Advertisers spent $410 million buying space for video ads online last year, up from $225 million in 2005. They will probably spend more than $700 million this year, according to eMarketer, an online advertising research firm.

“The Number 23” Internet commercials are rooted in experiential marketing, an increasingly popular tactic in the real world that has marketing teams trying to generate attention on the ground with product samples or events. New Line Cinema hired street teams to go to 80 bars or events like the Super Bowl across the country with a confession booth and a video camera.

Visitors to the booth last night could obscure their faces and did not have to say their names as they described their obsessions to the camera. Local Internet traffic can make streaming video arrive more slowly, and some dull or inappropriate content might have been removed.

Jill Corcuera confessed that she had an obsession with the singer Justin Timberlake. Diane Ingram said that she used to put Visine eye drops in the beers of customers when she was a bartender. Michelle Elefant, with her voice full of emotion, said she was straight but deeply in love with a woman. Molly Whipkey said she had a fear of dying without anyone knowing.

When Web surfers opened pages with the New Line ads, they first saw crowd shots from the Rhino Bar, then were taken to the most current video from the booth. Editors from Foglight Entertainment, a video production company, were sitting on the second floor of the bar last night editing on the fly.

The confessions were also posted on a YouTube channel dedicated to the movie.

Advertisers and publishers are sorting out how to measure video ads and how much they should cost. They are selling for much higher prices now than text-based ads on the Internet. The trend is to measure based on an “interaction rate,” which focuses on time spent watching an ad, or using tools in it rather than a click-through rate that measures how many people visit a company’s Web site as a result of an ad, said Mr. Young of DoubleClick.

Online video is possible on a large scale because broadband Internet connections are now in more than half of American households. This is the closest the Internet has come yet to replicating television. Many of the largest advertisers on TV and in print publications have been slow to move much of their ad spending online, but ad executives said online video may change that.

“Big marketers are excited about video because it’s a very familiar format,” said John Paulson, president of G2 Interactive, the digital marketing arm of the Grey Group of Companies, in the WPP Group. “Moving picture, sight and sound are more familiar. It doesn’t feel as foreign to them as in the old days of a banner ad or Web site content.”

But familiarity has misled many marketers into simply repurposing their TV spots to use online, which ad executives say is a mistake in the longer run. Web surfers would want shorter, more interactive ads, and online commercials would ultimately work best when they merge the interactive, user-involvement aspects of the Internet with traditional video, executives say.

Already, some marketers are experimenting with that approach. In November, Levi’s Internet commercials showed young people at holiday parties wearing Levi’s jeans. There were clearly marked spots in the video that viewers could scroll over to see demonstrations of the jeans.

In a banner ad for “The Prestige,” a Disney movie, last fall, Web surfers could scroll through local movie theater listings in the ad while they watched a movie trailer. That ad was developed by DoubleClick, but online ad companies like PointRoll, which is owned by the Gannett Company, have similar products. VideoEgg, an online video network, is selling scrolling ads at the bottom of videos that invite viewers to click on them to see more.

Media companies are rapidly increasing the videos they post online featuring popular TV shows as well as original Internet video, and they are selling ads to run with that content. Video in display ads may provide new revenue to the digital units of media companies, said Randall Rothenberg, chief executive of the Internet Advertising Bureau, an association for interactive publishers.

Many of the advertisers showing online commercials with Fox’s online videos are paying for the airtime from their TV budgets, said Michael Barrett, chief revenue officer for Fox Interactive Media.

“We’re seeing tremendous demand from marketers,” Mr. Barrett said. “The demand from advertisers is outstripping our supply of video.”

Based on the experience at the Rhino Bar, New Line is considering beaming video into banner ads from its confession booth at Comic-Con, a comic-book convention in New York, on Feb. 23, the day the movie opens.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/bu...ubleclick.html





Wireless Internet for All, Without the Towers
Randall Stross

THESE still are early days for the Internet, globally speaking. One billion people online; five billion to go.

The next billion to be connected are living in homes that are physically close to an Internet gateway. They await a solution to the famous “last mile” problem: extending affordable broadband service to each person’s doorstep.

Here in the United States, 27 percent of the population lacks access to the Internet, according to a study completed last year by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Among those who do have access, about 30 percent still rely on slow dial-up connections. The last mile for households with no or slow connections may be provided by radio signals sent out by transmitters perched atop street lights, as hundreds of cities have rolled out municipal Wi-Fi networks, or are in the process of doing so.

The impulse behind these projects is noble. It’s a shame, however, that lots of street lamps and lots of dollars — a typical deployment in an urban setting will run $75,000 to $125,000 a square mile, just to install the equipment — do not really solve the last-mile problem.

If you’re sitting with your laptop at an outside cafe, you’ll be happy with the service. But if you happen to be at home, you realize that service to the doorstep is not enough: you still need to buy equipment to bolster the signal and solve the “last mile plus 10 more yards” problem — that is, getting coverage indoors.

Wi-Fi signals do not bend, and you usually can’t get much of a useful bounce from them, either. Because Wi-Fi uses unlicensed bands of the radio spectrum, by law it must rely on low-power transmitters, which reduce its ability to penetrate walls. Travel-round-the-world shortwave, this ain’t.

Trying to cover a broad area with Wi-Fi radio transmitters set atop street lights brings to mind a fad of the 1880s: attempts to light an entire town with a handful of arc lights on high towers. But overeager city boosters around the country soon discovered that shadows obscured large portions of their cities, and the lighting was not as useful as had been expected. Municipal Wi-Fi on streetlamps, another experiment with top-down delivery, may run a similarly short-lived — and needlessly expensive — course.

WiMax, which will be a high-power version of the tower approach, comes in two flavors: mobile, which has not yet been certified, and fixed, which is theoretically well suited for residential deployment. Unfortunately, it’s pricey. Peter Bell, a research analyst at TeleGeography Research in Washington, said fixed WiMax would not be able to compete against cable and DSL service: “It makes more economic sense in semirural areas that have no broadband coverage.”

An intriguingly inexpensive alternative has appeared: a Wi-Fi network that is not top-down but rather ground-level, peer-to-peer. It relies not on $3,500 radio transmitters perched on street lamps by professional installers but instead on $50 boxes that serve, depending upon population density, more than one household and can be installed by anyone with the ease of plugging in a toaster.

Meraki Networks, a 15-employee start-up in Mountain View, Calif., has been field-testing Wi-Fi boxes that offer the prospect of providing an extremely inexpensive solution to the “last 10 yards” problem. It does so with a radical inversion: rather than starting from outside the house and trying to send signals in, Meraki starts from the inside and sends signals out, to the neighbors.

Some of those neighbors will also have Meraki boxes that serve as repeaters, relaying the signal still farther to more neighbors. The company equips its boxes with software that maintains a “mesh network,” which dynamically reroutes signals as boxes are added or unplugged, and as environmental conditions that affect network performance fluctuate moment to moment.

At this time last year, two of Meraki’s co-founders — Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket — were still Ph.D. students at M.I.T., pursuing academic research on wireless mesh networks in the course of building Roofnet, an experimental network that covered about one-third of Cambridge, Mass., and offered residents free service.

Last year, Google invited Mr. Biswas to give a presentation about his experience providing wireless Internet service to low-income communities. At the time, Google was testing its first municipal Wi-Fi network in its hometown, Mountain View, Calif., using transmitters attached to street lamps.

After Mr. Biswas’s talk, a Google engineer told him that people using Google’s network said they could get online at home only by holding their laptops against a window. Mr. Biswas said he was not surprised. Using municipal Wi-Fi for residential coverage, he said, was “the equivalent of expecting street lamps to light everyone’s homes.”

Mr. Biswas and Mr. Bicket realized that their mesh-network gear designed for residential use could avoid that problem, and hasten the extension of Internet access worldwide. They founded Meraki, took a leave of absence from M.I.T. and, along with a third co-founder, Hans Robertson, moved to Silicon Valley. In short order, Google and then Sequoia Capital, one of Google’s original venture capital backers, invested in Meraki.

Moore’s Law, with its regular doubling of transistors on a single silicon chip, makes possible the miracle of a Meraki “mini,” as the company calls its basic product for the home. It contains a Wi-Fi router-on-a-chip, combined with the same microprocessor and same memory that formed the heart of a Silicon Graphics workstation 10 years ago. These components are now cheap enough today to be included in a box that sells for $49.

The fact that 200 million Wi-Fi chips will be manufactured this year leads to economies of scale that will drive down the price of extremely intelligent network equipment. Meraki’s products are still being tested, but word-of-mouth has attracted 15,000 users in 25 countries.

One early adopter was Michael Burmeister-Brown, a director of NetEquality, a nonprofit in Portland, Ore., that provides free Internet access to low-income neighborhoods. He had not been impressed by Portland’s municipal Wi-Fi service. Because the Wi-Fi transmitter has to be both close and within unobstructed view, the limitations brought to Mr. Burmeister-Brown’s mind the sign on the back of 18-wheel trucks: “If you can’t see my mirror, I can’t see you.”

In Portland, the access points were installed only at every other intersection in residential areas — creating an “I can’t see you” problem. MetroFi, the service provider, advises residents who are not close to a transmitter to buy additional equipment to pull in the signal, with a starting price of $119 — and that is without the “professional installation” option.

For NetEquality, Mr. Burmeister-Brown decided to try out the Meraki equipment in several neighborhoods. In the largest, consisting of about 400 apartments, five DSL lines were used to feed 100 Meraki boxes, which cover the complex with a ratio of one box to every four apartments. Each box both receives the signal and passes it along, albeit at diminished strength. For an initial investment of about $5,000, or $13 a household, the complex can offer Internet access whose operating costs work out to about $1 a household a month.

The bandwidth can match DSL service, but here it is throttled down a bit to deter bandwidth-hogging downloads. Nonetheless, Mr. Burmeister-Brown says everyone is able to enjoy Web browsing with what he describes as “really snappy response.” The sharing of signals among neighbors does not compromise privacy if standard Wi-Fi security protocols are switched on.

Meraki’s products are not yet for sale, and its networks have not been tested with extensive deployment across a large city. Nonetheless, the intrinsic advantages of its grass-roots approach, with next-to-nothing expenditures for both equipment and operations, are impossible to ignore.

MR. BISWAS says there are about 800 million personal computers in the world, but only 280 million are connected. The rest are “stuck in the 1980s” — close to being connected, but not quite.

Meraki does not wish to go into the Internet service provider business itself, but it aspires to equip any interested nontechnical person to become a “micro” service provider for his or her local community. If the provider wishes to use advertising to cover costs rather than charge an access fee, little would be needed in order to cover the minimal outlays for equipment and operations.

This low-cost network model offers the prospect of broadband service reaching inside many more households. One billion and one. One billion and two. One billion and three ... .
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/bu...ey/04digi.html





MIT Scientists Detail Breakthrough in Optics-on-a-Chip Device
Jordan Robertson

Fiber-optic networks transmit massive amounts of information quickly, but the signals weaken as the data-carrying light travels long distances.

Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they've overcome a major obstacle in harnessing the full power and speed of the light waves.

It promises to solve a problem that's long plagued fiber-optic networks: Light waves gradually weaken over distances as they become polarized, or randomly oriented horizontally and vertically. The tools available to fix it are expensive to deploy on a massive scale.

The MIT researchers reported in a recent edition of the journal Nature Photonics that they've devised a solution that utilizes the mass-production capabilities of standard silicon chips.

It's a promising development as bandwidth-hungry video puts a strain on networks and consumers demand seamless transmissions.

Like polarizing sunglasses that block light waves oriented in different directions, the MIT researchers created a clever device that splits the light beams as they pass through a circuit. The device then rotates one of the polarized beams, before both beams are rejoined on their way out of the circuit, retaining the signals' strength.

But it's not just that device that the researchers are touting.

They're also trumpeting the innovative method they devised to integrate the optical circuitry with electronic circuitry on the same silicon chip.

"It's a big step forward -- no one was able to do this before in a way that is manufacturable and takes advantage of the manufacturability of silicon technology," said Erich Ippen, an MIT electrical engineering and physics professor and one of the study's co-authors.

Scientists have been chasing ways to tap into the enormous power of light waves in networks while figuring out how to manufacture the circuitry cheaply, and on a massive scale, using the established processes of the semiconductor industry.

They have often been stymied by incompatibility issues between silicon and light sources, but in recent years have major strides in discovering ways for the materials to work together.

The MIT research team demonstrated a working circuit on a chip that they said could be easily reproduced using silicon fabrication technology that is already highly developed.

Independent technology experts said the invention could eventually make its way onto next-generation telecommunications chips, and devices like it could help redefine how optical networks are built.

Connie Chang-Hasnain, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, said overcoming the problem currently requires large components that takes an operator several hours with precision instruments to assemble.

"Here, you just print (a silicon chip) and nobody is needed to align it," she said. "Imagine the massive increase in efficiency and the reduction in the need for labor and precision instruments. That's tremendous."

The advance comes as companies are looking for ways to boost the performance of their optical devices while lowering costs, as the technology becomes increasingly attractive to service providers spending heavily to upgrade their networks.

Video, which consumes thousands of times the network space of e-mail messages, is a key driver of those upgrades as Internet users demand more bandwidth to download content from sites like YouTube, and service providers prepare for the transition to Internet Protocol Television, or IPTV -- TV delivered over a broadband connection.

Alex Schoenfelder, general manager of the integrated photonics business at JDS Uniphase Corp., said the MIT research could help drive down production costs of making optical devices while moving the technology away from the core of a network and toward the end consumer.

"It will push the boundary between optics and electronics very close to the end customer," he said. "And that will be the significance -- it will open the marketplace to significantly higher volumes than we're serving today."
http://www.boston.com/news/local/mas...chip_devic e/





Mais no!

Fiber Optic Plan is a Missed Connection
Brad Spurgeon

Three months ago, I reached what a geeks' dictionary would probably define as online nirvana: a fiber optic Internet connection to my home.

A shoelace-size cable housing a hair-thin glass strand that transmits data using light instead of electricity now feeds me all of my television channels, video-on-demand, telephone service and the fastest Internet connection in France to my family's three computers.

Well, sort of. Three months into a pilot program by France Télécom, the national carrier, and I would be happy to tie myself back to the land line, cable and ADSL connections that served me faithfully for many years.

As several other French operators prepare to offer fiber optic service, and it spreads elsewhere, I'm left wondering what is going on.

When the program was offered last spring to a few districts in and around Paris, I jumped at the chance to combine all those traditional wires into one connection of close to 100 megabits a second, or mbps, for €70, or $92, a month.

It took three months after signing up to have it installed, but only one day for the regrets to begin.

In fact, the original offer of two months free was increased to six, but I still dread March, when we have to start paying and we no longer have our cable television or old-fashioned telephone.

Here are the promises and realities of this program:

Telephone: Free, unlimited telephone calls — kill your land line.

The reality: We invested in a pod of Internet compatible telephones, only to find that the fiber optic system haphazardly cuts out without signaling if it is working or not. We may pick up the phone and find we cannot call, or that we can make calls, but without knowing it we cannot receive calls. We often receive a busy signal calling a phone that is not occupied, or we are told the number does not exist, although it does.

Television: High-definition image, all our regular channels on both of our televisions, video-on- demand, and on our computers, a Web-based television access.

The reality: Forget the high-definition television. We did not invest in one because we cannot even depend on watching at low definition. The television signal cuts out constantly and we must reboot the modems and decoders, often for hours on end. Nor can we receive all channels on both televisions, as the service provider permits only one master television a subscription.

Video-on-demand simply does not work. We may buy a film, but not watch it because it cracks up, eating swaths of dialogue, and requires rebooting. After a technician encouraged two more downloads, he finally said that the problem was the server and that it affected all users. The Web-based television has never worked, despite repeated promises.

Internet: High-speed Internet on a network of home computers.

The reality: The fiber optic goes only to a central decoding box that transforms the light signal to an electrical one. From there it is spread throughout the apartment as in any classic home network. Although I was led to expect a power line network, the installers proposed Wi-Fi. It was inadequate, so at my behest they installed unsightly ethernet cables from room to room.

The Internet service itself? While my ADSL connection broke down about three times in nearly a decade, the fiber optic Internet connection is constantly switching off. It often requires rebooting the three boxes — the fiber optic transformer, the modem and the router — and sometimes the computers, too.

While most Internet tests rate the speed of my fiber optic connection to a cable connection, a French Web site measured it at 85 to 95 mbps downloading, and 23 to 27 mbps uploading, much faster than the French average for all Internet connections.

My old ADSL connection was 512/128 kilobits a second, or only a tiny fraction of the speed of the new one, but Web surfing still feels no faster than before.

Although I know I am only a guinea pig, I called France Télécom's press department to tell them of my discontent. They promised a return call, but it never came. Just before publication, however, a technician called to say someone would come over and try to root out the problems. So I now feel like a privileged guinea pig, if not exactly closer to nirvana.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/...ss/ptend07.php





Russian BitTorrent Trackers Shut Down
Ernesto

Several BitTorrent trackers in the Tomsk region in Russia have been shut down. The reason for the takedowns is still unclear. Some suggest that the cybercrime division of the Russian police, also known as “Department K” is behind it. Others think that it is a drastic measure to decrease bandwidth usage by Tomsk’s local ISP.

The Russian police denied that it had anything to do with the closure of the trackers, and refused to release any further comments.

Vadim Andrianov, one of the BitTorrent tracker admins, thinks that the shutdown of his, and other sites could be part of a new anti-piracy campaign. Andrianov is still waiting for an official response from his ISP. He is not worried about any form of legal action, because his site was only offering Open Source software.

Bandwidth management could be an alternative explanation for the closure of the BitTorrent sites. Immediately after the trackers were shut down, p2p traffic dropped drastically, to 20% of what it used to be. Could this be an attempt by Tomsk’s ISP to cut down the bandwidth generated by BitTorrent transfers? It sure is more effective than most traffic shaping devices.
http://torrentfreak.com/russian-bitt...ers-shut-down/





SecureIX Offers Anonymous BitTorrent Downloads
Smaran

A company called SecureIX is offering a free VPN service which allows you to hide your IP address from peers in a BitTorrent swarm or P2P network. Not only that, the service also encrypts and tunnels your data, making it extremely difficult for your ISP to sniff or shape it.

SecureIX launched last year with almost no hype surrounding it. Even we only came to know of it recently. Why something so seemingly important went unnoticed, is unknown.

What SecureIX offers is a whole package of ’secure services’. An IMAP/POP SSL-enabled e-mail account with PGP encryption and 1 GB storage, Usenet newsgroup access, and an encrypted VPN service. All of this free for personal use.

Instructions to set up VPN access are sent to the e-mail address you get when you sign up with SecureIX. That way, there’s definitely no chance of anyone intercepting e-mails from the site to you.

A passage on the site talks about how SecureIX provides added piracy:

As soon as you connect to our VPN server your computer is assigned a new IP address, an IP address that is owned by us, not your ISP. Unless you are using one of our static IP packages there are no records that link a single user to the IP address. The IP address is shared by many users. Remote servers on the Internet that try to identify you by your IP address will fail.

What I don’t understand is why a company would give away a service like this for free. Although, the site reserves the right to change their policy in the future, their “current plans are to always provide a free service.”

But how safe is this free service? After all, they also offer Business VPN for a price, so it is a commercial service. And even if your ISP doesn’t have your data, it’s almost assured that SecureIX does, as you’re using their servers to tunnel. In this way, they’re taking over from your ISP. Great idea, but who knows if we can trust SecureIX any more than our ISPs?

Where SecureIX could really come in handy is if your ISP is blocking encrypted BitTorrent transfers. In Canada, Rogers is throttling all BitTorrent connections, encrypted or otherwise. BroadbandReports.com writes, “Rogers has updated Cisco traffic-shaping hardware to perform more sophisticated deep packet inspection to again limit BitTorrent bandwidth consumption. Some users are using VPN software SecureIX to get around the new traffic shaping efforts, with mixed results.”
http://torrentfreak.com/secureix-off...ent-downloads/





BitTyrant Makes a Turbulent Entry Into Digital Filesharing

As you read this sentence, an estimated 5 million people are using BitTorrent to download their favorite movies or TV shows. The free software has achieved almost iconic status since its 2001 release, its creator profiled in glossy magazines, its users coining a new lexicon. The percentage of North American Internet traffic devoted to BitTorrent is in the double digits.

This week University of Washington computer scientists released free software that tweaks BitTorrent's cooperative core. The UW program, named BitTyrant, maximizes individual benefit by choosing file-sharing partners strategically. In doing so, it boosts downloading speeds by an average of 70 percent.

"Prior to this work, people thought BitTorrent was exactly how you want to build a peer-to-peer distributed system," said Tom Anderson, professor of computer science and engineering. "We figured out that it's easy for someone to cheat other users on BitTorrent, and we developed a set of changes that makes it much more difficult to do that."

Anderson's group began studying BitTorrent as an example of a system that uses incentives to promote cooperation. Then they went one step further, writing a program that questions BitTorrent's resistance to cheaters while improving performance. BitTyrant sparked immediate interest from the technical community, attracting more than 60,000 Web visitors on its first day.

"I hadn't expected it to blow up quite so quickly," Anderson said.

Anderson's goal isn't necessarily to help teenagers share bootlegged videos more efficiently. But BitTorrent is popular because it excels at sharing mammoth files over the Internet. Earlier versions of file-sharing, such as Kazaa and Napster, simply allowed people to trade files. BitTorrent chews up each file into a series of pieces, downloads each one separately and then stitches the pieces back together. Groups of users download files from one another, rather than a central server. A computer can be downloading a chunk of the latest episode of "The Sopranos" from one computer while simultaneously uploading another chunk to someone else.

Start-up companies are eager to develop a more reliable version of BitTorrent that can deliver high-definition television content over the Web, for instance, or distribute software releases, Anderson said. Even BitTorrent has gone legit -- creator Bram Cohen signed a multimillion-dollar contract last year to deliver content for major film studios.

"Peer-to-peer traffic is by far the largest form of traffic on the Internet today. It doesn't show any signs of dissipating," said Michael Piatek, a UW doctoral student. "Incentives are a crucial factor. Even the Internet itself can be thought of as a loosely federated group of individual organizations," he added. "How to coordinate the competing interests of these many players efficiently is an open question."

BitTyrant boosts an individual's download speed while fixing a bug in BitTorrent. Instead of choosing download partners at random, BitTyrant looks for computers that are contributing a lot of content. Choosing high-bandwidth partners boosts the individual's payoff. It also punishes people who have managed to use BitTorrent without sharing any content. So the update helps the individual, while leaving cheaters in the cold.

Philosophers have long lamented the "tragedy of the commons." This first referred to a group of shepherds who share a grazing pasture. When a single herder inflates the size of his herd he gains a huge benefit, but if everybody does it the shared pasture turns bare and everybody loses. More generally, when people act purely in their own interest they can destroy shared resources, and this ultimately harms each individual. It turns out the concept applies equally well to computer users in the twenty-first century.

For the researchers, "studying networks and file-sharing is really a way to get a picture of how we design systems that incorporate the motivations of the people using them," said Piatek. He will present a paper on the file-sharing technology at the Networked Systems Design and Implementation meeting in Cambridge, Mass., in April.

Meanwhile, the file-sharing world may be in for a jolt. An estimated 80 million people have a copy of the BitTorrent software. Many of them may be about to make an upgrade.

The research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Foundation.
http://www.exduco.net/news.php?id=903





Free File Sharing Programs In 30 Seconds
WebBlurb

Keep and Share free file sharing program and file sharing software is the ideal way to securely share files with your group. It's like a "private MySpace" - a free file sharing website that brings people together, but with all the security and privacy you want - where you always control exactly who can see what information.

You used to have to download and install a program right on your PC in order to do file sharing, but these kinds of programs got a bad reputation from people trying to exploit the internet for illegal copying. Keep and Share is a new way to legally share files - Keep and Share is a web site that doesn't require you to download and install software - Keep and Share will run on any internet connected computer with a browser. Keep and Share is different - it helps individuals share files within their family, friends, church group, community group, soccer team, etc.

Your Free File Sharing Programs Account

1. A free file sharing site on the web
2. Selective sharing, secure for those you want to share with
3. Additional free features: share calendars, documents, photos, lists and more with complete security for your group, family, and friends

From the moment you create your account you will have an instant web presence for your group.

Your Own Free File Sharing Programs Web Site

Your group's instantly available "share page" acts as a hub for others to access all shared information, shared files and lists. All they do is type in 'your-name.keepandshare.com' and they are at your file sharing site. You can even grant editing rights so others can create or update information, upload files, and download files. By keeping information in one place, everyone you share it with will always view the most recent and up-to-date version of your shared files. Your group members will always be automatically notified of new uploaded files of interest via their personal "dashboard" and email digests.

Share Files Easily

Avoid paper clutter and losing information on different PCs with our free file sharing programs by sharing files, storing, organizing and protecting your important shared files in one place in Keep and Share. Upload files just by pointing and clicking. Upload files spreadsheets, upload files, upload documents, share files of any kind, whether they are PDFs, spreadsheets, word processing files, image files or hundreds of other file types. Once uploaded, your files are safely protected in your Keep and Share account, giving you a great backup to your PC, or to share files between your work and home PCs.

Easily share files on the web, controlling just who sees what. With our free file sharing programs set the "share with" controls on individual files to control secure access by friends and colleagues. Of course, you too can always access your files from any internet connected PC, meaning you no longer have to worry whether a file is on your work PC or your laptop at home. This is easy file sharing!

You or your friends can easily download files with single click downloading. Click on a file name and you then have the choice to download the file to your PC or optionally viewing it in your web browser.
http://www.keepandshare.com/





Bluetooth File Sharing IS Happening

From December
Russell Buckley

One of the issues I’ve been banging about for the last three years is that kids are using Bluetooth to share music and ringtones. This has been met with widespread scepticism among ye of little faith.

New research commissioned by our friends at New Media Age released today shows that the tsunami I was talking about is actually here. 29% of children aged between 9 and 13 share files this way and I’m very sure it’s even higher among their older brothers and sisters.

One of the big issues with Bluetooth sharing is that it’s untraceable as it by-passes the operator network. This is a double whammy for operators as they still sell a lot of content and they don’t get the data traffic. In fact, given operators’ traditional reluctance to cannabilise revenues, it’s pretty amazing that they let Bluetooth creep in to handsets at all. After all, they’re resisting wifi enabled handsets (to prevent VoIP calls and loss of data traffic) and were very slow to embrace IM in case it cannibalised SMS revenues - my opinion is that it won’t by the way, but that’s a subject for another post.

The research also confirms another of my little theories - that many kids are using the mobile to listen to music. In fact 30% use their mobile as their main device for this. I quoted Nokia a few weeks back who were claiming that about two thirds of people used their phone for playing music and several people scoffed at me for believing them - you know who you are . Bearing in mind that this research was talking about using the phone as the main music consumption device and Nokia’s claim was in reference to people ever using it like that, I think that they’re roughly in the same ballpark. The figures would be much nearer if applied to teens, not tweens, as well.

So what’s going to happen next? Well, lots of people from the music industry and telecoms are going to go and panic and especially try to apply DRM solutions to prevent people from doing this. Like any DRM solution it won’t work or stop the problem - just cost the initiators a lot of money. I’m betting at least one operator will disable Bluetooth or at least pressure the handset manufacturers to leave it out of their specs for the handsets they supply. And I’m sure we’ll see a few more lawsuits, as the music industry just can’t resist suing their customers, whether they’re kids or grannies.

Finally, reason will prevail and a solution will present itself - Ad-funded or Ad-subsidised content. We could save a lot of time and energy if we reached this conclusion now. Adopt your business model to the prevalent market conditions, don’t go into denial. After all, once the PC came along, would you carry on making typewriters?
http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2006/12/08...-is-happening/





New Anti-Piracy Program for Private Use
WebBlurb

Softdetect is happy to present a new anti-piracy program for private use. The program makes sure that no illegal files or program will be downloaded to or saved on your computer.

The program is a private version of our business software and allows you to:

· Scan your computer for illegal music and mediafiles
· Scan your computer for file-sharing programs
· Limit the access to certain sites from your computer
· Create automatic scans of your computer

The program is free.

Supported operating systems: Windows 2000/XP/Vista.
http://www.softdetect.com/ProductPersonal.aspx


Betcha can’t wait to try this one. – Jack




Working Three Shifts, and Outrage Overtime
David Yaffe

JONI MITCHELL, despite her introspective reputation, has always been a dancer. At a disco during the ’80s she encountered a music critic spouting invective. But after watching her dance, he asked for a lesson. “I told him to close his eyes and center his weight on his body with his feet astride,” she recalled. “And I said: ‘Relax your body. Keep your eyes closed. Feel the beat. Express how much you enjoy that beat with your body and forget what you look like.’ ”

Two decades later this legendary singer-songwriter is still giving dance lessons: “The Fiddle and the Drum,” her choreographic collaboration with the Alberta Ballet, opens on Feb. 8 in Calgary. Meanwhile “Flag Dance,” an installation of her antiwar mixed-media art, has finished a two-month run at the Lev Moross Gallery in West Hollywood, and she has recently recorded enough new songs for an album, which she plans to call either “Strange Birds of Appetite” or “If.”

“I’m working three shifts,” Ms. Mitchell, 63, said. “I’m doing the work of four 20-year-olds. Between the art show and the ballet and the new album, I’ve never worked so hard in my life.”

She was seated at an outdoor table at La Scala Presto, a modest Brentwood trattoria. Los Angeles was hitting a slight cold snap, but under the heated lamp Ms. Mitchell could smoke in relative comfort, perched in front of a suburban parking lot, where they had doubtlessly paved paradise. We were having an early dinner, which for her is more like breakfast. She started with two cappuccinos and lemonade, warning me, “I’m a night owl. I’ll outlast you.”

Ms. Mitchell speaks as she sings, lilting up and down in bars of her native Saskatchewanean vocalise. But she insists on depth, on full attention and on sincerity, her “jive detector” on constant high alert. “I don’t like being too looked up at or too looked down on,” she said. “I prefer meeting in the middle to being worshiped or spat out.”

Over the course of a dozen or so hours of a wide-ranging conversation, she gets to talking about how her new interdisciplinary project began: with a curious letter she received last year from one Jean Grande-Maître.

“Please forgive my somewhat imperfect English as I am a native of Quebec and I am still brushing up on this new language,” it read. “Next year will be Alberta Ballet’s 40th Anniversary Season and as Artistic Director, I would be enthused by the possibility of choreographing a ballet to your brilliant and profoundly moving music.

“I would really love to fly to Los Angeles,” it went on, “and meet you personally for a very short moment.”

They got together at a Beverly Hills restaurant (with an outdoor terrace where she could smoke of course), and Mr. Grand-Maître presented his idea: a kind of jukebox ballet called Dancing Joni, leaning on audience favorites like “Both Sides Now” and “Chelsea Morning.”

“Everything centered around this blonde, blue-eyed ballerina from Australia, and it was sort of dancing my life,” Ms. Mitchell recalled. “But I thought, that’s not important right now.” Anyway, she had a better idea.

Mr. Grand-Maître couldn’t have known it, but after a hiatus of 10 years she had recently begun writing new songs. She was spurred on by something her grandson had said while listening to family fighting: “Bad dreams are good — in the great plan.”

Ms. Mitchell was stunned. “How did he know that?” she wondered. “That’s an amazing thing for anyone to know at any age. The line just stuck.” When the war in Iraq began, her grandson’s words resonated in her mind, and she “gave birth,” as she described it, to four new pieces.

Mr. Grand-Maître’s invitation seemed like an opportunity to present that music in a new context. “Humbly I hope we can make a difference with this ballet,” she told him, speaking of her outrage about the foreign and environmental policies of the United States. “It’s a red alert about the situation the world is in now. We’re wasting our time on this fairy tale war, when the real war is with God’s creation. Nobody’s fighting for God’s creation.”

That “short moment” he had requested turned into one of her inimitable all-nighters. And in the end the artistic director of the Alberta Ballet got more than he hoped for. Not only did Ms. Mitchell agree to the project, she took it over.

For the last several weeks she had been sleeping by day and recording songs for her new album from dusk till dawn. If she had a spare moment, she scribbled notes about the ballet set. Music, art, dance: Ms. Mitchell calls it “crop rotation.”

She is of course well past the stage of having to prove herself artistically. She is in possession of one of the most extraordinary song catalogs of the past half-century. Her chords break harmonic rules, have no technical names and defy Western musical theory. Her voice is an instrument that has grown sublimely heavier and huskier over the decades.

But she could not help being what she calls a “pot-stirrer.” She thought about how the Maya calendar ends in 2012, about the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. What, she wondered, what do you write at the end of the world?

“I haven’t written in 10 years, and what’s coming out of me is all sociological and theological complaint,” she said while staring at the lighted end of an American Spirit cigarette. She sees herself as a proud heretic: “At first I thought I was going over new territory, but then I realized that many of the people who went over this territory were killed.”

“The Fiddle and the Drum” features two of her new songs: “If,” based on the Rudyard Kipling poem about war and stoicism (“Just about my favorite poem,” she says), and “If I Had a Heart, I’d Cry,” criticizing what she calls the current “holy war.” The rest of the ballet, named for a 1970 antiwar ballad from her second album, “Clouds,” is dominated by material from her ’80s and ’90s albums, which are more rhythmically charged (and hence better for dance) than her earlier work.

The backdrop is composed of stills from Ms. Mitchell’s mixed-media art exhibition. One night while she was flipping through “The Gold Diggers of 1937,” CNN and the History Channel on her ancient television (she is something of a Luddite and only recently got a decent stereo system), her screen went on the fritz, blurring images and turning everything a radioactive emerald. Faces melted away, and lines of bodies seeped into the frightening indistinctness of nightmare, as though the malfunctioning television were offering a metaphorical political commentary. She could no longer tell soldier from chorus girl, battle casualty from lover, the dancer from the dance.

In “The Fiddle and the Drum” members of the muscular young dance troupe mimics these images, marching down the stage like soldiers, their bodies almost naked and painted jade green, looking as if they had emerged from the artwork projected above them. They are both graceful and military, tinged with the color of new life and nuclear holocaust, and move to what Ms. Mitchell called “the beats of war.”

With 9 songs and 27 dancers, the result is equal parts Busby Berkeley spectacle, political jeremiad and rock opera, a collection of songs that form an essay on war and incipient environmental apocalypse. Young, athletic bodies are sent off to kill and die. The earth is electronically set for destruction. Dire biblical prophecies and the grave warnings of Indian chiefs ring true.

But Mr. Grand-Maître wanted to avoid the literalism that marred Twyla Tharp’s recent Bob Dylan musical, choreographed as it was with jugglers and clowns who came down to do tricks for you. (“Dylan’s not a dancer,” Ms. Mitchell added. “I am.”) So when she sings the line “In some office sits a poet,” the choreographer was quick to say, we will not actually see a poet sitting in an office. The approach is more abstract — allegorical but not obvious.

“We’re going to open the curtain” Mr. Grand-Maître explained, “and people who are expecting a ballet will get something more like a rock concert.”

During “If” Kipling’s verse is staged as a street scene, a place where young people prefer dancing to warring, and where hip-hop, modern dance, ballet and jazz collide. Mr. Grand-Maître compares it to a Mardi Gras carnival. “Hold on,” Ms. Mitchell sings in the song’s refrain, but the dancers are going wild.

Mr. Grand-Maître said, “What she’s saying in the song is to hold on to that life and that flow.” He and Ms. Mitchell met twice in Los Angeles and talked on the phone a dozen times. But while she will be on hand for the last week of rehearsals (and will film them for a documentary she’s making), she was not directly involved in the dance itself.

“I never really explained to her what I was choreographing physically, but rather how I was staging it,” Mr. Grand-Maître recalled. “Like when Mary Magdalene appeared on a screen during ‘Sex Kills’ or when Killer Kyle in ‘Beat of Black Wings’ transforms from innocence to aggressive behavior. I told her I wanted to create that in a dance performance. She loved that.”

Referring to the ballet’s title song Ms. Mitchell explained: “I was using the fiddle to symbolize peace and the drum to symbolize militancy. Those Édith Piaf and Noël Coward songs were all marches. That was the groove of the World War II era. White rhythm is waltzes, marches, and the polka. In Africa rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn’t have such an enormous vocabulary of spirits. It’s basically militant.”

All in all it’s a far cry from the project Mr. Grand-Maître envisioned when he wrote that first timid letter to Ms. Mitchell. “It’s a hell of a lot better than what I had, and I feel very invigorated by these ideas.”

Once you get past the security gates, Ms. Mitchell’s house feels like a pocket of middle-class comfort in the midst of zillionaire Beverly Hills. In some ways life is still as it was in 1974, when she bought the house: She has no computer, no voice mail, no cellphone and no e-mail. At one point, when we tried to remember one of her lyrics, we scrolled through my iPod. She said it was the first time she had listened to one.

As she played some tracks from her new album, she was still adding and subtracting, wincing at lines that struck her as too sentimental.

“Listen to this song,” she insisted at one point. But she wouldn’t really let me, or I couldn’t sufficiently take it in. Her conversation competed with her music, and I was getting double Joni.

Talking about the ballet turned into a kind of circle game. The dance was about the war, and the war led her to write, which in turn meant talking about what makes her write in the first place. There was simply too much to express.

“You’ve only got so much space, and that’s the point,” she said. “That’s the art. In a very short space, you need pertinent details while knowing what to leave out.” One song she’s still revising is called “Shine.”

“It starts, ‘Shine on Vegas and Wall Street/Place your bets,’ ” she said. “You could write a thousand verses. ‘Shine on the dazzling darkness that mends us when we sleep/Shine on what we throw away and what we keep.’ I have written about 60 different verses and rhyming couplets to this thing, and I’ve kept 12. Are they the best ones? I don’t know. I could write 60 a week. What are the 12 most important things to illuminate? It’s overwhelming.”

She continued into the wee hours of the night, musing about her relationship with the daughter she gave up for adoption in 1964 but with whom she was happily reunited 10 years ago, and about the shift from personal writing to her broader ecological-political-theological ruminations. On “If I Had a Heart, I’d Cry,” one of the songs she used in the ballet, she sings, “Holy earth/How can we heal you/We cover you like blight/Strange Birds of Appetite/If I had a heart/I’d cry.” I asked her to replay me the song a few times. It is one of the most haunting melodies she has ever written.

“During that song,” she explained, “there are seven night photographs of the earth from every angle, and when you see it, it’s frightening to witness what an electronic blight we are at night.”

There was an electronic blight as she drove me back to my hotel at 5 a.m. in her Lexus, with her Jack Russell terrier, Coco, perched on her lap. The block had lost its electricity, as if on cue after a night of dire ecological warnings.

“My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species,” she said. “I can’t cry about it. In a way I’m inoculated. I’ve suffered this pain for so long. We were expelled from Eden. What keeps us out of Eden?” She thought about this for a moment before riffing on a Dylan line: “I tried to tell everybody, but I could not get it across.”

“Well, I’m being more specific now,” she allowed. “The West has packed the whole world on a runaway train. We are on the road to extincting ourselves as a species. That’s what I meant when I said that we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/ar...c1b&ei=5087%0A





Artists Aren't Starving Because of Piracy
Marion Jensen

In the age of digital media, piracy runs rampant. It is now as easy to share music or a movie as it is to share an idea. With the press of a button, you can share your digital content with 3, 300, or 3 billion people. It's just that easy.

So in recent years, we've been fed all sorts of (dis)information about copyright laws. “Think of the artists” we're told. If you download music, somewhere there is a poor, struggling artist who can't feed his kids.

It's all hogwash, and we'll use the Socratic method to show why.

Who makes the laws?

a) Congress
b) The President
c) The Tidy Bowl Man
d) Earl

If you guessed A, pat yourself on the back. Congress writes laws. Congress passes laws, and nobody can stop them except for the President (and he can be overruled), or judges (many of whom you know wear leotards under their robes).

Where does Congress come up with laws?

a) They're smart people, they come up with ideas on their own
b) They listen to the people who elected them, weigh the benefits and consequences carefully, and then write up laws
c) They ask the Tidy Bowl Man
d) They write whatever they are told, assuming the person doing the telling has lots and lots of money

I know you didn't guess D, because you were too busy snorting milk out your nose after reading answers A and B. You couldn't see through the tears of hilarity to see that the proper answer is in fact D. But, D it is. And no, that is not just cynicism, I spent 6 months in DC, and you better believe this is exactly how it works.

Who has more money and is better organized?

a) Artists
b) The record/movie/book publishing companies
c) The Tidy Bowl Man

Artists don't have any money, and if the Tidy Bowl Man did, do you think he'd be living in the crapper? Publishers/Recording Artists/Movie Producers are better organized and do better lobbying. Plus they have all the money they've made off the backs of the artists. They are the ones who get members of congress to write the laws. Don't believe me? Look up the Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Then look at who lived in Sony Bono's district.

Who do these producers really care about?

a) Artists
b) Teenagers who like to listen to/watch/ read media
c) No one but themselves

Let's think of how many millions of artists never really make it because they've signed away just about anything they have created, or will create, to get a shot at 'making it'. Let's think of the thousands of customers the RIAA has attempted to sue out of existence. That leaves us with C.

There is an entire industry that leeches off the creative talent of legions of artists. The artists, almost without exception, never make it big. Oh sure, there are the Steven Kings, J. K. Rowlings, Beatles, and more who do manage to make it, and make it big. But do you think that these folks build the industry? They are nothing more than the icing on the cake. It is the thousands of authors and musicians who never make it big, who are the bread and butter of the producers. The ones nobody hears about, and so nobody cares about. They write a few songs, write a few books, and 90-95 percent of the earning ends up in the pocket of the publishers. The artists go back to their day jobs, most of the time with no 'intellectual property' to show for it. The producers own the copyright and distribution rights.

Intellectual Property laws do nothing for the artists. It is the industry behind them, the ones who wrote the law to begin with, who are making all the money, and keeping mountains of content, culture, and enjoyment from the masses.

These suits are the 'anti-spock'. The greeds of the few outweigh the enjoyment of the many.
http://www.computers.net/2007/02/artists_arent_s.html





Italian Record Companies Fume at Brit Reporting

It is illegal to file share in Italy, bloke says
Nick Farrell

RECORD COMPANIES are fuming at her Majesty's loyal press over the reporting of a recent court judgement in Rome.

The case against two file sharers from Turin Polytechnic who set up a P2P file-sharing network in 1994 was chucked out by the highest court in the land.

The criminal court in Rome ruled that it was not a crime to download computer files from such networks if there was no financial gain.

But a spokesman for the Record Companies, Alex Jacob got on the blower pointing out that the case does not set a precedent, because Italy has since changed its laws.

The court ruling was made on a case brought in 1999 under copyright legislation that has since been updated. The law changed when Italy implemented the European Copyright Directive and the Urbani Decree in 2004.

"Despite what the press have told us, under the revised copyright law that is in force today, unauthorised uploading and downloading are illegal," Jacob said. Unauthorised downloading is subject to a fine, while unauthorised uploading is a criminal offence.

Under Roman law the penalty for piracy was crucifixion.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37406





German FBI: Keep Downloading Music!
Jank0

The De:Bug blog has a funny story today that shows how much police officers in Germany care about file sharing. Not much at all, apparently.

German internet users have been tormented by a new wave of trojan horse E-Mail spam lately. The messages pretend to come from the German federal police, which is known as the BKA, and warn their recipients that they have been caught using P2P networks to download movies, music or software. The message goes on stating that the recipient's ISP is informed and he or she will face persecution and possibly jailtime of up to five years.

One German Bittorrent user apparently got this message when he came home from a party slightly intoxicated. He panicked and decided to call up the number that was mentioned in the spam mail right away - even tho it was already 11pm.

Turns out, the number was real, and the BKA is having some nice folks doing their night shifts. The officer who picked up the phone explained that the e-mail was bogus and that there wasn't any case, which is why he gave the caller some friendly advice: "Just keep downloading music!"
http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-241.html





Holland Considers Banning DRM, Legalizing Filesharing
Ernesto

Last year the Dutch tried to tax all MP3 players, but that proposal didn’t make it into law. But not to worry, they have other brilliant ideas. Earlier this week, Dutch politicians suggested that it might be a good idea to tax Internet traffic, and use this money to compensate the music industry. This, under the condition that DRM is abandoned, and people can’t be charged for downloads. Say what?

Recently Dutch Record Companies decided to no longer use copy protection on CDs because the costs didn’t outweigh the benefits. Politicians are now looking for alternative ways to compensate the Music Industry.

Martijn van Dam, a member of one of the bigger political parties in The Netherlands said, “Taxing Internet traffic is great way to compensate the Music Industry for the loss in sales by illegal filesharing”. He added that a prerequisite would be that DRM and copy protection should be abandoned. The battle against piracy is lost according to Van Dam, he says that the Music Industry has to accept that their products will be traded over the internet.

Surprisingly, Van Dam is not alone in this. Nicolien van Vroonhoven, a politician from the leading party (CDA) in the Netherlands, also thinks that this pirate tax would be a good idea. She adds that this could only work if people can’t be charged for downloading music anymore.

The statements (Dutch source) from these leading politicians basically say that piracy should be condoned, as long as Internet traffic is taxed. Although the (hypothetical) model might sound appealing to some, it is not very practical. First of all, illegal music downloads are just a small percentage of all files that are swapped illegally. What about movies and software, will those companies be compensated too? And an ever bigger problem, these politicians seem to assume that all internet traffic is generated by illegal downloads. What about sites like YouTube, or software, music and videos that are released for free? These all generate a lot of traffic, but have nothing to do with piracy.

A bad idea if you ask me. It is good to see that politicians are exploring alternative methods to overcome piracy, but this one is quite ridiculous. This clearly shows how alienated politicians sometimes are from the real (or virtual) world.
http://torrentfreak.com/holland-cons...g-filesharing/





Not valid until it’s in the paper?

Bloggers Living in a Virtual Reality, Professor Says

Bloggers are living in a world where emotions may be real but everything else is make-believe, says a University of Calgary professor in a new book.

Blogs, short for web logs, are everywhere on the internet these days and often reveal the innermost feelings of individuals who hate their jobs, activists with a political cause or even angst-ridden teenagers in the throes of first love. The popularity of sites such as MySpace.com, which contains thousands of blogs, is a testament to the world of self-expression.

But Michael Keren, who has written Blogosphere: The New Political Arena, suggests individuals who bare their souls in blogs are isolated and lonely, living in a virtual reality instead of forming real relationships or helping to change the world.

"Bloggers think of themselves as rebels against mainstream society, but that rebellion is mostly confined to cyberspace, which makes blogging as melancholic and illusionary as Don Quixote tilting at windmills," the author said.

Unrealistic expectations

Keren, who teaches in the faculty of communication and culture, spoke to reporters Tuesday at The Loft, a student cybercafe at the university, where many students were busily typing away on laptops — perhaps updating blogs of their own.

"In this world of blogging, which the whole world can read, you have a personal expectation about a readership that's just not there for the millions of bloggers who are writing their personal feelings," he said.

Keren praised the internet as a great place for self-expression, but he also suggested that blogs often create feelings of loneliness for those who aren't lucky enough to reach "celebrity" status.

"Many of us end up like Father McKenzie in the Eleanor Rigby Beatles song, who is writing a sermon that no one is going to hear," he suggested. "Some of us are going to be embraced by the mainstream media, but the majority of us remain in the dark, remain in the loneliness."

In his book, Keren follows the blogs of nine individuals, including a Canadian woman living in the woods in a cabin in Quebec. She discusses her identity through stories about her two cats.

"One day one of the cats dies and the whole blogosphere becomes crazy about the death of this cat, and what happens is she gets a community of support which is not real," Keren said. "These are people with nicknames who express enormous support, but they can disappear in the next minute and they are not real, and she remains lonely in the end."

Controversial views

Keren's view of the blogosphere is not shared by everyone.

"That's harsh," declared Arian Hopkins, 36, of Calgary, who has a spot on MySpace.com.

Hopkins said the web, along with community portals and blogsites, has become a great tool for Generation Y to spout on everything from "how much they hate their mom to the best show that is out there."

Saying bloggers are lonely and living in a make-believe world is unfair, she said.

"I don't think it's based on these poor people who are so lonely and sad. I don't think that's really fair, because it's being used in all sorts of mediums," said Hopkins, a business analyst for TransCanada Pipelines.

Living in a make-believe world can help some people deal with loneliness, she suggested.

"There are these crazy relationships that are happening online from people getting to know people through their blogs. Who cares if they're not real people?" the mother of three said. "Bloggers tend to be a little more extroverted. They say, 'I have a story and want you to hear it.' It's kind of like my story is as important as everybody else's."

Fellow blogger Peter Leveque agreed.

"I would disagree with anyone whose thesis is that people who blog are lonely outcasts," the Calgary lawyer wrote in an e-mail. "I expect bloggers are like everyone else and come from all walks of life with all sorts of different interests.

"But what do I know? Not much, likely."
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...tech-blog.html





YouTimes?

New York Times to Post User-Generated Content
Ken Schachter

The New York Times, the gray lady of establishment journalism, plans to begin posting user-generated video in March, an executive said Wednesday.

Speaking in a panel discussion at the SIIA Information Industry Summit in New York City, Times executive Nicholas Ascheim said that developing video content is costly.

“The most expensive thing is the journalists themselves. That’s why user-generated content is interesting,” said Mr. Ascheim, director of entertainment for video and audio at New York Times Digital.

Another panel member, Cyrus Krohn, is director of content production at Yahoo Media Group. Yahoo commissioned a solo reporter, Kevin Sites, to report from global hot spots. But Mr. Krohn said the Internet company also is seeking to work out a “micropayment” system for compensating non-professionals for content submissions.

Without offering any details, Mr. Krohn also said that Yahoo planned to roll out a “different approach to news telling” around the end of March.

The Times launched a video player in November 2005, he said, and now has eight video journalists. Still, he acknowledged that amassing an audience for video has been daunting.

One notable success, Mr. Ascheim said, was a before-death video obituary with Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald.

The Times has conducted interviews with notable figures in advance of their deaths for years. The innovation was putting it on video.

“Hi. I’m Art Buchwald and I just died,” Mr. Ascheim quoted. “When you see it, it’s a no-brainer.”

Also on the panel were Randy Kilgore, chief revenue officer, Tremor Media, and moderator Jon Friedman, a Marketwatch.com columnist.

Mr. Ascheim also said that The Times no longer seeks to shackle its videos to in-house sites.

“We’re comfortable about embedding our video on other sites now,” he said. “Amassing an audience to make a business out of this on your own site is probably not a reality.”

Ultimately, will The Times abandon newsprint and become an online publication?

Mr. Ascheim said print has some advantages such as being easily navigable and highly portable. He said that a portable Times will exist in the future. “The question is whether it will be printed on trees,” he said.
http://www.redherring.com/Article.as...ed=YouTimes%3f





NY Times Publisher: Our Goal is to Manage the Transition from Print to Internet
Eytan Avriel

Despite his personal fortune and impressive lineage, Arthur Sulzberger, owner, chairman and publisher of the most respected newspaper in the world, is a stressed man.

Why would the man behind the New York Times be stressed? Well, profits from the paper have been declining for four years, and the Times company's market cap has been shrinking, too. Its share lags far behind the benchmark, and just last week, the group Sulzberger leads admitted suffering a $570 million loss because of write offs and losses at the Boston Globe.

As if that weren't enough, his personal bank, Morgan Stanley, recently set out on a campaign that could cost the man control over the paper.

All this may explain why Sulzberger does not talk with the press.

But perhaps the rarified alpine air at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, which ended last week, relaxes the CEOs of the world's leading companies. And what began as a casual chat ended in a fascinating glimpse into Sulzberger's world, and how he sees the future of the news business.

Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?

"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either," he says.

Sulzberger is focusing on how to best manage the transition from print to Internet.

"The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we're leading there," he points out.

The Times, in fact, has doubled its online readership to 1.5 million a day to go along with its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition.

Sulzberger says the New York Times is on a journey that will conclude the day the company decides to stop printing the paper. That will mark the end of the transition. It's a long journey, and there will be bumps on the road, says the man at the driving wheel, but he doesn't see a black void ahead.

Asked if local papers have a future, Sulzberger points out that the New York Times is not a local paper, but rather a national one based in New York that enjoys more readers from outside, than within, the city.

Classifieds have long been a major source of income to the press, but the business is moving to the Internet.

Sulzberger agrees, but what papers lose, Web sites gain. Media groups can develop their online advertising business, he explains. Also, because Internet advertising doesn't involve paper, ink and distribution, companies can earn the same amount of money even if it receives less advertising revenue.

Really? What about the costs of development and computerization?

"These costs aren't anywhere near what print costs," Sulzberger says. "The last time we made a major investment in print, it cost no less than $1 billion. Site development costs don't grow to that magnitude."

The New York Times recently merged its print and online news desks. Did it go smoothly, or were there ruffled feathers? Which team is leading the way today?

"You know what a newspaper's news desk is like? It's like the emergency room at a hospital, or an office in the military. Both organizations are very goal-oriented, and both are very hard to change," Sulzberger says.

Once change begins, it happens quickly, so the transition was difficult, he says. "But once the journalists grasped the concept, they flipped and embraced it, and supported the move." That included veteran managers, too.

How are you preparing for changes to the paper that are dictated by the Internet?

"We live in the Internet world. We have, for example, five people working in a special development unit whose only job is to initiate and develop things related to the electronic world - Internet, cellular, whatever comes.

The average age of readers of the New York Times print edition is 42, Sulzberger says, and that hasn't changed in 10 years. The average age of readers of its Internet edition is 37, which shows that the group is also managing to recruit young readers for both the printed version and Web site.

Also, the Times signed a deal with Microsoft to distribute the paper through a software program called Times Reader, Sulzberger says. The software enables users to conveniently read the paper on screens, mainly laptops. "I very much believe that the experience of reading a paper can be transfered to these new devices."

Will it be free?

No, Sulzberger says. If you want to read the New York Times online, you will have to pay.

In the age of bloggers, what is the future of online newspapers and the profession in general? There are millions of bloggers out there, and if the Times forgets who and what they are, it will lose the war, and rightly so, according to Sulzberger. "We are curators, curators of news. People don't click onto the New York Times to read blogs. They want reliable news that they can trust," he says.

"We aren't ignoring what's happening. We understand that the newspaper is not the focal point of city life as it was 10 years ago.

"Once upon a time, people had to read the paper to find out what was going on in theater. Today there are hundreds of forums and sites with that information," he says. "But the paper can integrate material from bloggers and external writers. We need to be part of that community and to have dialogue with the online world."

And while on community, the scandal about Jayson Blair, the reporter caught plagiarizing and fabricating, hurt the brand, not the business, he says. Blair was forced to quit in May 2003.

You're one of the few papers that continues to print on broadsheet, which people consider to be too big and clumsy. Until when?

"Until when? The New York Times has no intention of changing that," Sulzberger promises. At any rate, transitioning from broadsheet to tabloid would be prohibitively expensive, he says.

Do you feel that the newspaper world is weakening? Are advertisers pressing harder for better deals?

"Advertisers always press harder for better deals and influence over content," Sulzberger says. But the New York Times has nothing to apologize for and no reason to fold, "as long as I'm sure that what we wrote and what we're about to write is right."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/822775.html





Tribune 4Q Profit Soars 81 Percent on Gains, Higher Revenue
Dave Carpenter

Tribune Co., which has been fielding offers for its newspaper and broadcasting operations, said Thursday its fourth-quarter profit surged 81 percent, benefiting from multiple gains and higher revenue.

The results exceeded Wall Street's expectations but Tribune's stock rose only slightly in morning trading.

The media company reiterated that it will announce a decision this quarter on a plan to increase shareholder value but said it had no further comment on specifics of that process.

"The process has been rigorous, thorough, and as you might imagine we look forward to its completion so we can spend 100 percent of our time focused on the future," Chairman and CEO Dennis FitzSimons said on a conference call.

Net income after paying preferred dividends jumped to $239.1 million, or 99 cents per share, from $132.3 million, or 43 cents per share, during the same period a year earlier.

The 2006 quarter included charges of 3 cents a share for job cuts and to shut down its Los Angeles Times San Fernando Valley printing facility, as well as gains totaling 31 cents a share on the sale of Tribune's corporate airplane, its phones segment and related Time Warner investment, as well as on the sale of the company's investment in BrassRing.

Tribune also saw a $33 million favorable income tax expense adjustment, mainly due to reaching an agreement with the Internal Revenue Service's appeals office on the deduction of interest expense on its phones segment.

Excluding items, the company earned 68 cents per share in the latest period. Analysts were expecting a profit of 61 cents per share, according to Thomson Financial. Those estimates typically exclude one-time items.

Quarterly revenue grew 5.4 percent to $1.47 billion from $1.39 billion in the previous year, beating Wall Street's estimate of $1.43 billion.

The company's newspaper or publishing division saw operating revenues rise 4 percent to $1.1 billion and operating profit increase 30 percent to $225 million. While classified ad revenue was flat for the quarter, advertising revenues as a whole rose 4 percent.

Broadcasting and entertainment's operating revenue gained 11 percent to $356 million.

"Key factors were improved results in broadcasting, strong interactive revenue growth, and excellent expense control throughout the company," FitzSimons said in a statement.

He said on the conference call that Tribune is implementing initiatives throughout the company that will put it over its $200 million goal for cost savings for 2007 and 2008.

For the full year, Tribune earned $587.7 million, or $2.14 a share, up from $522.3 million, or $1.67 a share, a year ago. Revenue for the year rose to $5.52 billion from $5.51 billion.

Tribune owns 11 newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, along with 23 television stations and the Chicago Cubs baseball team.

In Connecticut, Tribune owns The Hartford Courant, Greenwich Time and The Advocate of Stamford newspapers, along with television stations WTIC and WTXX.

Shares in the company rose 6 cents to $31.01 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange, little-changed since Tribune put itself up for possible sale in September.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...02-08-10-21-00





Google Encounters Hurdles in Selling Radio Advertising
Miguel Helft

When Google acquired dMarc Broadcasting, a company whose software allows marketers to place ads on radio stations, for up to $1.24 billion early last year, it was seen as a clear sign of Google’s ambitions to extend its dominance over Internet advertising to other media.

Now, there are indications that Google Audio, as the company’s foray into radio advertising is known, has hit some snags. The two brothers who founded dMarc in 2002 have left Google amid growing speculation by analysts and radio and advertising executives that the Internet giant is finding it harder than expected to muscle its way into the radio business.

Industry insiders cite everything from culture clashes to resistance in the radio industry, which relies heavily on sales representatives, to automate its advertising systems. But the hurdle mentioned most often is Google’s apparent inability to secure enough air time, or inventory, to make its system attractive to advertisers.

“At a high level, dMarc and Google are both trying to move mountains and reshape traditional media,” said Jordan Rohan, an Internet analyst with RBC Capital Markets. “That’s not easy to do. If Google Audio were to be successful, it needs to have prime-time and drive-time inventory in major markets.”

Google, which began testing radio ads late last year, confirmed the departure of Chad and Ryan Steelberg, the dMarc founders, which was first reported on Thursday by paidContent.org, an industry blog. In a statement, the company said it was happy with the progress of the tests to date and remained committed to the audio business.

And during a conference call with analysts last week, Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president for product management at Google, said the radio test was “pretty robust in terms of scope.”

“I believe we had over 700 radio stations in more than 200 metros in the network,” Mr. Rosenberg said, according to a transcript of the call published by Thomson Financial.

But radio analysts said that they were not impressed by the numbers themselves, stressing that Google’s access to air time may be limited, by and large, to what the industry calls “remnant inventory” — ad time sold at the last minute and at low prices.

Many analysts say that Google has been trying to sign a large inventory deal with CBS Radio, whose network of 147 radio stations is among the largest in the country, but that negotiations have taken longer than expected and no deal has been announced yet.

A spokeswoman for CBS Radio declined to comment. Ryan Steelberg did not respond to an e-mail message and phone calls seeking comment, and Chad Steelberg could not be reached for comment.

Google’s success in radio is important, in part, because the company’s lofty valuation is partly based on investors’ expectations that it will be able to expand beyond its core Internet advertising business to media like radio, newspapers and even television.

Success is important for the Steelbergs, too. Google paid $102 million in cash for dMarc, and agreed to pay as much as $1.14 billion over three years, depending on how well the company meets certain performance targets.

Google’s relationship with one radio network suggests that speculation about its inventory problems is accurate and that the company faces challenging negotiations with others besides CBS.

During a conference call with analysts last month, Rick Cummings, president of Emmis Radio, described the airtime it had made available to Google as “remnant inventory.” Emmis owns 23 stations in major markets and was one of the first radio networks to work with dMarc.

“The Google folks have expressed an interest in doing more business with us and in some prime inventory,” said Mr. Cummings, according to a transcript of the call. “We’ve said we’re happy to discuss it so long as the money is there and the price is right. That remains to be seen. That’s really up to them.”

Analysts say they expect Google will eventually find a way to make deeper inroads into radio.

“I would assume that someone in the industry will eventually sell Google some inventory,” said Jonathan Jacoby, a broadcasting analyst with Banc of America Securities. In a note to investors, however, Mr. Jacoby said it was possible that “the management disruption at dMarc could slow the march toward online radio selling.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/te.../10google.html





Cronkite: Media Profit Goals Threaten Democracy
Anick Jesdanun

Pressures by media companies to generate ever-greater profits are threatening the very freedom the nation was built upon, former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite warned Thursday.

In a keynote address at Columbia University, Cronkite said today's journalists face greater challenges than those from his generation.

No longer could journalists count on their employers to provide the necessary resources, he said, "to expose truths that powerful politicians and special interests often did not want exposed."

Instead, he said, "they face rounds and rounds of job cuts and cost cuts that require them to do ever more with ever less."

"In this information age and the very complicated world in which we live today, the need for high-quality reporting is greater than ever," he told journalism students and professionals at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. "It's not just the journalist's job at risk here. It's American democracy. It is freedom."

Cronkite said news accuracy has declined because of consolidations and closures that have left many American towns with only one newspaper. As broadcasters cut budgets and air time for news, he said, "we're all left with a sound-bite culture that turns political campaigns into political theater."

The former anchor urged owners of media companies -- newspapers and broadcast alike -- to recognize they have special civil responsibilities.

"Consolidation and cost cutting may be good for the bottom line in the short term, but that isn't necessarily good for the country or the health of the news business in the long term," he said.

Michael Copps, a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, later said that looser broadcast regulations -- such as those that had required stations to regularly prove they serve the community interest -- have resulted in less local coverage, less diversity of opinion and fewer jobs for journalists during the past quarter-century.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/busin...ness-headlines





The Wizards of Buzz

A new kind of Web site is turning ordinary people into hidden influencers, shaping what we read, watch and buy.
Jamin Warren and John Jurgensen

This winter, many parents across the country are sitting on the floor with slabs of cardboard, box cutters and special rivets, and building pirate ships for their kids. How did this happen? Thank 45-year-old Cliff Worthington.

An English teacher in Osaka, Japan, he mentioned the box projects on a popular Web site called Digg.com. Soon, supplies of the rivets needed to make them sold out at MrMcGroovys.com.

"It would have taken me a year to sell that many rivets," says Andy McGrew, owner of Mr. McGroovy's, which offers free blueprints for the homemade pirate ships and other projects.

The next time you visit a buzzy Web site, see a funny video clip online or read an unusual take on the news, chances are you owe it to someone like Mr. Worthington. A new generation of hidden influencers is taking root online, fueled by a growing love affair among Web sites with letting users vote on their favorite submissions. These sites are the next wave in the social-networking craze -- popularized by MySpace and Facebook. Digg is one of the most prominent of these sites, which are variously labeled social bookmarking or social news. Others include Reddit.com (recently purchased by Condé Nast), Del.icio.us (bought by Yahoo), Newsvine.com and StumbleUpon.com. Netscape relaunched last June with a similar format.

The opinions of these key users have implications for advertisers shelling out money for Internet ads, trend watchers trying to understand what's cool among young people, and companies whose products or services get plucked for notice. It's even sparking a new form of payola, as marketers try to buy votes.WSJ.COM PODCAST

It's also giving rise to an obsessive subculture of ordinary but surprisingly influential people who, usually without pay and purely for the thrill of it, are trolling cyberspace for news and ideas to share with their network. They include people like 18-year-old Smaran Dayal, a high-school student who submits some 40 stories a week on Digg and has become a go-to source there for news about Apple. Diane Put, a nutritionist in Idyllwild, Calif., known to Netscape users by her handle, "idyll," has become a major source for health-related news on that site, which is viewed by more than 1.9 million people daily. A Reddit user known for scoping out striking images on the Web, Amardeep Sahota recently helped drive about 100,000 unique visitors to one amateur photographer's site.

Most sites are based on a voting model. Members look around the Web for interesting items, such as video clips, blog entries or news articles. A member then writes a catchy description and posts it, along with a link to the material, on the site, in hopes that other members find it just as interesting and show their approval with an electronic thumbs-up vote. Items that receive enough votes rise in the rankings and appear on the front page, which can be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. When an item is submitted by a popular or influential member -- one whose postings are closely followed by fellow members -- it can have a much better shot at making the front page.

Marketers and the merely curious have long tried to pin down how phenomena from Beanie Babies to cardio-boxing get popular. Sites like Reddit and Digg now raise the possibility that you can home in on the specific people who generated the early -- or, in some cases, the first -- buzz. But identifying these influencers is complicated.


WHERE TO FIND THE IN CROWD

Below, some of the main social bookmarking sites on the Web now.

Digg: One of the largest social-media sites in terms of submissions, San Francisco-based Digg.com launched in late 2004 and now has about 900,000 registered users and 20 million visitors monthly, the site says. Digg's content leans heavily on technology and science, but to help broaden its appeal, the site recently added new sections for entertainment and podcasts.

Reddit: Reddit works similarly to Digg, with people submitting stories and the wider community voting on them. The submitter receives one "karma" point for each positive vote and loses one for each negative vote. Condé Nast's Wired Digital acquired the Cambridge, Mass., company in October.

StumbleUpon: Unlike most other social-media sites, StumbleUpon requires users to download a toolbar onto their Web browsers. Click the "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" buttons when you visit a site you like or don't like and it will automatically post it to your page on StumbleUpon.com. You can also click "Stumble" on the toolbar and be redirected to a site another user has voted on that matches your interests.

Del.icio.us: Del.icio.us is essentially a database of users' bookmarked sites. The more other users bookmark a site, the more popular it becomes, and the more likely it is to land on the "hotlist" page. Started in 2003, Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo in 2005.

Newsvine: Seattle-based Newsvine launched last March with a focus on what has become known as "citizen journalism," amateurs reporting on the news. Users post links they think are interesting, and also post their own articles and opinion pieces, on which others in the community can then submit comments.

Netscape: One of the first major Web browsers, Netscape relaunched last June as a social news site similar to Digg. A unit of AOL, it caused a stir last year when it began wooing top users from other social-media sites and paid these "navigators" $1,000 a month to submit links.


To find the key influencers, The Wall Street Journal analyzed more than 25,000 submissions across six major sites. With the help of Dapper, a company that designs software to track information published on the Web, this analysis sifted through snapshots of the sites' home pages every 30 minutes over three weeks. The data included which users posted the submissions and the number of votes each received from fellow users. We then contacted scores of individual users to find which ones are tracked by the wider community.

Though it can take hundreds or thousands of votes to make it onto the hot list at these sites, the Journal's analysis found that a substantial number of submissions originated with a handful of users. At Digg, which has 900,000 registered users, 30 people were responsible for submitting one-third of postings on the home page. At Netscape.com, a single user named "STONERS" -- in real life, computer programmer Ed Southwood of Dayton, Ohio -- was behind fully 217 stories over the two-week period, or 13% of all stories that reached the most popular list. (Netscape, which gained fame with its namesake browser, is now owned by Time Warner's AOL unit and operates a news site.)

On Reddit, one of the most influential users is 12-year-old Adam Fuhrer. At his desktop computer in his parents' home in the quiet northern Toronto suburb of Thornhill, Mr. Fuhrer monitors more than 100 Web sites looking for news on criminal justice, software releases -- and the Toronto Maple Leafs, his favorite hockey team. When Microsoft launched its Vista operating system this year, he submitted stories that discussed its security flaws and price tag, which attracted approving votes from more than 500 users.

Besides an electric guitar and an iPod, "my favorite thing in the whole world is my computer," says Mr. Fuhrer, who has lately also been studying for his bar mitzvah in June. In spite of a content filter his parents use to block him from viewing certain sites (including YouTube), he has managed to consistently make it onto the list of Reddit's highest performers.

"I watch my son's page while I'm at work," says his father, Gerald Fuhrer, and "gush about his achievements to my co-workers."

Pulling back the curtain on these hidden influencers is a controversial subject. Many of these sites say it can heighten the risk of payola and attempts to game the system. Last summer, some bloggers posted accusations that a cabal of top Digg users were banding together to vote for one another's stories, thereby boosting their profiles.

Payola schemes depend on the voting system these sites employ. Some marketing companies promise clients they can get a client front-page exposure on Digg or one of the other social-bookmarking sites in exchange for a fee, according to marketers. To deliver on that promise, the company then recruits members at the site, offering to pay them for thumbs-up votes on the posting that links to the client. If enough paid-off members all vote for that posting, it could theoretically push the client's link onto the front, where it receives wide exposure. Digg and other sites say their systems have safeguards that can detect concerted attempts.

Ground zero of this cat-and-mouse game is the headquarters of Digg in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood. Here, dedicated site monitors track every submission that comes in, looking for restricted content and evidence of users colluding to drive up an entry's popularity or plugging services for pay. Jay Adelson, Digg's 36-year-old co-founder and chief executive, says refining the algorithms that analyze users' votes and determines a submission's popularity rank is a constant process.

Last week, Digg took a more dramatic step, pulling down the user rankings that had served as a prod to people on the site to post their best findings. "It became a target for those trying to manipulate the system," Mr. Adelson says.

On the other side of this battle are companies like User/Submitter.com. The site promises to pay users "easy money" for "digging," or voting on, links on Digg.com. Its offer is simple: Pay User/Submitter $1 for every "digg," or vote, you request and in turn it'll pay a user. Users can earn 50 cents for every three "diggs," and User/Submitter pockets the difference. At any given time, a top submission on Digg has anywhere from 800 to 3,000 votes, meaning a successful campaign could cost thousands of dollars. When contacted by the Journal, representatives of User/Submitter.com declined to identify themselves but said the company has successfully placed items on Digg's home page on behalf of its clients.

In December, Digg user Karim Yergaliyev was banned from the site after submitting a link to Jetnumbers, an international phone service provider. Other users who said they were offered compensation by the company to plug it -- but didn't accept -- had previously notified Digg of the offer. Mr. Yergaliyev, who uses the name "supernova17" online, says he didn't actually receive any compensation from the company. Digg agreed to reinstate him. Jetnumbers says it offered a free trial to 30 Digg users in exchange for a mention on the site. "It's my job to get our name out," says Nathan Schorr, business development manager for the company.

Though these sites are undeniably popular, there's ongoing debate about whether the model of filtering content through voting ultimately will pose a challenge to traditional media. Some say the voting-site approach can more quickly distill what's important for busy readers.

But critics say it's simply an aggregate of borrowed content and links to a relatively small pool of blogs. And while they sometimes drive traffic to Web sites that are spotlighted, the spike can be temporary. "Influence implies that I can change your mind and they're not necessarily doing that," says Duncan Watts, a professor of sociology at Columbia University.

For 17-year-old Henry Wang, the job of finding compelling information for Digg's 20 million monthly users starts when tennis practice ends. Mr. Wang, a senior at Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, Ill., says he spends three hours a day doing his Digg work, and highlighted his success on the site -- at one point, he was ranked the No. 2 user -- on his college applications.

After first posting some duds, three months after joining he says he finally figured out what works: Focus primarily on science and technology, fields that a bigger percentage of Digg users are naturally interested in, but throw in the occasional oddball story to stand out. His link to a site that explains the formula behind randomness in computer science earned more than 600 Diggs and a spot on the front page. His next post, a visual comparison of the diameter between objects (protons vs. electrons, among others), also rose quickly.

Last year, Mr. Wang took his skills to Netscape, which pays him $1,000 a month to do what he was already doing for free elsewhere. It's his first paying job. Mr. Wang says he doesn't talk about the gig with his friends very often because he doesn't want to rub it in: "They're working long hours at Starbucks and I'm at the computer all day."

One site that says it has a lot to thank Henry Wang for is Famster.com. Similar to MySpace.com but aimed primarily at families, Famster allows people to set up their own sites to keep track of everything from photos to family trees and blog entries. When it went live on August 7 of last year, the site says it had only a trickle of visitors.

Five days later, Mr. Wang posted a link to it on Digg, with the comment, "I can't believe that this site isn't widely known, even with all its features: share photos, stream videos, create a blog, upload files, keep track of RSS feeds... all in Flash? and for free? Ridiculous." More than 1,700 users voted on the link, driving traffic to Famster up to 50,000 unique visitors per day during the week it was on Digg's home page. "I was in awe," says Bryan Opfer, the site's chief technology officer.
***
The Influencers

A look at some of the hidden influencers deciding what is popular on the Internet.

Social Issues

PAMELA DREW/"Pamela Drew"
POSTS ON: Newsvine
WHO SHE IS: A mother of three in New York
HOW SHE DOES IT: She spends at least two hours a day looking for stories about genetically modified foods, which she says isn't covered enough in the media. Her opinionated articles have fueled her reputation; 272 of her postings have been particularly well-received.

DIANE PUT/"idyll"
POSTS ON: Netscape/Reddit
WHO SHE IS: A nutritionist in Idyllwild, Calif., who tracks health issues
HOW SHE DOES IT: Ms. Put got her first taste of social networking in 1988 when she joined "The Well," an early online community. She is now ranked 10th on the top-user list. "I got addicted to the vote," she says about her involvement.

KARIM YERGALIYEV/"supernova17"
POSTS ON: Digg
WHO HE IS: An information-systems major at the University of Maryland
HOW HE DOES IT: While many users rely on hundreds of sites for stories, Mr. Yergaliyav says he only monitors about 20, including mainstream ones like Business Week and ESPN. He checks his sites once in the early morning and again after lunch so he doesn't miss any updates.

DEREK VAN VLIET/"BloodJunkie"
POSTS ON: Netscape
WHO HE IS: A 27-year-old computer programmer
HOW HE DOES IT: At Digg, Mr. Van Vliet says he cultivated friendships with other users, which helped drive interest in his postings: That renown earned him a place at Netscape, where he now gets paid to post links.

Technology

HENRY WANG/"dirtyfratboy"
POSTS ON: Digg/Netscape
WHO HE IS: A high-school senior and varsity tennis player outside of Chicago
HOW HE DOES IT: In August, Mr. Wang posted a link to a new social-networking site Famster, saying, "I can't believe this site isn't widely known." The link got 1,700 votes and bumped Famster's daily visits to 50,000 in a day.

CLIFF WORTHINGTON/"CLIFFosakaJAPAN"
POSTS ON: Digg
WHO HE IS: A 45-year-old English teacher in Osaka, Japan
HOW HE DOES IT: Living in Osaka -- in a time zone 14 hours ahead of many Digg users -- gives him an edge on breaking news. He posts news about Apple and calls Digg's decision to yank its leaderboard "a slap in the face."

BLAKE REITZAMMER/"fatmike"
POSTS ON: Digg
WHO HE IS: A computer consultant in Miami
HOW HE DOES IT: Since joining in June 2006, he's submitted more than 3,000 links -- or roughly 100 every week. Microsoft is a pet topic.

NEIL PATEL
POSTS ON: Digg
WHO HE IS: A college senior and chief technology officer of an Internet-marketing company
HOW HE DOES IT: "Sometimes I overthink it," he says about his habit of studying a site before posting it. With so many people now using Digg, Mr. Patel says it's getting harder for him to discover a site first.

SMARAN DAYAL/"koregaonpark"
POSTS ON: Digg
WHO HE IS: An 18-year-old avid video gamer in Pune, India
HOW HE DOES IT: For the rabid Apple fans who populate the Internet and feed sites like AppleInsider.com, Mr. Dayal is something of a expert. He's often the first to pick up on issues affecting Apple, from controversy over music licensing to proposed legislation to ban iPods on city streets.

Breaking News

CHRISTOPHER THOMAS/"Killfile"
POSTS ON: Newsvine
WHO HE IS: A self-proclaimed "news hound" and the site's top user
HOW HE DOES IT: He subscribes to dozens of RSS feeds and constantly checks major media sites here and abroad. He submits around noon "to take advantage of the lunch rush hour," and as a "citizen journalist," was one of the first to report a story on an August 2006 Virginia shooting.

CURTISS THOMPSON/"curtissthompson"
POSTS ON: Digg
WHO HE IS: A 19-year-old college student
HOW HE DOES IT: Technology news was an easy choice for Mr. Thompson, a computer-science major. He watches sites like CNET closely for the latest developments about digital music and podcasts.

ED SOUTHWOOD/"STONERS"
POSTS ON: Netscape
WHO HE IS: A computer programmer in Dayton, Ohio
HOW HE DOES IT: In our analysis, more than 200 of Mr. Southwood's stories made it to the front page, accounting for 12% of all popular submissions.

MARK JOHNSON/"aidenag"
POSTS ON: Digg/Netscape
WHO HE IS: A photographer in Seattle
HOW HE DOES IT: Working out of his home office, Mr. Johnson says he goes through 2,000 Web sites a day looking for the coolest news on left-leaning politics and science. He says he got some help from user Mr. Van Vliet, whom he emailed shortly after joining Digg for tips on how to boost his popularity.

Video/Photography

JEFF HOARD/"Fedquip"
POSTS ON: Del.icio.us/Reddit/Netscape
WHO HE IS: A 25-year-old worker in a shipping warehouse in Victoria, British Columbia
HOW HE DOES IT: He got a Netscape contract after becoming a top user on Reddit, which he says he joined to draw attention to his site, ThrowAwayYourTV.com, a clearinghouse for video clips.

PAMELA THILO/ "anonymgrl"
POSTS ON: Reddit
WHO SHE IS: A part-time Montessori school teacher from Cambridge, Mass., who helps run a small independent record label.
HOW SHE DOES IT: She submits political and science news -- discovered over morning coffee or evenings at work -- but says photos and videos can be a surer way to hit the home page. Her strategy for finding videos: revisiting YouTube users who've had hits in the past to see what clips they've uploaded lately.

ILCIN TURKKAN/ "Tutto"
POSTS ON: StumbleUpon
WHO HE IS: Originally from Turkey, he now lives in Bergamo, Italy, where he runs an antique-rug store
HOW HE DOES IT: While waiting for customers at his store, the photography enthusiast searches the Web for compelling images, ranging from the surreal and photoshopped to the stark and political. He says his postings are very mood dependent -- some days he'll post 30 photos, some days none.

Culture

ADAM FUHRER
POSTS ON: Reddit
WHO HE IS: A 12-year-old hockey fan in Toronto
HOW HE DOES IT: Mr. Fuhrer has helped raise questions about whether electronic voting machines can be hacked, and the shortcomings of Microsoft's operating systems. His mother's content blocker prevents him from visiting sites like YouTube.

ANGUS FRASER/"angusf"
POSTS ON: Del.icio.us
WHO HE IS: A graduate student in film and television in Sydney, Australia
HOW HE DOES IT: Mr. Fraser has bookmarked more than 30,000 Web sites on his Del.icio.us page, more than any other user, according to the company. Because he joined Del.icio.us in its early stages, many of the sites he tagged first -- including a site that connects companies with freelancers, Elance.com -- have gone on to hit the "popular" page.

ELISE BAUER/"elisebauer"
POSTS ON: Del.icio.us
WHO SHE IS: A marketing consultant in Carmichael, Calif.
HOW SHE DOES IT: Ms. Bauer's bookmarks comprise hundreds of recipes on her food blog (some her own, and some discovered on other blogs), and make her somewhat of a maverick on this tech-heavy site.

MARK NUNES/"cineaste"
POSTS ON: StumbleUpon.com
WHO HE IS: A film lover in Chicago
HOW HE DOES IT: He searches for articles on foreign films, philosophy and religion, trying to find authors who are already popular. Anything by Richard Dawkins, he says, generates a lot of buzz.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article..._20080209.html





Microsoft Catches Heat Over Offer to Pay for Wikipedia Edit
AP

Microsoft Corp. landed in the Wikipedia doghouse Tuesday after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced internet encyclopedia site.

While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries. Paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no.

"We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach," Wales said.

Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft.

Spokesperson Catherine Brooker said she believed the articles were heavily written by people at IBM Corp., which is a big supporter of the open-source standard. IBM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Brooker said Microsoft had gotten nowhere in trying to flag the purported mistakes for Wikipedia's volunteer editors, so it sought an independent expert who could determine whether changes were necessary and enter them on Wikipedia. Brooker said Microsoft believed that having an independent source would be key in getting the changes to stick — that is, not having them overruled by other Wikipedia writers.

Brooker said Microsoft and the writer, Rick Jelliffe, had not determined a price and no money had changed hands — but they had agreed that the company would not be allowed to review his writing before submission. Brooker said Microsoft had never previously hired someone to influence a Wikipedia article.

Jelliffe, who is chief technical officer of a computing company based in Australia, did not return an e-mail seeking comment.

In a blog posting Monday, he described himself as a technical standards aficionado and not a Microsoft partisan. He said he was surprised to be approached by Microsoft but figured he'd accept the offer and review the Wikipedia articles because he considered it important to make sure technical standards processes were accurately described.

Wales said the proper course would have been for Microsoft to write or commission a "white paper" on the subject with its interpretation of the facts, post it to an outside website and then link to it in the Wikipedia articles' discussion forums.

"It seems like a much better, transparent, straightforward way," Wales said.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...-20070123.html





Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively
Noam Cohen

When a court-appointed special master last year rejected the claim of an Alabama couple that their daughter had suffered seizures after a vaccination, she explained her decision in part by referring to material from articles in Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia.

The reaction from the court above her, the United States Court of Federal Claims, was direct: the materials “culled from the Internet do not — at least on their face — meet” standards of reliability. The court reversed her decision.

Oddly, to cite the “pervasive, and for our purposes, disturbing series of disclaimers” concerning the site’s accuracy, the same Court of Federal Claims relied on an article called “Researching With Wikipedia” found — where else? — on Wikipedia. (The family has reached a settlement, their lawyer said.)

A simple search of published court decisions shows that Wikipedia is frequently cited by judges around the country, involving serious issues and the bizarre — such as a 2005 tax case before the Tennessee Court of Appeals concerning the definition of “beverage” that involved hundreds of thousands of dollars, and, just this week, a case in Federal District Court in Florida that involved the term “booty music” as played during a wet T-shirt contest.

More than 100 judicial rulings have relied on Wikipedia, beginning in 2004, including 13 from circuit courts of appeal, one step below the Supreme Court. (The Supreme Court thus far has never cited Wikipedia.)

“Wikipedia is a terrific resource,” said Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago. “Partly because it so convenient, it often has been updated recently and is very accurate.” But, he added: “It wouldn’t be right to use it in a critical issue. If the safety of a product is at issue, you wouldn’t look it up in Wikipedia.”

Judge Posner recently cited a Wikipedia article on Andrew Golota, whom he called the “world’s most colorful boxer,” about a drug case involving the fighter’s former trainer, a tangent with no connection to the issues before his court. He did so despite his own experience with Wikipedia, which included an erroneous mention of Ann Coulter, a conservative lightning rod, as being a former clerk of his.

“I have never met Ann Coulter,” he said, but added that he was heartened that the friend who spotted the error could fix it then and there.

That friend was Cass R. Sunstein, currently a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. “I love Wikipedia, but I don’t think it is yet time to cite it in judicial decisions,” he said, adding that “it doesn’t have quality control” He said he feared that “if judges use Wikipedia you might introduce opportunistic editing” to create articles that could influence the outcome of cases.

He added, however, that he could not fault a use like Judge Posner’s, which “seems too innocuous for a basis of criticism.”

Many citations by judges, often in footnotes, are like Judge Posner’s, beside the main judicial point, appear intended to show how hip and contemporary the judge is, reflecting Professor Sunstein’s suspicion, “that law clerks are using Wikipedia a great deal.”

The Supreme Court of Iowa cites Wikipedia to explain that “jungle juice” is “the name given to a mix of liquor that is usually served for the sole purpose of becoming intoxicated.” In the Florida case, the court noted that booty music has “a slightly higher dance tempo and occasional sexually explicit lyrical content.”

As opposed to these tangential references, Wikipedia has also been used for more significant facts.

Such cases include a Brooklyn surrogate court’s definition of the Jewish marriage ceremony and the Iowa Court of Appeals’ declaration that French is the official language of the Republic of Guinea. In 2004, the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Georgia, referred to a Wikipedia entry of the Department of Homeland Security’s threat levels in a ruling concerning magnetometer searches of antiwar protesters.

In a recent letter to The New York Law Journal, Kenneth H. Ryesky, a tax lawyer who teaches at Queens College and Yeshiva University, took exception to the practice, writing that “citation of an inherently unstable source such as Wikipedia can undermine the foundation not only of the judicial opinion in which Wikipedia is cited, but of the future briefs and judicial opinions which in turn use that judicial opinion as authority.”

Recognizing that concern, Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School who frequently writes about technology, said that he favored a system that captures in time online sources like Wikipedia, so that a reader sees the same material that the writer saw.

He said he used www.webcitation.org for the online citations in his amicus brief to the Supreme Court in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster Ltd., which “makes the particular reference a stable reference, and something someone can evaluate.”

Wikipedia is increasingly becoming the default reference for the curious. According to comScore Media Metrix, there were more than 38 million unique visitors to Wikipedia sites in December in the United States, making it the 13th most popular destination.

Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University Law School, saw this as crucial: “The most critical fact is public acceptance, including the litigants,” he said. “A judge should not use Wikipedia when the public is not prepared to accept it as authority.”

For now, Professor Gillers said, Wikipedia is best used for “soft facts” that are not central to the reasoning of a decision. All of which leads to the question, if a fact isn’t central to a judge’s ruling, why include it?

“Because you want your opinion to be readable,” said Professor Gillers. “You want to apply context. Judges will try to set the stage. There are background facts. You don’t have to include them. They are not determinitive. But they help the reader appreciate the context.”

He added, “The higher the court the more you want to do it. Why do judges cite Shakespeare or Kafka?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/te...ikipedia.html?





"Protected speech"

Web Attack on Surgeon Starts Battle
Dorsey Griffith and Ramon Coronado

Georgette Gilbert was at a low point in her life. At 33 and having recently broken up with a long-time boyfriend, she was feeling insecure about being single and looking older.

At least that's how the Sacramento-area woman describes her motives for undergoing facial plastic surgery on her Web site, www.mysurgerynightmare.com.

Dr. Jonathan Sykes, the UC Davis surgeon who performed the operation, believes that Gilbert's tale, as revealed online -- complete with before-and-after photographs -- is riddled with false and misleading statements and is defamatory. He filed a lawsuit to squelch Gilbert's online commentary.

Four years, several court filings and a medical malpractice lawsuit later, Gilbert's Web site is still up and running. Sykes, an author and frequent television commentator on cosmetic surgery, remains unhappy. And the self-expression revolution that is the Internet is emerging as a potential public relations threat to similarly high-profile professionals.

Late last month, a state appeals court sided with Gilbert on the defamation suit Sykes filed in an effort to shut down her Web site. The court said the Web site is protected free speech and that Sykes was fair game for public criticism because "he had placed himself in the spotlight on a topic of public interest."

Sykes told The Bee that he has written more than 100 articles and book chapters on plastic surgery and annually gives more than 200 lectures on the topic around the United States and the world.

The decision by the Sacramento-based 3rd District Court of Appeal may have ramifications for other kinds of professionals, some legal experts said.

"The opinion is good protection for consumers who want to express opinions about services they receive, but professionals who promote themselves may have this burden if they think they have been defamed," said First Amendment attorney Charity Kenyon.

Sykes' lawyer, Daniel L. Baxter, contends that doctors and other health care professionals will be left powerless to defend themselves, since they are bound by federal patient privacy laws.

Gilbert's attorney, William L. Brelsford, would not allow Gilbert to speak to The Bee because of her malpractice lawsuit.

On her Web site, Gilbert said she hadn't considered having plastic surgery until about three weeks before her appointment.

"I really liked how I looked, but I started to notice small changes that probably no one else noticed," she writes. "I never wanted to change my looks (sic) I just wanted to maintain what I had longer."

After consulting with Sykes, she said, she agreed to an operation in which the surgeon would lift her eyebrows (endoscopic brow lift), tighten the skin around her eyes (blepharoplasty), lift her cheeks and inject fat into her face to tighten skin and decrease wrinkles.

According to court documents, Gilbert "was extremely unhappy with the results, asserting that she could not fully close her eyes, her eyebrows were higher than she expected, one eyebrow was higher than the other and she had a permanently 'surprised' look on her face."

On her Web site, Gilbert posts before and after photographs of her face, the later one taken five months after the surgery.

"I was told by my doctor that this was a good result -- that I looked better after his surgery -- what do you think?" she asks Web site visitors.

Baxter contends that several statements and representations Gilbert made on the site were untrue or misleading, including her comment about the photographs.

Gilbert calls her decision to undergo facial plastic surgery "the biggest regret of my life," stating that she "didn't need five procedures and I had no idea what I was really getting myself into."

Baxter disputed the notion that Gilbert was an unwitting patient. In fact, he said, she "directed him to be very aggressive in carrying out the procedures."

Sykes, who spoke to The Bee by telephone from his UC Davis office, would not comment specifically about Gilbert's case except to say that her Web site has tainted some patients' opinions of him.

Speaking more generally, he said he never tells a patient what types of procedures to undergo, since cosmetic surgery is not a medical necessity.

He added that he commonly talks patients out of surgery, particularly those he deems to be impossible to satisfy or those who are emotionally unstable.

"They come to us with the complexity of issues, and our job is to ferret them out, to make sense of them and try to decide if we can please that patient," he said. "That is at least as challenging as the surgery itself."
http://www.sacbee.com/296/story/120266.html





Surveillance

The Brain Scan That Can Read People's Intentions

Call for ethical debate over possible use of new technology in interrogation
Ian Sample

A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act.

The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists' ability to probe people's minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future.

The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way.

"Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there's no way you could possibly tell is in there. It's like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall," said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study with colleagues at University College London and Oxford University.

The research builds on a series of recent studies in which brain imaging has been used to identify tell-tale activity linked to lying, violent behaviour and racial prejudice.

The latest work reveals the dramatic pace at which neuroscience is progressing, prompting the researchers to call for an urgent debate into the ethical issues surrounding future uses for the technology. If brain-reading can be refined, it could quickly be adopted to assist interrogations of criminals and terrorists, and even usher in a "Minority Report" era (as portrayed in the Steven Spielberg science fiction film of that name), where judgments are handed down before the law is broken on the strength of an incriminating brain scan.

"These techniques are emerging and we need an ethical debate about the implications, so that one day we're not surprised and overwhelmed and caught on the wrong foot by what they can do. These things are going to come to us in the next few years and we should really be prepared," Professor Haynes told the Guardian.

The use of brain scanners to judge whether people are likely to commit crimes is a contentious issue that society should tackle now, according to Prof Haynes. "We see the danger that this might become compulsory one day, but we have to be aware that if we prohibit it, we are also denying people who aren't going to commit any crime the possibility of proving their innocence."

During the study, the researchers asked volunteers to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers they were later shown on a screen.

Before the numbers flashed up, they were given a brain scan using a technique called functional magnetic imaging resonance. The researchers then used a software that had been designed to spot subtle differences in brain activity to predict the person's intentions with 70% accuracy.

The study revealed signatures of activity in a marble-sized part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex that changed when a person intended to add the numbers or subtract them.

Because brains differ so much, the scientists need a good idea of what a person's brain activity looks like when they are thinking something to be able to spot it in a scan, but researchers are already devising ways of deducing what patterns are associated with different thoughts.

Barbara Sahakian, a professor of neuro-psychology at Cambridge University, said the rapid advances in neuroscience had forced scientists in the field to set up their own neuroethics society late last year to consider the ramifications of their research.

"Do we want to become a 'Minority Report' society where we're preventing crimes that might not happen?," she asked. "For some of these techniques, it's just a matter of time. It is just another new technology that society has to come to terms with and use for the good, but we should discuss and debate it now because what we don't want is for it to leak into use in court willy nilly without people having thought about the consequences.

"A lot of neuroscientists in the field are very cautious and say we can't talk about reading individuals' minds, and right now that is very true, but we're moving ahead so rapidly, it's not going to be that long before we will be able to tell whether someone's making up a story, or whether someone intended to do a crime with a certain degree of certainty."

Professor Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist and director of the Medical Research Council, said: "We shouldn't go overboard about the power of these techniques at the moment, but what you can be absolutely sure of is that these will continue to roll out and we will have more and more ability to probe people's intentions, minds, background thoughts, hopes and emotions.

"Some of that is extremely desirable, because it will help with diagnosis, education and so on, but we need to be thinking the ethical issues through. It adds a whole new gloss to personal medical data and how it might be used."

The technology could also drive advances in brain-controlled computers and machinery to boost the quality of life for disabled people. Being able to read thoughts as they arise in a person's mind could lead to computers that allow people to operate email and the internet using thought alone, and write with word processors that can predict which word or sentence you want to type . The technology is also expected to lead to improvements in thought-controlled wheelchairs and artificial limbs that respond when a person imagines moving.

"You can imagine how tedious it is if you want to write a letter by using a cursor to pick out letters on a screen," said Prof Haynes. "It would be much better if you thought, 'I want to reply to this email', or, 'I'm thinking this word', and the computer can read that and understand what you want to do."

· FAQ: Mind reading

What have the scientists developed?
They have devised a system that analyses brain activity to work out a person's intentions before they have acted on them. More advanced versions may be able to read complex thoughts and even pick them up before the person is conscious of them.

How does it work?
The computer learns unique patterns of brain activity or signatures that correspond to different thoughts. It then scans the brain to look for these signatures and predicts what the person is thinking.

How could it be used?
It is expected to drive advances in brain-controlled computers, leading to artificial limbs and machinery that respond to thoughts. More advanced versions could be used to help interrogate criminals and assess prisoners before they are released. Controversially, they may be able to spot people who plan to commit crimes before they break the law.

What is next?
The researchers are honing the technique to distinguish between passing thoughts and genuine intentions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/st...009217,00.html





GOP Revives ISP-Tracking Legislation
Declan McCullagh

All Internet service providers would need to track their customers' online activities to aid police in future investigations under legislation introduced Tuesday as part of a Republican "law and order agenda."

Employees of any Internet provider who fail to store that information face fines and prison terms of up to one year, the bill says. The U.S. Justice Department could order the companies to store those records forever.

Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, called it a necessary anti-cybercrime measure. "The legislation introduced today will give law enforcement the tools it needs to find and prosecute criminals," he said in a statement.

A second requirement, also embedded in Smith's so-dubbed Safety Act (PDF), requires owners of sexually explicit Web sites to post warning labels on their pages or face imprisonment. This echoes, nearly word for word, a proposal from last year that was approved by a Senate committee but never made it to a floor vote.

Even though both requirements are central to a Republican-led effort, neither data retention nor Web labeling are that partisan. A Senate committee approved a telecommunications bill that included Web labeling by a 15-7 vote in June. And Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat, has been the most vocal proponent of data retention in the entire Congress.

Other bills in the Republicans' "law and order" agenda are related to terrorism, the death penalty, gangs, computer data breaches and drug trafficking.
ISP snooping timeline

In events that were first reported by CNET News.com, Bush administration officials have said Internet providers must keep track of what Americans are doing online. Here's the timeline:

June 2005: Justice Department officials quietly propose data retention rules.

December 2005: European Parliament votes for data retention of up to two years.

April 14, 2006: Data retention proposals surface in Colorado and the U.S. Congress.

April 20, 2006: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says data retention "must be addressed."

April 28, 2006: Democrat proposes data retention amendment.

May 16, 2006: Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner drafts data retention legislation but backs away from it two days later.

May 26, 2006: Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller meet with Internet and telecom companies.

October 17, 2006: FBI director calls for data retention.

January 18, 2007: Bush administration says it will approach Congress for data retention laws.

The legislative fusillade marks the renewal of a political tussle that began in earnest last April, when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called on Congress to target Internet providers with new regulations, which have been generally opposed by telecommunications companies and civil liberties organizations. CNET News.com was the first to report that the Bush administration has been pushing for such a rule privately since mid-2005.

Until this week, however, no formal bill had been introduced in the U.S. Congress.

Supporters of the proposal say it's necessary to help track criminals if police don't respond immediately to reports of illegal activity and the relevant logs are deleted by Internet providers. They cite cases of child molestation, for instance. Industry representatives respond by saying there's no evidence that Internet providers have dragged their feet when responding to subpoenas from law enforcement.

Details about data retention requirements would be left to Gonzales. At a minimum, the bill says, the regulations must require storing records "such as the name and address of the subscriber or registered user to whom an Internet Protocol address, user identification or telephone number was assigned, in order to permit compliance with court orders."

Because there is no limit on how broad the rules can be, Gonzales would be permitted to force Internet providers to keep logs of Web browsing, instant message exchanges, or e-mail conversations indefinitely. (The bill does not, however, explicitly cover search engines or Web hosting companies, which officials have talked about before as targets of regulation.)

That broad wording also would permit the records to be obtained by private litigants in noncriminal cases, such as divorces and employment disputes. That raises additional privacy concerns, civil libertarians say.

The American Civil Liberties Union is skeptical of data retention and Web labeling. "It's going to be very difficult for Web sites to know whether they fit into this," said ACLU legislative counsel Marv Johnson, referring to the labeling rules. "And then when you throw in the 'sexually explicit materials' definition, does that include safe-sex Web sites?"

"Preservation" vs. "Retention"
Currently, Internet service providers typically discard any log file that's no longer required for business reasons such as network monitoring, fraud prevention or billing disputes. Companies do, however, alter that general rule when contacted by police performing an investigation--a practice called data preservation.

A 1996 federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act regulates data preservation. It requires Internet providers to retain any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity."

Because Internet addresses remain a relatively scarce commodity, ISPs tend to allocate them to customers from a pool based on if a computer is in use at the time. (Two standard techniques used are the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet.)

In addition, Internet providers are required by another federal law to report child pornography sightings to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is in turn charged with forwarding that report to the appropriate police agency.

When adopting its data retention rules, the European Parliament approved U.K.-backed requirements saying that communications providers in its 25 member countries--several of which had enacted their own data retention laws already--must retain customer data for a minimum of six months and a maximum of two years.

The Europe-wide requirement, expected to take effect next year, applies to a wide variety of "traffic" and "location" data, including the identities of the customers' correspondents; the date, time, and duration of phone calls, voice over Internet Protocol calls, or e-mail messages; and the location of the device used for the communications. But the "content" of the communications is not supposed to be retained.
http://news.com.com/GOP+revives+ISP-...3-6156948.html





7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Okays Surreptitious GPS Tracking by Police
Rich

On February 2, the 7th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals, ruled against a defendant who claimed that the surreptitious placement of a GPS tracking device amounted to an unconstitutional search. From the court’s decision:

“The police had not obtained a warrant authorizing them to place the GPS tracker on the defendant’s car. The district judge, however, found that they had had a reasonable suspicion that the defendant was engaged in criminal activity, and she ruled that reasonable suspicion was all they needed for a lawful search, although she added that they had had probable cause as well. The defendant argues that they needed not only probable cause to believe that the search would turn up contraband or evidence of crime, but also a warrant. The government argues that they needed nothing because there was no search or seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.”

So the gist of it comes down to this. The fourth amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure, but the judges ruled that the placement of a GPS tracking device without the suspect’s knowledge, does not qualify as a search of his car.

This is the first time the seventh circuit has weighed in on this issue, which other circuits have split on. The court equated GPS tracking to police physically following a car, or monitoring safety cameras to follow a car, neither of which amounts to illegal search and seizure.

The court did note that wholesale surveillance of the entire population is another matter entirely.

Finally, I did chuckle at this and wonder if the judges really believe that Google Earth allows real time tracking:

“But if police follow a car around, or observe its route by means of cameras mounted on lampposts or of satellite imaging as in Google Earth, there is no search.”

Read the full court decision on surreptitious GPS tracking (Case number 06-2741 : USA v. Garcia, Bernardo). Here is the correct link, sorry its not live. http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/fdocs/do...submit=showdkt
http://gpstrackingsystems.biz/7th-ci...-by-police/25/





U.S. Set to Begin a Vast Expansion of DNA Sampling
Julia Preston

The Justice Department is completing rules to allow the collection of DNA from most people arrested or detained by federal authorities, a vast expansion of DNA gathering that will include hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, by far the largest group affected.

The new forensic DNA sampling was authorized by Congress in a little-noticed amendment to a January 2006 renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, which provides protections and assistance for victims of sexual crimes. The amendment permits DNA collecting from anyone under criminal arrest by federal authorities, and also from illegal immigrants detained by federal agents.

Over the last year, the Justice Department has been conducting an internal review and consulting with other agencies to prepare regulations to carry out the law.

The goal, justice officials said, is to make the practice of DNA sampling as routine as fingerprinting for anyone detained by federal agents, including illegal immigrants. Until now, federal authorities have taken DNA samples only from convicted felons.

The law has strong support from crime victims’ organizations and some women’s groups, who say it will help law enforcement identify sexual predators and also detect dangerous criminals among illegal immigrants.

“Obviously, the bigger the DNA database, the better,” said Lynn Parrish, the spokeswoman for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, based in Washington. “If this had been implemented years ago, it could have prevented many crimes. Rapists are generalists. They don’t just rape, they also murder.”

Peter Neufeld, a lawyer who is a co-director of the Innocence Project, which has exonerated dozens of prison inmates using DNA evidence, said the government was overreaching by seeking to apply DNA sampling as universally as fingerprinting.

“Whereas fingerprints merely identify the person who left them,” Mr. Neufeld said, “DNA profiles have the potential to reveal our physical diseases and mental disorders. It becomes intrusive when the government begins to mine our most intimate matters.”

Immigration lawyers said they did not learn of the measure when it passed last year and were dismayed by its sweeping scope.

“This has taken us by storm,” said Deborah Notkin, a lawyer who was president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association last year. “It’s so broad, it’s scary. It is a terrible thing to do because people are sometimes detained erroneously in the immigration system.”

Immigration lawyers noted that most immigration violations, including those committed when people enter the country illegally, are civil, not criminal, offenses. They warned that the new law would make it difficult for immigrants to remove their DNA profiles from the federal database, even if they were never found to have committed any serious violation or crime.

Under the new law, DNA samples would be taken from any illegal immigrants who are detained and would normally be fingerprinted, justice officials said. Last year federal customs, Border Patrol and immigration agents detained more than 1.2 million immigrants, the majority of them at the border with Mexico. About 238,000 of those immigrants were detained in immigration enforcement investigations. A great majority of all immigration detainees were fingerprinted, immigration officials said. About 102,000 people were arrested on federal charges not related to immigration in 2005.

While the proposed rules have not been finished, justice officials said they were certain to bring a huge new workload for the F.B.I. laboratory that logs, analyzes and stores federal DNA samples. Federal Bureau of Investigation officials said they anticipated an increase ranging from 250,000 to as many as 1 million samples a year.

The laboratory currently receives about 96,000 samples a year, said Robert Fram, chief of the agency’s Scientific Analysis Section.

DNA would not be taken from legal immigrants who are stopped briefly by the authorities, justice officials said, or from legal residents who are detained on noncriminal immigration violations.

“What this does is move the DNA collection to the arrest stage,” said Erik Ablin, a Justice Department spokesman. “The general approach,” he said, “is to bring the collection of DNA samples into alignment with current federal fingerprint collection practices.” He said the department was “moving forward aggressively” to issue proposed regulations.

The 2006 amendment was sponsored by two border state Republicans, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona and Senator John Cornyn of Texas. In an interview, Mr. Kyl said the measure was broadly drawn to encompass illegal immigrants as well as Americans arrested for federal crimes. He said that 13 percent of illegal immigrants detained in Arizona last year had criminal records.

“Some of these are very bad people,” Mr. Kyl said. “The number of sexual assaults committed by illegal immigrants is astonishing. Right now there is a fingerprint system in use, but it is not as thorough as it could be.”

Ms. Parrish, of the rape victims’ organization, pointed to the case of Angel Resendiz, a Mexican immigrant who was known as the Railroad Killer. Starting in 1997, Mr. Resendiz committed at least 15 murders and numerous rapes in the United States. Over the years of his rampage, Mr. Resendiz was deported 17 times. He was executed in Texas in June.

“That was 17 missed opportunities to collect his DNA,” Ms. Parrish said. “If he had been identified as the perpetrator of the first rapes, it would have prevented later ones.”

Immigration lawyers said the DNA sampling could tar illegal immigrants with a criminal stigma, even though most of them have never committed any criminal offense.

“To equate somebody with a possible immigration violation in the same category as a suspected sex offender is an outrage,” said David Leopold, an immigration lawyer who practices in Cleveland.

Forensic DNA is culled either from a tiny blood sample taken from a fingertip (the F.B.I.’s preferred method) or from a swab of the inside of the mouth. Federal samples are logged into the F.B.I.’s laboratory, analyzed and transformed into profiles that can be read by computer. The profiles are loaded into a database called the National DNA Index System.

The F.B.I. also loads DNA profiles from local and state police into the federal database and runs searches. Only seven states now collect DNA from suspects when they are arrested; of those, only two states are authorized by their laws to send those samples to the federal database.

Mr. Neufeld, of the Innocence Project, said his group supported broad DNA collection from convicted criminals. But, he said, “There is no demonstrable nexus between being detained for an immigration matter and the likelihood you are going to commit some serious violent crime.”

The DNA amendment has divided women’s groups that are usually unified supporters of the Violence Against Women Act, which was adopted in 1994.

“We were stunned by the extraordinary, broad sweep of this amendment,” said Lisalyn Jacobs, vice president for government relations at Legal Momentum, a law group founded by the National Organization for Women. Ms. Jacobs recalled that the amendment had been adopted by a voice vote with little debate. She said many lawmakers eager to renew the act, which enjoys solid bipartisan support, appeared unaware of the scope of the DNA amendment.

“The pervasive problems of profiling in the United States will only be exacerbated by such a system,” Ms. Jacobs said, because Latino and other immigrants will be greatly over-represented in the database. She noted that the law required a court order to remove a profile from the system.

Many groups warned that the measure would compound already severe backlogs in the F.B.I.’s DNA processing. Mr. Fram of the F.B.I. said there had been an enormous increase in the samples coming to the databank since it started to operate in 1998, but no new resources for the bureau’s laboratory. Currently about 150,000 DNA samples from convicted criminals are waiting to be processed and loaded into the national database, Mr. Fram said.

He said the laboratory had added robot technology to speed the processing. But in the “worst case scenario,” where the laboratory receives one million new samples a year, Mr. Fram said, “there is going to be a bottleneck.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/wa... ner=homepage





Your Face is Your Password
Tim Moynihan

Gone may be the days of remembering passwords or scanning your fingerprint to log on to your PC. If NecSoft's new authentication software catches on, all you'll need is your face.

The NecSoft BiodeLogon system uses a Webcam to take your mugshot, then matches it up to your assigned user photo. If it's a match, you're logged in. So if you need to change your password, just get a haircut or pierce your nose.

Sounds easy...maybe too easy. If you have an identical twin, can they access your PC? What if you're just not feeling like yourself that day? If the Caps Lock is on when BiodeLogon scans your mug, is the all-caps version of your face the same as your normal face?

Actually, it doesn't really matter. Face passwords are the coolest.
http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-968...eed&subj=Crave





Vista Encryption 'No Threat' to Computer Forensics
John Leyden

Security advances in Windows Vista are unlikely to frustrate cybercrime investigation, according to a leading computer forensics firm.

Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Vista include a feature that provides data volume encryption called BitLocker Drive Encryption. Suggestions that BitLocker contains a backdoor allowing law enforcement agencies automatic access to encrypted volumes have been robustly denied by Microsoft.

But that doesn't necessarily mean the availability of Vista will mean the widespread adoption of disc encryption technologies that will frustrate law enforcement investigations in computer crime, including trafficking in images of child abuse, computer hacking, industrial espionage and other offences.

For one thing, in two of its three modes of operation BitLocker requires a cryptographic hardware chip called a Trusted Platform Module and a compatible BIOS. These chips are yet to become widely available much less deployed. The third mode requires a user to insert a USB device that contains a startup key in order to boot the protected OS.

That means law enforcement officers need to get into the habit of seizing USB keys as well as PCs in the course of conducting a raid. Brian Karney, director of product marketing at Guidance Software, said the computer forensics firm had worked with Microsoft on BitLocker and that it knew of "no backdoors".

Getting to machines while they are still turned on and taking a forensically sound copy is an option even in the absence of USB Keys, Karney explained. "Even though the logical volume is encrypted the OS works on top of an abstraction layer. We can see what the OS sees so that it's possible to acquire data on a running Vista machine even when it is running BitLocker."

In cases when a consumer machine running Vista happens to be turned off at the point its seized, a password is needed. However, in corporate environments a BitLocker recovery key can be used to allow examination of target devices.

In some ways, the issue boils down to who is more knowledgeable about the use of encryption or other security technologies: investigators or the targets of investigation, an issue far from restricted to use of encryption technology in Windows Vista.

"We're seeing the same concerns with Vista as we saw with XP over the idea that built-in encryption features might frustrate law enforcement efforts. In practice XP has not proved to be a problem for computer forensics and we don't think Vista will be either," said Bill Thompson, director of professional development and training at Guidance Software. "Sometimes people use file wiping utilities or other tools but often they are not configured properly. People accept the default settings, which can leave fragments of data."

Guidance Software's EnCase computer forensic software is widely used by law enforcement agencies worldwide and is increasingly been used by private sector firms to investigate employee wrongdoing. One of Guidance's customers is the Metropolitan Police, which is using the technology to recover deleted emails as part of its cash for honours inquiry.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02...rensics_vista/





German Supreme Court Deems Police Hacking Illegal

Police hacking: a threat to civil rights or a boost to public safety?

Germany's supreme court determined Monday that police may not secretly hack into suspects' computers. Some are celebrating the decision as a civil rights victory, but the ruling may not be the last word on the matter.

No legal framework for secret police hacking exists at this time, decided Germany's Federal Court of Justice Monday in Karlsruhe, since searching computer and Internet data on a suspect's computer without their knowledge cannot be compared to existing methods of police investigation.

The court ruling stated that home searches differed from computer searches because they were always conducted in the presence of the suspect, or at least a witness. Telephone taps could also not be compared with computer hacking, continued the report, because previously saved data files fundamentally differ from live telecommunication.

New legal framework may be created

The public prosecutor's office welcomed the decision from Karlsruhe as it "established clarity on the scope of the existing investigation process concerning Online evidence, which is so important to the investigation," according to a statement cited by German news agency dpa.

Germany's Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble had been supportive of allowing police to conduct secret searches of computer hard drives and Internet records.

Interior Minister Schäuble favors police hacking as an investigation method

According to reports, it is likely that Schäuble will now press for changes to the legal framework of the criminal investigation procedure that would allow for police hacking, which advocates see as particularly helpful in locating and prosecuting terrorists.

Support from the left

Jan Korte from the Left Party immediately praised the court decision as a "godsend for civil rights." He also criticized Schäuble, saying the interior minister should not "keep thinking up new methods of spying and then figure out the legal situation after the fact."

Police hacking has been practiced in the past at the state level, often to scan the Emails of individual suspects and criminal groups. A court order was required in these cases and the computers could only be searched while they were running.

A supreme court judge affirmed the legality of secret police hacking in February 2006. When this judgment was overturned in November, Attorney General Monika Harms appealed. Monday's decision rejected Harms' appeal and upheld the November decision.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,...337932,00.html





Google Earth Agrees to Blur Pix of Key Indian Sites
Rajeev Deshpande

President APJ Abdul Kalam's concerns over Google Earth providing detailed and unhindered view of ‘sensitive' Indian establishments have been addressed, courtesy a formula which allows users uninterrupted access to the ‘eye in the sky' while camouflaging key installations.

Fuzzy, low resolution pictures and distorted building plans is how the government and Google Earth have agreed to get around concerns that images of sensitive military and scientific establishments available on the Web could either allow unauthorised snooping or become a ready reckoner for terrorists.

At a recent meeting between ministry of science and technology officials and Google Earth representatives, it was decided that installations identified by government would be carefully camouflaged. This, it was felt, was better than an outright blackout. Apart from well-known sites like BARC, there are many less prominent ones, and blacking them out would only attract attention to their locations.

Images of these locations will not be of more than 25-50 metre resolution, more like the older generation pictures provided by Indian Remote Sensing satellites. Official sources said Google Earth would distort building plans by adding structures where none existed or masking certain aspects of a facility. This could be done without attracting attention to such establishments, which range from laboratories, mines, military sites, space and atomic centres and residences of high-profile VVIPs.

The government list of such sites would be accepted by Google Earth. The controversy over Google Earth's images had gained momentum after Kalam, in October last year, expressed concern that unrestricted pictures on the web could have worrisome security implications.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/G...ow/1559236.cms




How the Net Turns Code Into Politics

The freedoms built in to the net are under attack like never before, argues regular columnist Bill Thompson.

The launch of Windows Vista last week was accompanied by widespread criticism from advocates of open systems, open networks and the free flow of information.

Particular attention was lavished on the digital rights management (DRM) features of the new operating system, the tools that determine whether you can play or copy video or audio on your computer.

Vista's DRM even aroused the wrath of the Green Party, which condemned it for requiring "more expensive and energy-hungry hardware".

It claimed that "there will be thousands of tonnes of dumped monitors, video cards and whole computers that are perfectly capable of running Vista - except for the fact they lack the paranoid lock down mechanisms Vista forces you to use".

Perhaps, though I can't really see home users dumping their existing hardware earlier than planned just so they can download high-definition TV shows and pump them through to their new HD television - they will just get a dedicated HD player instead.

Protect and survive

But the emergence of Vista and the protection measures it affords to certain forms of content gives us a glimpse of a new world, one we are entering almost without noticing. It is the world of protected content and the secured network.

The internet that we know today is changing, turning from an open, enabling and profoundly public space into a communications system which can be regulated, controlled, monitored and - where necessary - curtailed.

A regulated internet does not have to be a closed internet, but the trend is clearly towards increased control and the loss of the freedoms which the net has provided thus far. We must understand how this is happening before we can find ways to resist it.

Today's internet has a technical architecture which expresses certain liberal values, largely concerned with fair access to the net's resources, lack of centralised control, support for freedom of speech, openness to innovation, and resistance to monopoly - either cultural, economic or technological.

These values are implicit in the way that it links computers and networks together and moves data around, because they are a consequence of the way that every computer on the net communicates with other computers.

They are embedded in the network's protocols, the standards which determine how connections are made and how data is moved.

Free flow

One important consequence of this is that anyone can write an application that uses the internet to create a communications channel between any two co-operating computers, and the network has no reliable way of knowing what the data being transmitted means or how it is being used.

This makes censorship, monitoring and control remarkably difficult. They are not impossible, but the network tends towards liberal values just as a flower turns toward the sun.

The idea that the network just moves bits around and does not concern itself with the meaning of the data is generally called the end-to-end principle.

Unlike a political ideology, the end-to-end principle is not an abstract philosophical point but a statement of the technical capabilities of the network.

It tells us what facilities are available to those who write programs that use the network, and is therefore a much stronger determinant of behaviour than a belief in social justice, free markets or even a god.

Just because the protocols embody liberal values does not guarantee that the network itself will be a force for social good.

The freedom that the network offers is available to all, even those who pursue an illiberal agenda, and programs like a web browser or an e-mail client do not have to embody the values that underpin the network as a communications medium.

It is as easy to write the CyberPatrol internet filtering program as it is to write the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharer.

Control panel

It is also as easy for an oppressive, illiberal and authoritarian government to make use of the network as it is for a liberal social democratic administration, as we see in China, Singapore and Saudi Arabia.

Yet now governments and corporations around the world are making a concerted effort to dismantle the open internet and replace it with a regulated and regulable one that will allow them to impose an "architecture of control".

The freedom of expression that was once available to users of the Internet Protocol is being stripped away. Our freedom to play, experiment, share and seek inspiration from the creative works of others is increasingly restricted so that large companies can lock our culture down for their own profit.

If a closed network is built then the losers will be those who want to use the net freely, to share information across borders, to explore ideas or challenge institutions.

With no space for resistance or revolution, the shared social space provided by today's internet could vanish, and the potential for play, exploration, discovery and innovation may vanish with it.

Microsoft's Vista will be used in millions of homes, and people will find it simpler, easier, safer and more stable than previous versions of Windows.

They will appreciate the effort that went into developing the "Aero" user interface, the new security features that protect them more effectively from spam and viruses, and the way lots of things just work, like the improved wireless networking.

They will rarely notice the limitations, because they are not the sort of people who download films from the net or try to make copies of their DVDs.

But the day will come when they do notice. It is not that the features built into Windows are evil, as some of the more hyperbolic bloggers claim, nor even that they are unnecessary.

It is that they change the way our computers work and the way they relate to the network, and those changes could be used to take away our freedoms.

Thanks to the internet we are seeing an unprecedented shift of power from the centre to the people, a shift that we observe in the media, in politics and in the way large companies respond to their customers.

We need to ensure that the freedoms we currently enjoy online are preserved as the network evolves, or this shift could easily end up as minor historical footnote.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/6325353.stm





Rep. Frank Wants Added Protections for Consumers

Accountability is key goal of privacy legislation
Brian Krebs

Data privacy is likely to be among the hottest technology issues to face Congress this year, thanks in part to interest from the new chairman of the powerful House Financial Services Committee.

Panel Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said he plans to craft a bill by working with the head of the committee overseeing commerce issues. His measure would exempt companies from disclosing data breaches, provided they secure the data with encryption software, or some other technology that would render it virtually unreadable if it fell into the wrong hands.

Frank also said he wants retailers to be held more accountable for data breaches. Earlier this month, TJX Companies, the Massachusetts-based parent company of discount retailers TJ Maxx and Marshalls, disclosed that hackers had broken into its credit card processing network, exposing financial details on millions of Americans. This week, the Massachusetts Bankers Association said that some of its member banks have reported fraudulent transactions associated with the data breach. Credit card issuers have contacted at least 60 banks affected by the break-in, the MBA said.

While more than 30 states have laws requiring companies to alert residents of a data breach, most of the statutes let the affected company delay notifying banks while law enforcers investigate. Frank said retailers should be required to notify banks that issued the compromised credit card accounts so that financial institutions can issue customers new cards before fraud occurs.

"For too long, retailers have been immunized from having to own up when it's their mistake through contractual protection from Visa and MasterCard," Frank said.

Officials from Visa and MasterCard declined to comment for this story. But Mallory Duncan, senior vice president of the National Retail Federation, said Frank's proposal was an effort by some smaller banks to shift more of the costs of fraud to retailers.

"Most of the larger banks have very sophisticated, round-the-clock fraud monitoring systems in place, but a lot of the smaller institutions don't have those systems, Duncan said. "These institutions have abdicated their responsibilities in this regard, and now they want retailers to pay for it."

More than 100 million Americans have had their personal data compromised due to data breaches or mishaps, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

The data breach bill that enjoyed the most support from industry and consumer groups last year -- offered by California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein -- would require any organization holding personal data to notify consumers upon learning of a data breach. Feinstein's measure contains fairly broad exemptions, and it would preempt many tougher state laws.

Feinstein's bill, among the first to be reintroduced this year, also would require companies to notify consumers of a breach regardless of whether the data was encrypted, although companies would only be forced to notify if records on at least 10,000 customers were jeopardized.

But it is far more palatable to consumer groups than a proposal that came close to a vote in the House of Representatives last year. That measure would have barred most consumers from requesting "security freezes" on their credit files. It also would have given businesses greater discretion in determining when consumers should be notified about a data breach.

Liz Gasster, acting executive director of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, said her member companies would lobby for the inclusion of a legal liability exemption for data breaches that involve stolen or lost personal information that has been protected by encryption technology.

"We want to ensure that if companies take steps like using encryption as part of their overall security plan that there would be some sort of safe harbor limitation on liability, said Gasster, whose group represents some of the world's largest computer security firms.

David Sohn, staff counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology, a policy group in Washington, said an encryption exemption in a data breach bill would help avoid alarming consumers over data breaches that have a very low likelihood of compromising their personal information.

"So long as [the legislation] is written not to exempt companies that also have their encryption keys [needed to unscramble encrypted data] stolen along with their customers' information, there is a strong argument to be made that sending notices to consumers in those cases could desensitize people into not being vigilant in cases where it really matters," Sohn said.

While some major corporations -- most recently Microsoft -- have expressed support for some kind of federal consumer privacy law to govern how companies can use, combine and trade consumer data, the effort to produce baseline privacy protections for consumers may be among the most contentious of policy debates, said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"Data privacy is one of those areas where you're going to have very big corporate interests on both sides," von Lohmann said. "The question with this issue -- as with others -- becomes, is this an area where dueling interest groups will make it difficult for Congress to come to an effective solution, or is it something that's moving so fast that anything Congress is likely to do will end up obsolete a year or two from now?"

Consumer groups also expect corporate- and government-backed data mining practices to receive heavy scrutiny from this Congress, in part because the Senate Judiciary Committee is now headed by Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont known for his staunch advocacy on consumer privacy matters.

The Bush administration has come under heavy fire from privacy advocates for its data mining initiatives and for pressuring Internet service providers to dramatically extend the length of time that they retain records of their customers' online activities. In a shining example of how few technology policy concerns divide neatly along partisan lines, the administration's data retention plan was backed with legislation offered by Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat from Colorado.

Leahy declined to comment for this story, but in a speech at the Georgetown University Law Center following the mid-term election, Leahy said he plans to introduce legislation to curtail what he called the "proliferation of data brokers and the burgeoning market for collecting and selling personal information."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...020100748.html





Journalist's 169-Day Jail Stay Sets U.S. Record
AP

A freelance videographer, jailed for refusing to turn over footage of a demonstration to federal investigators, became the longest-incarcerated journalist in U.S. history Tuesday.

Josh Wolf, 24, has spent 169 days in a federal prison after declining a federal subpoena for unaired videotape he shot of a chaotic July 2005 protest in San Francisco against the Group of Eight summit in Scotland. A police officer suffered a fractured skull and a police car was vandalized during the melee.
Sen. John McCain of Arizona visited with potential voters at the Iowa State Fair last August as part of his effort to have a more visible presence earlier in key states as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. (David Peterson -- AP)

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that reporters are not entitled to withhold confidential sources or unpublished material in a grand jury investigation or criminal trial.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...020601601.html





Digital Security: A USB Drive That Erases Itself
Marty Katz

Key-chain thumb drives that pop into a computer's USB port, carrying hundreds of documents, songs or pictures, are suddenly everywhere. Their convenience and shrinking price — some sell for less than $10 — have made them standard equipment for academics and for business people taking their homework home. But their small size and ubiquity have created a huge security hole.

One solution is the three-inch, or eight-centimeter, Data Traveler Secure Privacy Edition from Kingston Technology. It sells for $297 in its largest-capacity version — four gigabytes — and starts shipping this week, available at major online retailers. Information inside is password-protected and scrambled using high- strength 256-bit encryption. An onboard 32-bit processor à la "Mission: Impossible" erases the drive if there are 10 consecutive failed attempts to log in. After that, the unit can be reset and reused, but its secrets are gone.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/...ptgadget14.php





Internet Boom in China Is Built on Virtual Fun
David Barboza

When Pony Ma, the 35-year-old co-founder of China’s hottest Internet company, sends a message to friends and colleagues, the image that pops up on their screens shows a spiky-haired youth wearing flashy jeans and dark sunglasses.

That is not how Mr. Ma actually looks or acts, but it is an image that fits well with the youthful, faintly rebellious nature of a company led by somebody who may be China’s closest approximation to Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the young founders of Google. In the two years since Mr. Ma’s company, Tencent, went public in Hong Kong, it has grown into a powerhouse that has crushed everyone else in the field.

No other Internet company in the world — not even Google — has achieved the kind of dominance in its home market that Tencent commands in China, where its all-in-one packaging of entertainment offerings and a mobile instant-messaging service, “QQ,” has reached more than 100 million users, or nearly 80 percent of the market.

“Everyone talks about eyeballs,” said William Bao Bean, an Internet analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities. “Well, they’ve got all the eyeballs in China. And now they’re beginning to cash in on that.”

But the rise of fast-growing companies like Tencent is also worrying the Chinese government, which strictly regulates the Internet and is wary of the Web’s ability to mobilize huge online political communities or perhaps to nurture underground economies.

A few weeks ago, China’s Central Bank — which oversees the country’s $2.6 trillion economy — even went so far as to issue a warning about Tencent’s virtual currency, Q-coins, which allow customers to shop online for games, music and even virtual furniture.

A Central Bank official said the agency was studying whether Tencent’s online tokens were a threat to China’s currency, the yuan or renminbi. He also said the authorities would crack down on the coins if they were used to engage in money laundering.

That is far from Tencent’s intention. Already one of China’s wealthiest entrepreneurs — worth an estimated $850 million — the soft-spoken Mr. Ma says he simply wants to let people in China use the Web the way they want.

“I think every Internet user likes personalization,” Mr. Ma said during an interview here. “In 2005 and 2006, we came up with a new strategy: ‘Online Lifestyle.’ ”

While America’s Internet users send e-mail messages and surf for information on their personal computers, young people in China are playing online games, downloading video and music into their cellphones and MP3 players and entering imaginary worlds where they can swap virtual goods and assume online personas. Tencent earns the bulk of its revenue from the entertainment services it sells through the Internet and mobile phones.

Another distinguishing feature is the youthful face of China’s online community. In the United States, roughly 70 percent of Internet users are over the age of 30; in China, it is the other way around — 70 percent of users here are under 30, according to the investment bank Morgan Stanley.

Because few people in China have credit cards or trust the Internet for financial transactions, e-commerce is emerging slowly. But instant messaging and game-playing are major obsessions, now central to Chinese culture. So is social networking, a natural fit in a country full of young people without siblings. Tencent combines aspects of the social networking site MySpace, the video sharing site YouTube and the online virtual world of Second Life.

“They have what I call the largest virtual park in China,” said Richard Ji, an analyst at Morgan Stanley. “And in China, the No. 1 priority for Internet users is entertainment; in the U.S., it’s information. That’s why Google is dominant in the U.S., but Tencent rules China.”

Tencent’s rapid rise is one reason America’s biggest Internet companies, like Yahoo, Google and eBay, have largely flopped in China. Analysts say the American companies struggle here partly because of regulatory restrictions that favor homegrown companies, but also because foreign companies often do not understand China’s Internet market, which is geared primarily to entertainment and mobile phones.

Google has lost market share to the search engine Baidu. Yahoo recently transferred its operations to a Chinese company, Alibaba.com. And eBay, even after buying one of its biggest competitors in China, has continued to lose ground; last December it handed its Chinese operations over to Tom.com, which is based in Hong Kong, in a joint venture.

Chinese youth prefer instant messages to e-mail messages; they play games, form communities and even adopt virtual personas, or avatars, which requires selecting an online image or personality and then buying that character virtual clothes, hairstyles, furniture and perhaps even a virtual pet that must be fed with virtual pet food.

It is a world that now dominates the life of Li Meixuan, a 21-year-old college student in Beijing who became hooked on Tencent’s QQ offerings in high school.

“I play with QQ about three to five hours a day,” said Ms. Li. “I usually play QQ games, buy game stuff from the QQ Game and buy decorations for my QQ show.”

Tencent will not release statistics on how its Q-coins are doing, but analysts say the currency is so popular that an underground economy in Q-coins has emerged, even though the coins are not redeemable for cash. Mr. Ma dismisses talk about the coins harming the Chinese currency.

“The media has misled the public,” he said. “A Central Bank official said that Q-coin did not affect the renminbi; it adds vibrancy to the economy. Our competitors raised this to intentionally cause panic.”

The controversy has done nothing to dim the company’s stock price, which has soared about 200 percent over the last year, giving the company a market value of roughly $7 billion. The rally was fueled by Tencent’s rising profit, which jumped 221 percent through the first three quarters of 2006, to $100 million.

Tencent was founded in 1998 by college buddies here in this southern China city, led by Ma Huateng, or Pony Ma, as he is known in English.

Mr. Ma has a boyish face and a quiet demeanor. But he is one of China’s most respected entrepreneurs. And when he shows up at Internet conferences in China he is mobbed by young people eager to have a picture taken with him or to shove their name cards into his pocket.

Mr. Ma earned a degree in computer science in 1993 from Shenzhen University, where his professors remember him as a diligent student who always stood out.

“He left a deep impression on me,” said Wang Jingli, the former chairman of the university’s computer science department. He recalled how he once assigned Mr. Ma to solve a classic chess problem called the eight queens puzzle. “He gave me all the answers in graphics, which was very rare among the students I taught.”

Later, Mr. Ma worked as a software developer for a paging and telecommunications company. But after making a lot of money trading stocks in his free time, he founded Tencent with his boyhood friend Zhang Zhidong. It was one of the first companies to offer instant messaging in China. But in the early days, profits were hard to come by.

“They didn’t really have a revenue model, and they didn’t know how they were going to make money,” said Shirley Yeung, who was among the first to invest in the company for PCCW, the Hong Kong telecom operator. “They were a bunch of young techies working in a crummy building but passionate about creating something new.”

In 2001, the company got a big infusion of capital from MIH, a division of a South African media company called Naspers. MIH paid $35 million to acquire about 50 percent of the company.

Tencent’s fortunes improved later that year when the company teamed up with China Mobile, the giant state-owned mobile operator, to forward Internet messaging to mobile phones.

“That was our first bucket of gold,” Mr. Ma said.

By 2004, Tencent was making a handsome profit on revenue of more than $130 million and Goldman Sachs was brought in to take the company public in Hong Kong, where Tencent’s offering raised $184 million in June 2004.

Since then, the company has been on a tear. Other big Chinese Internet companies, like Sina, Sohu, Netease and Baidu, are trying to keep pace. And so are the American Internet companies, like MySpace, which is looking to enter China’s market.

But Mr. Ma is not standing still. “There are a lot of opportunities in the market now,” he said. “The leader of the market today may not necessarily be the leader tomorrow.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/wo...rtner=homepage





China Shutters 205 Web sites Due to Piracy
Ed Oswald

With pressure increasing on the country to remedy its rampant piracy problems, China said Thursday it had shuttered 205 Web sites in an effort to begin to take control of the problem.

Between the months of September and January, China had opened 436 investigations, with at least 130 of them requested by trade associations outside the country. 361 of them had been ordered to stop, it said.

71 servers have been confiscated in the latest actions, with six ending up as court cases. At least one has already resulted in a conviction, and fines of 705,000 yuan ($91,000 USD) had already been doled out.

The problem of piracy in China is one of the worst in the world. Many blame the strict cultural controls placed on the country's citizens by the government. Western content is sometimes not available, leading to widespread -- and open -- piracy on China's streets.

For example, movie discs can be purchased for about 10 yuan ($1.29 USD). Some movie studios, such as Fox and Warner Bros., are attempting to combat it by selling legitimate discs for about twice that price, however piracy still remains an issue.

About 843,000 Web sites exist in China, although officials cannot estimate how many deal with pirated material. 137 million Chinese are on the Internet, making it the world's second largest Internet audience.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Chin...acy/1170946798





Numbers Out on How Rich the YouTube Deal Was
Miguel Helft

Everyone suspected that the investors, founders and early employees of YouTube made tidy sums when it was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in stock late last year.

But until yesterday, few knew just how tidy those sums were. The answer, which Google delivered in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is now in: The sums are big enough to spark a new wave of envy across Silicon Valley.

The biggest windfalls went, not surprisingly, to the company’s three founders and to Sequoia Capital, the main financial backer of YouTube, the popular video-sharing site.

A founder and YouTube’s chief executive Chad Hurley received 694,087 shares of Google and an additional 41,232 in a trust. Based on Google’s closing price yesterday of $470.01, the shares are worth more than $345 million.

Another founder, Steven Chen, received 625,366 shares and an additional 68,721 in a trust, for more than $326 million.

Sequoia Capital XI, the Sequoia fund that invested close to $11.5 million in YouTube from November 2005 to April 2006, was listed as having 941,027 shares, which are valued at more than $442 million.

The filing lists a Sequoia Capital XI Principals Fund owning 102,376 shares, valued at more than $48 million, and Sequoia Technology Partners XI with 29,724 shares, valued at nearly $14 million.

Sequoia, considered one of the most successful venture capital firms in the country, was also a principal investor in Google.

The third founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, who left the company early on to pursue a graduate degree in computer science, received 137,443 shares worth more than $64 million.

In addition, several funds affiliated with Artis Capital Management, a San Francisco hedge fund managed by Stuart L. Peterson that was a co-investor with Sequoia, were listed as having received 176,621 shares, valued at $83 million.

When the deal was announced in October, YouTube was less than two years old and had about 70 employees. Several of the early employees are listed in the filing statement as owning thousands of Google shares.

The acquisition, the biggest in Google’s history, put the Internet search giant in the leading position in the rapidly growing world of online video. But the acquisition has been clouded by threats that Google could be sued by movie studios and other content owners over the proliferation of copyrighted material on the YouTube site. Just last week, Viacom demanded that Google remove from YouTube more than 100,000 video clips it claimed to own.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/08/te.../08google.html





Microsoft’s Vista Debut Wasn’t Nearly So ‘Wow’
Louise Story

Television commercials for Microsoft’s new Vista operating system show a spaceship taking off, a reindeer appearing in the middle of a suburban neighborhood and a man holding a piece of the Berlin wall.

“Every so often you experience something so new, so delightfully unexpected, that there’s only one word for it: Wow,” a voice-over says.

But there weren’t many people saying “Wow” about Microsoft’s marketing last week. Despite reportedly committing close to $500 million on its Vista marketing worldwide, Microsoft did not generate nearly the excitement last week as it did 12 years ago when the company introduced its 1995 operating system with rock singers and a Super Bowl tie-in.

This time around, Microsoft focused much more of its efforts on an outlet that was less common in 1995: the Internet. And, now that computers are integrated in most people’s lives, Microsoft sought to relay the product details of Vista rather than the “high concepts” of 1995, said J. B. Williams, general manager of global communications for Windows.

“The assignment in ’95 was that we had to convince people the PC mattered and it was going to be part of their life,” Mr. Williams said. “Now people are doing this. They’re living this digital lifestyle today already.”

Offline, however, the product introduction may have stumbled in trying to generate excitement with midnight store openings for Vista. Recently, the introduction of game consoles like Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3 drew crowds to stores for a day or more before the consoles went on sale. But within 40 minutes of selling Vista for the first time, CompUSA on Fifth Avenue in New York already saw its line wane to a trickle.

Long lines for new products can have a positive effect on sales by generating news coverage that persuades consumers that they, too, should rush out to buy something. Consumers are more likely to buy based on product mentions in news content than on advertising, said Steven J. Farella, president and chief executive of TargetCast, an ad agency in New York.

Many marketers have bolstered their public relations efforts in recent years and replaced some of their traditional advertising with events or stunts that the press is likely to cover, like Bill Gates’s appearance on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.” This reflects a shift in mentality from a top-down approach to a groundswell strategy, Mr. Farella said.

This time around, Microsoft also faced consumers who spend their free time with a vastly different array of media and entertainment devices.

“It’s harder to get people’s attention now because of media fragmentation and audience distraction, and it’s easier for people to ignore you,” said Chuck Porter, the chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky. “Mass media to a degree doesn’t exist anymore.”

Mr. Porter said many advertisers now focus on finding prime customers rather than blitzing all consumers.

In the online aspects of its campaign, Microsoft took a narrow approach. The company focused on three groups of Internet users with different interactive campaigns.

For young consumers who like to spend time on social networking sites, Vista introduced a Web site featuring the comedian Demetri Martin. Young people online did take a liking to Mr. Martin — his MySpace.com page lists more than 80,000 friends. Microsoft also sponsored a tour for Mr. Martin and a special on Comedy Central.

For more technically minded consumers, Microsoft created a puzzle game called Vanishing Point with online and offline events and clues; 90,000 people played the game, Mr. Williams of Microsoft said.

For a broader audience, Microsoft created a site for people to post photos and videos of amazing moments — or as Microsoft called it, “Wow” moments. About 20,000 people did so.

Retail analysts said they were not worried about Vista sales in the long run, despite the lack of apparent excitement. For one, they said, Vista is available in large quantities whereas the sought-out game consoles were produced in limited supply.

Also, Vista was available at 39,000 store locations last Tuesday, while Windows 95 was introduced at far fewer stores, which made crowds at any given location bigger, said Christopher Swenson, director of software and industry analysis for the NPD Group.

Mr. Swenson also said that thousands of people ordered Vista through Amazon.

“People can get it overnighted to them and delivered to their office,” Mr. Swenson said. “Why would anybody go out in the freezing cold to a retailer?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/te...microsoft.html